Quick-lose-your-reader codes

January 3rd, 2012
By Dale Keiger

Do not scan this

As I page through new issues of various alumni magazines, I am beginning to come across these things: QR codes, or quick-response codes. They were developed by Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, as a manufacturing barcode that would let the company track vehicles during assembly. Now they are showing up in advertising, on T shirts and business cards and access badges, on posters and billboards, and in magazines. Equip your smartphone with a QR reader and you can scan information into your phone, all sorts of information—weblinks, addresses and phone numbers, product descriptions, Paypal payments, coupons.

I’ve spotted them in alumni magazine advertising, which doesn’t surprise me, and embedded in sidebars to magazine stories, which does.

As writers, editors, and designers, we do everything we can to arrest the attention of the distracted members of the public and keep them in our magazines—reading stories, turning pages, engrossed in our content. So why would we ever want to provide an easy, one-click means of exiting our pages? Why provide an invitation for readers to stop reading the magazine and begin dorking around with their phones yet again? Do you think after we’ve diverted their attention to their Androids and iPhones, they will put the gizmos down and come back to our magazines? I don’t. I think they’re gone gone gone, at least for that day.

If there’s logic to this, I’m missing it.

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Eight questions for Sherri Kimmel and Ann Wiens

December 22nd, 2011
By Dale Keiger

Two of the best alumni magazines in the land have appointed—anointed?—new editors. Sherri Kimmel, most recently editor of Dickinson Magazine, takes over from Jeff Lott at Swarthmore College Bulletin, and Ann Wiens, who created and edited Demo at Columbia College Chicago, will step into the office previously occupied by Guy Maynard at Oregon Quarterly. It goes without saying that their first editorial duties were responding to the UMagazinology questionnaire.

How long were you in your previous editorial jobs?

Kimmel: I served as senior editor of Dickinson Magazine for 12 years.

Wiens: I launched Demo in the summer of 2005 and edited it until the fall of 2010, when I left Columbia for a non-editorial position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

What proved to be the most significant thing you had to learn to do those jobs?

Kimmel: When I was hired, I was the only person working on the magazine. Then we added more staff to the roster, so I needed to learn how to hire good writers, manage them and inspire them to thrive, grow, and prosper.

Wiens: With Demo, it was to navigate the politics and various agendas of a large institution, and to learn when to dig my heels in to push something through and when to let it go. That, and basic HTML.

What have been your best experiences in alumni mag-azines?

Kimmel: Traveling to Germany three times to interview an alumnus for two magazines (ours and a national consumer magazine). The three Dickinson German courses that I took after the first visit boosted my bond with this distinguished octo-genarian writer/diplomat.

Wiens: Getting to meet so many people—story subjects, readers, and contributors—I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and finding all these little gems of experience that make great stories, then figuring out how to work through the writers and photographers to connect readers with those stories. With alumni magazines, you’re working within the limitations of the institutional purview—generally, everything in the magazine must somehow connect back to the college or university. This limitation forces you to look for stories in a different way than you would if your charge were broader, if that restriction weren’t in place. There’s a common exercise in painting and drawing classes in which students are restricted to a small range of colors or materials. The restriction is designed to force creativity, to encourage students to pull out all the stops in other areas, such as observation, composition, or mark-making. Editing an alumni magazine is similar—it compels editors and writers to look for the story in places they might not otherwise, to dig a bit deeper, be a bit quirkier, forgo the obvious.

What have proven to be your biggest frustrations?

Kimmel: Just now, making the grade in the UMagazinology blog. But seriously, dealing with the donors, trustees, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and students who did an end run around me to pitch outlandish story ideas or complain directly to senior officers. Luckily, leadership saw fit to bounce the decisions on how to respond down to me. But responding took a lot of time and tact and additional minutes in the college gym blowing off steam.

Wiens: Institutional politics, and the ongoing difficulty of convincing certain administrators that magazines and marketing/development brochures are not the same thing.

What part of your previous magazines never quite satisfied you, despite everybody’s best effort?

Kimmel: The sports section. We always have had limited space and felt obligated to run a roundup of seasonal results. With some reimagining (and another page) we could have made it more engaging.

Wiens: Demo was called Demo because we set out to show, rather than tell, the college’s stories. There was a section in each issue called “Portfolio,” which was intended to show the creative work of an individual or group with minimal text, to be a portfolio of work. It generally ran three or four spreads, and might feature a short story, or a series of photographs, or images of artwork. I still think the idea was solid, but it seldom hit just right. We always thought it could be a truly powerful, sustained feature, but it usually fell short, in my view. I suspect we tried to make it carry more weight than it really could.

What stories are you proudest to have published?

Kimmel: “Making Their Mark—Presenting the 25 Most Influential Dickinsonians.” The top 25 (in college history) were selected based on the number of votes cast by our readers, then our full staff (including two students) wrote 25 short profiles for our fall 2007 cover story. We created a lot of good will and inspired reader response and we invited all of the living “Influentials” to a luncheon at the President’s House. Recipients still list their Influentials status in their bios for speaking engagements.

Wiens: Despite my previous answer, the story I’m probably proudest to have published was the Portfolio in Demo 9, which was a selection of photographs by students and alumni who were in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008, witnessing Obama’s historic win. Grant Park, where Obama held his home-town election-night rally, is across the street from Columbia College, and many in the campus community were there, some great photojournalists among them. I worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John H. White, who teaches at Columbia, to put together a portfolio of images shot that night by his students and former students. John is African American and knew Obama; the victory was personal for him, adding to the beauty of the story. The images and accompanying text by the photographers capture a moment when I felt proud of my country, proud of my city, and proud of the community of students the magazine represented.

If you each could commission a story from any writer in the world, who would it be?

Kimmel: Before Nov. 29, I would have said the late Saul Bellow. But since I interviewed Margaret Atwood (on campus for a guest lecture that day), I would give the Canadian icon the nod. She wrote one of my favorite novels, The Blind Assassin, is dedicated to sustainability, and has about 300,000 Twitter followers. Who could ask for anything more?

Wiens: My favorite writer right now is Jim Crace, but I’m having a hard time imagining what he’d do with an alumni magazine article. Maybe Bill Bryson. His writing is like a good cocktail—an easy mix of history, humor, interesting word choices and sentence structures, personal anecdotes, and worldly information, so the reading is purely enjoyable at first, but it has a kick to it, it affects you without your realizing it. When I’m reading one of his books, I find myself thinking about what I’ve read, pondering new knowledge, engaging friends in discussions about obscure tidbits of information. Oh wait, I’d pick David Sedaris. Yeah, definitely David Sedaris. Maybe.

If you weren’t editors, what would your dream jobs be?

Kimmel: Horse whisperer.

Wiens: The job I’m beginning next month feels like my dream job, with all its potential as yet untainted by day-to-day reality. I think I’ll just bask in that for the time being!

Bonus question: What a) thrills you the most and b) scares you the most about your new postings?

Kimmel: A) Great place, great president, great people, great (Quaker) val-ues, great mag. B) Leaving a college I love, and staff that I love, to begin anew.

Wiens: I’m thrilled—truly, honestly, pinch-myself de-lighted—to be assuming the editorship of a magazine as solid as Oregon Quarterly, at an institution that clearly understands the value of a real magazine over a marketing piece, and seems committed to supporting its independence and continued editorial quality. I’m thrilled at the opportunities I see to add to what Guy Maynard and his colleagues have built. I’m scared, as an outsider, of getting it wrong, of misreading a story due to my lack of familiarity with the place. Thankfully, Guy has agreed to stick around for a while, to keep the training wheels on until I have a sense of the place and the publication. So I’m not that scared.

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James Wood’s inadvertent writer’s guidelines

December 15th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

Consider this post a pointer. Not as in Brian Doyle’s remarks at the 2011 CASE Editors Forum (if you weren’t there, Doyle was talking about his attempts to get his little boys to be on target in the bathroom; I leave it at that), but as in pointing you toward some worthy writing about writing. Start with the December 19 issue of The New Yorker and James Wood’s piece on John Jeremiah Sullivan, Geoff Dyer, and the robust health of the contemporary essay. (If you are not a subscriber, you might hit a paywall.) Then, by all means, read something by Sullivan (his just-published collection is Pulphead) and read something by Dyer. Then check out a couple of online publications noted by Wood, The Common and The Point. Then consider this fine paragraph from Wood’s essay. He’s describing Sullivan as a writer:

He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives. In a touching piece about the near-death of his brother (who electrocuted himself with a microphone while playing with his band, the Moviegoers, in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky), Sullivan mentions, in passing, “Captain Clarence Jones, the fireman and paramedic who brought Worth back to life, strangely with two hundred joules of pure electric shock (and who later responded to my grandmother’s effusive thanks by giving all the credit to the Lord).” Any reporter can be specific about the two hundred joules. But the detail about Captain Jones giving all the credit to the Lord, while a small thing, suggests a writer interested in human stories, watching, remembering, and sticking around long enough to be generally hospitable to otherness.

There’s a succinct set of writer guidelines if I ever saw one:

  1. Be a fierce noticer.
  2. Be undauntedly curious.
  3. Be porous to gossip.
  4. Have a memory of childlike tenacity.
  5. Be interested in human stories.
  6. Be hospitable to otherness.

Enough said.

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Lott

December 8th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

I think the first editor of A Major Significant CASE-Medal-Gobbling Alumni Magazine that I ever met, except for my boss at the time, was Tina Hay. But it could not have been long after meeting her that I first encountered Jeff Lott. You could not attend a CASE Editors Forum and not encounter Jeff Lott, and I’ve been to every one of them, so that’s a lot of encounters. This month, Lott retires as editor of Swarthmore College Bulletin after nearly 20 years at the top of the masthead.

I could tell you  a few Jeff Lott stories—poker games in various hotel rooms, manic dancing to Lynyrd Skynyrd covers in Nashville, a nocturnal foray in New Orleans that he still doesn’t fully remember, the details of his Cele Garrett Award, listening to a blues band play a song titled “If That’s All You Got to Say, Just Get Your Sorry Ass Home.” Then there was the time I did most everything I could to end his career with a single feature story that never saw light of day . . .  But dwelling on all of that would mean unjustly passing over his accomplishments, and they are substantial. Foremost, he was a damned fine editor who put out a damned fine magazine. Swarthmore set a standard for alumni magazines: smart, honest, well crafted, ex-emplary of the college that publishes it. Beyond that, Lott gave uncounted hours to the Editors Forum (he was there at the founding), the CASE Summer Institute, and other endeavors to raise the quality and defend the integrity of alumni mag-azines. We have a CASE-endorsed statement of standards for university magazines because of him, and if you knew what it took to get that accomplished, you’d appreciate it all the more. He did yeoman’s work pushing forward the ever-growing CASE member magazine reader survey. Plus, when he gets the chance, he journeys to Cambodia to help build houses. (Sure. Go ahead. Make me feel inadequate. Jerk.)

I asked a group of his distinguished colleagues to step up and testify:

Dean Woodbeck, formerly at Michigan Tech University: “An enduring memory of Jeff comes from one of the early CASE Editors Forums, when he led a session that had to do with the often-contentious relationship between editors and development officers. Jeff emerged as the moderator in his referee uniform, as I recall complete with a whistle, and set a very appropriate mood for the afternoon. He shoots . . . he scores!!!”

Brian Doyle, Portland Magazine: “The tattoos, the sniggering, the way he carried not one but two badgers in big canvas holsters on his hip, which is just disturbing, I feel. Who needs two badgers? Is not one badger enough badger for any man?”

Rachel Morton, former editor of Middlebury Magazine: “And what about the girls? He always had several pulchritudinous undergraduates who followed him adoringly to each conference—playing strip poker with him after the rest of his colleagues toddled off to bed. Truly a man of large appetites.”

Paul Pegher, former editor of Denison Magazine: “Ever seen what he can do to a handle of bourbon and a couple bags of pork rinds?”

Matt Jennings, Middlebury Magazine: “And mardi gras beads?”

Nancy Bartosek, The TCU Magazine: “When the Editor’s Forum was in Chicago, we decided we needed to hear live music and crammed into the back of a taxi. We got dropped at a bar where I was annoyed to have to pay a $10 cover. There were only about 50 people there, listening to the some blues/jazz musicians on a tiny stage. We drank some beers and played some pool until this gal got up on stage and started wailing away. Lott lit up. ‘Wow! She sounds just like Shamika Shamekia [that's an F for misspelling a name, Bartosek—DK] Copeland!’ he said, moving to his own little jazzy boogey-woogey, noting he had all her albums and loved her music. She finished the song and another band member stood and said, ‘Let’s give a big hand for Shamika Shamekia [Bartosek!?!?] Copeland!’ I’ll never forget the look on Lott’s face—shock, amazement then such child-like delight that it almost brought tears to my eyes. Next up? Buddy Guy. It was his place.”

Pegher, again: “Jeff Lott’s name first came on my radar back around 1997-8, when I worked for the tiny Carlow College in Pittsburgh (our mutual hometown)—so tiny that my only access to editors was through the then-fledgling CUE-L. It was around then that Jeff and other statesman of our craft were pushing forth a set of ‘principles of practice,’ seeking wide adoption by CASE. I thought, damn, even if CASE doesn’t want them I’m sure going to work by these standards—they were that informative and inspirational. I was ‘downsized’ by Carlow a year later and did not return to the college magazine world until 2003, but it was my ingrained knowledge of those principles that helped me land a gig at some place called Denison University, where they wanted to take the magazine ‘to the next level.’ A few months into the job I went to a CASE V conference in Chicago, where the savvy and skillful Teresa Scalzo had invited Jeff to speak about the finally-adopted and now-capitalized Principles of Practice for University and College Periodicals Editors. Yup, they still had that same power over me. But Jeff added something else: he described our jobs as ‘keepers of the campus culture.’ And I thought, damn, that is really cool, too! And I took that description to heart and maintain it to this day. Here’s to Jeff, one of the greatest mentors, spiritual leaders, and friends I could have hoped for in a professional life.”

Nicole McKeen, former editor, The Florida Engineer: “This past summer, during my hiatus from editorship, a CUE post caught my attention and I emailed Jeff with my usual snarkiness to get his take. Like a good friend, he was snarky right back. As these exchanges usually go, we began a ‘how are you?’ e-versation. It didn’t take more than my second reply for me to begin shooting pages of emotional diatribe into the Swarthmore email system and Jeff—bless him for this—didn’t say he would love to talk but had a bitch of a deadline or a lunch appointment he had to get to. Instead, he indulged my need to talk to someone. He saw a friend, a colleague, a parent in turmoil, and so very ready to ditch her housecoat for a day or two. He kindly invited me to get away, meet some new folks and witness his very last press check as the editor of Swarthmore College Bulletin. I got to see Matt Jennings, who also happened to be on press that day, and I got to smell the ink and feel the roar of the presses. It’s like editor crack. (The ink and press, that is. Matt’s super cool, but not crack.) But the thing I will remember most about that quick trip north isn’t the incomparable Jeff Lott fussing over the color of red on the back cover, or the gig-a-oodles of laughs we had or the gasoline attendant rubbing aloe all over a shirtless man in a convenience store. It’s the few hours we spent talking about our lives and our children and our struggles and then Jeff Lott, my friend, telling me that everything will be OK. I believe him. I will always be grateful for his friendship. Thank you, Jeff.”

Tom Griffin, former editor of Columns, University of Washington: “I once heard a CASE VP whisper that Jeff Lott was a ‘rabblerouser.’ I’m sure he meant that as a criticism, but I took it then—and still do today—as a grand compliment. God knows there is huge need for rabblerousing in the complacent world of higher education, and Jeff has done that to great effect over the years. Whether it’s putting an image of Andy Warhol in drag on a magazine cover, reporting gleefully on the demise of football at Swarthmore, or ramming a policy on editorial integrity through CASE, Jeff has always pushed the limits. He’s made a lasting impact on his profession—we’re all going to miss his wisdom, humor, and poker cards immensely.”

Lott always likes to get the final word in about anything, and I’ll give him the final word here, to repeat something worth repeating about editing an alumni magazine:

When bad things happen, move on. And yes, bad things will happen. You will publish factual errors, misquote professors, and piss people off. ‘Appalled’ readers will go straight to the top with their complaints, which will rain back down on you from that unfortunate direction. Stories will be spiked by administrators who had previously given them the green light. Writers will fail to turn in their copy on time—or at all—leaving gaping holes in your next issue. Shake it off, look ahead, and keep your wits about you to fight the next battle.

Well said, my friend.

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Eight questions for Michael Antonucci

December 7th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

Mike Antonucci, senior writer at Stanford, sets aside his quill—this is Stanford we’re talking about, so his quill is a transponder/stylus that inputs his cursive straight into an InDesign file—to answer the UMagazinology writer questionnaire.

How long have you been a writer?

I got my first daily newspaper job in 1975 at the Poughkeepsie Journal in New York. I was at the San Jose Mercury News for 31 years in a variety of roles, mostly writing, before joining Stanford in July 2008.

Of all the things you have to do to produce a story in the magazine, what do you enjoy the most?

Learning enough about the material to mix useful reporting with storytelling. That was true in newspapering and it’s exponentially true at Stanford, given the range of topics.

What has proven to be your biggest challenge?

The six-times-a-year schedule. It’s possible to be newsy as well as interesting, but the word “challenge” sums it up. On the other hand, that’s what I think my biggest challenge is. Maybe you should double-check with my editors.

For interviews, notepad or recorder? For writing, legal pad, typewriter, or computer?

Almost all of the above. For interviews: a recorder whenever I expect the story to be (a) very technical or nuanced or (b) very long. When I have a quick turnaround (and no time to transcribe), or I know the setting will be noisy or too awkward for a recorder, I rely on a notebook. And whenever a recorder is running, I’m taking at least some backup notes by hand. For writing, mostly, a computer. No typewriter (despite fond memories). I do use a legal pad (one is always nearby) because what passes for inspiration sometimes strikes when I didn’t think my brain was capable of it.

What do you wish you were better at?

Finding what a writing coach called “the emotional center” of a story and smoothly—smoothly—integrating it with the 5 Ws-and-H, plus crystal-clear translations of whatever is complex, in everything I write. In other words, making sure all the elements of every story mesh without losing the humanity that should drive a narrative.

What story are you proudest to have written?

I’ll stick to what I’ve done at the magazine, although I have some nice memories of assignments from when newspapers were so much better than they are now. What you want to do as a writer is make a difference. That can mean spurring some kind of change in the world or connecting with readers in an emotionally powerful way. The piece I did on Jim Plunkett about his life 40 years after becoming Stanford’s only Heisman Trophy winner clearly had a deeply felt effect on many readers, and there’s an enormous sense of satisfaction in that.

Who among writers have been your exemplars?

A long list. Self-editing: Red Smith (who I got to meet at a Super Bowl when I was a sportswriter), Paul Hemphill, Joseph Heller (Catch-22 is my favorite book), David Halberstam, and Stan Lee (that’s right, the comic-book writer).

If you weren’t a writer, what would your dream job be?

Comic-book historian. OK, historians write, but that’s the dream job, so that’s my answer.

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UMag inbox

December 5th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

A random walk through the newish—defined as current sometime in the last seven or eight weeks—issues of alumni magazines turned up some things worthy of notice. Open, the magazine of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, was clever with its letters page (click image to expand). Editor Cory Leahy ran two “letters” about an embarrassing typographical error in the previous issue; one of them reproduces exactly what the magazine received from a member of the Class of ’97, which was the offending page torn out and critiqued via a purple stickynote. Another reproduction tops the page, this one the image of a repurposed opt-out card—the correspondent altered the card so that instead of opting out of receiving the magazine he’s requesting two extra copies. Open also has a Tracy Mueller feature that takes 10 business “rules”—the customer is always right, you have to spend money to make money, etc.—and asks if they still obtain, or ever did. One of that story’s sections begins with what, so far, is my favorite sentence all day: “If a food truck doesn’t tweet, does it really exist?” This story also is part of a peculiar editorial harmonic convergence. More on that later.

LSA Magazine, from the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, has a feature on copyright in the digital age, and I’ll stick my neck out by saying LSA is the first magazine in history to illustrate a copyright story with a photo titled “Zombie Bunny.” (If I read Mary Jean Babic’s story right, I could be sued for reproducing the opening spread here. Lara Zielin edits LSA, and I’m hoping she opts for a cease-and-desist letter first.)

College of Charleston Magazine’s cover story “Rebel Without a Pause” was scribbled by editor Mark Berry, and it’s awfully good. The piece is a profile of writer Padgett Powell and opens with a well-wrought narrative recreation of Powell’s arrest in the parking lot of his high school for distributing an underground student news-paper titled Tough Shit, which ranks as one of the all-time great names for a newspaper, underground or otherwise. That episode set the tone for Powell’s academic and literary careers. The future novelist began as an English major at Charleston, until an English teacher gave him a D on a paper; Powell took one look at the graded paper and changed his major to chemistry. Clearly, Berry had a lot of good material with which to fashion a profile, and he brings it off with zest.

OK, so back to this harmonic convergence business. As already noted, Open from Texas has a feature that revisits, and questions the validity of, 10 business rules. The new issue of my own Johns Hopkins Magazine devotes part of its feature well to assistant editor Kristen Intlekofer’s round-up of 10 things that people do in the name of health that might actually be injurious to their health. Minor as coincidences go—10 business rules open for debate, 10 health practices open for debate—but wait, here’s where things get weird. Elsewhere in the Hopkins winter 2011 feature well is a long Mike Anft piece on contemporary neuroscience and memory, including help for people suffering from memory loss, plus a feature story on distraction in these digital days. Then I pick up the latest edition of Washington State Magazine and find in editor Tim Steury’s feature well a long piece by Steury about neuropsychologists helping people cope with memory loss, and a second feature, this one by Eric Sorensen, called “Attention!”, about the “poverty of attention” in these digital days.

After a long search for an explanation, I’ve settled on great minds think alike.

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Eight questions for Jason Hollander

November 14th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

Blog posts will be sparse this week. My father died Saturday morning, and I will be in Ohio for his funeral. But we do have Jason Hollander, editor at NYU Alumni Magazine, stepping up to answer the UMagazinology Eight Questions.

How long have you been in your job?

I’ve been at NYU for eight years, and editor of the magazine for five.

What has proven to be the most significant thing you had to learn to do that job?

How to be genuinely open-minded and see all perspectives. It’s not always easy, but it’s essential for getting to the heart of each story, and for making the magazine look as good as it can.

What has been your best experience at the magazine?

Interviewing celebrity alums is definitely a cool perk, and we have our fair share at NYU. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Clive Davis, among others. But there’s a real reward that comes from working on complicated stories, where the narrative eludes us all for so long . . . until it suddenly becomes clear. That moment of piecing the puzzle together gives you a natural high, along with knowing you now have a story that will, hopefully, communicate something new and insightful to people.

What has proven to be your biggest frustration?

This is sort of a universal issue with alumni magazines, but it’s frustrating when people don’t take the publication seriously because they think we’re just some review of campus events, crammed with group photos and promotional fluff. Many don’t realize that these days, in this new media frontier, some of the most innovative, long-form storytelling now comes from alumni magazines.

What part of your magazine never quite satisfies you, despite everybody’s best effort?

This is tough to answer. I think I’m supposed to say I’m a perfectionist, but I’m not. In the moment, issue to issue, our team works really hard, and we try to make the magazine fun and stimulating for every sort of reader. Of course, we don’t always succeed. Some stories and photos prove disappointing, and we try to learn from them. As a rule, it’s good to strive for improvement, but I think it’s also important to find some real satisfaction within the process.

What story are you proudest to have published?

It’s perfect timing to answer this question because our latest issue (Fall 2011) just came out with a cover story—by Jill Hamburg Coplan—on Edith Windsor, a former IBM programmer who lost her partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 2009, after more than 40 years together. She’s now suing the United States for the “widow’s tax” she was forced to pay because the federal government didn’t recognize their union. I’m extremely proud that we were able to tell a classic love story while illustrating the injustices that exist in denying certain individuals the right to marry.

If you could commission a story from any writer in the world, who would it be?

I’d love to have Woody Allen write a humor piece for us about the unsuccessful semester he spent at NYU. In his early standup, he famously mentions getting thrown out of college for cheating on his metaphysics final—by looking into the soul of the guy sitting next to him. Woody—if you’re reading this, please contact me. We pay a very competitive freelance rate.

If you weren’t an editor, what would your dream job be?

I’m still working on that great American screenplay.

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UMag inbox

November 10th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

First, the Great Whiteout of Fall 2011 continues:

And while we’re talking covers, apparently Dartmouth Medicine and Iowa Alumni Magazine now share color palettes:

St. Thomas had the good sense to devote a feature story to alumnus John Kascht, a remarkable caricaturist who became an editorial cartoonist when he was 14 and wasted no time getting into trouble as a junior high school kid by drawing and passing around a “nun of the month” pinup calendar. Kascht has become so good at what he does, he has 22 pieces in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Writer Doug Hennes did a nice job with the story, but he had a thankless task, providing the text to wrap around six examples of Kascht’s wonderful art.

Dusk is approaching, and from the farmhouse you can see lights on in the second floor of an old chicken coop and horse stable. John Kascht hunches over a drawing table and stares at a blank sheet of paper, surrounded by photos of his subject matter. He deftly swipes a pencil across the paper and looks up to cock his head sideways and stroke his goatee before taking another swipe. He repeats the motion over and over, hardly touching the paper but, swipe by swipe, brings life to the face.

Brian C. Brown edits the magazine.

NYU Alumni Magazine (Jason Hollander, editor) weighs in with an outstanding cover story, Jill Hamburg Coplan’s “When a Woman Loves a Woman.” A case now in the judicial system, Windsor v. United States, may prove to be the landmark case for the civil rights of gay Americans. The “Windsor” is Edith Windsor, an NYU graduate who met her partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 1963, married her in Toronto in 2007, and after she died in 2009 filed suit the next year to challenge the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that forbids exemption from estate taxes for gay marriages. When Windsor had to pay, out of her savings, $363,053 in estate taxes that a heterosexual would not have had to pay, she sued. Coplan does a great job of explicating the complex issues at stake, as well as telling Windsor’s story:

“We never dreamed it,” Edie reflects. “We didn’t expect marriage, even 10 years ago, and I never expected I’d be looking at a piece of paper that said ‘Windsor versus United States of America.’ Fighting is very hard—we spend our lives coming out, in different circumstances. We’re never all out, somehow. It takes a lot of guts to stand up and let people know—people you’ve lied to much of your life—that not only are you a lesbian, but you’re a lesbian fighting the United States of America.”

This last item is gratuitous, but I just have to say I love the name of the magazine from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina: Owl & Spade. Just set it right there on the coffee table next to Garden & Gun. I had to ask editor John Bowers how the magazine got its name, and he responded: “The first issue of Owl & Spade was published in October 1924 when Warren Wilson College was the Asheville Farm School. The masthead read, ‘The Owl and Spade: Dedicated to the Dignity of Manual Labor When Coupled with Brains.’” I love that.

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Amen

October 31st, 2011
By Dale Keiger

I believe in the healing of story. I think it’s good for people to talk it out. There is something clarifying, curative, restorative in the telling; some would call it “therapeutic.” Ernest Hemingway once said, “If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

The act of sharing is good for the recipient, too. The hand-off from storyteller to listener is an exchange of trust and understanding. And more is imparted in that transaction than the story itself. Storytelling is gift-giving.

—Kerry Temple, “Let me tell you . . . ” Read all of it.

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Best American Essays taps alumni magazines

October 19th, 2011
By Dale Keiger

Not for the first time, the annual volume The Best American Essays has honored a couple of alumni magazines. The 2011 edition’s editors, Robert Atwan and Edwidge Danticat, selected Pico Iyer’s “Chapels”  from Portland (you will need to scroll through the PDF to find it on pg. 50) for inclusion in anthology that includes work by Hilton Als, Christopher Hitchens, Charlie LeDuff, and Zadie Smith. Here is the opening paragraph:

Giant figures are talking and strutting and singing on enormous screens above me, and someone is chattering away on the miniscreen in the cab from which I just stepped. Nine people at this street corner are shouting into thin air, wearing wires around their chins and jabbing at screens in their hands. One teenager in Sacramento, I read recently, sent 300,000 text messages in a month—or ten a minute for every minute of her waking day, assuming she was awake sixteen hours a day. There are more cell phones than people on the planet now, almost (ten mobiles for every one at the beginning of the century) Even by the end of the last century, the average human being in a country such as ours saw as many images in a day as a Victorian inhaled in a lifetime.

The back pages of each edition of Best American Essays lists other notable essays published in the previous year, a sort of honorable mention. Among the pieces honored were Joseph Epstein’s “The Symphony of a Lifetime,” published by Kerry Temple’s Notre Dame Magazine:

I have taken to saying that my wife and I are at the grandparent stage of life. I don’t before now recall using the metaphor “stage” to describe any other segment or portion of my life. The notion of stages of life has been around for a long while, of course, and doesn’t look to be going away.

“Go-o-o-o , Lemmings!” by Brian Doyle, published by The American Scholar:

The first sports team I remember loving as a child, in the dim dewy days when I was two or three years old and just waking up to things that were not milk and mama or dirt and dogs, was the Fighting Irish of the University of Notre Dame. They were on television every day, it seemed, in our bustling brick Irish Catholic house. Inasmuch as I was hatched and coddled near Manhattan, there were also Metropolitans and Knickerbockers and Rang­ers and Islanders, and as I shuffled shyly into high school, I met snarling and roaring mammalian mascots, notably the Cougars of my own alma mater, which was plopped in marshlands where I doubt a cougar had been seen for 300 years.

“An Intimate Geography” by Barry Lopez, also published by Portland:

It was night, but not the color of sky you might expect. The sun was up in the north, a few fingers above the horizon, and the air itself was bluer than it had been that afternoon, when the light was yellower. A friend and I were sitting atop a knoll in the Brooks Range in northern Alaska on a June “evening.” We had our spotting scopes trained on a herd of several hundred barren-ground caribou browsing three miles away in the broad, treeless, U-shaped valley of the Anaktuvuk River. The herd drifted in silence across an immensity of space

Finally, the Spring 2010 edition of Portland, “Water as Soul,” was cited as a “notable special issue.”

Congratulations to all.

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