The rhythm of producing a seasonal quarterly magazine often has us thinking a season or two – or more – ahead, and occasionally I momentarily lose track of what season it is “in real life.” As you look through this Summer issue – which took shape as winter was just starting to thaw into spring – our editorial team is already deep into work on the Autumn magazine, and we have a sense of what will fill the pages of the coming Winter and Spring issues.
No matter the season, in each issue of Northern Woodlands, we strive to balance a number of things: information and imagery, stories that touch multiple areas of our nebulous geographic range of “the Northeast,” and inclusion of a diversity of people and forests within that region. We try to fit in articles covering the myriad topics our readers have come to expect, from forest management to ecology, from hunting and fishing to birding and nature journaling.
As a reader, long before I joined the Northern Woodlands staff, I appreciated that mix. I would peruse the articles I was most interested in, often more than once, and skim through others – sometimes diving in to learn more about an unfamiliar topic, other times moving quickly to whatever was on the next page. As a freelance writer pitching stories to the magazine, I would often encounter some subject I was curious about (how creating backcountry ski zones affects the landscape, say, or what my neighbor up the road harvested from field and woods to use in her work as an herbalist) and try to figure out how to sell that idea to the editors, then how to write it in a way Northern Woodlands readers would appreciate. Now, as editor, I am one member of a team trying to make sure we have coverage of different states and people and topics – both throughout an individual issue and across the four magazines we publish in a year.
Sometimes, one issue or another skews toward a particular topic or geography. This Summer magazine leans in to wildlife and ecology, with stories about efforts to contain an invasive species of bladderwort in Maine (page 60), of sturgeon returning to the region’s waters (page 46), of the ways biologists categorize – and manage – wild canines (page 36), and of the efforts of people in northern New England and beyond to bolster kestrel populations (page 54). During one of our weekly editorial meetings, Publisher Jack Saul pointed out that each of these – from plant to fish to mammal to bird – features carnivorous species.
This connection between articles that at first glance seem to be about very different topics is something my former Northern Woodlands colleague Cheryl Daigle called “magazine magic.” These associations, woven from page to page, generally emerge well into the process of producing the magazine. The accidental nature of them seems testament to the connectedness of forests and the ecosystems contained within them. John Muir once wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” In our small Northern Woodlands universe, that often seems to be true.
In this Summer magazine, there are other topics – beyond carnivorous wildlife – that pop up in more than one piece. Two of our columnists mention blackcaps: as the focus of Ari Rockland-Miller’s Foraging column (page 31) and in passing in Todd Davis’s Homeground essay (page 34). Ancient species – sturgeon and box huckleberry (page 28) and fishflies (Seasonal Notes, page 18) – are another coincidence. And road kill (while not magical) appears in both Homeground (briefly) and Discoveries (more thoroughly, page 68). This Summer issue of Northern Woodlands also covers forest management and forest products in Connecticut (Community Voices, page 12), explains forest succession (Forest Insights, page 74), and offers a close look at axes, wasps, and twinflower, among other things.
Whether you read the magazine carefully, cover to cover, or skip around to the topics that hold the most interest for you, I hope you’ll discover a little bit of magic within these pages.