If you haven’t already received your autumn issue of Northern Woodlands you should get it any day now. When friends ask me how I think the issue turned out, I tell them that I don’t know and I mean it. One of the perils of being an editor is that you get so tunnel-visioned on the minute details of each issue that you eventually lose track of the big picture. When the first copies show up you don’t see substance or beauty, you just see blocks of text and picture without context. You open the magazine with your face grimaced, scanning nervously for the photo credit you missed, for the headline you spelled wrong. You notice oversaturated pictures and wonder if that was your mistake or the printers. You slam your palm into your forehead when, within 5 minutes of the issue arriving, a co-worker points out that Woods Whys is listed as Woods Wise in the table of contents.
While I’m quite sure that none of this is good for my personal health, it is a fairly organic part of the publishing process. There’s a chain of custody with each issue of the magazine. The individual parts are born of the writers and photographers who create them – each piece its own being, its own stand alone statement. Then the writers and photographers relinquish control of their work to me and my editorial staff. We modify their work to fit our template, to fit our overall vision, then we re-assemble the individual pieces to create a larger whole – this magazine. The fact that I no longer have any sense of the thing is, in some ways, the point; the magazine’s no longer mine once it’s published, it’s yours. I’ve relinquished control to you, the reader, and it’s your job now to make of it what you will.
In time I’ll go back and rediscover each issue as a reader. Someone will ask me why birch trees are white and I’ll consult Mike Snyder’s autumn Woods WHYS column to remember the answer. Maybe I’ll read something and disagree with it – this has actually happened before – and I’ll try to get some like-minded person to take us to task in a letter to the editor. On good days, though, I’ll read a back issue and simply enjoy it for what it is, a nostalgic feeling that brings me back to the days before I had anything to do with anything, days when I’d sit up in camp and wile an autumn evening away with a pile of Vermont Woodlands.
Before I sign off I would like to highlight one part of the autumn issue that I know, even now, will be a success: the poem, STOVEPIPE. The poet who wrote the poem, Verandah Porche, is a favorite of mine – a sentiment based both on the merit of her work and on the fact that she’s one of the people who taught me to love language in the first place. Like many kids who grew up in the Northeast, I first met Verandah as a grade schooler – she came to our school to show us how words can paint pictures, how they can make you laugh or ache, remember or imagine. How language can stimulate the senses – even touch, as certain words can feel physically pleasurable as they roll of your tongue. Language as song, as prayer, even as math. Look closely at her poem on page 65 and you’ll see it’s an acrostic – a form of poetic geometry. We could have tipped her hand with bold-faced caps, but I liked the idea of leaving it a secret for certain readers to discover. I never asked Verandah her thoughts on this presentation, but there’s a better than average chance that many years ago she’s the one who put this subversive idea into my head in the first place.