ABOUT US

Dear Readers, The November / December 2006 issue,  our twenty-fourth, marks our fourth year of publishing the journal. Was it really only four years ago that Barbara Tatham Johnson, Lillian Baker Kennedy, Sherry Ballou Hanson, Joel Johnson, my husband Clif, our daughter Deirdre, and I worked together to produce issue #1? Yes, it was, and sometimes I wonder what possessed us to embark on such an ambitious undertaking. After all, my husband and I had no start-up money, no backing from wealthy patrons devoted to the arts, no assistance from any colleges or universities, and, with the exception of our daughter Deirdre, little experience in publishing. Yet, once the idea took hold, somehow all those disadvantages, daunting though they were, receded, quelled by a desire to be “a voice from the hinterland,” a voice that is often overshadowed by our talented but vociferous city cousins. Some of our subscribers who have been with us from the beginning might recall the modest look of issue #1, with its plain brown cover, simple graphics, chapbook size, and lack of photographs. Small and humble though it was, I think I can safely say that we were all proud of issue #1, our first effort and therefore special for that reason. In that first issue, in my opening essay entitled “The Notion of a Hinterland,” I wrote about the value of the hinterlands. “Since [going to a] conference in Presque Isle, I have often thought about the hinterlands and the role they play in the life of a culture. I have come to the conclusion that we need our centers [our cities] and all that they bring, but we also need our hinterlands. We need a place where there are fewer constraints on the body and on the imagination, a place where wild things thrive, a place where complete solitude from the company of humans is possible….we need to hear the voices that come from the hinterlands, voices that are off center but are fresh and valuable. I suspect that deep down even the most committed city dweller recognizes this.” My ideas about the value of the hinterlands have not changed, and, for me, they remain as true today as they were four years ago. However, there have been changes since we started, some of them good, but one of them very sad. One of the most profound changes, both for the journal and for me personally, was the death of Barbara Tatham Johnson. As I mentioned above, she was with Wolf Moon from the very beginning. She had been a good friend for many, many years, a kindred spirit who shared my enthusiasm for literature, tea, and art. She was one of my sounding boards, someone who would patiently listen to my thoughts and ideas, someone whose insight I always valued. As if that weren’t enough, Barbara was also a beautiful and eloquent writer who wrote nature essays until the very end, when she was too sick to do so. Her death last year was a terrible loss at every level, and, I must confess, my enthusiasm for the journal wavered to the point where if it hadn’t been as well established as it was, I probably would have given it up. But, because of other changes that were thankfully much more positive, I rallied and kept going. The biggest and best change, perhaps, has been the number of contributors who have generously donated their work to the journal. When we first started, there were six of us (my daughter helped with editing). In the last issue, by my count, there were twenty-eight of us, and that number is fairly consistent with each issue. Many of the writers come from Maine, but some come from out of state, and a few even live overseas. While Maine is quite rightly the center of the journal, it is also good that the journal touches on issues and concerns that go beyond Maine. Other positive changes have been going from chapbook size to that of a standard magazine; using color photographs on the cover as well as often featuring a center section with color photographs; and using black and white photographs throughout the journal to add visual interest. When we first started, our primary focus was on the web magazine, of which the print journal was an outgrowth. However, over the years we came to realize that our main source of revenue was the print journal, not the web magazine, and, as a result, we made the decision to include only samples of the print journal in the web magazine rather than the entire contents of each issue. This has been a very good change. We continue to have an average of fifteen thousand online readers a month, but our subscriptions have doubled, and they continue to increase. Foolish optimists that we are, we even think the day might come when we will be able to pay writers for their work. Over the years, we have tinkered with the title and have used various permutations of wolf moon. We have decided to tinker yet again and shorten our title from Wolf Moon Press Journal to Wolf Moon Journal. Several readers have suggested that we do this, and we agree that the shorter title is a good thing. Many thanks to you, dear readers, for supporting this journal with your subscriptions as well as your donations of time, money, and submissions. Thank you for buying our note cards, which also support the journal. Truly, we could not do it without your help, for which we are very, very grateful. Now, onward and upward toward our fifth birthday! We hope to double our subscriptions yet again, and there is even a plan afoot to publish a book in celebration. Stay tuned. Laurie Meunier Graves

 

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