Lately I’ve been thinking about reaching out to people I interviewed for GBXM to see if they want to catch up. Do they still have the same machines? The same interests? What’s the last decade done to them?
I know I interviewed a couple hundred people over the span of about 10 years. What I didn’t know was how many of those people I might be able to track down after all this time. The sites have been down for at least a year, now, so I looked up GBXM on the Wayback Machine.
A pleasant surprise. At least ten people I connected with in 2010 have remained in contact in some way over the years. I’ve even stayed with a few of them. It makes for a promising starting point for thinking about next steps.
I’ve spent this year more or less sending one-pager post cards to friends. Each time, I find myself trying to figure out how to grow from the post card to something more resembling a zine or nascent magazine.
I think I’ve figured it out.
Instead of (in addition to) sending post cards, I’m thinking about building magazine-ready features. If I create a couple, and a couple other friends do likewise, we could combine our stories into a printed digest of our collective adventures.
The challenge has never been coming up with stories we wanted to tell. It’s always been how do we get enough to build a magazine that isn’t more work than it’s worth? Many hands make light work.
In my mind, I’m picturing a half a dozen or more friends telling stories purely to be shared with other friends, we pull them together quarterly and turn them into a keepsake for ourselves (and for sharing with other friends IRL).
From there, it’s a question of coming up with any fun, interstitial things we’d like to include to make the “issue” a sort of personalized time capsule. Top 10 lists, memes, how-tos, maybe even a pro bono “ad” for a product or service run by good humans.
That’s always been my vibe; something that feels more like a small spotlight going around a theater, pausing on normal people to share their accomplishments, so that everyone can cheer, because we’re it’s more a celebration of our COLLECTIVE ABILITIES than any single individual’s exceptionalism.
Earnest, yet Novel
The post cards have felt so right this year. And they’re actually pretty easy to put together when I’m not obsessing over trying to be clever. But I find myself wanting more; room to tell complete stories. It would also be nice to get to read some new stories, too.
(No pressure.)
It feels a bit like pen pals, but where our collective letters are stories about our collective adventures, and then we pull them all together into a nice printed magazine we can keep on our bookshelves; almost like a slow build thread where the pictures will always work.
