She’s made you laugh, and she’s made you cry, and if you’ve read enough of her work she’s probably also made you cringe in painful recognition while she plumbs the depth of our human condition. Introducing Megan Nourse, our new editor in chief!
Schooled first at UW’s student publications and then Alternatives\Journal, I am thrilled for the new and exciting places Megan will take the Community Edition. (She already launched our podcast, so you know she’s got the goods.)
And I am thrilled to be handing off this publication to someone who appreciates in such a fundamental way what a fundamentally important thing we’re doing, here.
We are the stories we tell. This means different things to me, on different days.
A few weeks ago a small community newspaper in Iowa won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting about agribusiness poisoning groundwater. So it means that we need independent storytellers speaking truth to power.
A few months ago I got a kind letter thanking us for our writing about refugees struggling to find affordable housing, a theme that also runs through this issue. And so it also means something about how we have tried, in small ways, to make space for voices that appear less frequently in the pages of the for-profit publications in this region.
Finally, I am thrilled that Megan so deeply values the community that is TCE, and more specifically, the dozens of volunteer contributors who write and take photos and draw and tweet and code and copy-edit and design our covers at two in the morning. I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: the list of contributors on page two of any issue is a list of people who could have been doing anything else but instead gave us their time and their talents for something (see previous paragraphs) larger than themselves.
And so I want to end this last letter of mine with a last thank-you to the many dozens of volunteers that I’ve worked with at TCE. Democracy dies in the dark, slowly and piece by piece. Thanks, folks, for shining a light with me.
Jesse Bauman
Editor in chief
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