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Editor's Note

Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Brian Mahoney and I am Chronogram’s editor. What you’re reading is a new feature of the magazine, the Editor’s Note (EN). It will appear each month on this page or in close proximity, before any of the editorial proper, for which you have picked up the magazine. (The EN is not mandatory reading; you may skip this page and still understand and enjoy reading Chronogram without a sense of loss or nagging regret.)

The following are some industry standards for the EN:

The EN should serve as an introduction to what is to follow, illuminating the various far-flung components of the magazine’s contents. For instance, the EN is the correct forum to explain why the middle portion of this magazine is titled “The Backbone.” The Backbone (pages 28-45) is the catch-all name we hung on the monthly columns we assigned in late 1999 when we switched to our larger format. Beth E. Wilson (Lucid Dreaming) is our art critic; Susan Piperato (Life in the Balance) writes about sustainable living, answering the question: How do we meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, or the health of the planet?; Sharon Nichols (Ear Whacks) is our music editor; Eric Francis (Planet Waves) is our astrologer; and Frank Crocitto (Frankly Speaking) and Sparrow (Quarter to Three) write somewhat unclassifiable musings about the human experience.

The EN should announce new initiatives of the magazine, providing a verbal launching pad for new sections and new editorial forays. To wit: The Book Shelf. Since 1998, we have published an annual Literary Supplement in the late winter, in which we review books and profile authors. Based on the swelling number of books by local authors and books of local interest that had been piling up on my desk in the past year, I realized we should dedicate some space each month to book coverage. Not surprisingly, the Mid-Hudson Valley is as thick with novelists, memoirists, poets, playwrights, and true-crime writers (see the profile of Fred Rosen on page 46) as it is with musicians and visual artists—and we intend to cover them all in The Book Shelf. The section debuted in our April issue with a profile of novelist (and Woodstock resident) Gail Godwin, three book reviews (we bumped the number up to six for the May issue), and a bestseller list provided by BookSense, the trade organization that represents independent bookstores across the country.

To oversee our new section, we have hired Nina Shengold as Books Editor. Nina is a playwright, writer, and editor who lives in Stone Ridge, and we are delighted to have her aboard. Her first novel, Clearcut, will be published by Anchor Books in May 2005. (All book review–related queries can be e-mailed to Nina at books@chronogram.com.)

The EN should also set the tone for what is to follow, whether contemplative, skeptical, matter-of-fact, blissed-out, pissed-off, celebratory, valedictory, what have you. However, how an editor at a magazine whose content runs the gamut from meditation to music to poetry to food to dispatches from Iraq is supposed to reconcile these elements is still elusive to me. The EN, while reflecting the sensibility of its author (who, by editorial extension, is a kind of author-writ-large of the entire magazine), should not overpower the rest of the writing in grandstanding displays of pin-wheeling verbal pyrotechnics whose purpose is to edify all and sundry that the editor, having stayed awake in vocabulary class from second through twelfth grade (while most others somnambulated), pored over word lists late into the night as a teenager (with occasional forays into the dense word forests of Gaddis, Joyce, Pynchon), and pegged a 780 on the verbal portion of the SATs, is, despite his nagging insecurities, in fact brilliant and capable of shouldering the duties associated with what is essentially the position of product manager—it’s just that instead of manufacturing widgets, he creates an entirely new, 140-page product each month.

And finally, the EN should alert the reader to what is on the editor’s mind.

See above.

—Brian K. Mahoney