Editor's Letter Issue 29: Winter 2019
It’s hard for me to believe that this, the Winter 2019 issue of Edible Idaho, begins our eighth year of publication. It doesn’t seems that long ago that Claudia Mahedy, our publisher, and I met rather randomly at a food conference in California and began plotting a possible magazine— something with which neither of us had an ounce of experience.
What we did have was a passion for food. Claudia had written for a Colombian newspaper and I’d recently come off six years of a public radio show called, coincidentally, Edible Idaho.We scrambled to find writers, photographers and that life blood of any publication, advertisers. It wasn’t easy. We made mistakes. We ended up writing and shooting much of the content ourselves as well as covering the inevitable revenue shortfall. But when that first stack of magazines arrived from the printer in December of 2012 we were hooked. A subject we loved was suddenly made physical, distilled from daydreams, phone calls and road trips into a collection of stories we could actually hold in our hands.
The magic of publishing has grown a bit more mundane with the passage of time—you simply can’t be amazed every day a FedEx truck rumbles up your street carrying pallets of new magazines. Over the past seven years, we’ve occasionally run low on enthusiasm; we’ve considered closing down a few times (labors of love seldom pay the bills); contributors and crew have come and gone and the magazine itself occasionally invades our personal lives more than we’d like.
But what we’ve never run low on are stories. Idaho is full of them. They’re everywhere. And that’s why we can’t stop telling them. They’re too important, too memorable, too much fun to pass by. So, despite the challenges, our commitment just keeps getting stronger. With that, I’d like to thank our current crew for making it possible for Edible Idaho to cross into its eighth year: Tim McKinley, our associate publisher and lead sales guy, has pushed the magazine forward in ways we never imagined. Carissa Wolf, my co-editor and an award-winning journalist, has made the act of editing a whole lot more fun. Courtnie Dawson, our social media editor, has energized our online presence and endured bee stings in pursuit of stories. Graham Kerin, our sales guy and coordinator in North Idaho, has greatly helped in giving the magazine more statewide relevance. And then there are all the writers, photographers and advertisers who have provided the content that fuels every issue. They’re too numerous to list, but too important to not give our deepest gratitude.
Claudia and I have learned a lot about keeping this tenuous, impractical and seemingly oldschool project called a print magazine going, but stories of Idaho’s small-scale farming and local food just keep growing. You’ll see the evidence in this issue. How could we stop now?
Guy Hand | Managing Editor
