As much as any other region of the United States, New England is characterized by its history. Its name says “new,” but it means “old,” usually with an “e” on the end.
This makes sense, to a point. The Pilgrims landed here nearly 400 years ago. The nation’s oldest universities are here. American industry first sprang up next to New England’s rivers, and it withered here first, too, moving to the South and Midwest before going overseas.
The six New England states even have the oldest populations. It is conventional wisdom that young people often move away, seduced by the lights of New York or Los Angeles and the creative people who live there.
But there’s another New England, one that goes largely unnoticed. It’s relatively young, it’s creative, it’s vital and it’s the subject of a new print magazine intended to call attention to it.
“There’s a lot that you don’t sort of think of New England doing or having or being,” Michael Kusek, the founder and publisher of Take Magazine, said in an interview in the magazine’s temporary offices in an artist’s studio in Northampton, Mass.
Take’s first issue landed on newsstands in September. Kusek and the magazine’s small staff and cadre of investors want to knit together the loose threads of the region’s arts and culture. Take has a succinct mission statement, cast as a tagline: “New England’s New Culture.”
“We want to help promote it because nobody knows about it,” said Lauren Clark, the magazine’s editor. “One of the big ambitious things that we’re trying to do is create this regional identity.”
Thus far, Take has shined its light on artists, writers, performers, restaurateurs, clothing designers and other culture-makers across the region.
Profiles of visual artists have included Vermont’s Jesse Azarian, who gets by selling paintings for $50 to $100; Anna Hepler, who lives in relative isolation in Eastport, Maine, after leaving her teaching job; and Anna Schuleit Haber, who has worked on commissions all over New England.
Take has featured Gypsy Layne, a burlesque troupe in the Berkshires; Lucky’s, a new old-school barber shop in Concord; Studio 860, a hip-hop dance school in Hartford, Conn.; and El Rancho Grande, a tiny, traditional taco joint in Providence, R.I.
In its first year, the magazine has published submissions from some well-known New England writers: Former Hartford Courant rock critic Eric Danton, Northampton-based writer Nanette Vonnegut, Kevin Kelley, a longtime writer for Burlington’s Seven Days, Kate Nocera, daughter of former New England Monthly writer and New York Times op-ed writer Joe Nocera.
The February/March issue, the magazine’s fifth, was the first to have a theme: Analog. It included stories about a vinyl record plant in Burlington, Vt., letterpress printers, milliners and hand-painted signs.
The lists above reflect two aspects of what Kusek, 47, and Clark, 48, are trying to achieve. They are geographically and thematically diverse and they’re about people.
Those efforts run counter to most arts coverage in New England. Daily papers are “hyperlocal,” Kusek said, interested in what’s going on in the immediate area, but seldom beyond. And a lot of arts writing centers on institutions that get the word out about their offerings, the big and medium-sized dogs on the New England arts scene – Tanglewood, MassMOCA, Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, Northampton’s Iron Horse Music Hall, Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts and on and on, in every sizable town, from Provincetown west to Rutland.
“I like the idea that we focus on the people, rather than the institutions,” Kusek said.
This has posed some challenges. Not all New England artists want to be found. Jesse Azarian is an example.
“A great part of the story is that we had to chase him down,” Clark said. Azarian, who grew up in an artistic family in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom (his mother is the printmaker and illustrator Mary Azarian), “didn’t want the attention,” Clark said.
“The New England artists, they come up to the woods and they hide,” she added.
Kusek got to know the New England art world from working in it. After graduating from Ithaca College, he moved to New York, where he raised money for arts organizations. He’s a native of Holyoke, Mass., and returned to the area in 1993. “I moved back for six months, and I stayed,” he said.
He kept working in the same vein, raising money for nonprofits, then handling PR and communications. He wrote for the Valley Advocate, a Northampton-based alt-weekly (now owned by the same company that owns the Monitor).
“That’s really where I got the bug to do Take,” he said. He’d also gotten a feel for the media landscape in New England and sensed that there was a niche for an arts and culture publication.
“We’re all a day’s drive away from each other,” Kusek said of the people the magazine covers. There’s a map in each issue that shows readers roughly where the story subjects are located.
Kusek left the Advocate in 2008, but the economic downturn made the idea of starting a magazine seem impossible. Magazines were failing, most notably Gourmet. The iPad was briefly considered a savior for magazines, but readership never materialized.
In the past few years, new print magazines have started to crop up, both in New England and globally. Titles including Monocle, which tackles global affairs and design, Modern Farmer, whose founding editor called it “a farming magazine for design professionals” and Iron & Air, a Manchester-based motorcycling magazine, have emerged in the fragile economic recovery. They all share certain qualities: smart design, a tight focus on lifestyle and an aspirational attitude.
And where what might be called mainstream magazine writing is distanced and skeptical, the new magazines seem earnest, at times even credulous. In Take, some of the short profiles are written by a friend of the subject, and are warm appreciations rather than cool appraisals.
Kusek’s first “publisher’s letter” reflects this new form. “Thanks to pushing from good friends, followed by countless hours devoted to planning by an amazing team of incredibly talented colleagues and contributors, you hold in your hands the very first issue of Take – a magazine about people and for people like you – New England’s culture makers and culture consumers.”
A few of Kusek’s friends stood him at a whiteboard in 2014 and “pounded the business plan out of me,” he said. He gathered a group of investors, mainly from the Pioneer Valley and Providence. The magazine started online first, earlier last year, then put out its maiden issue in September. The first office was Kusek’s Northampton apartment.
Take is the first new magazine meant to serve New England since the demise, in 1990, of New England Monthly. (There’s a new New England Monthly, published on Cape Cod, but it bears little resemblance to the original.)
The older publication might seem a cautionary tale for anyone trying to start a print magazine in New England. Founded in 1984, New England Monthly won two National Magazine Awards and was nominated for five more. Its offices were just outside Northampton, in a mill building in the hamlet of Haydenville, Mass. When it closed, it had never turned a profit, despite robust circulation, said its founding editor, Daniel Okrent.
“I admire them if they think they can pull it off in print,” Okrent said in a telephone interview. If he were starting a magazine today, “I would focus strictly on a digital version.”
New England Monthly Publisher Robert Nylen did just that, co-founding Beliefnet after the print magazine closed. Nylen died in 2008, a year after Beliefnet was sold.
Kusek said the internet enables a print publication by lowering production costs. The magazine’s staff lives all over New England. Clark commutes from Somerville to Northampton, but not every day. The magazine’s advertising and circulation reps are in Boston. Meetings are held by Google Hangout. “We’d never be able to do this magazine without Google,” Kusek said. In addition, every Take story ends with a URL for the artist’s website.
But Take’s analog issue is a sign that people in the arts are looking away from their screens. “There really is a place where there’s this, like, wall of stuff that comes at you all the time,” Kusek said. “I have to put the phone down.”
If people involved in New England’s arts and culture get to that point, will they pick up a magazine? Most of Take’s digital traffic is mobile, on phones or tablets. But “we sell way more magazines than people read it online,” Kusek said.
Take started as a 10-issue-a-year enterprise, but with the December/January issue Kusek decided to cut back to six issues a year, “so as not to burn out our small staff.”
If Kusek and Clark and their collaborators are banking on anything, it’s the growth of New England’s creative sector. Vacant mill buildings across the region have been filling up with artist studios, galleries, musicians, coffee shops, breweries, metalsmiths, writing centers, restaurants, clubs, interior and graphic design consultants, yoga, dance and martial arts studios, and on and on. Highlighting this growth is a way for Take to demonstrate the power of the arts to reshape communities.
“New England towns are built around their factories,” Kusek said. “If you take those factory buildings and fill them up with creative people” that can give a town a center for new growth.
If Take is successful five years from now, it will have built a community of readers, writers and story subjects, people who have a stake in the arts and culture. For now, they’re still digging up the new New England.
“This is the fun part of the job,” Kusek said. “We get to go all around New England and meet even more artists.”
