This place where I work
This place where I work is a publisher, does magazines for hobbyists in a small town just to the right of the center of Wisconsin, out in some rolling farmland that’s pretty all year. It’s out here because the old guy that runs the place is from here, published his first magazine at the kitchen table 40 years ago, and things just grew without him really trying to. It’s sort of the same way today only the table is bigger, and you got more and more people pushed up to it all the time.
Hobbyists have real specific passions. It’s our job to figure them out, and it’s not easy.
It’s like postcards. Most of us have a hard time understanding why people get all worked up over postcards, but the postcard editor tells us she can’t figure out what’s so great about baseball cards (which is what I write about), so there you go.
Most of the people who work on the editorial side are experts first and writers and designers second, and while sometimes it shows it’s better than the alternative, which is real pretty magazines with big words in the right order that the readers don’t read because they don’t go deep enough. The editors, the ones that are experts as opposed to the general dopes like myself, have these knotty balls of concentrated knowledge of a subject, sometimes only a little bit of a subject. For instance, one of the coin editors is the world’s number-one expert on Chinese coins. Knows why some have square holes and some have round holes, and what all the letters mean on both sides. Most places that’d never get you hired, might even get you fired. Here it gets you an editor’s job, which is real fortunate for all the collectors of Chinese coins in the world.
What you wind up with in this place where I work is an office full of people talking different languages, saying English words but assembling them in some dialect, like rhyming slang. They can’t talk to almost anyone else in the office about what they really want to talk about, which is their knotty little ball of knowledge, and they can’t talk to anyone outside the office about their knotty little ball of knowledge, because the office is in Iola, Wisconsin.
Iola has about 700 people; 100 or so work here. Town’s full of Norwegians. You got Norwegians pumping gas and making bobbers, Norwegians milking cows and laying out other Norwegians at the Olson and Johnson Funeral Home, Norwegians cleaning house and selling houses and teaching school and driving around in pristine 1977 Buick LeSabres with 12,000 miles on the clock. They eat pie with lunch at the Crystal Café and lutefisk at the Northland Lutheran Church. They can’t help but run into the people from the magazine company with their knotty balls of knowledge, because they like pie with lunch at the Crystal Café, too. There’s not much the Norwegians and the magazine people can talk about with each other should they ever get thrown together at the counter or down at Honeymooners, so they talk about the Packers. If they didn’t talk about the Packers before they came to Iola, they learn. If you sit at the counter long enough, and everyone tries to, talk turns to the Packers. What they talk about when they talk about the Packers may not be what everyone else talks about when they talk about the Packers, but it’s how you talk in Iola. Mostly I like to sit back and listen.
This place where I work is a publisher, does magazines for hobbyists in a small town just to the right of the center of Wisconsin, out in some rolling farmland that’s pretty all year. It’s out here because the old guy that runs the place is from here, published his first magazine at the kitchen table 40 years ago, and things just grew without him really trying to. It’s sort of the same way today only the table is bigger, and you got more and more people pushed up to it all the time.
Hobbyists have real specific passions. It’s our job to figure them out, and it’s not easy.
It’s like postcards. Most of us have a hard time understanding why people get all worked up over postcards, but the postcard editor tells us she can’t figure out what’s so great about baseball cards (which is what I write about), so there you go.
Most of the people who work on the editorial side are experts first and writers and designers second, and while sometimes it shows it’s better than the alternative, which is real pretty magazines with big words in the right order that the readers don’t read because they don’t go deep enough. The editors, the ones that are experts as opposed to the general dopes like myself, have these knotty balls of concentrated knowledge of a subject, sometimes only a little bit of a subject. For instance, one of the coin editors is the world’s number-one expert on Chinese coins. Knows why some have square holes and some have round holes, and what all the letters mean on both sides. Most places that’d never get you hired, might even get you fired. Here it gets you an editor’s job, which is real fortunate for all the collectors of Chinese coins in the world.
What you wind up with in this place where I work is an office full of people talking different languages, saying English words but assembling them in some dialect, like rhyming slang. They can’t talk to almost anyone else in the office about what they really want to talk about, which is their knotty little ball of knowledge, and they can’t talk to anyone outside the office about their knotty little ball of knowledge, because the office is in Iola, Wisconsin.
Iola has about 700 people; 100 or so work here. Town’s full of Norwegians. You got Norwegians pumping gas and making bobbers, Norwegians milking cows and laying out other Norwegians at the Olson and Johnson Funeral Home, Norwegians cleaning house and selling houses and teaching school and driving around in pristine 1977 Buick LeSabres with 12,000 miles on the clock. They eat pie with lunch at the Crystal Café and lutefisk at the Northland Lutheran Church. They can’t help but run into the people from the magazine company with their knotty balls of knowledge, because they like pie with lunch at the Crystal Café, too. There’s not much the Norwegians and the magazine people can talk about with each other should they ever get thrown together at the counter or down at Honeymooners, so they talk about the Packers. If they didn’t talk about the Packers before they came to Iola, they learn. If you sit at the counter long enough, and everyone tries to, talk turns to the Packers. What they talk about when they talk about the Packers may not be what everyone else talks about when they talk about the Packers, but it’s how you talk in Iola. Mostly I like to sit back and listen.
posted by Kit Kiefer | 7:59 PM
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