The Compass - fini!

About six years ago, my local nature center, Pennypack Ecological Trust received huge 'open space' grants for the preservation of fields and meadows and forests and ponds - over 700 acres of them - which are now community property forever and ever. I remember asking David Robertson, the exec director, about the grantwriting process since, I as director of ND, also write grants. I figured I'm the only one who has difficulty getting grants in on time.

We worked around the clock, said David. We were so exhausted that when it came time to turn in the grants, we had no energy to celebrate. We all just wanted to go home and go to sleep.

Thus it was that yesterday, Monday, when I finished working on the Summer/Fall issue of the Compass magazine I was too tired to party. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders and that I was visibly lighter. I'd shipped out the 25 or so articles to group members to proofread. Our proofers were Mary, Tiffers, Ada, and Anthony. Four articles in particular are really exciting - My Life and Times as a Gay Bipolar Man, Life as a Black American with Bipolar, an in-depth Compass interview with psychoanalyst and author Bob Gordon, and the slow difficult recovery of a woman with borderline personality disorder. Those are my own personal favorites.

I woke up on Monday with the intention of re-reading all the stories and condensing them even further. I was absolutely merciless, pretending I was the editor Alan Kerr of the Intelligencer ("we just can't justify all the space" is something he might say"). One woman had written a 10-page story which I culled down to 8 pages. This woman was very difficult. She wanted to micromanage me, look over my shoulder and okay all my editorial corrections. Finally, I sent her an email and said, "I'm going to be blunt with you. I am the editor of this magazine and I'll do what's best for the magazine. If you don't like it, feel free to withdraw your story." That was hard for me to do but of course you must do what's best for the readers.

I sent it to a local printer in Hatboro, close enough for me to drive over. But I emailed the graphic designer six different emails with all the articles attached. Here's what my title line of the email said:

5 articles attached - batch 1

Up until the last minute I was re-reading the darn things until I thought I was gonna puke. I'd read the borderline story, then say to myself, okay read it again, make sure everything is correct. I felt like I was a surgeon sewing up the body parts of a patient and wanted to make sure everything was in there and that I didn't leave any sponges inside.