My friend Joe McDonnell and I are local writers. In the early 1990s, I wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about Polaris titled, “Points North” and Joe wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about 50th wedding anniversaries. We both contributed stories and illustrations for the Roseau County Centennial Book and the Roseau County Heritage Books. I also contributed to the Roseau County book, 'Up Home', its title derived from my mother’s expression for her childhood home in Palmville Township.
Joe and I interviewed people over the years and realized the tremendous wealth of human interest stories around us. All we had to do was be good emphatic listeners and accurately write their stories in their own voices. Consequently, in 1994, we started a publication we named THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal. The Roseau Times-Region did a story on us and launched us into the public’s eye. We were both working full-time at other places; both had a family with kids around the same age. Publishing what was technically called a ‘zine’ THE RAVEN proved to be quite labor intensive using crude methods such as a PC, an inkjet printer, and a copy machine to produce its pages on 11x17-inch paper and folding each sheet by hand.
My wife at the time, and our daughter, helped us, as well as hand-screen hundreds of multi-colored postcards and RAVEN tee-shirts, when they both weren’t in school. Joe's wife and sons helped too, by folding and collating the pages into issues. The fun Joe and I had in the meantime, writing stories/talking to people made up for all the work involved, but eventually we burned out as I think is typical of small ventures like ours, given all the opposing activities bombarding our lives i.e., employment/farming/college/traveling/children. So we took a sabbatical in 1998.
I was surprised to learn that a group publishing The Commonwealth Reader in Warroad, Minnesota, in 1998, had taken interest in THE RAVEN, having followed it for several months. They invited me to their publisher's home to get acquainted. I was honored to learn someone 'out there,' had admired our work and had sought us out for an exchange of ideas. Seeing I was between gigs, so to speak, they invited me to write a few articles for them in exchange for an informal education into the modern world of publishing. It was quite the education. And fun to boot.
Recommitted to the task of publishing THE RAVEN, in December of 1999 I purchased two Mac computers installed with Quark word processing software, an Olympus digital camera, Photoshop software, a Yale tabloid-sized folding machine, a $6500 HP 8500 color laser printer, its software, and spare parts, and several cases of high quality laser paper; then signed an re-commitment agreement with Joe McDonnell to just write for THE RAVEN on a semi-regular basis. Was greatly assisted by the Northwest Minnesota Arts Council, and the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund we began republishing THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal in full color.
Sounds like a RAVEN story: In early 2002, my college friend Jacqueline Helms, a retired eleven-year graphic artist at THE TIMES in Thief River Falls, joined THE RAVEN. She greatly elevated its layout through her hard work (and through no small part her accounting degree); also designing and printing postcards, expediting its publication through collating, labeling, bagging, and sorting for mailing when I was at work. After participating in Minnesota's Sesquicentennial walking with Orlin Ostby's family Ox & Cart, we were married in 2008, outdoors, on December 31st in wind-chills of minus 21. Typical RAVEN fare.
The late Catherine Stenzel (1950-2026) heightened its editorial composition.
We retired THE RAVEN in 2018.
ReplyDelete"The Raven was a good excuse to explore the nooks and crannies of North and South Dakota and Nebraska for material to write about.
People ask me if we're still putting out our "little paper". I tell them no, but we're better than ever here at the Wannaskan Almanac. No postcards or tee shirts though.