Making the Magazine

Making Coxing Magazine is like everything else that's good in life. It’s a lot like rowing, in fact: moments of jubilation that require your best effort to create what your mind sees, what your heart wants. The first year of Coxing Magazine has been more than publishing a magazine.

Making the magazine has been a series of surprises, those moments when it taught us things we never knew we needed to learn. It’s been print specifications and editorial schedules. It’s been photoshoots halfway around the world and designing at midnight. It’s been meeting people that have stories to tell, and recipes to share and interviews to record. It’s been traveling to factories to see how boats are built and how gear is made. It’s been watching friendships grow out of articles. It’s been flights and road trips and learning that sometimes the best thing that can happen is to have all your equipment disappear in a foreign country. It’s figuring it out.

It’s unpacking boxes of magazines and feeling the paper. It’s that smell that permeates the office for days after a new issue arrives: the scent of ink and paper lingering in the air. It’s pushups on the dock and early morning rows, a coffee cup balanced on the deck of a 4+. It’s nights spent dreaming and scheming and planning. It’s the next day when we realize that’s not going to work. It’s the manifesto. It’s watching each issue take form, laying it out and changing it and stepping back. Is it right? What hasn’t been said yet? What needs to be said?

It’s meeting a 94-year old coxswain and having cookies on her porch. It’s realizing that there are more connections in our world than we can ever imagine. It’s seeing that we aren’t as fast as we want to be or as business-minded as we should be but that we have something worth doing here. It’s understanding that each stroke is what makes the race and each word is what makes the magazine. And it’s you, our readers. You are the reality we wanted all along. If Coxing Magazine can bring coxswains, coaches and rowers together to form a movement of growth and skill and stories that lets each of us know we’re stronger together than any other way, then we’re in. We’re all in. Together, we’re making the magazine.