The Wave Goodbye
Coming to Adirondack Life in 1989 was inevitable: my previous jobs had been at the Adirondack Museum and Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts (ALCA), both in Blue Mountain Lake. At an ALCA career day focusing on employment in the arts, I met photographer Nancie Battaglia and Adirondack Life editor Christopher Shaw. At the end of the day, as high-school students piled into buses, Shaw asked, “You’re not planning to do this for the rest of your life, are you?”
It turned was open and I started as possibly the least prepared editor ever to join a publication. I was still hyphenating adverbs, and until a fellow magazine staffer photocopied the full page of editors’ marks from , I had no clue how to intelligently scribble over virgin copy. That tool is basic, of course, and it took years for me to see where a story lurked amid a forest of words and how to encourage writers to uncover the materials that made for solid, surprising reads. I was aware that many subscribers knew far more than I did about the Adirondacks. Every day I appreciated their forbearance and lived in fear they would find the flaws and factual errors that would blow our (and by extension, my) credibility.
