Mel Allen's New England from YankeeMagazine.com

The Gift of the Glaciers

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

During my childhood summers in Chester County, Pennsylvania I did many things: played baseball, rode my bike, caught fireflies, waited for the twilight jingle of the ice cream truck -- but swimming in clear fresh water was not one of them. My town was too far south for the ice age glaciers to have reached it, so there was no retreat and melting, no carving of the hundreds of deep ponds and lakes that so refresh the New England landscape.

Oh, we had one man made quarry on the other side of town, known for it cold water, and it served as a private swim club. There was also the Lenape River a few miles away, and while I knew kids who fished it, I did not know any who swam there. For us, summer meant running under hoses, a day at Lenape Park with its public swimming pool packed end to end, or being lucky enough to have a friend with one of those really big plastic pools you filled from the same hose you ran under before the big day when the pool was set up.

One of the town's biggest industrialists, and hence one of the wealthiest men, lived on my street. His house there was modest, in keeping with all the modest houses in the neighborhood, but then he built a lavish summer home complete with a dredged pond. I do not remember exactly where he built it, but I remember it was a big deal when my dad and I were invited to come to the newly filled in pond. I remember standing on that pond's bank, no sure exactly what to do -- I had never jumped into water before where fish and who knows what else lived.

I tell you this because here in New England we take our lakes and ponds and swimming holes for granted, as if they were so many stone walls, or white steeple churches, parts of the landscape we barely see only because we see them every day.

Just a mile or so from my house is a sweet, long pond made sweeter by knowing it was the family land of a well known local writer who gave the pond to the town's residents. A college student sits in a chair at the entrance checking to see if you have the free town pass, and if you want to kayak the pond you can get one right there for the bargain price of $5 an hour. I've taken a swim there before 7:30 in the morning on work days, and I nearly always see someone else doing the same thing. I've returned in the evening to wash away the heat and stress of the day, and far out in the water I will see someone stroking his way towards shore.

All ages come here, the teens flirting and pushing each other off the dock, until the lifeguard, jealous no doubt, shouts for them to stop. The pond has become a tribal connection to everyone who lives here, we share the cool (but now warming delightfully) water, as much as the air and the view.

When outsiders think of New England, I am sure the sea springs to mind first. But for every ocean beach there are hundred fold more lakes and ponds. The sea helped shape New England's fortunes and defined our heritage, but when I think of summer I see first a wooden raft set a hundred feet from shore, throngs of children jumping off then climbing back on -- all of them unaware of the wondrous gift of the glaciers all those thousands of years ago.

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.

Write It and They Will Come

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The July/August issue of Yankee features one of the most complex stories we have done during my nearly 30 years here at Yankee. We titled it "25 People You Must See This Summer." We put this together many months ago when the editors got together repeatedly to toss out the names of New Englanders we knew personally, or New Englanders we had read about, or New Englanders we wished we knew. We finally reached agreement on 30 people. Then we called a team of photographers and set them loose.

While not a travel story about New England, we felt the people we chose (we wrote about 30, but only had room at the end for 25. But New Englanders do not waste anything, so I have a feeling the five will make their way to our readers one way or another) would certainly provide impetus to anyone wanting to experience not just the landscape, but the people who give New England its special flavor.

A week or so after the issue came out we heard from a man named Ray who lives in Nashua. He said it was one of his favorite issues ever, and he was determined to not just see each of the 25 people, but to get their autographs on the pages. Well, he certainly took to heart our advice: "25 People you must see this summer."

Over my years here I have seen this phenomena many times with Yankee readers. I do not know any other magazine whose readers do not just read but who take the stories to heart and put them into their own lives. One of the first stories I wrote for Yankee, back in 1980 or so, was about one of my favorite spots in Maine. It's called the Oxford Hills, and at one time I had lived there in the break-your-heart lovely village of North Waterford.

It was a fall story so I wrote about a hike up Mt. Tirem, then descending and heading to the Fillebrown apple orchard for cider that Tom Fillebrown made right in front of you. I also wrote about an all but unknown French restaurant in Paris, Maine, and the joys of digging in the earth for gems and minerals after visiting Perham's Gem Shop in West Paris.

Here's what happened. Hundreds of readers drove up to these places, many hugging the issue of Yankee and they followed my story as if it had been a road map. They hiked the mountain, they drank the cider, they brought back gems from Perham's and they polished off a fine dinner at Maurice's unlikely touch of France. I remember talking with Tom Fillebrown a few weeks after the story came out and he was all but speechless. He had signed his first autographs! He was a fine farmer and orchardist, a true native of the Oxford Hills, but never before had he been a celebrity!

It is one of the best reasons to write for Yankee's readers. They are not just reading stories, filling in time, or looking for one more tip on how to lose five pounds -- they are living inside the pages, looking for New England even if they have moved away, even if they, in fact, have never been here, except in their dreams, hoping one day to travel the back roads to find cold fresh cider pressed right in front of their eyes.

Actually, Yankee is that map after all.

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.

The 5 Best, Surefire Ways to Break into Yankee

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

"How do I break into Yankee?" I hear that question over and over from hopeful writers. Through the years, I've spoken to hundreds of freelancers at writers' conferences, as well as on the phone and through letters and e-mails. The earnestness and hope in that question are not to be taken lightly.

The desire to be published runs wide and deep among us, and Yankee, for many people, has seemed like part of the family. Even a colleague, when she finally saw her byline in the July/August issue, confessed to me the other day, "It was one of my dreams, to be published in Yankee."

The other day I gave a speech to the Sanford-Springvale, Maine, Chamber of Commerce. I enjoy this part of my job: getting out, meeting the people of New England, the very heart of why Yankee Magazine matters. We're not an abstract part of their lives; many of the people I meet grew up with Yankee in their homes, and now their own children are doing the same.

I met a wonderful, gregarious man who grew up in Sanford, left for a while after high school, and then came back to stay. He told me about his two teenaged children, and his pride in them fairly made his sport coat pop off. He told me about his son, who loves to write. As I was leaving, he pressed a few pages of his son's writing into my hands and entreated me to read it. "He'd love to write for Yankee," he said.

I understand, and that's why I've compiled here the "5 Best, Surefire Ways to Get into Yankee." They'll seem simple. They're deceptively difficult to pull off. But it happens. It happens. Stories do come to us "over the transom." That means we haven't assigned them. They come like a knock on the door, and we open the envelope and here's this rare treasure of a story we must accept and publish.

We also receive dozens of queries each month. A query is basically a job interview. If a query is fascinating to read, if the writer shows that he/she has a passion and knowledge of the subject, we'll often want to know more. This list will serve you well, whether you send a query or a completed manuscript.

1. Know the magazine. A magazine isn't static. A magazine lives and shows what it is every issue. If you're going to get in, know what we're doing now.

2. Write about New England. That seems obvious, since Yankee is "New England's Magazine," but a surprising number of submissions arrive that have little to do with the region.

3. Tell us what we don't know. This is key. Yes, we know New England, but we want to be surprised. If we can be surprised by what you write, we know the readers will be. Take a look at the March/April 2008 issue. The story Hidden Trails of Cape Cod delivers the surprise. It came in with that unexpected knock on the door.

4. Write with authority. This applies to both queries and finished stories. Make sure you show us that you know what you're writing about. Any one of us can find information now on the Internet. What we want is a real sense that you have a depth of knowledge about whatever it is you write about.

5. Write so that we pay attention to the first words. Again, this is imperative for queries as well as finished stories. Many query writers send us lengthy resumes. The best resume is that page that shows us how you use words, how you want to write the story. We want to discover new writers. It's why we come into the office every day: to put out a magazine that excites us. The competition is stiff; the bar for what we publish is high. But I have so many stories over the years about unpublished writers breaking in that I know it can happen for you.

See our Submission Guidelines for Writers and Photographers.

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.

Paper Trails

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

I'm one of those people who keep things long after I've ceased to need them. For instance, my raw material for stories has long been the daily newspapers that come into the office from all corners of New England. I pore over the Maine Sunday Telegram, the Providence Journal; the Hartford Courant; the Cape Cod Times the Burlington Free Press; and others. I keep scissors handy, and whenever I find a story that sparks my curiosity to know more, I clip it and put it into a folder to look at later.

The other day I picked up some of those folders and found wonderful clips -- from the 1980s. They make for fine nostalgia reading now, but I wonder why I never tossed them after, say, a decade or so. After all, the papers keep coming, day after day.

My office is legendary around Yankee for being, well, a tad cluttered. I always think I'll regret tossing something out. Sometimes my obsession with holding onto stuff proves productive. For instance: A few years ago I was working late. The offices were dark and quiet. I found a shoebox of clippings I hadn't seen for some years. I pulled it out. There on top was a story on child prodigies that I'd plucked from Parade years before.

The story profiled children from around the country with extraordinary intellectual gifts. One was a 12-year-old girl from Aroostook County, Maine, an isolated, distant pocket of New England. In the story the child, Daphne Brinkerhoff, tells the reporter that by the time she graduates from college she expects to win the Nobel Prize -- perhaps in science, perhaps in literature. I looked at her words, which I'd highlighted in yellow nine years earlier, and wondered, what happened to Daphne?

I found Daphne living in Portland, Maine. Her life hadn't turned out the way everyone had expected. The story Yankee published, "What Ever Happened to Daphne?" got a lot of attention from school groups, and whenever colleagues chided me on my boxes of papers that continued to clutter the space, I smiled and handed them my Daphne story.

Then, of course, I held onto things even more tightly -- a cycle that leads, I suppose, to those stories we read about from time to time, where some old man or woman is found in a house with barely enough room to turn around, and every corner is crammed with newspapers from generations past.

Now everyone says that print is on its way out, that within a generation, we'll get all our news from online newspapers. No more newsprint hands. No need for scissors. Every office everywhere neat as a pin. Just computer screens glowing in semi-dark rooms. What, I wonder, will keepers like me have to keep?

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.

Obama and the Little Snowflake

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Those of us who live in New Hampshire saw the just-concluded primary season unfold like nowhere else. Everyone came here -- candidates, eager campaign staffers, press -- and we soaked it up. We didn't catch newsbites; we had conversations. Our flesh touched their flesh. Our eyes met theirs. No wonder the state holds onto its first-in-the-nation status with a fierceness that the rest of the country resents. But we got to know candidates more personally than anywhere else -- for instance, Barack Obama.

Long before the world knew much about the way Barack Obama could capture and hold a crowd with his message of hope, empowerment, and change, he arrived in the town of Peterborough, just a few miles east of our Yankee offices in Dublin. There was no fanfare, no entourage. It was cold and spitting snow, one of those bleak early February days in 2007, a year before the New Hampshire primary.

He stepped down from his bus in Depot Square, alongside the local diner. He had one aide, who held an umbrella over Obama's head. His audience numbered, at best, 80. He could have given a cursory talk and hustled back into the warmth of the bus before heading to more promising territory, somewhere inside, with more listeners. Instead, he gave a speech that stirred his listeners. I wasn't there, but I wish I had been. I heard this story from my friend, Annie, who stood in the snow with her 82-year-old mother, Mary.

Obama spoke for 30 minutes. When it was over, Annie phoned me. Before that day she hadn't known very much about Obama. She has no television, rarely listens to the news. But his words riveted her, and she left convinced that this was a politician unlike any we've known: a man of character who won't be blown this way and that by the prevailing political winds. She said as Obama spoke, her mother pressed closer to the front. Mary reads deeply and widely; she also owns no television, but her constant home companion is National Public Radio and she can speak with depth about any issue.

Obama took Mary's hand. She stands about five feet tall. Her hair is white. She was wearing her trademark white cloak against the chill. "I never thought I'd live to see this day," she said, moved to tears by Obama's speech and by the notion that just maybe, maybe, America would embrace the son of a white woman and a black African. He held her hand for a moment and said, "Thank you so much. That means a lot to me. You look like a little snowflake."

There's a photo of Obama bending down to say those words to a little lady in white in a small New Hampshire town. It hangs in her house, and in her daughter's house. If you look at the photo, you'll know that Obama's improbable journey from obscurity to the Democratic nominee for president of the United States is not a fluke of history. It's not a mystery. On a dank New Hampshire day, he lit a fire in everyone who saw him. Then he just never stopped.

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.

Father's Day at the Office

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

A few days ago, a young woman and a young man, one a college senior, the other a college junior, walked through the doors of Yankee for their first day as summer interns. Over my many years here, I've worked with dozens of interns and have never failed to learn from them, perhaps more over time than they learned from me. They bring youth, an eagerness to immerse themselves in whatever I ask them to do, a genuine glow of pride when they see their work translate to our pages. The working pulse of Yankee's daily life is new to them, and I get to see what goes on inside our Dublin offices with fresh eyes, almost as if I've come to a new town for a few days. The young woman's name is Mirel, and she comes from my own alma mater, the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Within a few days she's impressed everyone with her quiet focus as she's tackled a major project for our winter issue. Readers will see her byline on this story in our January/February 2009 issue.

The young man's name is Josh. He's working with Yankee's Web team, the editors and designers who produce these pages, our online magazine. He's 20 years old, and I've known him from the moment he was born. When he was a baby, I'd come into the office on a Sunday, turn on the copy machine, press his hand to the glass, and make a copy of his palm. Somewhere in my crowded office files, I have a whole set of palm prints from Josh and his brother.

When he was in fourth grade, I'd pick him up from school and he'd spend several hours doing his homework in a quiet corner of my office until we left for home, some 15 miles away. My life as writer and editor always intersected with his life, but always on the fringes of his own -- the way it should be. But now, for the all-too-brief weeks of summer, our working hours link; we go to lunch together to the wonderful Dublin General Store, and we sit outside on the store's porch and catch up with what he's doing. Right now he's working on putting new links into our foliage tours. The other day he worked on finding the best sand castle competitions. What he does in his hours here will reach so many of you who come to this site; I try to not let him know what a big deal this is for me.

My mentor at Yankee since I arrived in the fall of 1979 has been Judson Hale. Jud is now into his 70s, and when he comes to our senior management meetings he sees his nephew Jamie Trowbridge running the meeting as Yankee Publishing's president, and he sees his son, JD Hale, sitting there as Yankee's publisher. I don't think I ever fully understood the pride he must feel until the day I saw Josh walk through Yankee's door the other day.

It was one of the best Father's Days I've known.

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Yankee editor Mel Allen is the author of A Coach's Letter to His Son.