Six Month Update
Dear Friends of Ruminate,
Thank you for your faith and trust during this transition. We’re nearly six months into our journey toward the future of Ruminate Magazine and it’s been a privilege to watch our amazing community and staff step up to the plate as we navigated uncharted territory for the organization. I’m pleased to announce that we’ll all be a part of this community for a long time to come: Ruminate has decided to remain an independent literary arts magazine.
Our search for a university partner spanned thirteen schools and four months, seeking out the organization who would be able to preserve Ruminate’s unique voice and perspective and provide a platform for the next phase of our growth. We are so grateful to the universities and the professors who have been an essential part of these conversations. Your passion and care for the work we do is incredible and we hope to build creative partnerships with you in the future.
Reaffirming our independence is a bold statement for an organization that relies primarily on donations to fund its operations, especially in times like these. The decision to remain independent was only possible because the board has full confidence in our community and our staff. Our most recent issue, Issue 54: The Everyday, was the first issue we built from the ground up since we started this journey, and it is in the heart of that process that we have seen the true strength of our organization emerge.
Our next issue, Issue 55: Under Pressure, will be published this summer, at a time when we have been brought into magnified contact with our lives. It does what every issue of Ruminate does: connect us, writer to reader, poet to artist, human to human. The Ruminate community has always been connected by fearless creativity and compassionate exploration of life and faith. The importance of our work is just a bit more literal these days.
Ruminate has spent over a decade learning how to cultivate connection in the absence of co-location. No two staff members live in the same city, and yet they curate seamless collections of words and art, building tiny museums that explore the human experience facet by facet. Most of our readers have never met but they exchange stories, sharing their lives with one another in our pages. And when a subscriber settles in to read the magazine they remember that they are not alone.
Isolation has made our human desire for connection visible in new ways, highlighting the importance of the work we do. In the coming months, Ruminate will draw on the deep roots it has to set a course for the next ten years. We’d love your input—tell us what Ruminate has meant to you here and how you envision us growing. Your support is just as important—consider becoming a monthly donor to provide a firm foundation for the magazine and the community.
We hope also that you will join us today and in all the days to come in doing the work of noticing and celebrating the tiny miracles that hold together the everyday: small things, done for one another with great love. This is a new beginning for Ruminate. We’re so pleased to be beginning again with you.
Sincerely,
Keira Havens
Board of Trustees President
Ruminate Magazine
Notes from our staff leadership team:
Rachel, Editor:
I am excited and honored to step into the role of editor of Ruminate Magazine. I have been writing seriously for fourteen years, and have worked in publishing for a decade, including for the past two years as the managing editor of Ruminate, and it seems as though everything I’ve learned on my journey—from line editing to InDesign to project management and more—has prepared me for this role. I love Ruminate’s unique and nourishing aesthetic, and am pleased to help bring more contemplative art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry into the world.
Over the next few months, I’ll be spearheading the search for new poetry and fiction editors. We will have an open call for a poetry editor starting today and an open call for the fiction editor in mid-to-late summer. We are looking for experts in their respective genres who are engaged by the spirit of our magazine. If that sounds like you, please check out our job listings in Submittable for more details. I’d love to work with you.
Amanda, Director of Operations:
My journey with Ruminate started a few years before I was hired as the circulation and publishing manager. I became a subscriber at the end of 2016, and my love for this organization continued to grow as I attended local events and savored each issue. In the spring of 2018, I was fortunate to join Ruminate as a staff member. I myself am especially drawn to the stunning images from our visual artists and the essays in each issue.
Since coming aboard two years ago, I have tended to the marketing, customer service, and financial aspects of Ruminate. I enjoyed working alongside Brianna to bring Ruminate to more readers across Fort Collins and across the globe. During this transition period, I am continuing in my operations role as the director of operations and innovative management, and I am thrilled to announce that our former intern Natalie Peterson will be joining me as our marketing and publishing manager. I am eager to hear from you regarding what Ruminate has meant to you, and I am grateful to take this journey with you in sharing Ruminate’s beauty with many more hearts.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.