For the last few weeks, we have been tugging on the invisible threads.
We didn’t know what would happen when we started. After all this time, would anyone still be there? Would these stories still matter to you? Would The Great Discontent still feel like something worth carrying forward?
And then you started writing back.
Some of you told us where you were when you first discovered the magazine. Some told us you still have every issue. Others shared stories about Hugh, or about something you had read in these pages years ago that stayed with you.
It has felt a little like pulling gently on a thread and realizing there is someone holding the other end.
So we are going to keep pulling.
The issue Hugh was working on is called Resilience.
For three years it has waited somewhere between what The Great Discontent was and whatever it might become next.
In the editor’s note, I write that resilience is built and sustained in community. I was writing about the artists in its pages. I did not know then how much those words would come to describe the magazine itself.
On Sunday, September 27, Hugh would have turned 49.
That morning, we are launching a Kickstarter to bring The Great Discontent back into print.
We are starting with Issue 6, Resilience, because in many ways it has become the clearest picture of what we want to keep making.
In it, Mira Nakashima talks about taking over Nakashima Woodworkers after her father, George, died. She had spent twenty years learning alongside him, and then suddenly found herself responsible for carrying his work forward while still making something of her own.
I understand that story differently now than I did when we made it.
Brad Montague tells another kind of story, one about Hugh.
Years ago, after an event in Chicago, Hugh walked up to Brad and handed him an old pin that read I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE. Brad had known him for about three minutes.
He told us how the gesture made him feel seen. Invited into something he didn’t know he was allowed to be part of.
He still has the pin. And so do I. And so do many of you.
The pins were originally made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, for an exhibit imagining the future. Hugh loved them. He collected them and handed them out to people he believed in.
That was Hugh. A possibility hander-outer, literally pinning us all together.
These are the kinds of stories I want The Great Discontent to keep finding.
People making serious creative work. People whose names may not yet be everywhere. People doing something worth paying attention to, often outside the places where everyone has been told to look.
Issue 7 begins there.
We are still choosing its stories, but we know where we are looking.
And this time, some of you will be invited into the process with us.
A small number of Kickstarter backers will join editorial conversations, propose a story for consideration, and see how an issue moves from an idea to a finished page. There will also be ways to read Issue 6 digitally, receive the new print edition, collect past issues, or secure one of just 30 complete archive sets.
Our goal is $20,000. That will fund the print run for Issue 6 and allow us to begin Issue 7.
We chose Kickstarter for a reason.
It lets us print as many copies as people actually want. But more importantly, it is where the life of The Great Discontent in print began.
The first time around, readers helped decide that this magazine should exist.
It feels right to ask you again.
We have carried The Great Discontent as far as we could on our own. What happens from here depends on whether enough of you still believe there should be a place for this kind of storytelling.
From everything you have sent us these past few weeks, I think there might be.
Hugh spent years talking about invisible threads: the influence that passes quietly from one person to another, traveling farther than any of us can see.
Through our friends. Our friends’ friends. Our friends’ friends’ friends.
We have spent the last few weeks tugging on those threads to see what might shake loose.
What came back was you.
On Sunday, we are going to tug a little harder.
If you want Issue 6, if you want to see what Issue 7 becomes, and if you want The Great Discontent to keep going, I hope you will be part of it.
And then I hope you will pass the thread to someone else.
For now, you can follow the Kickstarter here. Kickstarter will let you know the moment we go live Sunday morning