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 BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Here and Gone
A little over six years ago, I started putting together the premiere issue of a new zine. After three years of working on a collectively run community-based political zine (Brooklyn Metro Times), I was eager to try something that could appeal to a national audience and that would allow for more creative ways to cover important issues than the usual "Is it a blow for the liberation struggle or a blow against the liberation struggle?" stuff that typifies leftish publications. What I came up with was a zine about "places and the issues behind them"; the title would be simply "HERE." HERE was always more of a struggle than I'd hoped, for a bunch of reasons, some of which relate to the difficulties of publishing a print zine in the digital age. (Especially a print zine that oftentimes seemed to specialize in 13,000-word articles.) Mostly, though, it comes down to time: With more and more things on my plate and a nearly-two-year-old whose response to seeing me working on my laptop is shouting "Bye-bye!" and slamming the lid shut, I simply don't have the time to put together a zine, or a website, that would do justice to what HERE has been. To some degree, that's a measure of how, even though it's never been a commercial success (one website slogan for a while was "America's least-read great magazine"), HERE has succeeded beyond what I'd ever hoped for. In these pages and on these pages, I've been proud to collect some incredible writing on everything from gentrification to compost to coffee bars, all dedicated to the idea of explaining the world around us without ever resorting to rhetoric, dogma, or dry intellectual abstractions. Without HERE and all its contributors over the years, I never would have learned about the horrors of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia, or the wonders of chicken-shit bingo. To everyone who helped write, edit, illustrate and otherwise make HERE happen over the years, a heartful thank you. In case you're wondering, the HERE archives will remain here indefinitely, so you can continue to read the fine work of these writers. And I won't be going away, either: You can follow my future writing projects (and those of other HERE writers, as I hear about them) at the newly revamped demause.net. Finally, thank you all for reading HERE over the years, for writing in support of our work, and for sending the checks that helped pay the printing bills. Not to sound hokey, but you're what made it all worthwhile - especially moments like the "What Does The War Look Like From Where You Are?" section that brought out dozens of you to write in as the bombs started falling over Baghdad (and which was honored by being reprinted in Clamor's Zine Yearbook of the best zine writings of 2003). I hope we'll meet up again in the future. 
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