As editor Cara Ellen Modisett shifts to part-time editor at large of BRC, Kurt Rheinheimer resumes his onetime position of editor.
When I was in college, majoring in English and writing for the school paper (the James Madison University Breeze), my uncle picked up a magazine and showed it to me, a magazine he loved to read. I looked through its pages and thought, “those are the kinds of stories I’d like to write.” Back roads, little festivals, small towns, mountain history.
The magazine was Blue Ridge Country.
A few years later, still in college, still writing for the school paper, I was finishing up a degree in music and planning to teach high school English. One weekend afternoon I found myself on the other side of a “staff only” door at the Green Valley Book Fair in Mt. Crawford, Va., in the middle of a two-hour interview with the owners, talking about books and words, and I realized I really loved this.
I researched internships, and while digging through magazines, I rediscovered BRC. My mother and I drove south from Harrisonburg to Roanoke one morning for an interview with editor in chief Kurt Rheinheimer. That May I started an internship, and late in the summer he offered me a job.
That job led to so many more stories – “behind-the-staff-door” conversations with potters and D-Day veterans, poets and fishermen, journalists and musicians. I’ve talked about art and matrimony with painter P. Buckley Moss; I’ve sat in guitarist Wayne Henderson’s living room and listened to him play music with pianist Jeff Little (and enjoyed a bowl of chili with them afterwards in the kitchen). Interviews on tour buses, in churches and log cabins, on stages and in green rooms, looking through and learning from these windows into other people’s lives.
Twelve years after moving to Roanoke to work here, I find myself making another life-changing decision.
This is the last column I’ll write as BRC‘s editor – I’m going back to school this fall to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction at Goucher College, among other projects. The great thing is that I’m handing Blue Ridge Country back to Kurt, its first editor, who was its guide for the first 17 years, and a guide for me these past 12.
And I’m not going away completely, either. I have the joy of continuing to write, blog, web edit and handle social media for this magazine we love, under the new title of editor at large.
Thank you for a wonderful first dozen years with Blue Ridge Country, and I look forward to many more.
Remembering another staffer from Leisure Publishing, longtime writer, Mountain Homes and Roanoker magazines editor Norma Lugar, 1934-2010.
