Editor's Note: Il Miglior Fabbro

by Brian K. Mahoney, June 25, 2009

In mid-June, I received an e-mail from Julie Hanus, assistant editor at Utne Reader, inquiring about reprint rights to a piece we ran in our May issue. The bimonthly digest of the nation’s alternative press, Utne publishes the best independent news and views from 1,300 publications. With a paid circulation of 90,000 and a strong online presence, Utne has the ability to showcase the ideas, trends, and solutions you won’t find in the mainstream media—views like you find in this publication, albeit on a larger scale.

Obviously, I was thrilled that Utne was interested in featuring a piece from Chronogram. We pride ourselves on the quality of our content. What we say and how we say it in our publication is both vocation and avocation for those of us who work here. I should add that this was not the first time we’d been approached by Utne. They reprinted a piece from these pages in their January/February 2008 issue by Erika Alexia profiling Music Together, an innovative, interactive music education program for parents and kids.

In their September/October issue, Utne will be publishing an excerpt of an interview our health and wellness editor, Lorrie Klosterman, conducted with Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona from the May issue. An author as well as a physician, Mehl-Madrona has studied indigenous healing for 30 years. He has pioneered a holistic approach that brings narrative medicine—the idea that we can discover the power of personal storytelling to pull us out of sickness—into statistics-driven conventional medicine. (The full transcript of Lorrie’s interview with Mehl-Madrona is available online at www.chronogram.com.)

Like Mehl-Madrona, Lorrie’s background is a seemingly paradoxic hybrid of science and native studies; in addition to being a shaman, Lorrie has a PhD in biology. She brings the rigor of the scientific method to every topic she’s written about in the last six years, allying it with an understanding that there are also viable therapeutic possibilities outside of what is taught in medical school. It’s a perfect set of qualifications for Chronogram.