Big Sky Reader

Around here, we call it The Project.Outside the offices of Big Sky Journal, it is called "a magazine."But wht it is, really, is a collection of voices, a choir of the uncommon, trying to define itself through a place that is larger than any of us.The magazine is a convenient package of delivery, a reflector, providing the best of the place in the form of essay, image, art and fiction.A lot of good stuff blows through this joint, and some of it sticks between the covers.What we have here is the nearly impossible reduction of several years and several thousand pages into a lucid collection of those voices. The idea for Big Sky Journal crossed my mind several years before I was able to escape the demands of an existing career to move the concept toward reality.By 1992, I was able to ask David McCumber, then the talented editor of a Santa Barbara newspaper, if he would help give the magazine its launch.With the confused excitement of a new project, Big Sky Journal punched a hole in the sky, bound for who knows where. For the past few years, the magazine has enjoyed the award-winning editorship of Allen Jones, in whose hands the reigns still lay.Without such hands, there would be, as they say, no ink, no paper.And no anthology.Pleasantly, we have found that there are still a surprising number of serious readers at large.Just when we might think the entire planet has abandoned the printed word for the sirens of the internet and video store, Big Sky Journal continues to grow and evolve. So what is this collection about?To some measure, each of us has that somewhat odd impulse to try and save the unsavable, to freeze the moment: the prom photo; the yearbook; the Christmas video.Some people collect stamps, we collect stories.... But unlike some collectors, we think we might have an idea why we collect these essays, articles and fiction pieces: they make us feel happy and smart and put us in touch with a place that interests us.They make us respond in a way we can trust.Wallace Stegner said it best: "....the smell of distance....the largeness and clarity take the scales from my eyes, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a rivermouth and tastes the waters of its birth." Describing the moment and making it happen are two different things.The pieces in this collection are easy to read.They are hard to write.Ask the best of them: there is nothing automatic about a well-focussed piece of writing, especially when one is wrestling with a subject as vast as the West.It's had to get your arms around it.Describing his short story Big Two-Hearted River in a 1924 letter to Edward O'Brien, even Hemingway admitted the difficulty in delivering a place to the reader."What I've been doing is trying to do country so you don't remember the words after you read it but actually have Country.It is hard because to do it you have to see the country all complete all the time you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it." If we have done our job, you will have Country, and, even if it's only for a moment, we will have saved something.To those writers who have so bravely given us their personal reflection of this amazing place, we offer humble thanks.Jones, Allen is the author of 'Big Sky Reader' with ISBN 9780312262938 and ISBN 0312262930.