Echoes magazine to celebrate 20th year Anniversary photo calendar makes debut

PRESQUE ISLE – Officials with a local magazine devoted to rural culture are gearing up for their 20th anniversary celebration with their first-ever calendar.

Echoes magazine, with its formal title of Northern Maine Journal of Rural Culture, has been published quarterly in Caribou since 1988. The magazine’s mission is to focus on “positive values rooted in the past that have relevance for the present and the future.”

Kathryn Olmstead has served as editor and publisher since the first issue.

“It’s not just nostalgia,” Olmstead said Monday. “The point is that some of these traditional values of rural culture are relevant today. Things like conservation, minimizing waste. … Knowledge of the rural experience can help us live in modern society.”

Olmstead pointed out that Echoes is an Aroostook magazine, but that its themes transcend geography and “apply to anybody who grew up in a small town where everyone knew you by name.”

Echoes contains feature stories, essays and life stories written by readers, including some fiction and poetry, regular columnists, and lots of local photos.

In fact, Olmstead said, people have been asking the publishers for years if they were “going to do a calendar because there are so many beautiful photos in Echoes.”

But officials always seemed to start planning for a calendar too late in the year.

Olmstead said she made a special point, for the magazine’s 20th anniversary, to get this project started in the

middle of the winter.

On the calendar cover is one of Echoes’ most well-known photos, Brook Merrow’s composition of a teenager on her knees picking potatoes in a Mars Hill field. The back cover photo from the magazine’s premiere issue later became a poster that was dispersed to homes across the United States.

The 16-month calendar also features the work of 12 other photographers and an artist. They are Gordon Hammond of Westfield, Janet Stephenson of Washburn, Shari Ireland of Castle Hill, Julia Bayly of Fort Kent, Michael Gudreau of Presque Isle, Steve Leighton of Fort Fairfield, Erni Roberts of Gorham, Roger Stevens of Lincoln, and Ray Burby, Robert Longlais and Mary Sanipass, all of Caribou. Also showcasing works are Darlene Rossignol of New Brunswick and Mark Savary of Chesapeake, Ohio.

Their images show Aroostook County throughout the seasons in landscape shots and close-ups of wildlife, flowers and crops.

High-quality images have been an important part of the magazine. “It was the idea of creating a thing of beauty from a beautiful place,” Olmstead said.

And being able to keep those standards for two decades, she said, has been overwhelming sometimes, but also very satisfying. There were many times when it seemed like the issue wasn’t going to fit together properly, she recalled.

“But there’s always some sort of serendipity that happens in the crucial moments,” Olmstead said. “Someone walks in and says, ‘I have a portfolio photo. Would you like to look at it?’ And it just happens to fit what we need. Those kinds of things are a delight.”

Echoes works with a small crew: Mary-Ann McHugh as assistant editor, and volunteers Glenna Johnson Smith as associate and poetry editor, and Hammond overseeing illustrations. The magazine also has a small group of volunteers who help with the quarterly mailings.

Olmstead said that while she couldn’t predict the future, the magazine could go on indefinitely if more people become involved in it.

“I have always thought about having Echoes as something bigger, maybe an organization of which Echoes would be the publication, but one that would celebrate rural culture in the same way,” Olmstead said. “I’d just like it to be bigger and better.”

For more information about Echoes or its anniversary calendar, contact Echoes Press at 498-8564 or visit www.echoesofmaine.com.