What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine?

What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine? Maybe it’s okay that I don’t know — maybe it’s enough to believe that is has a point, to believe that the work we do at home/school/life matters.

This is the question I spent most of last summer asking myself.

The truth is: Publishing a quarterly magazine is hard work. It takes a lot of time — the time you’d expect coming up with story ideas and conducting interviews (so many interviews) and finessing stories, but also time you don’t expect: hunting for the right photos, tweaking layouts, adjusting the page count, uploading everything. It’s never been a lucrative business, which is fine with me, but this summer, I spent a lot of time wondering if it’s even a project that anyone who isn’t me cares about.

After all, the publishing world has changed. Magazines are closing down left and right, everyone’s going digital, and there is so much free information online — in Facebook groups, on blogs, in forums. Does anybody actually want a magazine about secular homeschooling? 

Even the platform we used for our subscriptions started second-guessing me: We’re no longer going to support subscriptions for publications that fall in your profit bracket, they said. Maybe you should think about charging more? Or publishing less? Or getting into another kind of writing game?

This summer, I conducted a little experiment — I moved the summer issue entirely online. Instead of publishing a magazine, I published a webpage — and I’m not going to lie: It was SO MUCH EASIER on my end. I knocked the whole thing out in six weeks, which is a record for me. All those little details that take so much time — should I add an extra sidebar here? Is it better to add something or cut something to deal with this overflow? What could I do make this page more visually interesting? — vanished. 

And people had been pushing for an all-digital version of the magazine for a while — I’d envisioned HSL as a print magazine from the beginning, even though most people opt for the more affordable digital version, and it reads like a print magazine. Magazines, you know, have a flow — they have a beginning and an end, a rich meaty middle full of features. I’ve always loved that — they feel like theatrical productions when they’re done well — but you don’t get the same thing online, where you can instead click to whatever interests you. Lots of people have complained that our digital version should be more, well, digital, and that doesn’t seem crazy or unreasonable to me.

Only, as it turns out, no one really loved the digital edition. They missed the magazine. And frankly, I did, too.

What’s the point of a secular homeschool magazine? Maybe it’s okay that I don’t know — maybe it’s enough to believe that is has a point, to believe that the work we do at home/school/life matters. I feel like our mission statement might seem a little out-of-step with the world today, but in many ways, that’s how our entire homeschooling life has felt: out-of-step. And I’ve loved that out-of-step-ness, I’ve loved finding the beats of our own drums and dancing to them outside the lines. Maybe, more than anything else, that decision to homeschool has felt like The Right Thing for our family. And this magazine, I realize, still feels like The Right Thing for me.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that you won’t see more digital editions of home/school/life magazine, but you will see more issues — which you can definitely download but which are going to be old-fashioned print magazines, built on original reporting and good writing, and created with the idea that a magazine is a delightful indulgence, a luxurious and encouraging companion that inspires you both practically and philosophically.

I’m glad I took the time to think through whether home/school/life is a project I want to keep doing. I always try to sit down with my kids every summer and make sure we’re homeschooling because we want to — because it’s the best thing, not because it’s the default thing. It would be kind of silly of me if I didn’t give my work life the same kind of respect. We’ve had to make a few changes — our subscriptions run through Patreon now (you can support the magazine and subscribe to the digital edition for as little as $2/month) — but these changes feel like they make sense for our mission. It sounds hokey, but this is work I believe in. It’s work I want to do. And I am so, so thankful that you are a part of it.

---