Bitterroot is a product of a class at Montana State University (MSU) called WRIT 374: Magazine Editing and Production. This is my third year teaching it, applying my own experience in the publishing industry, and while it is certainly more work than a typical course would be for the professor, it’s absolutely worth it. Every year in this publisher’s note, I get to go on about how proud I am of how seriously the students take their own writing and that of their peers, because the printed word has that power. This year, those feelings of pride and admiration started earlier than usual.

Pitch day, where every single student must pitch a story idea out loud to the whole class, is always my favorite day of this project. It’s early in the semester; everyone’s still figuring each other out; I don’t always know everyone’s names yet; there’s excitement but nervous energy rippling around the room. But something in all that nervous energy clicks and the reality that this is going to be a real publication settles in for the group. Sometimes, it’s a single-story idea that everyone has lots of thoughts on, and sometimes it’s a story that one person is just really passionate about. This year, for me, it was a slow realization as I heard pitch after pitch begin or end with “I think this would be a good fit for the Communities section.” Nearly all of the students were adamant (rightly) that they were writing about or for a specific community. This created a bit of a problem, as we didn’t want a magazine with 16 stories in one section, but it also warmed the dark recesses of my heart.

The semester had started so darkly for academia, with threats and uncertainty surrounding the Department of Education, grant funding, student loans, the humanities in general, and 7 the continued and shocking rise of AI writing technology. I heard a lot of “I can’t even look at the news anymore,” from friends, students, colleagues, and myself. At the beginning of the year, the idea of teaching a class on magazine production as a way to prepare students for a career in writing and journalism, left me in an honest daze. As a writing professor, my central goal is to teach my students not just how to be better writers, but how that skill of writing and communicating well can empower them to effect positive change in their communities. I’ve always seen the stories we share in this magazine as a source of that empowerment for change.

I hit a low point around Week two of the semester where I wasn’t sure that mattered anymore. While students worried about financial aid and faculty worried about grant funding, cultural shifts, science communication, and mostly how to support our students struggling through these times, many of the MSU faculty talked about how we were trying to find ways to form a stronger community, to take care of people in our immediate sphere, the very minimum that we could do but that brought us comfort. We wanted to figure out how to pass that message along to our students, to encourage them not to be afraid but to take care of each other. Then pitch day came, and as the story ideas flowed, I realized my students had all gotten the memo. Every idea was about something they cared about on a personal level because it affected their community. Every student wanted to write a story that was important to tell because it mattered to a community in Montana, not just to themselves. These communities are what have always made Montana strong, and they are what will continue to see Montana through difficult times.