“Now that digital media is the dominant form out there, I think that books and magazines are showing the strengths they’ve always had, which is they’re a respite.”

“Print is a place where you can get away from the noise that never stops in the digital world and have some sort of actual quiet experience within your own home.”

To say I am a proud professor would be a major understatement.  What one of my former students has accomplished brings nothing but pure joy to this retired professor.  Dr. Garreth Blackwell, my former student and assistant director of the Magazine Innovation Center during my tenure at The University of Mississippi is now an accomplished assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Art and the editor-in-chief and creative director of a new magazine aptly named New Christian Makers. 

Garreth, a maker himself, has accomplished so much since he departed from Ole Miss.  He worked hard to attain a Ph.D. and a teaching position, in addition to editing and designing many different projects with the helping eyes of his wife Callie, also a former student of mine and an accomplished designer herself.

The father of four still finds the time to edit and design the new magazine that  he calls “a labor of love,” that the entire family is involved with. 

Flipping through the pages of the first issue of New Christian Makers was like entering through the door of a museum and feasting my eyes on one art piece after the other.  A masterful curation of 30 artists and makers and a pure delight for this retired professor.  I may not be teaching classes any longer, but as you can see from my blog, I am still tracking and consulting with the magazine creators and makers.  Garreth Blackwell is the latest maker whom I had the pleasure of interviewing about the first issue of New Christian Makers.  Please enjoy my conversation with the editor-in-chief and creative director of New Christion Makers Dr. Garreth Blackwell.  But first the soundbites…

On the genesis of the magazine: “We started to see a lot of folks who had considered themselves makers, artists, designers, whatever it may be, they had time to actually make again.”

More on the genesis of the magazine: “One of the things that we started to see is that even though it seemed like the world was crumbling all around us in 2020, the art we saw coming out was very hopeful.”

On the uniqueness of print: “There’s nothing that beats opening up a box of things fresh off the press and just seeing them, smelling them and seeing that that’s something you’ve put together and done.”

On why New Christion Makers is in print: “The only way to do that would be a tangible product in somebody’s hand. It would have to be a book or a magazine or something of the sort, because we all understood that social media just wasn’t cutting it, that digital platforms, for lack of a better term, were kind of cheap. They didn’t ask a lot of the viewer.”

More on why the magazine is in print: “Having a thing in your hand, touching it, seeing it, actually was much more humanizing.”

On his elevator pitch of the magazine: “The elevator pitch is that for a long time, the historical church was the center of culture. It was where art was preserved. It’s where libraries began. It’s where hospitals started. It was the place where a lot of what we understand as Western culture started.”

On the mission of the magazine: “New Christian Makers seeks to connect artists who have foundational beliefs in Jesus Christ, who make things to the glory of God and the flourishing of a world that we think should be good, true, and beautiful.”

On his reason for the love of paper: “I think there’s more relationship with the paper than there is with the flickering pixels.”

On the future of print: “It would just become a much more niche-based thing. So we see it with people buying vinyl records and things. But as far as print goes, I don’t know that it ever left.”

On the strength of print: “Everything is constantly going, never stopping, and magazines and books give you a rest stop on that busy, busy highway to just take a break.”

More on the strength of print: “More filling than they are depleting, which the research shows that digital media and social media especially can be very, very depleting to people. It takes a lot out of somebody to spend their day engaged just digitally, whereas you don’t have that same experience with print.”

On his role in the magazine: “Moving forward from here on out, the curation is actually going to be something where I would be more of a curation facilitator-in-chief.”

On the magazine as a museum: “One of the things about going into a gallery or a museum is that you’re able to go in and it is a quieting place. It’s a place where you can feel reflective with work. You can look at it, spend time with it. We wanted that to be the same case here.”

On whether the magazine is a mission or a business: “If I were just to give you a blanket answer before going specific, I would say what good business isn’t also a mission. And I think that’s part of it. I think if we focus on mission first, the business can follow. But very often, if the business is the sole focus, the mission will get muddied and get lost.”

On the frequency of the magazine: “So by the time we’re in full swing, we’ll have seven issues a year coming out.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Garreth Blackwell, creative director and editor-in-chief of New Christion Makers magazine:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, and pun is intended, what is the genesis of the New Christian Makers magazine?

Garreth Blackwell: I’ve been trying to think of where it all started. It’s been a hard, hard time to figure out where we started, but the best way to describe the genesis of it is that in 2020, when everything just went sideways during quarantine, there were a lot of things that people didn’t know about.

People, I think, started to re-understand. One of the things is that disconnected communication and disconnected relationships were not actually something that were fulfilling and stabilizing for people’s lives. Something that also came up is that we started to see a lot of folks who had considered themselves makers, artists, designers, whatever it may be, they had time to actually make again.

These two things together, you started to see a lot of really amazing art start to come out of people’s homes. For the last six or seven years, I’ve been involved in the operations side of a local art gallery here in Richmond. One of the things that we started to see is that even though it seemed like the world was crumbling all around us in 2020, the art we saw coming out was very hopeful.

It was beautiful. It was something that really helped people remind themselves of how wonderful the world actually is and how good God is to give us the world we have, even when it’s upside down or sideways. We started talking a lot, and I have a friend who just like me, we love making stuff.

I’ve always enjoyed books and magazines. I’ve always enjoyed making them. There’s nothing that beats opening up a box of things fresh off the press and just seeing them and smelling them and seeing that that’s something you’ve put together and done.

When we started having these conversations, we said, what does it actually look like for people to be connected, for communities to be established and developed? We said, well, we probably need to make some sort of journal. At that time, we were thinking about writing, maybe something that had some long-form content. But the more we thought about it, the more it just made sense that we needed to connect a community of folks who existed in disparate ways.

The only way to do that would be a tangible product in somebody’s hand. It would have to be a book or a magazine or something of the sort, because we all understood that social media just wasn’t cutting it, that digital platforms, for lack of a better term, were kind of cheap. They didn’t ask a lot of the viewer.

In fact, they just kind of took a lot from the viewer. They took your data and they took your interests and they took all of this for a free product. But we knew that having a thing in your hand, touching it, seeing it, actually was much more humanizing.

It was much more about the embodiment of people in real ways together. So here we are, and we’ve got New Christian Makers issue one, and issue two should be out early next year.

Samir Husni: You created a museum in a magazine. Tell me, what’s the elevator pitch for the magazine?

Garreth Blackwell: The elevator pitch is that for a long time, the historical church was the center of culture. It was where art was preserved. It’s where libraries began. It’s where hospitals started. It was the place where a lot of what we understand as Western culture started.

So throughout the Industrial Revolution, throughout modernism and everything else, those cultural centers shifted. But the historical import of the church and Christians as makers and people who helped to define culture, that never changed. We may have just had a few other voices in the room that were pretty loud.

So New Christian Makers seeks to connect artists who have foundational beliefs in Jesus Christ, who make things to the glory of God and the flourishing of a world that we think should be good, true, and beautiful. So New Christian Makers is about making art with and for your friends, and then going out and making more friends.

Samir Husni: Do you think there’s a community of  people your age that are rediscovering print or never left print?

Garreth Blackwell: I think it’s hard because I waffle back and forth on whether they’re discovering it, rediscovering it, or if they’ve always kind of been there. You can see behind me, print has never stopped being something that I enjoy.

I love books. I love how they are and how they exist. I love magazines. I still would prefer to sit in the airport waiting for my plane with a magazine rather than my phone just scrolling through. I think there’s more relationship with the paper than there is with the flickering pixels. But I think as far as my generation goes, we are seeing that, and we saw this in early 2000s with Chris Anderson The Long Tail, where he was talking about that generational media of sorts would never really go away.

It would just become a much more niche-based thing. So we see it with people buying vinyl records and things. But as far as print goes, I don’t know that it ever left.

I think that they began to sequester print to a kind of academic space, right? Like, I buy a book to think about a thing or learn about something, but they didn’t see it as an escape. Well, social media was that escape because we were surrounded by so much print media. Now that digital media is the dominant form out there, I think that books and magazines are showing the strengths they’ve always had, which is they’re a respite.

Print is a place where you can get away from the noise that never stops in the digital world and have some sort of actual quiet experience within your own home. So I think there’s a great draw to that. We have a lot of friends who will spend their evenings with books and magazines because it’s just quieter.

Everything is constantly going, never stopping, and magazines and books give you a rest stop on that busy, busy highway to just take a break. So they are more filling than they are depleting, which the research shows that digital media and social media especially can be very, very depleting to people. It takes a lot out of somebody to spend their day engaged just digitally, whereas you don’t have that same experience with print.

Samir Husni: I noticed in your editorial and in the introduction to the magazine that everything in the magazine is curated. Are you the curator-in-chief, or how is that process of curation taking place?

Garreth Blackwell: Well, it’s fantastic because, like I mentioned in the write-up in the magazine, we could have filled several issues with the people who submitted. And with any new venture, you never have any idea.

Is this going to be good, or are we going to get quality content? Will people even care? We had a strong conscience that they would, but you’re never totally sure. So in terms of curation, one of the things that we wanted to do was make sure we just got our first issue out. We got it out there.

People could see the proof of concept. It wasn’t just talking about it. But moving forward from here on out, the curation is actually going to be something where I would be more of a curation facilitator-in-chief.

We’re going to have guest curators who come in from different parts of the art world, whether they are writers, illustrators, graphic designers, painters, professors, researchers. We’re going to have other folks who come in because it will be kind of a curation by committee of sorts. So we take in whoever we’re blessed enough to receive as applicants, and then we pick our 30 that we want to showcase in that issue that we think just show the breadth and beauty of what’s out there.

Then we have a handful of folks that we know will be just on the cusp of that, and we want to make sure we show them off as honorable mentions as well. So it’s technically just the same way that an exhibition would be in a gallery or museum, just in print.

Samir Husni: So as I walk into that museum and flip the pages, which are designed in a nice horizontal space to project exactly like your eyes, tell me more about the decision to have this specific size (9X7), it’s unusual size for a magazine.

Garreth Blackwell: We debated a lot because if you look at the genre of  art books in general or art magazines, you’re going to have things that are very large format because you want to have as much real estate for the eye as possible. So it makes sense, but you also have some other constraints that really have to be dealt with when you’re talking about something of this kind. One, we needed to make sure that we kept the per issue price at a point that would be proper expectations for the market.

So from our research, we knew we had to hit somewhere south of $40, but could be above $20. And we wanted to make sure that we could do that well for folks so we could serve them in that way. The other thing is you have to mail stuff.

When you don’t have the larger size group of folks, larger size of constituency or reader base, you have to take a lot of that in consideration because you may not have a thousand pieces that you can go to the post office with to try to negotiate a lower rate. We’re shipping much lower than that. So we wanted to make sure we hit all of the economic marks for ourselves, but also we wanted something that did feel intimate.

One of the things about going into a gallery or a museum is that you’re able to go in and it is a quieting place. It’s a place where you can feel reflective with work. You can look at it, spend time with it.

We wanted that to be the same case here. We also wanted to make sure that it was still portable, that this was something you could pass to your friends, you could show off to others.

Some of the bigger, bulkier art books. I have a few books on my shelf behind me from Taschen that they’ll break your back, right? I mean, they’re not really passable books for the most part to friends. But this is something we wanted to make sure somebody could kind of throw in the seat of their car, take it to their friend’s house, show it to them, have on a bookcase, pull it off, and easily pass around. So we kind of ended up on this size because it did all the things we wanted it to.

Visually, like you said, it moves you left and right across. It feels very much like you’re viewing a gallery or a museum. The size helped us economically, but they also helped us in terms of how we wanted it to be used.

So form, function, economics all had to be considered. And this was the best of all possible worlds.

Samir Husni: You mentioned the economics. So is this venture a business or a mission?

Garreth Blackwell: Oh, gosh, that’s such a tough question. Well, I think if I were just to give you a blanket answer before going specific, I would say what good business isn’t also a mission. And I think that’s part of it.

In a large part, it is mission first, because with what we’re doing, we went into it knowing that this was going to be a labor of love. It was going to be nights and weekends. It was going to be.

My children were helping me pack envelopes, sending them off to people. My wife was, as always, a second set of eyes to make sure that all of my spelling errors or missed things that just became white noise visually as I was designing actually were corrected, that I wasn’t doing the same kind of habitual design mistakes that I tend to that she came in and helped with all that. So it’s been a wonderful way for a lot of us to do work together.

And because we knew that it wasn’t going to be something that just skyrocketed,  I would say it’s more of a mission to connect artists who have foundational beliefs about life and the way that the world is supposed to be, that do things with excellence towards God. I think that if we can connect those people and provide a playground for them to showcase what they do in a way that brings joy and promotes them, I don’t think we ever have to really have full time positions to do it.

It can stay working. I think if we focus on mission first, the business can follow. But very often, if the business is the sole focus, the mission will get muddied and get lost.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Is there any question that, before I ask you my personal questions, that I failed to ask you or anything else you would like to add about New Christian Makers?

Garreth Blackwell: I would say one thing, because it’s nothing we talked about in the first issue, but just to give some kind of clarifying questions, we’re at $25 per copy as the cover price for it. The outlook for the magazine is something that we have, I’ve been slowly stepping into.

We wanted to make sure we tested the market and tested it in a real way, not in some sort of fake or less quality than it would eventually be, but actually do the thing. So I had this really great old professor back in the day, and he talked a lot about how your frequencies can change as you understand what’s going on, and as you test the market. So I’m taking his advice to heart, and I’m saying, well, the first year, I’m going to do two of these, because I think two is very reasonable. But by the time we get to full frequency, we’re going to be a quarterly publication with three special editions each year.

The quarterly publication will be exactly like what you’ve seen. And the special editions, one will be geared towards professors within art schools, so that we can showcase the things they’re doing. Because within the current art culture right now people aren’t so excited about you if you’re a Christian. So giving them a platform and a place where they can showcase their work, their research, what they’re doing, we think is a necessary and needed thing.

The second one will be for rising seniors in high school in the arts, because we want to showcase young artists as soon as possible. We know how hard it is to get your work out there, and how most of college, if you’re in an art program or a design program, you’re going to just be going up against a brick wall trying to get your work shown somewhere. So we want to provide a platform for that.

And then each year, we’ll have an annual that would be a kind of a best of show for the year, where we showcase in depth the folks who have really just been the winners, the kind of best of issue for each issue. So by the time we’re in full swing, we’ll have seven issues a year coming out.

Samir Husni: So tell me, Garrett, if I come uninvited one night to your house, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, taking care of the four children?

Garreth Blackwell: Oh, gosh, Doc, I would say most nights, you probably find me accidentally dozing off in my chair. I think that’d be the truest answer. But it’s a smattering of things.

As a family, we do watch a lot of like different makers on YouTube, whether that’s like people who build homes, or make small dioramas, or models, or things like that. So different things the kids have interest in. Dude Perfect is constantly on the TV at the house. But there are, I would say, most nights, we’re around the kitchen table, we’re talking about stuff, we’re hanging out, the kids are drawing and playing, and we’re just trying to stay awake until we can go to bed.

Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps you up at night these days?

Garreth Blackwell: I’ve heard you ask this question a million times. And I would say that probably every other time I heard you ask it, I had a quick answer. And I knew because that’s the folly of youth, right? To have extremely quick answers to things that maybe you shouldn’t.

What keeps me up at night? I think a lot of the times, the things that keep me up at night are, what am I building for my kids? I think that’s what it is. I thought a lot the last few years about what it looks like for the things you do to produce a generational impact. I’ve got the things that I like and I desire.

I have the things that I have interest and ability in. And I know that won’t be the exact same things for my kids. But with four kids ranging from almost 11 to just turning one, there’s a whole range of what I want for them.

One of the things I want for them is to build something that they can take and do something with, no matter how small that is. So when I think of things like New Christian Makers or the other stuff I’m a part of, I always like to think of, what could my daughter do with this? How could I grow my son into doing something with this? I think it takes folks a long time to figure out what they like and what they want. And sometimes it might be helpful if a little earlier in their lives we say to our kids, hey, here’s a thing you can do right now.

You don’t have to be in your early 40s to launch a magazine. Why don’t you launch one with dad? Why don’t you learn design not in a classroom one day because you think it’s cool. But what if you learn design as part of the work you’re doing as a family business, as a hopeful family business? So I think that’s probably it, what am I leaving for my kids in terms of things for them to do, stuff for them to have in the world they’re going to inhabit?

Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck.