In newspapers, we’d often scramble for art to match articles and keep pages from becoming big, unreadable masses of gray. We’d dispatch an already busy photographer to capture something last-second. Most of the resulting photos looked as you might expect from a rush job. A few were transcendent, though. In every such case, your editor here would move heaven and earth—and trim lots of words if necessary—to print these photos extremely large. (Truth be told, we sometimes made the worst ones huge as well to give the slackers a little incentive to at least try next time and avoid having their name appear below a monstrosity. Does it work? You bet it does.)
The power of art to move readers and bail oneself out of sticky spots stays with me. For instance, we started off planning for this issue of the magazine with a little dilemma. The young woman who handled the gathering of Class News in the Vigilando section took a job with another organization. The new associate director of alumni relations, Katie Damaroda, was jumping in midstream. What to do?
Katie had heard updates from a few alums as she introduced herself around. (If you haven’t met her yet, drop her a note when you’re done reading here—[email protected].) A grad had written a book, so the publicist contacted us. One decided to run for Congress, so we heard about that. All of these items had nice art, and then a wordsmith shared a delightful poem and … none of this was going to match our very specific Class News format.
So, for this issue anyway, we tossed the format—inspired by previous surprise submissions like the Spring 2016 image that accompanies this post from 2006 classmates Lindsay Bischel and Jes Deputy. The result is a pleasant surprise. You might want to make us do it again by sharing your news and your best photos. We probably won’t institute a poetry section, but try me.
For this magazine is about you, as life and Johns Hopkins take you from prospective student to student to grad to working nurse to voice of experience to a well-earned retirement, plus all the stages of life in between. The goal is that everybody who picks up an issue of Johns Hopkins Nursing can see themselves somewhere within its pages. Do you see yourself here?
Know that you could.
Steve St. Angelo
