News from Midwesterner
We're growing!
Earlier this summer, I got a call from a subscriber who’s been reading—and responding to—our pieces from day one. He wanted to know how he could get more involved. This week, I’m happy to announce that Brook T. Smith is joining the Midwesterner team as a partner and an occasional contributor.
I’ll start by addressing the elephant in the room: Brook is based in Louisville, Kentucky—which, as some of you might remember from past newsletters and our “About Us” page, is not part of our Midwest. We like him anyway. A serial entrepreneur and philanthropist, Brook has a long history of boosting nonprofits and mission-driven small businesses like ours. He works alongside craft beverage pioneers at Post Parade, Barrell Craft Spirits, and Yola Mezcal, supports the Southern Foodways Alliance, and—with his wife, Pam—established the Appalachian Impact Fund at the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky.
As Brook will tell you, you don’t need to be a born-and-bred Midwesterner to get value from Midwestern stories... and Louisville is just across the river from the Midwest, anyway. “Every Midwesterner feature unlocks what’s amazing right in front of us, that we’d often otherwise miss,” he wrote, when I asked him why he wanted to be part of this project. “As it informs us, Midwesterner reminds us of what we’re missing—of why we identify with our neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, and regions, and why we identify with each other.”
With Brook’s support, we’ll be able to tell more stories about and from the Midwest in the coming months and years. Please join me in welcoming him!
Keep an eye out
If you ordered a copy of Marika Josephson’s Aromatic Wild Herbs and Spices of the Midwest, you should have received it a couple of weeks ago—so I hope you’ve taken it out to the woods by now! Summer is over, but here in Cincinnati, you can still find spicebush berries, sweet clover, and late-season mushrooms, plus all the black walnuts, hickory nuts, and acorns you care to process and year-round harvests such as hickory bark and sassafras root.
Our first print field guide sold out while we were still taking preorders, but if you’re looking for a copy, you’re not too late. We said that we weren’t going to print another run, but Marika and her Small Letters business partner Rachel Linn, who print, cut, and bind our pocket guides themselves, have generously agreed to make just 100 more copies. They should be available by mid-December—just in time for the holidays. We’ll begin taking pre-orders again later this fall.
After that, we’ll offer a digital edition at a discounted price. This is truly meant to be a pocket guide, so I recommend getting your hands on a print copy if at all possible, but a digital copy is better than no copy, and we want to get this guide in as many hands as possible. Stay tuned for more information.
Don’t forget
We’re still selling Midwesterner merch at shopmidwesterner.com! We’re out of field guides for now, but we have “Corn-Fed” t-shirts and Midwesterner bumper stickers, among other things. And when that “Corn-Fed” gear is gone, it’s gone.
Thank you for your support!
We’ve bounced around a little bit this year—from Substack to our own custom platform at Midwesterner.com and then back to Substack, called home by readers who missed the convenience of media’s favorite newsletter platform. We’re glad to be back. If you signed up for a subscription at Midwesterner.com, it has been transferred to Substack. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me: jed@midwesterner.org.