Tabla de contenidos para Issue No. 1 2021 - 75 Anniversary en KANSAS!

Kansas native Jim Richardson is one of the nation’s most respected contemporary photographers and portrait artists. His images have appeared in Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, New York Times, National Geographic and have won numerous international and national awards. This dance of the photographic portrait is a relatively new thing in human history, little more than 150 years old. From photography’s earliest times, subjects understood they could, just by having their picture taken, speak to people they would never know, to people not yet born. They, instinctively looked into the lens (and not at the photographer), surrounding themselves with possessions, signifiers of who they were—or who they wanted the world to believe they were. Savvy photographers seeking to capture the timelessness of a moment are masters of this transaction. Our subjects…

When preparing to write my letter, I surrounded myself with issues of KANSAS! from the last 75 years, allowing the words and images from past editors and contributors to soak in. Celebrating a milestone such as this is often a time to reflect on our history, cherish the present, and have hope for the future. Originally titled “To the Stars,” our first issue was printed in November 1945. World War II had ended a few months earlier, and our state was preparing for a post-war industrial “boom” and a hope-filled future. What began as a modest business newsletter flourished to become a treasured multigeneration lifestyle magazine. I share the sentiment mentioned previously by Andrea Glenn, the magazine’s longest-serving editor (1978–2001), that our success has depended greatly on the continued loyalty…

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate and the author of two dozen books, most recently How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems, which is full of poetry about time, place, and especially weather. You can read more about her works at carynmirriamgoldberg.com While some might race across I-70 to get to what they deem good scenery, we understand what it means to live under the sky and on the land. Whether we’re from the short grass prairie out west or the rolling Flint Hills, we have front-row seats to a skyscape of infinite color, wind, temperature, light, and the most astonishing mountains of clouds on the planet. This hasn’t changed in the last 75 years, yet so much else has. Today many might see the weather as just…

Tim Stauffer is the managing editor at The Iola Register in Iola, Kansas. Before working at the newspaper, Tim taught at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas. He and his wife, Violeta, have two children, Lucas and Sofia. Allen County, where I live, had a population of around 18,500 in 1945. It’s now just over 12,000. I live and work in Iola, the same town where I graduated high school. Of a class of 110 students, I’d be lucky to name ten who stayed. Not exactly a long-term solution for growth. While Kansas is indeed growing, most of our counties are not. The only exceptions are those containing metro areas. The future of our state doesn’t look like our past. It doesn’t even look like our present. Our state…

Growing up in central Kansas, Cheryl Unruh developed a fierce love of the open landscape and the Kansas sky. Her two books of Kansas essays, Flyover People and Waiting on the Sky, each received the Kansas Notable Book Award. She lives in Emporia. My hometown of Pawnee Rock had few goods and services, so once a week my mother, brother and I headed “to town,” usually Larned, for groceries, library books, and, in the summer, the swimming pool. During these rides, my eyes reached as far as they could across the flat Arkansas River Valley—all the way to the end of the earth where the land stopped and the sky began. That view is forever imprinted on my brain. I feel the pull of the horizon daily. Heading toward it…

Kansas native George Frazier is a software architect, outdoors writer and author of the book The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes. Despite the blissful comfort of my soft sleeping bag and the crisp air on my cheeks, midnight came and went and I couldn’t fall asleep. Moonlight shone through the mesh of my tent, and a Glastonbury Festival of crickets buzzed off and on, like an alarm clock just beyond reach. Tired of tossing and turning, I got dressed, put on my stocking hat, and stepped out into the midnight prairie. Though light pollution has ruined dark skies across much of America, this isn’t the case in south central and western Kansas. What I saw nearly leveled me. The moon was three-fourths full and the sky…