| It’s hard to believe that Juno magazine is turning 20! I first got involved with Juno back in 2007. My mother gifted me with a copy of Juno not long after my first child was born and I loved it so much I subscribed at once…this was a really big deal as we were pretty broke and shipping to Ireland wasn’t cheap. I submitted my very first article to them and was blown away by the enthusiastic response of the editors. I was so touched by the personal email I received and just how excited they were by my writing. I submitted a few more articles, and then when they put out a call for help around 2008 or 9, I jumped in to help. At that stage I was pregnant with my second child. I worked remotely for Juno for six years overall, becoming contributing editor and columnist, as well as running the food pages, book reviewing, proof reading and commissioning and editing articles. I was very, very busy for them, as my second and third children were born. In fact, as I was lying in bed, having just given birth to my third child, the postman came with the edition that I had curated entirely, it had been a major labor of love. I was lucky to interview many big names in the birth and alternative culture communities for Juno including Ina May Gaskin. Michel Odent, Sir Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project in Cornwall and met many many special people through Juno including Steve Biddulph and many wonderful women submitting their articles or artwork, often their first time in print. Many of these folks I continue to be online friends with and have watched their work flourish and bloom over the years, as they too have published books and set up fabulous businesses. I was lucky to attend several conferences with the Juno stall, both in the UK, and Ireland, and spent many special days with Saffia at them meeting hundreds of readers. Perhaps the most memorable was at Embercombe in Devon, where Juno was media sponsor. We hosted Hollie McNish in the Juno tent when she was just starting out, having recently published one of her poems in an edition of the magazine. She and I went down to the orchard and ate wood fired pizzas together, still hard to believe it. I self-published Moon Time and Reaching for the Moon whilst I was working at Juno, and The Rainbow Way: cultivating creativity in the midst of motherhood found a publisher. I collated many of my Juno articles, Dreaming Aloud columns and Dreaming Aloud blog posts in Moods of Motherhood: the inner journey of mothering. It was after these four books that I moved on from Juno and founded Womancraft Publishing. I remember my Juno years fondly, I learned a lot during them, about editing and publishing, and building community around a vision. Articles in Juno taught me so much of what became my way of mothering. The magazine and the people who have collaborated to create its content have enriched my life in so many ways. I am so proud of Saffia and the whole team and what they’ve done with Juno in the last decade, and wish them all the best for the decades ahead. |
