CPQ February Newsletter
Sometimes the world of print production feels like sitting at the edge of a meadow you planted and quietly watching the grass grow. The occasional hiker or bird watcher might come through and tell you how much they love the flower mixture you chose. Sometimes a person might come through and try to spray pesticides on the flowers they don’t think belong there. But, for the most part, you tend, the best you know how, to the seeds you have sown. You weed and plant and hoe and enjoy the growth as it comes, season over season, learning more each year about how to make it better. The little foxes and rabbits play in the tall grasses, and a bird watcher comes silently to admire the canopy views along the edge. CPQ has always been like this, a quiet growing place, full of a gracious and kind readership that comes in on their own terms and grows as God allows, without a lot of interaction one way or another, which can sometimes leave us at a loss as to how much of the behind-the-scenes we should share. How much of our own homeschool lives, how much of the business end, how much of the changes does everyone want to hear about? We truly have no idea. So, we stick to ideas and the Charlotte Mason method, which makes content creation a sustainable joy to produce.
Except, this week, someone asked a question I thought we could answer. So, here’s your hall pass to not read any more if you aren’t interested in a deep dive into why we run CPQ the way we do.
The question asked was fair and is one that we are constantly talking about behind the scenes. The reader said, “Has this issue shipped yet? When I first subscribed in year 1, the issues came at the start of the quarter. Now they arrive at the end.” The question we are always addressing, internally, is, “How do we meet the constant magazine deadlines, of which there are many each quarter, in a timely manner and also honor our duty to our families without burning ourselves out?” We are still working on the answer. The simple reason that the magazine is coming later in the quarter these days is because our lives are all just really busy and we allow for the importance of prioritizing our families. For both Mariah and I, the magazine has been a part of our everyday lives for 7 years. This means our kids have grown up with CPQ voxer conversations happening around them all the time. For me, there are boxes of magazines stacked in many corners of our home and whole walls of our house dedicated to holding space for inventory and production. We have shipped out of our living room and my daughters are the ones that pack your shop orders and get them out the door. Mariah’s kids share their mom with me all the time and so does her husband, Andrew. They have drawn for us, given ideas for the kids gazette, made a space for me to sleep in their basement, and are a constant inspiration for why we do this thing that we do.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t prioritize the magazine’s deadlines or do our best every single quarter to get it out earlier. (And one of these quarters it will just start arriving at the beginning again, without any fanfare.) But, it does mean that almost always, deadlines butt up against illness or emergency or a sports tournament/church activity/emotional need, etc, and we have chosen to be a family-first business which simply means that we allow our writers to put their families first and we give ourselves the grace to do the same. This is so very black and white for us in our daily reality that we often forget that it might come across differently to our readership when the public-facing business end of things isn’t what you would expect from a larger company, or one where the employees are working 30-40 hour weeks.
In the song Briefcase by Walker Hayes, there is a line where he says, “every time I pick it up, my kids say, Daddy, put it down …” And that line always reminds me of my kids when I would open my laptop a few years ago because, in the first three years of getting CPQ off the ground, I worked tirelessly—up early, all day, and into the nights, in an effort to learn about business and production and Charlotte Mason and layout and in order to meet deadlines. I was constantly saying, “Not now, Mama needs to get some work done.” Or “I’m on deadline this week, so I’m going to make dinner and then I’ve got to go be on the laptop for the rest of the night.” We would have editing meetings at 2 am, trying to manage the time difference between the East and West coasts. Our whole team worked hard, and we had a lot of hands to stir the pot. But as time went on, we saw our first wave of writer turnover and created our initial management structure, a team of 4, simplifying who stirred the pot and cheering on writers who left to build their own projects, like the CMEC and CM Living Latin Lessons! For the first 18 months, 20 people worldwide were on a never-ending voxer conversation. It was amazing but not sustainable.
One day, after a week of shipping out of our house, I woke up, exhausted, to a police officer ringing our doorbell. He had discovered our toddler, who had managed to open the front door, walking the sidewalk next to the road in front of our house. My living room was filled with empty shipping bags and boxes and labels that still needed to be cleaned up, and he was so horrified at the state of our home and the fact that our kid had wandered outside unattended that he called CPS. We got the privilege of meeting with a local CPS investigator who checked my cabinets for food and asked all my children whether or not they felt safe in our home and if they had chores. It was scary and humiliating. But, also, a very good learning opportunity. After that experience, I began to let go of some of the business expectations I had previously held. I had to change where my priorities lay. I discovered that we could have the printer ship for us, so I didn’t have to do it out of the house. I took some life coaching classes to learn how to manage the processes and work-life balance. I bought a planner and started to figure out how to use it. Business management has not come easy for me, and if you have been on the rough end of my learning curve (you know who you are, you gracious, gracious ladies.), then you know that’s true. But, God is good, and growth does come if you work at it. But success is a moving target, and even this last quarter, I had to pull away from some things I was actively committed to—that I wanted to have the bandwidth for but didn’t really—because my kids said to me, “It’s really hard to talk to you about important things because you are always working.” And y’all, if we produce the most amazing, timely, professional magazine, but I lose the heart of my kids, what am I even doing with myself?
Currently it is only Mariah and I on the administrative end. Sarah helped us shore up layout these last two years, and we have streamlined and built as many systems as possible to be able to keep the business moving while we still read to our kids, do our best to support our families, and try to understand the changes Instagram makes every two months. We keep it quiet because we have to, but, honestly, we have improved so much over the last two years that I kind of wish we could be noisier about it all. It’s been a lot of growth and work, and we are proud of the creative changes we have come up with to maintain production through this crazy time in our worlds. However, amongst all that good stuff, the hard stuff of life still comes to us all without exception, and we still have six kids between us in our homeschools with varying levels of special needs. We have therapy sessions and counseling sessions, reading lessons, sports and dinner and laundry, just like everyone else. In between that, we do our best to meet the deadlines required to get the magazine out the door on time.
It is a joy and a privilege, and we work hard at it. But we don’t always make the deadlines. We do get a magazine out each quarter, and we always will. But now, we make sure that it isn’t to the detriment of our relationships with the ones we love most. We give this same courtesy to all of our writers and editors. We believe in the mission of CPQ, to provide a quiet growing place for moms, and we are so proud of our writers and the content that they produce. We love creating a place for others to write, and that is still what I most enjoy about CPQ. The writing (and writers) are amazing. The content of the magazine is second to none. The CM community is beautiful, diverse, and full of amazing minds and hearts. I love every second of building a table where writers can sit and discuss their ideas and experiences about education.
If you find yourself with a desire to write and would like to contribute to CPQ, we are always excited to find new writers for the magazine and on our blog. If you are concerned that the magazine is coming later in the quarter this last year, just wait a few quarters, and it will probably change around. But, as always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at info@commonplacequarterly.com
-Cara
On The CPQ Blog
Behind the Scenes
Books will ship end of next week
Things is in layout
Truth articles are in copyedit
Main article writers for Laugh are being contacted
Proofs from West Press
When we lay the magazine out, we see the basic design, but we don’t know how it will look on paper—how the colors look, the sharpness of the designs, etc. When the proofs come, I (Cara) get two copies. One shows me the color on paper and the sharpness of the art and photos chosen, and the other is a sized copy of the original, but it isn’t on the proper paper. We don’t see the actual magazine until after it has shipped, and we receive the extras to sell in the shop.
Proofs allow us to change anything that stands out as a mistake during the proofing process—however imperfectly.
Something Borrowed
Twaddle is such a funny word, and yet, it can strike fear into the heart of any new homeschooling mom. What if we pick the wrong books? Will our children ever recover? Will they love silly, idle talk and hideous illustrations? We worry we’ll ruin everything if we accidentally let a piece of twaddle through the door. We are, after all, the bookshelf gatekeepers.
So we set out to find the best of books, something Charlotte Mason moms refer to as ‘living books.’ But that’s almost just as hard to define. Every mom has a different list of living books and it’s easy to wonder if ‘living book’ just means ‘old book.’
But rather than fret or freeze when trying to choose books for our children, let’s work on gathering a few key characteristics of twaddle and living books so we’re able to quickly discern what’s best, what’s good, and what’s twaddle.
This month’s Something Borrowed is from The Commonplace podcast. As we continue with our quarterly theme of “books,” we would be amiss if we didn’t take a pit stop to consider twaddle. Click on the button below to listen!
New to Charlotte Mason
Are you new to Charlotte Mason? Carol, a column writer for CPQ, recently posted an introduction on her blog. We highly recommend checking it out (and giving her a follow!), and then, if you’re captivated and want to learn more about Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophy, you can begin reading through our ABC’s of a Charlotte Mason Education series here on our Substack! Each post explores the “why” behind subjects and ideas, further readings from Charlotte Mason’s volumes, links to blog posts and podcasts for further learning and resources from others in the Charlotte Mason community.
Habit of Reading sale!
A great companion read to the Book issue that will be landing in your mailboxes soon is our Habit of Reading issue. You can snag this issue for 10% off from our shop now through the weekend! No coupon code necessary.
March Recitation Printable
Get To Know The Editors
What’s Cara…
Reading: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson because Karen Swallows Prior said I should, and Tales of King Arthur with the kids.
Eating: sliders!
Making: dreams and life changes
Drinking: nothing fancy. We are overcoming sickness so mostly Gatorade and tea
Watching: high school softball—so fun!
Listening to: Flavia de Luce novels at night (still working through the set—I keep falling asleep) and The Beautiful Truth by Sarah Clarkson
Learning: how letting go gives you freedom to start over. And the joy of home.
What’s Mariah…
Reading: The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich and Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver. I had to take a break from East of Eden. Cathy is too much for me in February.
Listening to: a Spotify playlist I made for our small group
Eating: chicken tacos
Making: painting a fun design under the cabinets we just finished refinishing in the kitchen.
Drinking: a Fresca.
Thinking about: how I need to menu plan and order groceries as soon as I’m done writing this newsletter.
Learning: how a hydra feeds on daphnia in biology labs. It was fascinating to watch under the microscope! Also: the Amoeba Sisters have amazing YouTube videos a group of teenage boys enjoy watching with me weekly—highly recommend!