We are in H&E Naturist
A couple from small-town Manitoba… four pages in a 102 year old publication.
We don’t actually know how many people will read it. H&E doesn’t publish subscriber numbers, and we didn’t ask. What we do know is that it’s an audience we didn’t naturally write for. We don’t know if those who read it would ever have found us through a hashtag or an algorithm.
But now they’ll have found us because an editor at the world’s oldest naturist magazine decided our story belonged on their pages, and reached out to us.
We’re also under no illusion that we’re the only ones. H&E has been running for over a century. They’ve certainly built relationships with other bloggers and writers in this space before us, and will after. We’re not the first couple from behind a laptop to end up in their pages, and we won’t be the last. That’s fine. That’s how a publication with that kind of history stays alive: by staying open to new voices, over and over.
But knowing that doesn’t make it mean less. If anything it puts it in better perspective. Out of everyone doing this, an editor read what a couple in small town Manitoba writes about their life and decided it was worth four pages in a magazine that predates both of us by a century. We’re not a big account. We’re not based anywhere naturism has deep roots or cultural weight behind it. We’re just two people who started writing honestly about our life eighteen months ago, from a place most people couldn’t find on a map.
That’s the part that’s hard to put into words. Not the size of the audience. The distance between where we’re writing from and where this ended up.
The piece itself is more personal than most of what we publish. It’s my account of the brain tumour, the surgery, the memory loss that followed, the remaining life stuggles, and how photography became the way I holds onto a life I sometimes can’t fully remember living. Although we wrote about it here first, it’s not something we talk about often. Putting it in front of strangers, in print, felt like its own kind of exposure, separate from the nudity entirely.
We’re proud of it. We’re also still figuring out what it means that it’s out there now, in a stranger’s hands, in a medium not written for an algorithm.
Kevin and Corin
If you are interested in a copy, they are available here: https://pocketmags.com/he-naturist-magazine
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