SATELLITE ISSUE 3: Cory Bernat, American 1977-

EACH ISSUE OF SATELLITE ORBITS AROUND THE LIFE OF ONE PERSON. THIS PERSON IS NOT EXAMINED BIOGRAPHICALLY, BUT OBLIQUELY, THROUGH A SERIES OF OPEN-ENDED RESPONSES TO MANY OF THE THEMES THAT DEFINE THEIR LIFE.

(cover image by Will Rogan)

Contributors for Issue 3: Laura Albert, Cory Bernat, Daniel Coffeen, Nadine Fecht, Helena Keefe, Julie Lequin, Reuben Lorch-Miller, Naomi Miller, Jason Mortara, Will Rogan, Jon Rubin, Alice Shaw, Zack Sternwalker, James Tantum, Robert Wechsler

THEMES FOR ISSUE 3: AIR FORCE, ARCHIVES, CIA, CONSPIRACIES, ESPIONAGE, FOOD AND CONSPIRACY, FOOD AND KNOWLEDGE, HAIR CUTS, LIBRARIES, NATIVE FOODS, PARANOIA, SCHOOL GROUPS, TOUR GUIDES, AND WIGS.

Letter From the Editors:

Our criteria in choosing the central figure for this, our third issue of Satellite, were as follows: must be living, female, willing to travel, and have an unusual diversity of interests and experiences. Alive, interesting, and willing, Cory Bernat was a good match. Cory happens to be someone we both knew from our days at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she worked as a librarian. We chose her both deliberately and arbitrarily.

We devised a new strategy for this issue. First, we choose a group of potential contributors from around the US. Then we flew Cory to personally hang out with each contributor for a day and stay in their home for a night. This generally turned out to be fun for the contributors and exhausting for Cory. The idea was for a personal meeting to reveal facts and experiences from Cory's life, and for those subjects to become the starting points for the contributors' proposals. The only flaw in our plan was that we didn't send Cory to meet with enough people to cover our usual attrition rate. We soon realized we had a strong yet decidedly thin publication.

So we regrouped and tried a different approach. This time we sent a streamlined distillation of Cory's bio to travel electronically in her place. Now there was less risk to our budget and to Cory's sanity, but how would this new strategy affect the type and quality of the contributions? How inspired would the new contributors be to respond to a list rather than to a person? And in the end, in a publication about tangents, would anyone notice?

-Jason Mortara and Jon Rubin

Editors: Jason Mortara and Jon Rubin

Design: Brett Yasko

Proofreader: Carole Honeychurch