Welcome to Dialann.org,
the online version of our family’s magazine

Dialann (ISSN 2334-3230 print; ISSN 2334-3249 online) is our family’s journal, which we keep in the form of a magazine that we print every three months. Like a real magazine, ours has articles, photo spreads, and features on a variety of topics, as well as departments, some of which—like The Journal and We Believe in Christ—appear in every issue and others (Book Report, Gastronomy, among others) that appear occasionally. Unlike a real magazine, ours has just one household that subscribes (that would be us), though we occasionally print an extra copy to give to our parents. In late 2013 we plan on producing our first compilation volume, with the first three years (12 issues!) of Dialann, and we’ll print enough copies for Susan and Dustin to keep one themselves, to give to each of our sets of parents, and to keep for our children when they are older. Which means that the number we’ll be printing is indeterminate, since we don’t know how many children we’ll eventually have.

Our family loves the printed word, so our magazine, like most, got its start in print, and now it’s expanding to the Internet. We now plan to publish each article that will appear in our magazine online first and share it with friends and family immediately, before it appears in the print edition. We will also use this site as a blog, making entries that may or may not make it into the print version of the magazine. We hope that by doing so we will be able to interact more with friends and family and use their feedback on editing and improving the articles that make it into print.

But why not make like Newsweek and go online only? For a few reasons. We believe in the power of the printed word. Websites today are beautiful, and they will only get more so. But we still think that nothing compares with the beauty of text and photography on paper, and being able to hold and touch and feel and connect with a book or journal from years ago. So, ironically, we’re doing it with an eye toward the future. The space and cost considerations of print force us to pick and choose—or, as we call it, “curate,” for it’s similar to the process a museum goes through in deciding what pieces to collect and display—the things that are most important. Yes, things get left out (a gap this website may help us overcome), but what’s left is what’s most important—and therefore what we will most likely be interested in remembering (and looking at and reading) years and decades from now.

We publish the printed version of our magazine through Blurb (which, by the way, is a service we would recommend to anyone—it’s fantastic), which requires a minimum of 20 pages in a book. So we look at it this way: with four issues per year and a minimum of 20 pages per issues, that means that when our daughter Fiona is 20, she will have at least 1,600 pages (and likely many more) of text and photos chronicling her years growing up. Susan and Dustin would have loved to have such a record, and we think Fiona and whoever else joins her in our family will love it, too.

To learn more about why we keep our journal in the form of a magazine, and how we came up with the name, check out the first article in the first issue of Dialann, from January 2011.