Happy 10th Birthday to Eidolon

April 27, 10 days ago, marks ten years to the day since the launch of Eidolon. It’s hard to believe that it’s been an entire decade since the day when I first hit the publish button on three articles (in between trips to the bathroom, because my toddler had gifted me a stomach bug the previous evening) and wondered if anybody would care. With my arms wrapped around the toilet, I imagined how I’d try to spin the situation if the project belly-flopped: it was just an experiment. I’d basically already left the field of classics anyway. You win some, you lose some. Hey, even a few hundred views is still orders of magnitude more than my dissertation got!

I’ve already written so much about what Eidolon was and what it meant to me. Much of that was in Eidolon’s editorials. Fun fact: the very first editorial — or “e(i)ditorial”, as I called it, the kind of touch that a lot of people thought was cringe but that I think was part of the overall irreverent vibe that made the whole publication sing — was written in a desperate attempt to fill a content hole one month into publication, because a few pieces I’d lined up in advance were taking longer to come together than I’d expected and the early pitches I’d gotten were still in the process of editing.

That kind of MacGyvering was part of what made it all feel magical. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, and I was making it all up as I went. I hired co-editors who were much smarter than I was. That helped a lot, because my leadership style is very, shall we say, consensus-driven (a nice way of saying that I hate telling people what to do). One of the editors, Yung In Chae, works for The Yale Review now,¹ and we were comparing process notes on short-turnaround pieces done by a real-ass magazine as opposed to a bunch of grad students and recent PhDs fucking around in the dark. Their process is infinitely more polished and fine-tuned, but in retrospect, I think we actually did pretty well.

At one point we started hiring an extremely talented friend of mine from grad school to do custom art for some of our pieces, and it ruled. Other things, like a short-lived advice column, kind of flopped, and that was fine. Book reviews always — every. single. damn. time — had the most insanely disproportionate response of generating a ton of headaches and very few views. Humor pieces were always a delight, enough so that we spun them out into a separate publication, idle musings. We took our work seriously but not ourselves.

one of my favorite pieces of custom art

Thanks to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I feel like I’ve been reading a lot about the founding of the Hairpin recently. The Hairpin, for those who don’t know, is one of the lost, lamented websites that published a lot of amazing content a decade or so ago, along with The Toast and many others. Most of the content was written by women, and it was very voice-driven and weird and specific and beautiful. Jia Tolentino and Haley Mlotek discussed it in their interview about Mlotek’s recent divorce memoir No Fault:

It’s wild how close in time that was to Eidolon’s founding, and how much Eidolon was involved in the very same project — excavating the world through excavating the self — but paired with the (sometimes very literal, archaeological) excavation of the classical past.

In many ways, Eidolon existed in a perfect moment. Public Humanities was ripe for a change: the former way of doing things, with well-established dons and tenured professors writing op-eds, was ripe for disruption by the younger generation of classicists who had spent the last decade and a half on the internet and who wanted to connect with audiences from a place of self-aware aporetic legibility instead of expertise.

another favorite, for a piece about my exhaustion with people comparing Donald Trump to Roman emperors in June 2016(!). If only I’d known just how much more exhausted I could get

I was even more struck by a recent piece in the wonderful Evil Witches newsletter:

AIMing with old internet friends

One of the titular old internet friends was Edith Zimmerman, a founder of The Hairpin. So much of what she said in the piece hit me in my softest, tenderest spots. Especially this:

What made you decide not to keep the Hairpin going in some other form?

That still haunts me. I stepped away from The Hairpin because I was burned out. And I didn’t do much for about five years after that.

Sometimes I think, “Oh man, I wish I had just taken a vacation instead of quitting, because I’ll never have a job that’s as perfect a fit for me as that one was.” But I don’t think it could have gone any other way. And I like where I’m at now.

OUCH. Just @ me next time.

But there was another part that gave me pause:

Do you think of those Hairpin days as good old days or just “that was a younger time in my life”?

I think of it as the good old days, because it was so fun. But it’s also utterly incompatible with any adult version of my life. There’s no grown-up Edith who’s a mom and a wife who also lives online like I did when I was 25. Before I had children, I had a lot of free time and spent an enormous amount of it just refreshing my email. I guess I still do that, though.

When I launched Eidolon, I was only 28. But I was already a mom and a wife. Reading Zimmerman’s words, I wondered how those roles had left an invisible impression on the publication and helped dictate its shape. Two out of the four of its editorial team were moms, and we both were pregnant and gave birth during our time with Eidolon. Sarah worked literally while in labor, although I swear I in no way encouraged or asked her to do that. In fact, that last clause there is symptomatic of my compulsive need to reiterate over and over how very much I didn’t need her to do that, a discomfort so palpable that my team came to relish poking at it and made it a running joke that I forced Sarah to work through contractions. That, and one time I told Tori to “do her thang,” and they’ll never let me live it down.

If two of our four editors hadn’t been mothers, I don’t think we’d have published our special issues on childbirth and parenting. But I wonder if the influence of parenting on Eidolon is also detectable in less obvious ways. I certainly thought of Eidolon as one of my children. You can parent your children, but you can’t really control how they experience the world and the impact they have on others. That’s part of how I see the legacy of Eidolon — it’s something I had a part in, but it’s also something I’ve had to let go of. That’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Sometimes I wonder what I’d like to say to Donna from ten years ago, visualizing Eidolon’s stillbirth in between retching. I had no idea that it was going to get millions of views and launch several books, including my own. That it was going to lead to so much joy and pride and also pain and heartbreak. And so, so much work. More work than I possibly could have imagined, another thing it has in common with parenting. Maybe parenting taught me to run a publication, and running a publication taught me to parent. Fucking around and making it up as I go.

an actual custom hero image for an actual excellent humor piece I definitely could not have predicted publishing

Reflecting on that first day, I see that I was much more emotionally and mentally prepared for Eidolon’s failure than I was for its success. There’s a lesson there, I’m sure. A lesson I definitely haven’t learned, because I can already see the same thought patterns coalescing in my brain around the memoir I’m working on and how I’ll metabolize and minimize the embarrassment of its inevitable failure. Maybe I’ll have figured it out in another decade. But if my history can teach me anything, it’ll be an experience richer and wilder than anything I could anticipate or imagine.

1. Which she stipulated, when I sent her this piece, should be referred to as such, with a capitalized “The” and in italics. Please take a moment to sympathize with Yung In, who was frequently frustrated with the first versions of our titles, where our capitalization schema was purely based on vibes.