From the Editor – Justin Zoch

from the

EDITOR

By Justin Zoch

PERMANENCE

THE MAGAZINE you’re currently holding was first imagined in the final few weeks of 2020 and it has been a long three months finally getting this ink to soak into this page. It’s not the first issue we built under the Dirt Empire moniker but it’s the first one to go to print, and thus, will forever be the debut issue. The digital preview edition was a great experience and featured a lot of talented writers and photographers who gave us their seal of approval and allowed us to share their work and our vision – I’m very proud of that digital edition.

Unless you have lots of ink and a dedicated printer...magazines are just better.

However, being a diehard for the printed word, this one will always be the first one in my mind. There’s something special about holding a magazine in your hand that can’t be replaced by an online edition. It’s the permanence of print that always make me extra proud of a product. It’s designed to be kept, savored and collected (or recycled promptly if you so choose!) and that’s what I love about it. Even after 20 plus years in magazines, I never get tired of seeing a product I’m involved in show up in the mailbox.

I didn’t start off writing in print though. I first started typing up race reviews in my dorm room at Gustavus Adolphus College in the late 1990s and titled my weekly missives Upper Midwest Ramblings and volunteered to send them off to plumber turned webmaster Allan Holland on his then burgeoning Hosheads.com. From there, I went “syndicated” and found several other websites, including gotomn.com to print them but Hoseheads was first and always garnered the best exposure. Eventually, I left college and went to work at Mid-States Racing News for Howard Mellinger in Webster City, Iowa, before Dean Nardi hired me on to edit FlatOut in 2001.

FlatOut was my favorite magazine even before I worked there and Kevin Eckert graciously allowed me to write for it. My first piece was a Q&A with Craig Cormack and Rodney Droud on the messiness of the Eagle Raceway/ NSCA schism around the turn of the century. I’m pretty sure I stared at my first byline for about five minutes before starting the story. I have that on my shelf in my office along with every other FlatOut I ever helped assemble. I just read it again right now – took me 30 seconds to find it.

All those years that I toiled on Hoseheads and searched for my voice and shared my news, notes and ramblings, I would regularly post around 4,000 words per week (for reference, this column is about 600!) and used travelogues, interviews and personal anecdotes. Almost all of them are lost to the void that is the internet with the exception of a few found through google searches on old websites. I’ve long wished to go back and read those rambles. That’s why this issue is so important to me – its real and it lasts.

Just two weeks ago, my father surprised me with a truly special gift – a huge chunk of my columns. As I was posting online and moving to the next column, he was printing off my work. He found them and gave me a long, detailed look at the racing scene from 99-01 and short glimpses of myself from 20 years ago. I never expected to read them again because they were never printed. Something tells me this magazine might be stashed away somewhere in that house to be found 20 years anon. Thanks Dad!