A colorful alley in Prospect New Town, Longmont Colorado

Two weeks ago I came across the very unpleasant news that Time Inc. had shuttered Cottage Living magazine.  Cottage Living was my all time favorite magazine and the first magazine I wrote a major feature for (on Prospect New Town).  I have been in love with Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado since I first saw the very first houses going up in 1996.  When I first started writing as a freelance writer I thought about what would be the ultimate article to write, and I thought I would like to write something about Prospect New Town.

I’d been getting Cottage Living for a year or so and it was one of the only shelter magazines that had articles about different neighborhoods and communities in the U.S. (which is one of the reasons I loved it), so I thought one day, “Why don’t I query them about Prospect?”.  Prospect is so different from anything else out there and it seems like almost no one knows about it (although it was on the cover and had a large feature article in Dwell magazine).  I emailed a query and photos to Cottage Living’s travel editor and figured I’d never hear from them again. 

A lot of time in freelance writing, you send a query–which is basically a description of the article you would like to write and your credentials for doing so–to a magazine and get….silence.  Editors are so deluged by queries they often just don’t respond when the answer is “no”, so most freelance writers send out queries they never hear back about.  Sufficed to say I was very surprised when Cottage Living’s travel editor called me that night.

A few months later, I met the travel editor and the photographer at Prospect to watch the photo shoot which was very interesting and fun.  We went to dinner at Prospect’s awesome BBQ joint.  They were great guys and fun to work with.  The article came out a year later and I was very happy with it.  I ended up working with Cottage Living on two other neighborhood articles, one of which–about the Harmony Village cohousing community in Golden–was never published due to changes in the format of the magazine (happens sometimes).  Cottage Living was always very professional, always paid on time (can be a challenge with some magazines), and was a great magazine to work with, not to mention, awesome.  I am going to miss them.