Alive & Well
Allie Shaw
Star Tribune
Alive & Well: A young woman turns her painful struggle with anorexia into a literary arts magazine created for and by other young women.
By Allie Shah
Star-Tribune
Monday, May 28, 2007
Heather Scheiwe smiles proudly as she looks across her desk at the photos of the young women she’s hired as interns for her magazine. The faces posted on the bulletin board in Scheiwe’s rented office space near the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus look eager, confident… alive.
It’s a word Scheiwe (pronounced SHY-vee), 25, doesn’t take for granted. For years, she battled anorexia – the result of a deep, internal schism over her identity as a strong, outspoken leader and as a Christian woman told to be submissive and feminine. Today, she is well and has turned her struggle into Alive, a successful literary arts magazine created by and for women 25 and younger.
“It’s about changing the media and having it reflect what we want it to be,” Scheiwe said. “We don’t want to see skinny models anymore. We want to see girls hiking through Nepal or volunteering in inner-city Chicago. It’s really about empowering young women to speak up with their stories.”
Alive celebrated its third anniversary last month, a significant milestone in the magazine business. Most magazines fold within their first three years. Alive is still kicking, but it’s also evolving. Until recently it was a glossy publication that came out quarterly and cost $5; now it has morphed into an online magazine (www.alivemagazine.org). A best-of glossy will be published once a year.
The web format makes sense for a publication aimed at a younger audience, said Scheiwe, and it extends the magazine’s distribution reach worldwide. It also allows her staff to update content more often.
Written almost entirely by women 25 and under, Alive is full of poems, drawings, and essays covering topics ranging from studying abroad, to favorite dorm recipes, to breast cancer and body-image issues. It also covers fashion, but the focus is on how to add personal flair to trends.
Alive does not accept ads from companies that conflict with its mission to offer young women positive and healthy messages. The magazine is part of an umbrella nonprofit group called Alive Arts Media, also founded by Scheiwe and funded by hundreds of individual donors who support the organization’s mission.
The donations cover the cost of producing the magazine and pay for two staff people – Jennifer Dotson, 23, the creative and marketing director, and a part-time office manager, Julia Butcher, 23. Scheiwe, who is managing editor and CEO, works full time on a volunteer basis. She makes ends meet by working as an office manager at a music center and sharing a house with seven roommates.
Ironically, this will be her last year with Alive. She is “aging out” of her job under a rule she established herself. “You have to be 25 or under,” she said. “We say it’s a magazine for young women; it really needs to be young women running the magazine.”
The latest issue features a woman on the cover who is wearing Teva sandals, not high heels, as she surveys the wilderness below her perch on a cliff. The title: “Take a risk!”
Scheiwe has taken that advice herself.
She grew up in Fort Collins, Colo., and was active in her church youth group. It was then that she first struggled with the conflict between wanting to be a strong leader and a good Christian woman. “I was getting messages about how I was supposed to look and behave as a woman from Christian books on dating, and from magazines like Cosmopolitan,” she said. That inner tension soon manifested itself in a physical way, Scheiwe says, and she became anorexic.
Minnesota Bound
She moved to Minnesota to attend St. Olaf College. There, she studied writing, religion, and women’s studies. Her battle with anorexia continued. A runner, she exercised obsessively and lifted weights. She weighed 85 pounds at one point and was hospitalized.
Eventually she recovered, and in the process, found a way to reconcile her identity as a person of faith who was also an outspoken voice for change. “I realized that my personality wasn’t wrong,” she said. For her senior project, she pitched the idea of creating a magazine that would examine how the popular media, psychology and religion interplay with teenage girls.
“I was conscious of the fact that a lot of teenagers were probably going through the same thing,” she said. Though she was only required to come up with the concept of the magazine for her project, she decided to actually publish one issue using a $1,700 special grant available to St. Olaf student entrepreneurs. She presented her first issue to a faculty committee and a group of students and received rave reviews. Several students volunteered to help with graphic design or marketing, anticipating that there would be another issue.
“There was so much energy behind it, I couldn’t let it go,” said Scheiwe, who graduated in 2004 and moved to Minneapolis to launch the magazine. Today its mission is twofold: to give a voice to teen and young adult women to share their stories and to provide internships for young women so they can acquire job skills and pursue their passions.
It’s the second part of the mission that makes Scheiwe smile when she sees those photos of the interns she’s hired. Past Alive interns have all gone on to jobs in their related fields, she said.
Will there be enough voices and stories to tell to keep the magazine going for another three years? Scheiwe is certain of it.
“I feel like we’re just getting started.”