Déjà Vu Redux

As we close out our twentieth year of WILMA magazine, I’m a little nostalgic, remembering the past several years and our tenth year in particular.

For that anniversary issue, then-co-editor Nina Bays and I combed through a decade of WILMA covers and photos on hard copies and CDs to pull together retrospectives and cover collages. This year hasn’t been so different. WILMA art director Suzi Drake and I – Bays currently basks in the Los Angeles sun, orchestrating business newspaper designs while moonlighting as our style writer – combed through even more photos and covers this year, this time on a server cloud instead of CDs.

WILMA, twenty years old and wise beyond her years, continues to evolve and reflect the perspectives of women in Southeastern North Carolina.

In the name of taking stock, here are a few examples of figures to sum up WILMA’s growth.

4: number of redesigns the magazine has undergone, including this year’s beautiful and thoughtful reimagining by Drake;

243: number of WILMA covers over the years; women featured on the cover have come from a range of fields from the arts such as singer Bibis Ellison, media such as Michelle Li, business such as Fran Scarlett, and so many others;

363: number of Women to Watch Award finalists featured in the magazine since the annual awards program began in 2012.

In the incremental progress of daily focus, it’s easy to overlook where you’ve landed. Sometimes, you look back and realize you’ve swum far, far away from where you threw your towel down on the sand.

One of those checkpoints happened last month on moving day to our new office downtown.

Ten years ago, while rifling through ten years of back issues, we spread covers out in our downtown office – one very large but singular room. Not long after, we pulled up stakes for a larger spot.

After this recent moving day, we all have our own rooms, and even more strikingly, the number of brands on the wall has eclipsed more than just the twinsies WILMA and Greater Wilmington Business Journal. Expansion is no small feat for media these days, so I have zero problem bragging.

The space might be bigger, the view better, but at one, ten, or twenty years, some things fundamentally don’t change about what we do.

For example, I was flying back to Wilmington recently and editing in mid-air the spread about Linda Pearce Thomas for this issue. I got a nudge next to me. My middle-seat neighbor nodded at the photos being checked. “Did you know Linda?” I asked. She did. I shared that we were running a story about her in this issue. She approved.

She remembered when WILMA was Wilma! and still the newsprint that Joy Allen founded. It was an important thing we were doing, she said.

And that’s a mission that transcends addresses, editors, and years. So here’s hoping it’s one that carries us through the next twenty and beyond.

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