The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and ad revenue were down, so down, in fact, that it looked as if Minneapolis’s most prestigious national publication might fold.
There was personal turmoil, too. A few years earlier, in a stinging public undressing, Utne, who has made his living and reputation championing a New Age brand of liberalism, was taken to task by his employees. They described him to a local reporter as maniacal, controlling, and, worst of all, a hypocrite. They said they’d repeatedly had sex on the couch in his office in secret rebellion. They said they’d placed a giant zucchini in his chair and pretended to worship it.
Utne wasn’t running a sweatshop. Nor was he pushing crystal meth on the side. His biggest crime, it seems, was espousing high ideals and not quite living up to them. His second biggest crime was blindness to how others perceived him. When an idealistic reader discovered that Eric and his wife Nina Rothschild Utne had four kids—not exactly in line with the magazine’s philosophy of environmental conservation—Utne responded in embarrassingly guileless fashion, explaining to readers that he’d asked certain friends to refrain from reproducing, to balance things out. He described himself and Nina as “designated breeders in a tribal or extended family.”
Statements like that chafe in a place like Minnesota, whose citizens pride themselves on reasonableness. And when Utne started discussing walkabouts and fasts, during which he said he’d talked to rocks, trees, the wind, and a pigeon, well, even the man’s robust national reputation couldn’t save him.
But if a person earns any points at all for effort, it’s worth noting that Utne truly believed, and still believes, in the power of nature and the power of community. He may be flawed and grandiose, but it seems that he earnestly wishes to be a force for good, to be part of some grand cosmic solution, even if it is from a palatial Linden Hills home with a Volvo and Prius in the garage. Utne is quite aware that on certain points his philosophies and actual life haven’t matched up. (At the magazine, for example, he subsidized bus passes for Utne staffers, while he continued to drive his car to work.) That’s why, five years ago, he fired himself and walked away from his empire in order to embark on a tortured stretch of soul searching. He found some of what he was looking for, apparently. Today, the once deadly earnest Utne cracks wise about his formerly “inflated ego.” And when friends describe him, they use adjectives like mellow, charming, and delightful.
Given Utne’s almost Candide-like optimism, it’s not exactly a surprise that in November he published a new project, Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac: Celebrating Nature & Her Rhythms in the City. “I never expected to be publishing again,” says the fifty-eight-year-old Utne from a corner seat at the Zumbro Café, just blocks from his house. He speaks quietly, almost nervously at first, but as the conversation progresses, he loosens up. “I thought I was done with that. But I’ve always loved almanacs. The Farmer’s Almanac always seemed interesting to me, but maybe written for somebody else.”
The idea behind the Urban Almanac—conceived during one of Utne’s legendary personal vision quests—is to alert urban dwellers to the surrounding environment, to get them in tune with “living time.”
“Eight or nine years ago I had an experience in the desert where I connected with nature in a way that I never had,” Utne recalls. “And especially the full moon on the last night. And then a month later, I was in the heart of Manhattan and a little breeze came up and I turned into it and here was the full moon again. I felt a connection with it as I had in the desert, and I realized we are always in nature wherever we are. I’m usually pretty much oblivious to it. And I wondered, what would it take to be connected to nature even in the city?”
It’s a simple enough notion. It’s also the kind of notion that infuriates Utne’s detractors. Here it is, 2004, and the country is embroiled in the wrong war at the wrong time. The future of abortion and other civil liberties is at stake. And Eric Utne, the one-time digester of the nation’s alternative press, arrives with a book about stargazing in the city. Its publication date, the day after the presidential election, was chosen deliberately, Utne explains. “Wasn’t it Thoreau who once said, ‘Read not the times, read the eternities’? I think we should be doing both. But if we are only caught up in the turbulence and chaos of current events, we just get swept and buffeted back and forth. This is a way to kind of ground people so that we can participate without being jostled by every urgent piece of news.”
Eric Utne was born in St. Paul, the second of four children, to Norwegian parents. His father was vice president of an insurance company, his mother a homemaker. They divorced when Utne was thirteen. He attended the University of Minnesota casually, off and on, through a seven-year period, and majored in architecture before dropping out. “I was a good designer,” he once told Time magazine, “but I couldn’t pass mechanics and materials.” His wife added with a snap, “He could build them, but they wouldn’t stay up.” Later, in 1969, Utne began studying Eastern cosmology and macrobiotics in Massachusetts with a guru named Michio Kushi. The fascination ran deep. The man offered tangible answers and a formula for living. With what Utne describes as “missionary zeal,” he managed Kushi’s natural foods store and sold ads for his East West Journal. When, in the mid-seventies, Utne began to question the narrowness of Kushi’s philosophies, he and a handful of other devotees jumped ship and formed the New Age Journal. That effort, too, devolved into acrimony, so he switched gears and, for a time, worked as a Manhattan literary agent.
It was while living in New York that Utne met Nina Rothschild, with her wild curly hair and piercing blue eyes. She still remembers the details. “That was twenty-five years ago,” she says. “I had had a greeting-card business with a friend. She kept having religious conversion experiences and it was tough on the business. I was trying to figure out what to do next.”
Rothschild—not of the legendary banking Rothschilds, but of the lesser-known department store Rothschilds—was at an entrepreneurs’ conference. She was sitting at a table when Utne walked in. “People made assumptions that we were together,” she recalls. “I had been in this relationship that was basically over. I was making a statement for myself and to myself and by myself. And I didn’t want people to lump me in with somebody else. I got more and more flustered. I was blushing more and more. He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth in the middle of dinner. And I didn’t even know his name.” Eric invited Nina to Minnesota to meet his family. “We came out here in May of 1980 and the lilacs were in bloom,” she says. “It was seduction by lilac. We never left.” The two, each having been married and divorced before, were wed the following May.
Four years later, while Nina raised the children and acted as loose consigliere to her husband, Eric started the Utne Reader, a compendium of “the best of the alternative press.” First housed above a food co-op, the publication gained renown and moved on up to tonier but still suitably Bohemian headquarters on the edge of Loring Park, where it remains today. The business grew and grew and grew. From 1987 to 1992, circulation quadrupled to almost three hundred thousand paid subscribers, making it the fastest growing magazine in the country, according to the Detroit Free Press. Utne was optimistic about the magazine that Bill Moyers had labeled an “underground railroad of ideas.” Said Utne at the time, “We think we’re going to reach five hundred thousand in circulation by the year 2000.”
Unfortunately, by the mid-nineties, subscriptions had leveled off and begun to decline. Onlookers, barely able to conceal their schadenfreude, pointed to a variety of factors. Some felt the magazine had sold out and forsaken its mission of directing readers to fringe perspectives. Others suspected that with the Internet, people no longer needed to be directed. Still others surmised that formerly radical ideas had been co-opted by the mainstream, making the fringe less fringy. Perhaps the magazine’s privileged readership (subscribers are consistently well-to-do and well-educated) was tiring of the publication’s increasingly spirituality oriented outlook. Bill Babcock, at the time a U of M journalism professor, surmised that the Utne was in the “throes of its midlife crisis” and that the publication had run its course. “Eric hit on a wonderful gold mine,” he said back in 1995. “That was giving yuppie baby boomers the opportunity to feel they are part of the counterculture while still driving their Saabs and Volvos.”
It was downhill from there. Utne launched an expensive and quickly aborted foray into web publishing (“We were distinguished by how much we lost on the Internet,” says Nina Rothschild Utne) and a failed attempt to sell the business. There was a staff downsizing and mounting ill will around the office, and, in November of 1995, that damning cover story in the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader.
The article seemed to take unbridled glee in popping Utne’s warm bubble of privilege. By the Reader’s estimation, he was guilty of both frivolity and hypocrisy. These were serious transgressions in the world of advocacy journalism, and he was committing them on the newspaper’s own lefty turf. Utne, who’d spent a decade digesting the alternative press, suddenly found himself being chewed up and digested by the alternative press. It was especially galling to the story’s author, Jon Tevlin, now a reporter for the StarTribune, that the magazine editor had refused to be interviewed. Designating him a “hypocritical flake” and the “self-appointed guru to the questing hip-oisie,” the Reader’s cover text asked, “Has the global village idiot gone off the deep end?” It was a brutal rebuke.
Utne was, no doubt, a juicy target. During the early nineties, he recalls, “there was a few-month span in which People magazine did a profile. Time magazine did a piece. CBS launched a show opposite Nightline hosted by Charles Kuralt and Lesley Stahl. And they gave me a minute or two a month to talk about whatever I wanted. That was very inflationary to my ego. I thought I must be really hot stuff. And then I learned that I wasn’t.”
Utne jokes about it now, but at the time, the revelation was painful. “Praise is very hard for me to take,” he says. “I’m much more alert to criticism. And it lands much more deeply.” So, when faced with the vitriolic Reader article, he was devastated. “That was terrible,” he says. “It was the innuendo that was so insubstantial that was really awful. But you know, I have not sought out [Tevlin], but I’m very grateful that it happened. Because, while it wasn’t the only factor, it made me take stock of myself.”
Rothschild Utne adds, “There was something about Eric that made people want to take him down a peg. And, perhaps, rightly so. Eric was really riding for a fall. The story wouldn’t have been complete without it.”
Beginning in early 1996, Utne took a couple of years off, during which (as he later wrote to Utne readers) he went on a walkabout to “find, feel, and follow my heart.” Along the way, he “learned to meditate, did lots of therapy and ‘inner work,’ took singing lessons and joined a gospel choir, enjoyed lots of leisurely conversations for the first time in years, and volunteered at a local health crisis resources center.” He returned to the magazine in 1998 with bright eyes and big plans to expand into book publishing, radio, television, and the organizing of events and cruises. But this new energy quickly fizzled. In a fundamental and irreversible sense, Utne was burned out. In 1999, he turned the reins over to his wife.
“I said I’d do it, but it had to be for real, not window dressing,” recalls Rothschild Utne. “He gave me half the company. We ran it together for six months. It became clear that he didn’t want to do it anymore. His heart wasn’t in it. He was making messes everywhere. At that point, he turned all the ownership over to me.”
Rothschild Utne was—and had been for years—the magazine’s primary investor, and she was concerned for the family finances. “At some point I had guaranteed a credit line,” she explains, sipping water in her comfortable, sky-blue Loring Park office “And then the company didn’t expand and wasn’t sold. Nobody was paying attention to the fact that it was hemorrhaging money. I had a lot at stake and so I said, ‘I want to try to turn this around.’ In order to be effective in that way, I had to be able to call the shots.” Though at the time Rothschild Utne had zero publishing experience (she was a Harvard English major), she says, “I have some fairly sturdy business genes.”
These days, she counts her efforts, which have included a redesign, trimming the name simply to Utne, and landing a handful of additional investors, a resounding success. “We’re not profitable, but we are close,” she declares, while her assistant approaches with packets of supporting documentation. “With the anniversary issue, we had our best ad-sales issue since 1996.” Most importantly, Rothschild Utne adds, the magazine is getting back to its original mission-cum-mantra: Focus on what’s breaking through, not what’s breaking down.
That’s all good news, of course. But without the magazine to run—in fact, watching his namesake fare better without him—Utne was left directionless and missionless, not an entirely comfortable position for him, one suspects. He hung around home, trying to be a better husband and father, shopping and cooking, taking care of the boys, rebuilding himself. And then he crossed paths with Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher who believed in spiritual evolution and in 1919 founded the Waldorf Schools movement. “I tried to read Steiner thirty-five years ago,” says Utne, munching the last of his bacon while REM’s “Everybody Hurts” drones from the Zumbro’s speakers. “I found him absolutely impenetrable. And then after leaving the magazine, I was reading widely, and doing some of the stuff we’d been publishing about but never really doing—like learning how to meditate—and I encountered some of his ideas. I picked up my old copy of the book I had tried to read before and it was moldy and musty and this time it just leapt off the page. It spoke right to my soul.”
The Waldorf schools, described in broad strokes, espouse age-appropriate education. Children learn the various disciplines, like reading, when they are ready to learn them. Creativity is nurtured and handcrafts are required. Exposure to television and other forms of mass media is discouraged. As it happened, back in 1988 Rothschild Utne had co-founded the City of Lakes Waldorf School, now located on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis (which seems to draw the children of every thirty-something artist and musician in town). Because Utne believes that some things are fated, when he was asked to teach seventh and eighth grade at the school, he said no and then yes. “I have four boys and they’ve all been in Waldorf, preschool through at least eighth grade,” he says. “They’re really good guys and they’re really interested in life and the world, as are many of their classmates. I’m quite impressed with the curriculum. I’ve always said we teach what we need to learn. I got a real liberal arts education by teaching these kids.”
And because Utne is always looking into things, searching for some deep hidden meaning, he says his education went beyond the topics he instructed, which included Renaissance history, creative writing, meteorology, astronomy, geography, and algebra. “I’ve always considered myself unemployable,” he offers with a chuckle. “I’ve often been in situations where I’ve been the entrepreneur. So working with a group of colleagues at the school was a great thing for me. I got a yearbook at the end of the year signed by all my colleagues telling me—I know this is going to end up in the article—saying how much they loved working with me and what a great time we had. I found myself bringing it home and showing it to Nina and saying, ‘Look, I can work with other people. I just have to not be the boss.’”
The Urban Almanac is a modern, citified, lefty version of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Its motto (Utne is undeniably fond of mottos) is: Look up, look out, look in. Toward these goals, the book contains a varied collection of information, a reflection of Utne’s eclectic mind, including a piece on naked-eye astronomy, another on how to predict the weather, and a primer on the life of Franklin himself. There are also poems, recipes, lyrics to Elvis and Prince songs, quotes from Goethe, a yearlong date book, and airy inspirational passages like, “The soul shines in the darkness and gives it form.” The book, which Utne hopes to publish annually, is at its best when paying tribute to “essential places” and “living urban treasures” such as Minneapolis’ Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, Domino Park in Miami, authors Studs Terkel and Jane Jacobs, and L.A. peace activist Aqueela Sherrills.
During his time at the Utne Reader, Utne was deemed a glory hog, partly because he’d plastered his own name across the cover of the magazine, a move he now calls a mistake. “It’s really a team of people doing it,” he says. Where the self-published Almanac is concerned, he’s eager to share the credit, albeit in his own grand, cosmic way. Of designer Margaret Bossen, he says, “I met her and she had shown up with an armload of almanacs and other stuff that was clearly just exactly the sensibility I wanted for this almanac. And I got the feeling when I was interviewing her that this was her project to do. Almost like she was born to do it and I was facilitating her destiny.”
He’s equally effusive about managing editor Martha Coventry, whom he calls a “dear friend.” Coventry, who worked with Utne at the magazine and has known him for twenty-two years, offered this assessment in return: “Eric has become a really wonderfully mature man.”
The stated goal of the Almanac is to draw people to nature, but the larger (and largely unarticulated) aim is to connect people to each other. Utne has long been entranced by the idea that cooperation creates power, which leads to change. In 1991, the Utne Reader published a story titled, “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” The piece drew national attention and, in fact, did start a bit of a revolution, with the New York Times discussing the revival of conversation and the L.A. Times publishing an instructive how-to called “Bringing Together Your Own Salon.” Both pieces credited Utne for instigating this new chattiness: At the time, more than eight thousand Utne readers had signed up to participate in some five hundred klatches nationwide. It was the perfect salve, a culturally positive trend that also served as a brilliant marketing tool for the magazine.
The movement itself turned out to be short-lived, but Utne claims he was not disappointed. The effects live on, he says. “People meet each other and they develop a relationship or start a business or a school or a co-housing project. They forget about this magazine in Minneapolis. We couldn’t figure out how to maintain a connection to it. But we were like this catalyst. Mostly I think salons lead to things. I don’t think they are an end unto themselves.”
It was the impulse to facilitate a larger conversation, to be a catalyst (Utne describes himself as a “proselytizer and a pamphleteer”), that led to the Almanac, which he hopes will be popular among a wide range of people, including students. “We get our news now from TV, newspapers, and the radio rather than from each other,” he laments. “The media tends to separate us from each other. So a big part of the Almanac is to connect us. That’s sort of buried in it. We have things like the citizen wisdom councils and community-supported agriculture, farmers markets, poetry slams. There are all kinds of aspects encouraging people to connect with other human beings. People are craving connection.”
That is probably true. It’s a bit of cultural analysis that Utne has always gotten right. But people are connecting, just not necessarily along the lines he would prefer. The Republican Party has never been more solidified or zealous. Religious fervor is on the upswing. People are bound together and stratified by fear—fear of terrorism, fear of our nation’s perceived moral weakness. Back in 1989, Utne told USA Today, “We are convinced the country’s values are changing in the direction we have been articulating in our pages.” Alas, quite obviously, the tide didn’t turn that way. Thus far, the twenty-first century has been decidedly grim and non-green.
After the September 11th attacks, New Age leaders suggested that the movement had to change. Mainly, it needed to be more macro and less micro, less concerned with small, internal matters. In October 2001, astrologer Walter Mercado declared, “The New Age, the way we have defined it in the past, is passing now. Everything was how to, how to, how to. Everything was me, me, me. But being egocentric is over. Even the astrology of the individual has changed. September 11th was a very violent shock to the way we saw the world. Now people are less interested in what the stars have in store for them and more interested in what they have in store for the universe.”
Is there room in the post twin-towers era for somebody like Eric Utne, for stargazing and flower sniffing? Even Voltaire’s Candide finally had to conclude that “regrettable things happen in this world of ours,” that the fundamental aim in life is not happiness, but merely survival.
“I think the last line of Candide is about tending your garden,” says Utne, decidedly upbeat. “We become better citizens and more responsible citizens when we are more grounded and more connected, not just to nature, but to each other. Even in warrior cultures, for example the Samurai, in order to know what they were protecting, they became masters of the arts. The Samurai were the guys who did the tea ceremony or flower arranging or brush painting. They had to develop their inner being. I think, related to 9/11, that for us to really know what we are trying to protect and take care of, it might be good for us to become intimate with it. We’re pretty clueless these days.”
Certainly, Utne’s sights have lowered from the days when he was leading the Utne Reader and igniting a national salon movement, or, as with the Y2K guide, proposing a radical, new way to operate society. His idealism has been seared by hard truths. Asked whether, at this point, he considers himself an optimist, he says, “I would have said that in the past. But I don’t know anymore.”
That’s just real life talking.
