Elm City Beat

We caught up with New Haven native Brooke Thomas, editor and founder of 11 project and turned the tables by posing the magazine’s 11 questions to her.

1. What is your work?
I am a maker of stuff. I have a Rolfing practice in New Haven, am a helper outer to other holistic professionals through my other business Practice Abundance, and am the founding editor of this magazine. It can all seem pretty disparate, but in my mind it all falls under one umbrella: sharing. If I had to distill it I would say everything I do springs from my phobia of letting any truly meaningful experience in my life go to waste:

I became a Rolfing practitioner when it healed me from lifelong chronic pain (I had had a birth injury and was 22 when I finally got better). With that kind of result, I knew I wanted to share this work with the world.

I started Practice Abundance after I realized how poorly educated we are to spread the word in holistic fields. My first years in practice were agony. People don’t exactly line up ready to pay out of pocket just to see what something so soothingly named is all about. I fell in love with marketing (word-spreading, community connecting), and decided to pass that knowledge along to my fellow struggling practitioners.

I started The 11 Project when I got tired of having no place to put the volumes and volumes of information I have collected through the years on people who have amazed me, my writing, and my thoughts on what true personal growth looks like. It needed a home already.

2. What impact do you hope it will have?
Even though the work I do sometimes falls into seemingly different categories, my hope for everything I do is that someone, somewhere (and ideally lots of someones) can have the realization that it’s never too late to be who you might have been.

3. Why create something that enables us to share more easily (in my case the magazine)?
My hope is that The 11 Project is a publication that allows us to share thoughts about what defines the “good life” in these changing times, and to shine a light on the amazing people who are putting good stuff into the world.

I feel we are in a huge time of flux where so many of the old models we used to turn to to define our lives and our happiness are being shaken up. For just a few examples: the economy and how we live and work is transforming constantly, how we define family is shifting, and technology is evolving and changing our lives at a very rapid pace. That leaves us, as with any big transition point in history, wobbling a bit and sometimes feeling rudderless.

I wanted to build a publication that could be a home for the conversation about all the new possibilities that are springing up as times change. I feel like we’re honing in on new, more personal, definitions of what happiness is to each of us, and that’s a conversation very much worth having.

4. Why do you think we're seeing more models based on sharing in this time in history?
Technology is clearly a huge part of it. All of the platforms that allow us to share vastly more easily and in real time- think Facebook, Google, Craigslist, and oh so, so many more- are a gift of Web 2.0. Without that enabling us, sharing would be so much more challenging.

However, sometimes I see it as a chicken and egg question. I do feel like as humans we’re craving more community and connection (in fact, I believe it’s strongly coded on our DNA and is something we’re trying to reconnect to), and technology happens to be the main vehicle to deliver that for us. So I feel like there’s a primal human drive that’s being satisfied through a myriad of ever-growing platforms that are impacting our tangible, non-screen lives on the day to day level.

5. What challenges or misperceptions, if any, did you face in getting people to understand this model?
Redefining the good life is a pretty big umbrella that a lot of stuff falls under, so people can get confused about just what it is we’re up to. We’ll talk about health and wellness- but we’re not a wellness publication. We’ll talk about technology, but we’re certainly not a tech publication! Having a look at how the world is changing and how our definition of happiness is changing is a pretty broad topic.

For example, I want to interview Barton Brooks who is traveling the world on a one man mission to just plain old help out, guerilla aid style, in whatever way he can. He’s an incredibly inspiring example of what one person can do when they decide to just do the thing already. However, I also want to interview the guy who created the Crème Brulee Cart. His tagline is “better living through dessert”, so how can I argue with that? The topics are broad, but they all add up to living the good life.

6. Was there an event or catalyst that made you realize you had to do this work?
I can’t say there was a single, clear catalyst as much as there was just several years worth of spending all my free time thinking about the things we look at in The 11 Project, and it finally seemed like time to just make a home for it already.

7. What were some of the momentum points for you with your project where you saw it coming together?
Getting the first issue complete and out into the world was definitely a huge thing. When I received my print copy in the mail, and could hold this beautiful tangible object, the whole thing became more real to me. It was very exciting.

8. What are some of the stall points and how did you get past them?
Right now The 11 Project is made up of just two people- myself and my designer (who is a genius) Reese Spykerman. So other than design, I’m running it all as a one woman show, and I also have two other businesses and a son. As a practical matter, The 11 Project will definitely have to drop the one woman show in order to be sustainable long term. At the moment I’m investigating some potential partnerships with digital publishers.

9. What does "the good life" consist of for you?
For me it’s pretty simple- doing meaningful work that I love, being surrounded by the family and friends that I adore, moving my body every day, and eating good food. It doesn’t get better than that.

10. What's your idea of hell?
I’m incapable of fully answering this question, but I can say that you don’t have to go anywhere to experience it.

11. What do you think humanity needs most these days?
I think as a whole we need more illuminating thought sparks that will tell us that, in whatever way we feel trapped in our own lives and situations, there really may be other options besides hunkering down into that trapped feeling.

Whenever I say that, I think of the privilege issue. Yes, it is so much easier to say and to do that if you have a life where you aren’t eking out an existence. And a large percentage of people are.

However, then I think about the sisters I’ve sponsored through Women for Women, or someone like William Kamkwamba (and you really need to read the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind if you want your mind blown), and even in their lives which had punishing circumstances, they were able to notice and respond to the spark that set them on better courses. Mostly I think it’s the noticing that we all have the hardest time with. My hope is that The 11 Project helps more people to notice broader options.