When NEON Died
I read NEON completely—front to back, then back to front, hunting for details I’d missed. The reporting on dreams, the talk about sex that didn’t flinch, the strange honesty about what it felt like to be alive online. Every month it found the exact nerve to touch. Then somewhere I stopped being the person it was written for. I’d outgrown it, and that was fine.
NEON started in 2003 with a question disguised as a statement: Actually, we should be growing up.
The magazine lived in that contradiction—the space between youth and forced adulthood, between wanting to stay reckless and knowing you can’t forever. For fifteen years it was the only place that seemed to understand that feeling completely. Not gossip or trends. Real thinking about dreams, about what living actually felt like, about the strangeness of becoming someone when you’re not ready.
The closure came down to numbers. Fewer readers. The subscription base drying up. The generation that should have replaced the old one had found other places. Editor Ruth Fend announced it with a kind of brutal honesty that felt right. She spoke directly to readers: you’ve moved on, you’ve grown up, and not enough young people came after you. That’s the truth. That’s when you let something go.
When I reread her words, I thought about the old issues on my shelf. The ones I still pick up sometimes. They’re from a version of me I’m not anymore, but when I’m inside them I recognize the thinking. Ideas from writers I didn’t know became part of how I thought. This blog—everything I do here—comes partly from seeing what NEON did. Not in any direct way. Just knowing it was possible to write about life in a way that felt true. They showed me that. I owe them something for it.
The final issue comes out in June. Ruth promised a last look back, a celebration and goodbye both. The kind of thing you do when you’re leaving something you made and you want to hold it one more time before you let it go.
NEON goes digital, which is what nearly everything does now. The chances exist there, but so does the noise. What dies is the physical magazine. The thing on a rack, the weight in your hands, the front cover you see before you’ve decided whether to buy it. That’s not replaceable. A website can do similar work but it’s not the same. When something like that ends, it takes a piece of time with it. That specific feeling of being a particular age, reading a particular magazine that knew exactly who you were. That’s gone now. The world keeps moving. The magazine doesn’t. That’s all.