Jon Spayde

Writer, editor, communicator

Saint Paul, Minnesota

I'm a veteran journalist who tells powerful stories about how spirituality, art, science, and history impact our lives. And I do it with a smile.

Jon Spayde

Writer, editor, communicator

Saint Paul, Minnesota

I'm a veteran journalist who tells powerful stories about how spirituality, art, science, and history impact our lives. And I do it with a smile.

The Science of Stress
Understand how stress operates in your body — and how to reduce stress and build resilience. You’re trying to concentrate on a project that’s due in less than two hours, and that horn has been beeping outside your window for the last five minutes. Its effects are impossible to ignore. Your heart rate is up.
Experience Life
The Craft of Scent
For a growing number of independent scent makers, perfume is a powerful and delightful means of self expression.
American Craft magazine
Sacred Silence: Silent Retreats
Writer Jon Spayde takes a break from his noisy world and spends a few days in quiet contemplation. When I signed up for my first silent retreat several years ago, I was delighted by the prospect of three days without small talk. I was also bent on total serenity, and hopeful that I might experience a vivid spiritual vision (or two).
Experience Life
Hemp
The versatile hemp plant-which can be processed into textiles, bioplastics, food, and a lot more-is a "new" old crop that offers visions of profitability. And U of M research is exploring those visions.
Minnesota Alumni
Interdisciplinary Art
Sara Cluggish, the Perlman Teaching Museum’s new director, talks about mission, visual learning, and acquiring work for the permanent collection. A bold watercolor landscape by postimpressionist master Maurice de Vlaminck. A blocky figure with a book in its lap by French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
Carleton Voice
Museums Go Public
The art museum has been undergoing evolution, from a warehouse of rare objects into a force for education, community involvement, and even social change.
Public Art Review
Tiny Treasures
The vessels are ornamented bronze, finished with basketry details: coils and weaving in natural materials like sweetgrass, seagrass, bamboo, and grapevine. Their shapes evoke Japanese pottery and basketry, and they’re sometimes embellished with precious m
American Craft Council
Highly Infectious
None of Cape Town’s richness, and none of her contradictions, are lost on the people who organized Infecting The City, a weeklong public art festival that I attended in mid-March.
Public Art Review
What Does it Mean to Be Educated?
It's far too easy to stop learning anything you don't have to. We lead hectic lives, and by the end of the day just getting dinner on the table seems like an insurmountable challenge; who's got the energy to tackle Tolstoy, Fellini, or the latest music sensation from Cape Verde? Yet, self-education doesn't have to mean another bunch of chores to do.
Utne Reader
A Literary Treasure Hunt
The vast University of Minnesota Libraries system—in possession of millions of books and magazines, and able to address tens of thousands of research questions annually—provides U faculty and students with comprehensive coverage of the humanities, arts, sciences, and other areas of study. But, if U libraries is the universe, the Department of Archives and Special Collections is its glorious Pegasus constellation.
Minnesota Alumni
Craft That Calms
Four artists share the stories behind objects they make to help us rest and reflect. March 21, 2024 Spring 2024 #Features + Profiles #Goods Free To Read Photo by Kelley Schuyler Megan Winn holds a stack of her handbound journals, created using reclaimed l
American Craft Council
How artists help communities heal after disasters
A couple of days after Hurricane Sandy slammed New York City, Caron Atlas, director of the nonprofit Arts & Democracy Project, got a call from a nearby neighborhood city council member, Brad Lander. The two had worked together as community organizers; now Lander wondered if Atlas could arrange cultural programming for some 500 special-needs evacuees—mainly elderly and people with physical and mental disabilities—who were taking shelter in Brooklyn’s Park Slope Armory.
Public Art Review
The Provocateurs
Carleton Professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder are challenging seemingly progressive academic orthodoxies — from the left. During a period when it’s de rigueur for conservative pundits on cable television to proclaim that an epidemic of “wokeness,” “canc
carleton.edu
Light Houses
Four artists light up their architecturally influenced works to tell stories, create moods, and explore ideas—all with the mysterious poetry of illumination. January 25, 2024 Winter 2024 #Features + Profiles Free To Read Photo by Layla May Arthur Where We
American Craft Council
Monumental Changes
In America, monuments have been coming down. Other monuments have been challenged, including a statue of Christopher Columbus in New York and one of Philadelphia’s former mayor Frank Rizzo (widely resented in the black and gay communities)—while cities ponder renaming streets and other facilities bearing the names of slaveowners or racists.
Public Art Review
Remote Access
Finding healthcare and support has never been more challenging in rural areas. Researchers are studying how to support rural people at every stage of life. There’s a notion that the country is a healthier place than the city, that breathing fresh air, and
Advances Magazine

About

Jon Spayde

writing

editing

magazine planning

web content creation

book doctoring

voice work

stage performance

teaching writing

coaching writers

consulting

I began my career in journalism in New York, at Travel and Leisure magazine and other travel publications. I was a long-time writer and editor at the pioneering cultural-political magazine Utne Reader, and am the author of the 2008 book “How to Believe: Teachers and Seekers Show the Way to a Modern, Life-Giving Faith,” from Random House. I edited the online magazine The Line, covering business and urbanism in Minnesota, and am currently working with Franklin Covey in San Francisco, the Bolster marketing agency in Minneapolis, American Craft magazine, and other outlets. I live with my wife, artist/entrepreneur Laurie Phillips, and three beautiful black cats.