Kate Heitmann: Harbinger was one big try-not-to-laugh challenge and she failed every time

A spoonful of Kellogg’s Special K Red Berries Cereal in one hand and the other flipping through the pages, I was reading yet another issue of the Harbinger. At age 8, I was consuming Harbingers at the same rate as American Girl Doll Magazines. Each issue was a surprise to see what the staffers cooked up, and the political opinions and features were much more interesting than the stationery and bedding sets in the catalogs I usually read with my cereal. 

And after seven years of subscriptions, you’d think that once I joined Harbinger, everything would be a bore — my older sister’s stories from staff prepared me for the deadline panics and the Dallas bus-rides. I’d practically heard – and read – it all. 

But luckily, I’m still on my toes. For the past four years, I’ve edited or docstalked nearly every story and seen the designs printed out and in the works on InDesign. Now, the surprise wasn’t in the pages but in the places I ended up. 

After all, how can something stay boring when you put 80 high schoolers in one room and give them Chick-fil-A? Or when Greyson starts scaling the side of the library outer-wall? While half-harmonizing Pitch Perfect riff-offs in a pod as we were launching up into the St. Louis arch? Unpacking over 50 cans of LaCroix to form one mega-review of 24 flavors? Harbinger was one big try-not-to-laugh challenge and I managed to fail every time.  

Soon I’ll go back to not knowing what to expect when I open up the site. But I’m not surprised that I’m going to miss Harbinger, it provided me with more entertainment than anything else. But it also taught me the importance of relationships and good old-fashioned grit when things got tough — things that I couldn’t have learned from reading it over the years. 

To Lyda, Carog and Carow, I’m not sure what you guys will do without my bi-weekly, 3-hour-long monologues broken with my five-minutes-of-silence times (a.k.a. deadline), but I bet you’ll get at least a bit more work done — just don’t be too productive! 

Even as a ten-year Harbinger super-subscriber, it’s weird knowing I’ll no longer have a behind-the-scenes look. Even so, I’m beyond excited for what is to come and I would not have been able to tackle it all without everything I learned from Harbinger.