In 1998, I was asked by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico, the cofounders of the MFA Design/Designer as Entrepreneur program, to join the faculty of this brand-new department at the School of Visual Arts whose mission was to train students to be “total authors” who could conceptualize, manufacture, and sell their ideas. 

I devised a seminar called “The Magazine Workshop,” which consisted of a series of weekly lectures on the history of magazine publishing combined with a workshop in which students, over the course of one semester, would create the first “dummy” issue of their own, original magazine from scratch. 

I taught this course for three rewarding years. After spending so much time advising students on their magazine projects, I was inspired to once again create my own. I started working on the first issue of Esopus in 2002.