Capturing the South Coast

Marlissa Briggett likes lists, especially bucket lists. Upon turning 40, she made a list of things she wanted to do before her next milestone day – 50 under 50 – which included learning calculus, doing a cartwheel, and running in a marathon. She has now run several half-marathons, which she says counts. In addition, she’s eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and followed through on her wish to write more.

She didn’t make a 60 before 60 list, but now at 57, she is not only writing more, but she is the publisher of South Coast Almanac in Massachusetts, which she founded in 2015 with the first issue out in 2016. Not bad for checking things off that list.

“I was looking ahead and thinking, oh, when both of my kids go off to college, I will have a lot more free time,” says Briggett who is also a lawyer and works part-time.

Briggett has always loved writing. “I was always writing stories when I was a kid. That feeling of just liking it –feeling like play, not work –is still there. I love when you think you can’t figure out what you’re going to say and then the magic of it all falling into place.”

The first piece she got paid for was for the New Bedford Standard-Times. From there, she wrote some for the Boston Globe Food section, Cape Cod Magazine and other regional publications.

She pitched and was assigned a story for Harvard Magazine on people who step away from their careers to raise families. But she didn’t really know what she was doing, and the editor killed it. And, Briggett learned what a kill fee was – a portion of the original fee. Instead of taking the kill fee, she asked if she could revise it. She did and the piece ran and she got the full feel.

Briggett has always loved writing, but writing for magazines is different from legal writing. When she took writing in law school, she assumed it would be a breeze. It wasn’t.

Then the epiphany – “Why don’t I create a magazine, where creative folks are given more respect? That was mission number one. Mission number two was to celebrate the people in places of the South Coast.

A quick study, Briggett continued to write a lot, but she also discovered the challenging financial side of being a freelance writer. Magazines charge oodles for their ads, but share very little of that with their writers.

Then the epiphany – “Why don’t I create a magazine, where creative folks are given more respect? That was mission number one. Mission number two was to celebrate the people in places of the South Coast. I feel pretty passionate about that because I feel like it’s kind of an under-appreciated corner of New England.”

Briggett reached out to an editor from Cape Cod Magazine, who had started the Chatham Magazine. He was no longer at either, and he got on board as well.

Briggett has spent much of her life – as a child and adult – in Onset on the South Coast, which she says was getting short shrift next to its well-known neighbor, Cape Cod. As a kid, she spent summers there, and now as an adult she and her family are there often. “It means summer and all the wonderful things that summer means,” she says.

While many South Coast residents want to keep its riches quiet, there is a vast amount to do and a diverse history to learn and applaud from New Bedford, Fall River, Marion, Westport, Dartmouth, Mattapoisett, and Wareham.

“When I started the magazine,” she says. “I knew where to go on the Cape.” But on the South Coast, she only knew Onset and Wareham. “I didn’t know two towns over. When I started the magazine, I realized I was missing out on so much.”

“I love editorial when I’m visiting a new place to see where I should go to eat? What should I do? So part of starting the magazine was to encourage people to explore beyond their backyards.”

“I wanted to write a lot more,” says Briggett. “I’d get to write all the stories I’ve always wanted to write, and won’t have to go through as many hoops…I didn’t consider that there are so many hoops in running a magazine, that I have less time to write.”

The magazine has evolved from an annual to a quarterly. Most of its income is from ads.

Of the 10,000 copies in each print run, only 500 are for paid subscribers. Briggett wants to get that number up much higher – to 5,000 compared to the 10,000 that Cape Cod Life probably has.

While it may not have the circulation Briggett aspires to, it is a beautiful glossy magazine, with gorgeous ads and stories like the ones in the most recent (winter) issue. There’s a piece on the growing drag scene, one on model boat building, another on textile as art and a photo spread of all the ways the winter season has been celebrated.

“I’m so happy I did it,” she says. “I would have regretted it if I had just been a lawyer these last eight years.”

“I love it,” says Briggett. “I love the excuse it gives me to approach people and say, hey what are you doing? I’m not some creepy woman. I actually have a good reason…The fun thing about having a magazine that doesn’t make a lot of money is you don’t worry.”

“I’m so happy I did it,” she says. “I would have regretted it if I had just been a lawyer these last eight years.”

“I always thought of this as a ten-year experiment. If the creative people owned the magazine, would it succeed? We’re coming to ten years, and my goal has changed,” says Briggett. “My most recent goal is to have it live beyond me.”

About the Writer

Morgan Baker is the managing editor of The Bucket and lives in Cambridge, MA. Her award-winning memoir, Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes came out in May ‘23. She spent a year in Hawaii in 2019, and writes about this experience in her Bucket article, Holy Aloha!. She teaches writing at Emerson College in Boston, and privately. Her writing has also appeared in Grown & Flown, Motherwell, Cognoscenti, The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Brevity Blog, Thebark.com, and The Martha’s Vineyard Times, among other publications. In 2006, she won the Gold Award for feature writing from Parenting Publications of America and in 2018 was an award winner in The Writing It Real winter contest for her essay “Talk Much?”