Accidental Captain

It’s become a Maine publishing legend: how a man with an idea put together a magazine in a small cabin without running water and electricity, with the nearest telephone nailed to a tree half a mile down a dirt road. The magazine was WoodenBoat, which now circulates nearly 100,000 copies every two months and has birthed spinoff publications, a respected boatbuilding school, books, and a busy anchorage at the eastern end of Eggemoggin Reach in Brooklin that is a regular summer stop for sailors cruising the Maine coast.

Yet Jon Wilson, the man behind it all, insists it happened mostly by accident.

“I really didn’t know what I was doing, and in many ways I still don’t,” he says. He admits bringing one essential skill to the table: “a natural ability to listen, the ability to ask questions and listen carefully to the answers.”

Originally from Rhode Island, Wilson began building boats as a teenager and came to Maine via the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Penobscot Bay. He spent a year and a half on the island, repairing and rebuilding the wooden “pulling boats” used by the school’s staff and students. The experience “firmed up in me my desire to build boats and to do it in Maine.”

But in 1974, he found himself with a wife and young child on a backwoods road in Brooksville, feeling disconnected from the shrinking world of wooden boatbuilding. “Fiberglass was really displacing wood as the material of choice,” he says. “The wooden boat tradition, and the genius of wooden boat construction, was in danger of going extinct.”

Cobbling together content from a few boatbuilders he knew, Wilson produced the first issue of WoodenBoat and took a few hundred copies to the Newport Sailboat Show. “I did not do any market research,” he says. He sold 200 subscriptions and 400 individual copies, and the rest is entrepreneurial history.

“We were in a niche without a lot of competition, and that allowed us to grow stealthily. Over the years, as the magazine became more widely known, we focused on elevating the standard.” It took five years for the magazine to break even; it turned its first profit in 1980.

The following year, Wilson launched the WoodenBoat School, which he modeled after David Lyman’s Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport (now the Maine Media Workshops). “I thought it was a genius model—having people come from anywhere and be able to sit and work with masters of the craft.”

Like many successful people, Wilson is quick to credit others. “I didn’t dream we’d have anything like we have here now,” he says. “If I had dreamt it, I couldn’t have made it happen. I have a lot of respect for and trust in the people who work here.”

Wilson, 63, remains chairman of the company that runs the school, the magazine, and its sister publication, Professional BoatBuilder. But most of his time is spent on criminal justice issues, an interest that grew out of publishing another magazine, Hope, which had a nine-year run that ended in 2004.

“After WoodenBoat had achieved a steady circulation, I asked myself about the reasons people love their boats the way they do, and if I could translate my interest in the ways we think, act, and feel into a magazine about human beings,” he says. “The magazine never made money, but it led me to the idea of working with the victims of violence. They are a very lonely and largely unheard population.”

Wilson now travels frequently to facilitate victim-offender dialogues (VODs). He was recently in Louisiana for a VOD between a convicted murderer and the mother of the young man he killed 10 years ago. He finds that the same listening skills that served him well as a magazine publisher apply. “It’s different,” he says, “but not dramatically.”