By
Amplitude’s debut issue appeared in March 2015, 10 years ago this month. To help mark the occasion, our longtime friend and fellow storyteller Bjoern Eser invited us onto his podcast (The Active Amputee) to look back on an eventful decade for the magazine and for the limb loss community as a whole.
The conversation runs a little over half an hour. Below, we’ve posted a few snippets of the transcript to whet your appetite. There’s a lot more information in the full episode, which you can hear at Buzzsprout. Our thanks to Bjoern for the chance to reminisce, and for his many years of collaboration and support. Visit his blog at theactiveamputee.org.
Active Amputee: I can’t remember exactly when we first linked up. I think it’s probably five, six years ago when we first were in touch.
Amplitude: I’m sure it was 2020, because that’s when I began working for Amplitude, and the Active Amputee was one of the first good sources of information that I found online. When I say “good sources,” I mean from the community grassroots. I myself am nondisabled, so I needed to educate myself about limb loss, and the Active Amputee was a big part of my education. . . . .
Tell us a bit about Amplitude and tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get involved, and what was your motivation to get engaged?
Amplitude was founded in 2015 as a spinoff from a trade journal called The O&P Edge. That was a fairly auspicious time, because Limb Loss and Limb Difference Awareness Month had just started a couple of years earlier, there was a rise on social media of amputees who were beginning to draw audiences like Amy Purdy, Josh Sundquist, and Mama Cax. There was a lot of demand for information and a desire among amputees to connect with one another.
I got involved in 2020 because the creative director at Amplitude, Karen Sader, her kids and my kids were classmates in school. I had done a lot of online publishing, I was familiar with search engine optimization, and Amplitude‘s website really hadn’t gotten the attention it needed. There wasn’t anyone that had a lot of experience on digital, so I came in as a part-time person. I started fishing around on the internet, looking for good stuff [about limb loss]. That’s how I found The Active Amputee, I found Footless Jo, I found The Amputee OT, and various other people who were really telling good stories. And I tried to bring some of that flavor into Amplitude right away.
If you had to describe Amplitude in one or two sentences, what’s the main strength? What niche and what need is it addressing?
What we try to do is to normalize limb loss and limb difference. We all go through periods of increasing and decreasing physical ability. We all face challenges from time to time that may impair us, and then we adapt to that and do our best to regain some capacity. There is a lot to learn from people who have adapted to limb loss, because we are all going to have to adapt at some point. And people who’ve lost a limb are really good at adapting. They have a lot to teach.
What speaks to me about Amplitude is that it has a mixture of really good information from the O&P sector, from research, from new developments, but at the same time there is a certain lightness to it. There is some joy.
I’m thrilled to hear that you see this balance between serious, evidence-based, practical information, as well as that light touch. That’s very much related to normalization. I saw amputees like you, Jo Beckwith, Christina Stephenson, Johnny Maynard, and other people on the internet coming across in a spirit of playfulness, which is very relatable and helps you understand that amputees are just normal people. The thing that stands out about them isn’t that they’re missing a limb. What I notice about them is they’re funny, or they have clever perspectives on life, or they share an interest with me in sports or music or film. That playfulness in the limb-loss community is something that attracted me, and I wanted to share those stories and elevate those voices. I felt that to address the core audience of our magazine, these kinds of storytellers and storytelling modes were really beneficial and would make our magazine interesting to read.
