Good Morning Lowcountry

Steppe

Summer Coish, 28, of Sullivan's Island, graduated from Wando High, attended the College of Charleston and graduated from George Washington University with a degree in international economics and African studies before earning a master's degree in public health in Boston and spending some time in Africa.

Then a few years ago, she took a trip to Kazakhstan to work on a health reform project, and a light went on.

"I didn't know anything about Central Asia when I went there," she said. "It was such a contrast and so fascinating. China's to the east, Russia's to the north, the EU is to the west ... (but) it's such an unknown area to us.

"We feel like it's the last undiscovered part of the world. It's this big, blank spot we thought of as the Soviet Union."

There she met Lucy Kelaart, 34, a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, who had traveled the Silk Road from China to Turkey by horse and camel.

Together, they decided to start a magazine that would color in the blank spot.

The result is the biannual, glossy, coffee-table magazine "Steppe: A Central Asian Panorama," with two issues ... Winter/2007 and Summer/2007 ... published so far.

The magazine has beautiful photography and articles on the arts, culture, history, landscape, traditions and people of the five post-Soviet Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, plus Afghanistan and the autonomous region of Xinjiang Uighur, China.

"We spent two years researching," Coish said by phone from Sullivan's Island, where she's parked herself briefly before moving to Kazakhstan in July.

"Neither of us had ever worked for a magazine. It's just me and Lucy, so we are the publishers, editors, advertising salespeople, proofreaders..."

She's still researching, she said.

"When I'm in Washington or New York, I'm meeting with anybody and everybody who has anything to do with Central Asia, from somebody who attended a business conference in Uzbekistan to the curator of Near Eastern art at the Met."

Aimed at an elite Central Asian audience, with ads for high-end consumer goods and travel bureaus, "Steppe" has a circulation of 6,000 and about 800 subscribers, Coish said.

It's in bookstores in Central Asia and the U.K., and the publishers are looking for a North American distributor. Two oil companies backed their first issue, but they have 100 percent editorial control and made enough money on the first issue to produce the second, Coish said.

Central Asia is, of course, vast and diverse. "In Kazakhstan they're wearing Prada, Gucci, Cartier and riding around in Hummers," Coish said. "In Tajikistan they're riding yaks. The area's in such transition."

"We don't want to be ethnicky," she added. "Kazakhstan alone has over 50 ethnic groups. We don't want to exotify. There's real development there. There's tremendous construction going on ... With the integration of this region into a larger global society, people (elsewhere) need to have a fuller perspective."

Find "Steppe" at steppemagazine.com.

The current issue includes articles on American poet Langston Hughes' travels through Soviet Central Asia in the 1930s; the Kyrgyz nomads of Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor; a 4,000-year-old lost city in the Kara-Kum Desert of Turkmenistan; and Uighur carpets.

GMLc

Call 937-5564. Write gmlc@postandcourier.com. Find the blog at gmlc.typepad.com.