Editors Scott Clark, Kat Skjoldager, & Kellyn Lock near the end.
By Paul Crowley
April 25, 2018
So the last post was almost absurdly honest and full of feelings.
Which is gross.
In the spirit of levity, and with apologies to Sir David Letterman, I submit the Top 10 Reasons To Take English 418: Literary Journal Production.
10. You hang out with Creative Writing majors, who are all, to a person, delightful and beautiful people. Much better than those gross Rhetoricians. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID.
9. We have at least one in-class pizza party. It’s the good stuff, too. None of that [INSERT YOUR LEAST FAVORITE PIZZA PLACE HERE] garbage.
8. You need three credits, and can’t bear to take another Writing Workshop. We get it.
7. Regular dance parties. I know I haven’t talked about it at length, but these people get down. You will be pleasantly surprised by how many sick beats the Professor throws down.
6. You want to reinforce your superiority complex by editing incoming work. This won’t actually happen; you’ll work with superlative submissions.
5. If you have strong feelings on the Oxford comma, or spaces after a period, this is the class for you. Organic chemistry is cool, sure, but does what they do really matter? ALL THE ELEMENTS ARE ALREADY SETTLED.
4. You know those programs that take kids on trips to the wilderness, and the participants learn self-reliance and discover things about themselves and then get hunted one by one by crazed survivalists until the one final kid manages to escape after sustaining a flesh wound? We stay indoors. Checkmate, crazed survivalists.
3. We have a release party, and it is wicked awesome. We don’t always have A-list celebrities coming by. Actually, we haven’t yet. But we might! And until then, the release parties are still super fun. We go out. We celebrate. We don’t get hunted as the most dangerous game.
2. There’s a decent chance that you’ll work on some future Nobel Prize winner’s work, and you can impress everyone at parties by saying, “Yeah, that thing she does that is so key to her success and was so innovative? That was a tip from my editorial notes back when I was in undergrad. No big deal.” Talking that way is impressive, right?
1. Maybe you’re interested in getting published. While we can’t promise you that taking this class, going through submissions, editing the winners, copyediting the winners, doing the layout, asking for money, planning a party, and getting a journal printed will get you published, we can tell you that you’ll know more about the business than when you started. And as the old saying goes: knowledge isn’t power.
