Disputes and Controversies

So let’s say your piece manages to grab the attention of one of these editors. They see something about your submission — maybe it’s concerning a subject matter that college students don’t often write about, or maybe it explores a well tread campus topic in a different way. But perhaps there’s something holding your piece back: a grammatical goof, a clumsy metaphor. Is that the end of your journey to publication?

There is a debate among the different editors about the best way to handle less-than-perfect submissions. The RC Review and Xylem will contact the writers of pieces and work with them to improve submissions, while Blueprint and Fortnight feel it is not their place to do so.

“We wouldn’t discount a piece because there was one tiny thing (we didn’t like),” Jaquith said, noting that Xylem is sometimes met with resistance from authors unwilling to make changes.

Doukakos, however, questioned whether such editorial suggestions were wise to make.

“Is that our right to do something like that, to kind of impose our views of what we think is stylistically appropriate for a story?” she asked.

Kinzer was against the idea.

“I find it kind of troublesome to send an e-mail, like, ‘We like this poem but there’s too much alliteration, cut it out,’ ” he said.

This is but one point of contention between the editorial staffs of Xylem and Fortnight. Both Xylem, which is published annually, and Fortnight, which has a print run every month, are published through the Undergraduate English Association (UEA), and they hold joint readings and writing workshops. Nevertheless, their editors claim there is a “friendly rivalry” present, which manifests itself in the occasional staff overlap and Kinzer’s claim that the UEA cut Fortnight’s funding in half the previous year while keeping Xylem’s intact.

Then there was the case of a controversial photography submission: a picture of two nude female bodies from the waist down, lying on the beach, their feminine regions covered by two strategically placed piles of sand. When Fortnight selected and published it as the cover image for one of the magazine’s issues last year, a student member of the UEA decried the piece as pornography. Then the same piece appeared again — in the following issue of Xylem, to which it was also submitted.

Doukakos pulled out the issue with the offending image on the cover to show around, and both Perng and Jackie Cohen declared they would have absolutely published it. Jackie Cohen noted that the RC Review often receives erotica submissions — though they are often met with stranger reactions when presented at readings, the genre is accepted just as any other would be.

Get a Job

Congratulations — your piece has been selected for publication in one of the University’s very best forums for creative expression. Go ahead and ride that high that comes with being a published author. Submit more pieces. Maybe join a staff. Maybe you’re thinking now about actually doing this for a living … if so, you might want to think twice.

“I used to want to have a career in literature, and now this has convinced me out of it,” Jackie Cohen admitted, to a chorus of laughter and sympathetic reactions.

Doukakos and Dena Cohen are still interested in the publishing industry, and Kinzer wants to be a writer. But at the other end of the spectrum is Jaquith, an aspiring high school French teacher — though she said she would jump at the chance to oversee the production of a similar literary publication at whatever school she ends up working at.

Despite their different vocational interests, all of the editors were quick to list ways in which their roles have aided them in their future career goals — regardless of what those goals might be. As Medical School students, Rajdev and Albin most likely won’t be pursuing careers in literature to pay off student loans.