Monday, February 19, 2007
Intern
My name is Jordan Cory and I am the other intern for the Southern Indiana Review this semester. Along with the duties of submission entries and mailing of rejection or acceptance letters, the internship also provides the opportunity to witness the duties of acting editors. It is a fortunate experience for an undergrad, since normally literary magazine experience is only open for grad students. We also work on a student version of the review for further practice on the procedure of developing a literary journal.
Outside the internship I have been rereading Saul Bellow's "Herzog" for a critical assessment paper. Trying to find a way to write something new and true about something that has been written on widely already. A lofty choice of literary work for the assignment, but it was mine and now I have to go with it.
Outside the internship I have been rereading Saul Bellow's "Herzog" for a critical assessment paper. Trying to find a way to write something new and true about something that has been written on widely already. A lofty choice of literary work for the assignment, but it was mine and now I have to go with it.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Introduction
Okay! I finally got signed on to this thing! That was forty-five minutes of my life I'll never get back. Apparently, I was at eblogger.com, instead of blogger.com, and I couldn't understand why it kept saying "incorrect log-in information." I don't even know. In my defense, the B in the Blogger.com logo does look a lot like an E.
My name is Katie Guthrie. I am a senior majoring in English and French, and I am an intern at the Southern Indiana Review. So far, my duties have included logging in and sorting submissions, sending out rejection letters, and researching turtles and top hats. (The turtle logo is still my favorite, by the way.) I've never been an intern before, but it's been a good experience so far. It'll also be nice to have something besides fast food restaurants on my resume.
Speaking of food, what is going on lately with all these recalls? First, it was E. coli in spinach and green peppers, and now they're apparently finding salmonella in peanut butter! I was just watching the news today, and they were saying those pre-cooked rib meat chicken strips are also being recalled. Honestly, what kind of a world is it when eating has become a high risk activity?
My name is Katie Guthrie. I am a senior majoring in English and French, and I am an intern at the Southern Indiana Review. So far, my duties have included logging in and sorting submissions, sending out rejection letters, and researching turtles and top hats. (The turtle logo is still my favorite, by the way.) I've never been an intern before, but it's been a good experience so far. It'll also be nice to have something besides fast food restaurants on my resume.
Speaking of food, what is going on lately with all these recalls? First, it was E. coli in spinach and green peppers, and now they're apparently finding salmonella in peanut butter! I was just watching the news today, and they were saying those pre-cooked rib meat chicken strips are also being recalled. Honestly, what kind of a world is it when eating has become a high risk activity?
In search of a new logo
We need a new logo. We've held meetings, drawn funny pictures on scraps of paper in the office, smacked our foreheads in frustration, and given each other supportive, friendly slaps on the back. But we've still got basically nothing. Here are the problems with choosing a logo:
1) Do we want to emphasize the regional nature our title suggests, or do we want to suggest that we are more than just southernmost Hoosiers, and that while we strive to be the "voice of the Heartland" (doesn't Tom Petty already do that anyway?), our scope and view is much broader than that? How do we say both? Do we want to say both? Do we want to say either?
2) A logo: a single, simple image that sums up an entity. What can do that in this case? A leaf? A bird? A salad fork? A turtle with a top hat? What does any of this have to do with literature, or with Southern Indiana, or with us? How does anyone ever decide on a logo?
3) Must literature always be represented by leaves and trees and fountain pens? Are we earthy? Have any of us ever used a fountain pen, and so what if we have? Can literature not also be represented by a turtle with a top hat, or by a dancing bear, or by a car in flames?
In addition to my duties for SIR, I also run an online literary venture at www.theedwardsociety.com. It's been dormant for a long time now, shoved to the bottom of several piles of seemingly more important things. But I bring it up to illustrate (no pun) how arbitrary and meaningless a logo can be, while still doing a fine job. I chose, for no reason at all, to place a bird on a bald man's head and stick it at the top of every page. It looks like this
and it has been well received. People have offered their own interpretations, none of which ever occurred to me. For SIR, here's what we've done so far:
What do each of these say about us? How can we ever decide?
1) Do we want to emphasize the regional nature our title suggests, or do we want to suggest that we are more than just southernmost Hoosiers, and that while we strive to be the "voice of the Heartland" (doesn't Tom Petty already do that anyway?), our scope and view is much broader than that? How do we say both? Do we want to say both? Do we want to say either?
2) A logo: a single, simple image that sums up an entity. What can do that in this case? A leaf? A bird? A salad fork? A turtle with a top hat? What does any of this have to do with literature, or with Southern Indiana, or with us? How does anyone ever decide on a logo?
3) Must literature always be represented by leaves and trees and fountain pens? Are we earthy? Have any of us ever used a fountain pen, and so what if we have? Can literature not also be represented by a turtle with a top hat, or by a dancing bear, or by a car in flames?
In addition to my duties for SIR, I also run an online literary venture at www.theedwardsociety.com. It's been dormant for a long time now, shoved to the bottom of several piles of seemingly more important things. But I bring it up to illustrate (no pun) how arbitrary and meaningless a logo can be, while still doing a fine job. I chose, for no reason at all, to place a bird on a bald man's head and stick it at the top of every page. It looks like this
and it has been well received. People have offered their own interpretations, none of which ever occurred to me. For SIR, here's what we've done so far:
What do each of these say about us? How can we ever decide?
Friday, February 16, 2007
Things Need to Look Nice
Among the problems we try to solve here at SIR headquarters is the ongoing problem that Things Need To Look Nice. We're constantly designing things: chapbook and SIR covers, posters, a table layout for the upcoming AWP conference, a new website, and a new SIR logo. In nature, plants and animals are born and they grow naturally into aesthetically-splendid things, but in the artificial world of literary publishing (despite all of the parent-child metaphors writers love to use for their relationship to their work), everything is faceless and without personality until we have sat for days in front of a bright screen, manipulating lines and text until our eyes are puking.
We're amateurs at this, of course. It takes us entirely too long, and the revision process is grueling. I hesitate to put a percentage on the amount of our office time that goes into graphic design - a thing we never claimed to be qualified for (Well, I once did, and faked it well enough to land a job as a graphic designer/web programmer in New York City, but that's another story that ends just as pathetically as it begins...), but it's somewhere around 100%. It's almost all we do. Editors, ha! Let's be honest here. We're underqualified, overworked, graphic designers.
- Chris Dickens, Associate Graphic Designer for the Southern Indiana Review
We're amateurs at this, of course. It takes us entirely too long, and the revision process is grueling. I hesitate to put a percentage on the amount of our office time that goes into graphic design - a thing we never claimed to be qualified for (Well, I once did, and faked it well enough to land a job as a graphic designer/web programmer in New York City, but that's another story that ends just as pathetically as it begins...), but it's somewhere around 100%. It's almost all we do. Editors, ha! Let's be honest here. We're underqualified, overworked, graphic designers.
- Chris Dickens, Associate Graphic Designer for the Southern Indiana Review
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Pictures
A few images from yesterday's SIR meeting (Top to bottom - Ron, our Managing Editor; Katie, one of our University of Southern Indiana interns; 3/4 of the group hard at work; Katie and Jordan, our other semester intern; and Chris, Associate Editor):
- posted by Chris
- posted by Chris
Welcome to the SIR blog
SIR is a bianual literary journal published by the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, featuring original artwork, poetry, and prose. The journal is also associated with RopeWalk Writers Retreat, a conference held each winter and summer in New Harmony, IN. Here are our two primary websites:
www.ropewalk.org
&
www.southernindianareview.org
www.ropewalk.org
&
www.southernindianareview.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
