The Class Behind The Peal
Isaac Kitchen | April 21, 2022
Harley Woods
Gramm Pollack hard at work in Jensen, editing the upcoming Peal magazine.
With the submission period for the Peal closed, the 9-person class compiling the student literary and arts magazine is in the final stages of publication. Tucked away in Jensen 214, the class has been slowly working away on the many aspects that come with making a literary magazine.
Caroline Crew, visiting creative writing professor, starts the class by putting a list of tasks on the board — most involving what she calls “busy work,” such as responding to emails or going over edits to the large number of submissions the Peal received.
“There's a lot of submissions which was great, we had about 30 submitters, and most of them had more than one piece, so going through all that took a while,” said Dan Acocella, a student in the class, who, along with eight other students, helped sort through the high number of submissions.
This marks the first year that a creative writing class ran and published the Peal. In the past, Peal was its own separate crew, then a subcrew of the Writing Studio before transitioning into a class.
Before submissions opened up, the class spent the first half of the semester studying and analyzing what exactly a literary magazine is and the many broad forms it can take. They had assignments such as each student finding two literary magazines, one defunct and one still going, or writing outlines on what they would want their dream literary magazines to look like.
The exercises were assigned to develop a coherent vision of what exactly the students wanted the Peal to be this year before calling for submissions. They used a website called Submittable to receive submissions on a wide scale.
The class spent a good amount of time trying to decide the best process of how to collect submissions. They eventually settled on an anonymous reviewing process, where every submitted piece was printed out, read outside of class and then voted on in class — all without knowing the author. The idea was that it might remove some bias of the student reviewers.
Even so, there were times when class members recognized a piece from someone they knew. In those cases, they could abstain from voting if they felt too close to the submitter.
Despite the high number of submissions, the voting went relatively well, with the most contentious votes being over visual art pieces more than any writing, according to Crew. The class accepted a total of 47 pieces, with 28 poetry submissions, three creative nonfiction pieces, three fiction pieces and 13 visual art pieces.
Outside of the submission process, the class faced a few challenges when it came to both the structure of the class and the general difficulties of printing, according to Crew.
“I had the expectation that we would use the college printing access, so that has not been the case,” Crew said. “I did not have access to the financial details needed and finally really just lack of access and resources for students. ”
With both on-campus printing machines broken for the foreseeable future, the class did not know if they could print at all. Luckily, through the help of Julie Wilson, director of the Writing Studio, they found a company called IngramSpark, which specializes in self-publishing, allowing them to go forward with printing.
Along with the printing hiccup, Crew said that she didn’t feel properly prepared with what she was given to work with: “I did not think it was unreasonable to expect when, given a class and a student-led class that incorporated InDesign as a key component, I did not know until I got to this part of the semester with layout that we had only one machine available.”
InDesign, the editing software the class uses to format the full layout of the Peal, exists on only one computer on campus, located in the library. This led to a great amount of difficulty in getting the layout of the magazine started as they often had two students split off from the main class to go work in the library.
Crew said that despite these difficulties, they are hopeful to finish everything up in time for an end of semester release.
“The Peal’s going to be distributed on campus once it's done, so that's part of what folks will be figuring out. They will kind of make a distribution map.”
With the limits of printing, they’re also looking to provide online access in the form of a PDF on their website. Despite that, they think they’ll manage to print around 100 physical copies for distribution around campus. There will be a launch event sometime during the last week of the semester in collaboration with Student Activities.
For now, they spend the last two weeks or so before the release in full get-it-done mode, editing submissions, the layout and the many other moving parts that come with publishing a literary magazine.
