Three years ago, my English teacher asked me to head the school lit journal as a big, bad senior.
I was taking an “independent” creative writing class where I sat in with the lower level class and did different exercises. There wasn’t anything independent about it.
I would not be able to tell you during my final semester of high school in 2013 that I would be working on a similar project for my college as an English major. An English major.
I was set on getting a “real job” in some sort of health care science. I had no clue what was going to happen.
While I worked on Venango Catholic’s lit journal, Mrs. Eckert had me and one other student critique journals from other colleges. I looked at a handful of Totems from Gannon, where I had decided to attend by the time prom rolled around.
Totem is Gannon’s literary magazine that publishes poetry, prose and artwork from students and faculty of all majors each year. It is distributed for free across campus as a tribute to student creativity.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the venues holding stacks of books near The Gannon Knight with a mysterious name that reminds you of Pacific Northwest Native American tribes. It was probably a stack of Totems.
This year, I had the privilege of serving as the assistant editor for the Totem publication. I was secondhand to Bethany Lewis and Berwyn Moore, a professor in the English department, we proofread the books and came up with a design.
For those of you who didn’t attend last week’s English Awards Night, Totem looks like a notebook this year, with a gold spiral binding and a composition book style marble-printed color. Once all the pieces for publication were agreed upon, the Gannon University Press printed mountains of unassembled pages.
That’s where Bethany, the Totem staff, and I came in. We ordered the pages into stacks of loose books, punched holes 10 pages at a time, and wound the spirals into the finished books.
Thankfully, the press had machines to help with most of the jobs. Not only did I learn how to assemble a notebook, I learned how manual factory labor can be relaxing.
There’s not much room to think when you’re too worried about lining up the punches of each page correctly. Maybe I’m just easily distracted, but all my free time spent in the basement of Palumbo last week was a nice break from my course work, the final papers I’m supposed to be writing and my jobs on campus.
That’s another thing you might not know about Totem, besides the fact that Gannon does indeed publish a literary magazine. The staff spends the last month of the year putting the books together.
While we got around 200 completed for the awards night April 13, we have around 500 more to put together. Nothing like hard-earned handiwork to distract you from the mandatory stressors of finals week.
As I trek down to put together more books, I hope you will look forward to reading them. The hours of effort put together in those little books are always pretty mind-boggling. It’s something that your peers wrote and worked on, which is hard to find.
Another student publication worth checking out is gannonedge.com, which features Buzzfeed-type articles, and don’t underestimate the ability of your peers to impress you on paper.
KELSEY GHERING
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