by Seth Beinarauskas Boyles

–well, I’ll tell you!  You come and start packing envelopes, and sometimes you read some poetry.  And truth be told, it’s been enlightening.  I’ve often wondered what exactly goes on behind the doors at periodicals.  Not so much the actual putting of the physical book together—I’ve worked on Carnegie Mellon’s literary journal for the past three years, so I’m somewhat familiar with that aspect of it—but I was always perplexed as to how journals actually get to their subscribers—it seemed like there would have to be an inhumane amount of mailing to be done that there must be some kind of machine or robot that did all the labeling, sealing, etc . . . and now I realize interns are those machines.  Of course, that’s an exaggeration . .  there’s a lot of mailing that I don’t do.  Rebecca is telling me now that she uses 4 or 5 (!) companies just to keep track of all the subscribers and to have the journal sent out, and while that still seems extremely complicated, it doesn’t seem impossibly so.  I’ve one more semester to go until I get my B.A., and everyone’s been asking about my big plans for the future. I’ve been playing with the idea of starting a periodical myself. I’ve always been concerned about how contemporary fiction is represented in public high schools, and I’ve always thought that if kids don’t read these days, part of the problem might be because they don’t realize that there are contemporary voices out there that relate more to the time they are living in than most of the authors they are reading in their classrooms. I know I didn’t . . . it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I began to suspect that people alive today were still writing fiction and poetry.  And so the concept is this:  a monthly (or so) periodical that collects contemporary literature that has at least been previously published in literary journals, selected specifically with high school readers and the public school setting in mind. The journal would be sent directly to high school English teachers across the country, for free. It would simply be meant to serve as an easily available resource for them, so that they might be tempted to introduce any of the included stories or poetry to their classes. I know teachers are often very busy and it’d be difficult to find the energy to search for good contemporary literature, let alone good literature that would fit in the classroom. This would, I hope, make their job a little easier. 

 So if I wanted to get contemporary literature to students this way, I’d have to first figure out how to get it to the teachers.  Either Rebecca needs to give me a list of those distribution companies, or I need to get me an intern . . .

artwork by seth

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