LITERARY MAGAZINE Saint Rose student publication bids farewell to 2020
Class unites around theme of “F* 2020” following difficult year
In the spring, professor Daniel Nester, founder of the Pine Hills Review, asked the students in his online literary journal, editing and publishing class at the College of Saint Rose what theme they would like to work with for the semester. The class bounced around some ideas until one student said, “F* 2020.”
The class agreed unanimously, deciding to use this for the college literary magazine’s spring 2021 edition. Alexis Stephenson, a senior at Saint Rose and the student who suggested the theme says that it was only apt.
“I thought about 2020 because it was pretty much a terrible year in some degree for most of the world,” said Stephenson. “Whether that was COVID or environmental causes or the economy. Everybody had a reason to kind of say, ‘F— 2020’ to some degree, so, it only seemed fitting.”
She went on to add that it also meant that everyone could contribute. Stephenson also felt it would expand the range of submissions they would get.
As the class learned about online literary journals and went about producing and publishing theirs, the students put out a call for submissions. They sent out emails to mailing lists, posted on Facebook groups and literary groups. The response turned out to be overwhelming.
“They were from all over the map,” said Nester. “Some of (the respondents) had five, six books and are professors at colleges and teach writing. Others were high school students. So, it was a really wide range. Which is a testament to the student editors, because they really just love what (submissions) they liked.”
Nester combined over a hundred entries that they had received into one large PDF file and sent them out to the class, who then — despite working remotely — painstakingly combed through it, finally selecting 15 submissions that made it into the issue.
According to Samantha Zimmerman, an English major at Saint Rose and the managing editor of the project, this was the best part but also the hard
est.
“As I worked on the F*2020 feature, I found myself connecting with so many different writers, coming together to share the stories of their experiences of 2020,” she said. “From COVID -19, vaccinations, mental health crises, loss and grief, every writer added something to the feature. It was really difficult choosing which pieces to include and to not include, but in the end, we chose pieces that had different voices and perspectives of the seemingly endless year.”
The whole process took about a month and a half, Nester said. The students reached out to local artists and within the student community for artwork to go with the issue. Some writers sent in art with their pieces and some pieces were made by the student editors themselves.
But what everyone agrees is that they couldn’t have done it without each other. Zimmerman never thought she would work this way, never actually meeting her professor or co-editors in person.
But with a lot of communication, coordination and hard work, she is delighted with the results.
As for the name, Nester said that while he was initially resistant to it, its unanimous acceptance by the rest of the class made him change his mind.
“If only the founding nuns of this college could see me now,” he said.
You can read “F*2020” at https://pinehillsreview.com/2021/04/20/special-feature-f20/.