The Students Behind the "Weeds Literary Journal"

Audrey McEntire

Staff

The Weeds Literary Journal of Snow College is where people can submit artwork of any

kind including poetry, creative writing, photography, etc. The submissions are to be submitted

before the deadline, after which the Weeds class debates on the theme, focus, and flow of the

Journal to determine which submissions will be finalized into the Journal.

Once the process is completed and the Weeds class has put everything together the Journal will then be published, printed, and purchased by those who wish to view the talent of the Snow College students who submitted their work.

By taking this class called Methods and Practice for Professional Editing and Publishing

students get to see the Journal’s process of how it is brought to life from editing, to designing, to

picking the theme, and everything else in the process.

Ivy Pickett is one of few students taking this class and helping put together this Weeds Literary Journal for Snow College. She states, "working with Weeds has been incredibly informative, not just about the editing and design process, but also in how those principles can apply to drafts of my own work. It’s been comforting to see how the publication process works, and be able to see the variety of jobs that are available for English and humanities majors outside of traditional academia.” Like Ivy has stated here, the students can see how they can improve in their own personal work as they go

through the process of putting together this professional Journal.

Ivy Pickett has also said: “one of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about Weeds has

been going into elements of grammar and looking at how to modify things slightly in a piece to

better suit the intentions of the author.”

One of the first things the students in this class do is talk about design, composition, theme, emotions that are portrayed, contrast in visuals, how easy it is for people to read the information based on different layouts and any other aspects you could think of that would be important when putting together a piece of work like this Literary Journal.

When discussing these aspects of the Journal the students look at previous journals and discuss

what they like or didn’t like about previous Journals, along with what they would do differently.

From there the students put together a plan to get the word out for submissions and how

they want to go about deciding which submissions will be in the final works of the Literary

Journal.

This year the students have discussed having emotions be flowing throughout the book

from one emotion to another, rather than jumping all over the place. The theme was decided on

dandelions to be throughout the design of the book; a simple drawing of the dandelion growth

process throughout each page. Simple and not too crazy. Now that the submissions are in, the

class gets to debate and discuss which ones are in the final Journal along with the order or flow

they should be in.

Overall, this is a very interesting process, and each student learns something new that they

can practice in a professional way and then take on in their own works. This is a learning process

even for the professor as they gain new insights from the students' comments and discussions. As

things are adjusted accordingly the project will eventually be completed and people can view the

incredible talent of the students of Snow College. The whole goal of Weeds Literary Journal is to

share that talent to inspire others to share their talents if they so desire.