Introducing An Eclectic Collection

Explore My Work

An Eclectic Collection Literary Journal

My project is a mock-up layout of what an actual literary journal would look like before going to press. The creative work gathered for this journal is all stuff I’ve written while here at Southern Utah University. So besides being a presentation of my creative skills putting together a literary journal it also exhibits my writing. This becomes a win win for me because this project exhibits multiple instances of my creative skills. All together the journal is forty pages of work as well as including three different covers that I conceptualized.

For the process of gathering stuff to include I went through all my old and new archived poems and short stories. I did an elimination process similar to what’s used for determining work for the Kolob Canyon Review. I read what I had gathered and distinguished works into piles of yes, no, and maybe. Since I designated a forty page limit I had to make sure I had the required page count. After designating what finally got in I began the process of editing and revising everything that would be included in the final layout. When everything was good to go I began designing the layout for the journal in InDesign, which was tougher than I thought. At the end of it all I had a forty page literary journal lay out and three unique covers for it.

I’ve always in the back of my mind wanted to create a literary journal. If I ever had the money or funding I would like to expand the idea of An Eclectic Collection to include more written works but also essays, works of art, recipes, book reviews, editorials, and anything else that fits. I’ve always liked the idea of the word eclectic and everything that it denotes. So to turn that word into an idea for a literary journal is something that I pursued with this project. If I had more time and money I would have liked to have gone further with this.

This whole project was a bit of a challenge. To do a literary journal by oneself is a large feat to tackle. For the KCR we have a staff of fifteen students and our faculty advisor. Even tackling the literary journal we do for the school is a challenge. The one saving grace I had going for myself is that all the pieces I had to read were written by myself. Another large challenge was teaching myself and practicing graphic design work to make everything look refined. Though the biggest challenge was having some of my files get corrupted when I tried to format everything together.

As part of my outline I included that I would have help in some of my revising and editing. Also I had two friends look over my final layout and write what they thought of my finished project. One of the people that helped with my editing wanted some more practice doing it. They want to become an editor after they graduate so I thought they would be perfect to help me. Plus it would be beneficial for them to get extra practice with editing. One of the friends I had look at my finished project had expressed interest in literary journals. Having gone through the process I thought it beneficial to show them.

This project benefitted me because it made me work more on revising and editing. Something that I struggle with and hate doing. I’ve seen improvement in aspects of my written stuff currently when I go back and revise and edit. Also it gave more insight and what things are important with writing and submitting writing. I found stories that I had initially loved when I had written them now lacking something that made them stand out against my other writing.

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