Inside Avant

Pound for pound, Avant Literary Magazine is one of, if not, the most invaluable resource a Rowan Writing Arts student has available to them on campus. As the university’s second oldest club, it's been producing collections of undergraduate work each semester for nearly 60 years. For those who participate in either the club meetings or serve on the Executive Board, Avant provides a wealth of experience in giving and receiving criticism as well as seeing how a literary magazine gets made. As an Assistant Editor myself (and Avant’s #1 fan), I’m going to take you inside Avant with descriptions of what we do and interviews with the E-Board. 
  
Firstly, what’s it like to go to an Avant meeting? Undergraduate students submit their work, whether that's a short story, poem, or even a drawn piece of artwork or photography, and then we compile them into a manuscript that we read together during meetings. I went to club meetings my entire Freshman year before joining the E-Board, and I can tell you that Avant takes all kinds. There’s talkative ones (like me), but if you wish to simply read and keep your thoughts to yourself, you’re free to do so. We read or view the piece before going through praise, then critique, and finally, voting. 
  
Yes, club members get to vote on what gets accepted into the magazine. One can vote “accept”, “submit” or “abstain”. Abstaining is usually reserved for those who may have missed the initial reading or know the author personally, or are the author. Sometimes, with pieces we especially like but might not be quite an accept, we deem those a “strong resubmit”, one’s we’d like to see again sometime. Unlike most other lit mags, you can resubmit a piece to Avant as many times as it takes for it to get accepted. 
    
My job as an Assistant Editor is to receive these submissions, write down feedback during meetings and let the author know the status of their piece. But it takes a village. My good friend Steven Flickinger is also an Assistant Editor. We split the work by alternating the note-taking duties in meetings and catching new submissions whenever we can. I asked him what the best and worst parts of the job are, and this is what he told me: 

“I think the best is probably…being able to be an editor and an active member of the club and contributing to the magazine at the same time. Worst part is, I’d say, Hell Night emails. Something part of the regular process is turning people’s critiques into something we can put in an email.” 

Being on the E-Board hasn’t stopped any of the members from still submitting pieces to the magazine and getting accepted. In the case of resubmits, Steven and I turn that feedback into a concise email for the author to take into consideration. What Steven was saying is that sometimes that feedback can be hard to transcribe. “It's giving Shakespeare vibes” is a little too vague to put down in an email, yeah? Oh, and there’s Hell Night. Hell Night is the meeting following the submission deadline, where we start early and end late. Sometimes the number of submissions reaches 100 and over. Afterwards, the Assistant Editors go through and send out feedback emails. 

Steven and I work closely with the club President, Editor in Chief—our boss—Kelsey Pederson. We put the submissions in the right folders and log them in our spreadsheet so Kelsey can compile the pieces into the meeting manuscripts. They help guide the conversation from praise to critique and finally, onto the vote. 

We make a lot of hay during the discussion and voting process but it wouldn’t much matter if we didn’t have someone to put the actual magazine together. Sam Szumloz is our Graphic Layout Designer, “...which means that I make the latest editions through Adobe InDesign. I copy and paste the latest pieces and artwork into the page layout design software and basically prepare it for hardcover printing", she explained. It's Sam’s job to make sure each piece appears in the magazine as it should be. (No pressure.) You’ll be able to see her work in the upcoming Fall 2024 edition of Avant. 

Our Social Media Coordinator is Rob Pallente, master of the digital domain. Most recently, our social media accounts reached out with a call for more artwork and the announcement of the March 27th submission deadline, (get those pieces in now, folks). Last but certainly not least is our Treasurer, Jackie Ganter. While Jackie isn’t a Writing Arts major, she’s a huge part of making the magazine possible: “I manage our budget for printing and food! The magazine is a great way to get involved with the writing department, even if you aren’t part of it!” 

Avant will be hosting a standard meeting on Marth 20th after we return from Spring Break. We meet in room 301 at 260 Victoria Street from 7PM to 9PM on Wednesdays. Hell Night is always on a Friday, so feel free to stop by at any point in the process, whether that means when we first start and still have light and hope in our eyes, or after midnight when we can hardly form a thought. Even if you can’t make it, picking up an issue around campus and giving your fellow students’ work a read, or even submitting your own work before the deadline, is a great way to not just get involved, but be a good literary citizen in your local writing community. It's a big, scary world out there when it comes to publishing, but Avant can give you a starting place to start learning about working at, and with, literary magazines. 
    
​Hope to see you at Hell Night. 

​By Adam Buckley