Reflection of Literary Publications

Hey everyone! This was my 3rd and final year taking Literary Publications, so I wanted to give a bit of an overview of the class, and a deeper reflection of my experience with Northern Eclecta. 

My first year of Literary Publications was 2023, a year after our website was first created. During that year, we had 28 students that took the literary publications course and had a hand in creating the 17th edition. This was beneficial in some ways, but definitely not the most ideal in terms of creating a literary journal. As a class, we vote on all the pieces that are submitted, and the more people in the class, the more opinions are offered on whether or not a piece should be accepted. On one hand, I think hearing so many opinions on some pieces was extremely helpful. It allowed me to get a glimpse into how other people viewed the work and why they thought it could fit the theme, even if I wasn’t seeing it during the initial read-through. However, this prolonged some of the voting and discussions for different pieces. It wasn't all of the pieces, and a lot that were really well written specifically for the theme were easy to accept, but there were some that ended up being the cause of larger debates for a longer period of time than they probably should have been. Again, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but it could be more time consuming than the class generally allows for. 

In 2023, I initially joined the editing team. I have always been passionate about reading and writing, and honestly that was the only team that I really felt comfortable in. However, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. I joined the class on a recommendation from another classmate, and had only briefly heard of Northern Eclecta before. In short, I was out of my depth. 

When Professor Jamee Larson told us about tabling- a fundraising tactic that’s used throughout NDSU campus- I knew that my schedule didn’t really allow for a lot of outside class-time during the hours that we’d have to be available. Jamee also let us know that there were ways to make up tabling time if it didn’t fit into your schedule. An example of this is wrapping mystery books. Mystery books are books that people donate, and we wrap them in newspapers with the genre taped to one side. This was a huge staple of our fundraising attempts for Northern Eclecta, and still is a huge aspect to our tabling events. Along with the wrapping of mystery books, we could come up with things that were "extra" for the class. 

I knew that we were having trouble finding people to work on the website, and since I had my computer and phone on me the majority of the time, I decided I could look over the website and give my opinion on ways to make it better, and ways to utilize the site during the offseason- summer and fall semesters. I emailed our then editor in chief the ideas that I had for the site, and she passed along my email to the advisor. I was then asked if I wanted to incorporate some of these changes. My initial thoughts were complete and total panic. I only had very limited experience with creating a website- mostly using it for class portfolios. All I needed to do for that was to input the papers I had already written with templates that I could just randomly choose. I had never worked on a website in this capacity before, and I still wasn’t totally comfortable with posting about Northern Eclecta when I wasn’t really sure what it was in the first place. 

With the encouragement of Kylen and Jamee to take the website in whatever direction I saw fit, I began to make changes to the website. First, they were small- changing the border color, updating some of the information, and editing any errors that I could find. Before I knew it, I was adding pages, creating forms, figuring out ways to make our existing website more accessible and informative, and finally, our blog was born. I watched a crazy amount of Youtube videos, and looked up a lot about how to do specific things via Wix. It was definitely a lot of work, and I was still hesitant to change too much, and I spent more time learning how to do things than actually getting them done. Over time, I became more comfortable with the Wix platform and the layout of our website, which allowed me to make more significant changes and updates.

My second year, 2024, the class size was a much more manageable 16 students. This was the year that we ultimately got about 210 submissions to go through and decide which ones would best fit our journal- the most submissions I’ve seen in all three of my years. I was the Design team lead that year, but I thought of myself as more of a facilitator to the design team than anything else. I was still primarily focused on the website, and now, I had also added merchandise creation to my repertoire. I use a process called sublimation to put images onto various objects like bookmarks, magnets, jewelry, etc. I also started using a thermal printer to make the majority of our stickers. 

I really lucked out with the design team that year. Sadie, Phoebe, and Anna are all talented, creative, ambitious individuals that didn’t need a lot of direction to get the results they wanted. They were excited to find ways to make the journal more aesthetically pleasing, and helped out with designing different merchandise and stickers. As a team, they decided that the best option that year was to make the drastic change from using InDesign to using Canva to put the journal together. I watched all the hard work the design team put into the layout of the journal, the cover designs, the advertisements they created, and also the extent of what they were able to accomplish. I was in awe of their work ethic and their dedication to completing the journal and dispelling as many errors as they could possibly find. 

In 2025, this year’s 19th edition, Jamee Larson was unable to be the advisor to the course. Instead, Dr. Suzzanne Kelley became the advisor as well as her continued role as the Editor in Chief for NDSU Press and Associate Professor of Practice. In addition, we only had 9 students in the class, while it still takes the exact same amount of work. In my opinion, that’s about half of the ideal number of people to work on the journal the way this particular class is set up. With three teams, that gave each team exactly three people, including team leads. The workload was demanding most times, and with only myself and Yakira as the only ones to previously take the course, there were definitely times when things quickly became overwhelming. 

Sara and I became the co Editors in Chief over the course of the semester, being the ones to organize and keep track of all of the submissions and information as well as keeping the class as on track as we possibly could. We didn’t always immediately have an idea of how to answer some of the questions that were asked, or what tasks should be completed next. Jamee wasn’t teaching the course, but she did help out a lot with directing us to the information we needed at any given time. Sara was also great at leading the class in our voting sessions for submissions, covers, and poster designs. I gave any information I could remember, and tried to provide as much materials from previous years as I could. Going back through our past Google Drive folders was extremely helpful but it was also an immense amount of information that wasn’t all necessary at any given time. I pulled out all the things I thought would be helpful and added it to my own Google Drive. I also started a Northern Eclecta handbook that I feel would be convenient for future use, especially if things like this were to happen again.

Overall, my experience with Northern Eclecta, and the Literary Publications course in general, has been extremely positive. I’ve enjoyed learning new things, helping others figure things out, working on the website, creating merch, and having three published books that I’ve had a direct hand in putting together. 

—Caitlin