Chimera

Chimera= the student-run, faculty-sponsored literature and art journal at Edinboro. I've joined the staff on the literary end of things.

Now, I must premise this post by saying that Kenyon had not just 1 but 3 literary journals, and none of them were of Chimera's caliber. HIKA (the journal that I helped staff for about a year and a half) was a little full of itself; the staff was arrogant, which is mainly why I left, and it didn't pool a lot of good work from the student body. Persimmons was too quaint, a cute little mag, but most of the published works were from the staff. And the Horn Gallery Magazine (in my opinion the best of Kenyon's student-run publications) was representative of some of the better creative writing and art going on at Kenyon but was rarely much over 75 pages long.

The 2006 Edition of Chimera is 183 pages long, printed on heavy stock paper in full color. In terms of art, I think Chimera might actually rival the Kenyon Review, which is a nationally recognized college publication. Of course, Kenyon being a huge English institution, the Kenyon review leaves Chimera in the dust in terms of literature (the Kenyon Review has published many well-loved and well-known authors, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell among them). BUT, the point is that Chimera has a whole team of Graphics Design majors designing logos and layouts for the finished book. Sharp. As far as I know, graphic design does not exist as a major or even a department at Kenyon.

So, Chimera fields works of art and literature from Edinboro students and publishes said works in an annual magazine. Last year, over 200 works of art were submitted and juried: only 30 were represented in the magazine. I don't have any fancy statistics to share about Chimera's literature because I haven't learned any yet, but suffice it to say that I'm sure the works of creative writing are juried just as stringently.

Am I in over my head? I sure hope so.