The Good, the Really Good, the Unwanteds and the Ugly

It occurs to me that there are just two dozen days left for poets to submit for our Fifteenth Anniversary Issue—a thought that leads me (again) back in time—back over a dozen plus years of editing and publishing the Aurorean.

I recall the assembly line on our kitchen counter as we printed out, collated and stapled our first issue. Things got ugly when my husband sliced his hand with an X-Acto knife while trimming covers. He says he still has the scar. But things were good again when (once he was bandaged up), all the debut journals were collated, folded, and stapled together.

I was so proud of my little magazine (which is what my mother called it—not a huge fan of poetry, she was just proud that her daughter had her own "little magazine" and she kept each successive issue on her bureau until her death in 1999). I loved the clip art and even the gray paper we chose for the first cover. I was overjoyed to mail that first issue to its thirteen contributors and our two subscribers (mind you, most of the contributors were either friends/writers or fellow Creative Writing students).

I have always been proud of my little magazine. I can look back, and see where improvement needed to be made. I can shake my head at my own naiveté. But each step, each issue, each poem I read, each poet we have published, has helped to make it what it is today. And it steadily did improve. The quality of poetry could only improve as I learned more about poetry, as more poets learned of the Aurorean, and as its reputation grew. We were lucky to be feautre-profiled in Poet's Market four years into our journey. Lucky, because the word was getting out.

That high led to some of the unwanteds that come with being more well-known. Those include receiving KKK-propoganda poetry (a KKK acrostic, no less; I didn't want to believe it was what it was so I asked my then Creative Writing professor to look at it, and she said, "of course it is! Why would you think it isn't? Look at all those K's going down the left-hand side!"), being threatened because I wouldn't publish another poet, having yet another poet cancel her subscription because (I paraphrase) her poetry was just as good as anyone's in the journal, yet I had rejected hers.

And here we are this very day, a short time before deadline on a milestone issue. No hate poetry in the mail today, no threatening letters. Instead, some very hopeful-looking submissions, an order for the next issue, a bio and a very kind letter from a poet whose poetry we have accepted, among other items. It's a really good day.

Working Up to 15 Years

Looking back at the past almost-15 years of publishing a small-press poetry journal, I had no idea where it would lead me. I wouldn't have guessed that in our 10th year of publication we would move from Massachusetts to the Great State of Maine, or that in the same year I would receive my BFA in Creative Writing.

I couldn't have envisioned needing the help of an Assistant Editor. I couldn't have envisioned publishing over 1,000 poets in this fleeting time. I could only wish for the type of response the Aurorean has received so far from contributors, readers, and reviewers such as Small Press Review.

To put out that first issue, I begged and cajoled fellow writers in a Creative Writing class to submit their work. Not surprisingly, many of them did just that. Surprisingly, the Creative Writing professors did the same. We started humble.

I hope we remain humble. We still appreciate each and every poet who sends us their work. Without them, the Aurorean would be a bunch of blank pages—although a neat idea.

As we move into the last month before deadline on our 15th Anniversary Issue, I cannot wait to read every poem that comes our way. I cannot wait to decide which two poets will be featured in this milestone issue. I cannot wait until every i is dotted, every t is crossed. I can't wait until the box of freshly-printed journals arrives from our printer.

And I can't wait to see what's in store for the next 15!

—Cynthia