"14/17/2000/FP2007": Guest Blog from Poet Russell Rowland

Hi, I’m “14/17/2000/FP2007.” Given name, Russell Rowland. My Aurorean alter ego, created by editor Cynthia especially for the 15th Anniversary Issue, tells you (and reminds me) that I have appeared in the journal fourteen times, had seventeen poems published in it since 2000, and was Featured Poet in 2007. As I remarked to Cynthia after receiving this informative moniker, she and I go back a long way. Indeed, if I’ve counted on my fingers correctly, only five contributors to the landmark issue go back farther.

Each time I turn the pages, the feeling increases that this unique suffix of numbers and letters is as special to me as my educational and professional degrees. First, and most obviously, the Aurorean is such a handsome journal. Font, format, and photography (by Cynthia) distinguish one of those publications in which one is delighted to appear, confident that one’s own work will look so darn good in context (as opposed to mags that have one biting one’s nails about what may have happened to it in its pages). When my contributor’s copy arrives, I always think, “When I finally have a book, may it look as nice as this…”

Second, the combination of “New England,” “seasons,” and “uplift” work together to produce a consistent, convincing viewpoint, that both transcends the individual contributions, and unites and reinforces them. It’s a magazine with a message: not a heavy-handed, preachy, or travelogue message, but a worldview that, like the work of a good individual poet, finds universality in the particular. Each issue seems less an anthology or miscellany than a unified statement about life as it is lived among the blessings and idiosyncrasies of a given place. And, as another editor puts it about another mag, in the Aurorean there is no “pissing or moaning” about our lot. Between its covers one finds a celebration of life in this environment, under these circumstances. It may sound trite, but for fifteen years under Cynthia’s editorship, it has encouraged our gladness to be alive.

Third, my “14/17/2000/FP2007” reveals her intentional focus in the Anniversary Issue, which is no different—just perhaps more explicit—than the focus in the issues that preceded it. This focus is, she says, “to celebrate our contributors and our relationships with them.” Nothing could say more about the personal touch she brings to editing, about why it’s a pleasure to be associated with her as a contributor, or about the kind of person she is: happy to step out of the spotlight on the auspicious anniversary, and let it shine on her poets.

I write as one who has been submitting for publication long enough to have dealt with all kinds of editors: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I have on occasion not been treated well, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. I have received responses that might have made a less determined writer give up, aghast. I’m as aware as any writer that editors are human beings, and in a few cases flawed ones.

One is safe with the Aurorean. Submissions are treated with care, submitters with respect. Transactions are timely, predictable, professional, yet cordial. At all times it’s obvious that a warm, caring human being is at the other end, one who is a writer herself and knows what both sides of the desk are like.

It is indicative of the kind of respectful, solicitous, meticulous relationship that Cynthia has with her contributors, that she and I have become friends over the years—friends who have never laid eyes on each other (save by photo), but whose mutual regard began with the common cause of poetry and over time included details of family, illnesses, aspirations, and mutual encouragement. I have no doubt many other contributors can say the same. In theory, it ought to be problematic to mix an editor/contributor relationship with a friend/friend relationship. Warning flags about conflicts of interest pop up. But in practice, there has never been a problem. Cynthia and I have enriched and exhorted each other, in good times and hard, as friends do. We have made each other chuckle, and made each other thoughtful, as friends do.

But she has never hesitated to return a submission, with thanks and best wishes, if it didn’t seem quite right for the Aurorean, and our camaraderie has not suffered in the least. She has, thank goodness, felt no need to accept my work solely because she likes me. Indeed, our friendship often seems to benefit the editorial process. I fondly remember, when I was to be Featured Poet in 2007, the exchange of e-mails as we wrangled over one blooming line in a poem, working together to make it better, but not easily seeing eye to eye. It was a friendly wrestling match, ending in laughter. I have worked with over a hundred journal editors, and with how many do I enjoy that kind of relationship?

So, this is “14/17/2000/FP2007,” and proud to be so, signing off with the hope that, like the odometer on my car, the numbers in my Aurorean moniker will keep turning over upward—both for the sake of my development as a poet, and for the satisfaction of knowing that, not unlike our flag over Fort McHenry, the Aurorean is “still there.” Thank you, Cynthia—and I trust you can hear the affection behind those words.


——Russell Rowland is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, recent winner of descant’s Baskerville Publishers Poetry Award, and 2010 winner of Old Red Kimono’s Paris Lake Poetry Contest. His chapbook, Train of All Cabooses, can be ordered from Finishing Line Press. He enjoys Moxie, classical music, hiking, and snow-shoeing.

Building A Rep

The other day, I took my foot-long, just-about-full-to-its-limit 4x6 card file out and told my husband and Assistant Editor that I was leaving with our 1,000+ poets. Later in the day, I placed the card file back in the gray metal cabinet where it is kept, and said that I was now leaving the poets to themselves, envisioning 1,000+ Aurorean poets gathered together for the evening, perhaps enjoying some lively poetic discussion.

We set out to be different in one distinct way: we set out to treat poets the way I'd want to be treated as a poet. This involves, for one thing, the infamous black hole. This is where one's poetry goes (most often) when it is sent out to a publisher. There are two types of black holes. One, the black holes in which one has no idea where one's poetry has gone off to (like an errant space ship)—specifically, if one's poetry actually arrived at said publisher. Two, the black holes from which it may never return (those hopeful groups of poetry that are forever lost, about whose fate said poet never hears a word).

At the Aurorean, we thought the answer to black holes were twofold, yet simple. 1) Let people know their poetry was received. 2) Reply to poets' work within the time promised. Therefore, it won't take a NASA scientist trained in fearsome intergalactic black holes to come to a reasonable conclusion about the whereabouts of one's submission. 1) If we didn't acknowledge your work, we didn't receive it (or, you didn't enclose an SASE, but that's another blog for another day). 2) If we didn't reply to your work in the time promised, we didn't receive it (or, same parenthetical disclaimer as above).

Simple. Yes, this takes a bit of extra time. Yes, it takes a bit of extra investment when we don't have an e-mail address for submitters and need to acknowledge their work by postcard. But really, isn't it worth it? For the peace of mind? To show poets that we care and are ever-mindful that without their submissions, we are nothing (well, we might be a lovely cover, a letter to no one from me, and all blank pages, but that's all we'd be without our submitters). That we know what it's like to have our work sucked into a black hole.

What does all this have to do with my 4x6 card file? Well, this is what houses a 4x6 card for every poet who has ever appeared on our pages. Some poets have been with us since almost the beginning and have 3 4x6 cards stapled together. A poet's card contains their most recent contact information, and a notation on every appearance with us. It is a history of our relationship with each poet, in that they thought enough of us to send their work our way. In that we found a poem—or a certain number of poems—penned by this poet that we felt fit our journal. In that they have continued to think enough of us to keep sending us their poetry, in that we have continued to find gems in their submission envelopes.

I wish I could sit down and chat with all of our poets. But for now, they are all holding a very important meeting in a file box. Perhaps they are workshopping. Perhaps they are working on sending us their next batch of work—which we will acknowledge with a smile, and reply to within three months (unless they forget their SASE).

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.