A Kennesaw State publication run by graduate students is celebrating the successful launch of its inaugural issue, published April 3.
Ashley Crisler, the editor-in-chief of “The Crambo,” describes it as a magazine that focuses on publishing fiction, creative writing, nonfiction, poetry, drama, photography and art from graduate-student submissions.
According to The Crambo website, its mission is to “serve as a home for honest, uninhibited creative ideas and emancipated expressions for various genres such as poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction/memoir, screenplays and visual arts.”
Founded in fall 2017, The Crambo is the result of effort from students in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing program at KSU, Crisler said.
When asked about the beginning of The Crambo, Crisler said that the graduate students who came together to start the publication found out quickly that the logistics of creating a magazine would be challenging.
“One obstacle was coming up with a consensus on what type of work we were willing to accept, how censured it needed to be and which category to place everything,” Crisler said. “When that was chosen, we started building the website. We divided and conquered.”
When asked about the submission process, Crisler said that The Crambo editorial board is course-based so that student submissions are accepted in November and published in the spring,
Crisler said that the reader will find personal work by students from the University of Texas at Austin all the way to the University of South Carolina. Every contributor featured in The Crambo offers a unique and personal work that exemplifies the larger body of work that readers can further investigate.
In order to create a publication that is unlike any other, The Crambo inaugural team had to build the publication from the ground up, Crisler said. The team, composed of content editors, designers, marketers, production managers and an editor-in-chief had to create a system of guidelines and a website for future teams to follow.
When talking about the magazine’s approaching deadlines, Crisler said that the team had to make vital decisions that would impact the issues to come. Crisler said many of the initial submissions were works of poetry or writing, so the team continued to reach out to various university writing departments about submission opportunities and re-posted ads requesting more specific pieces such as scripts, nonfiction and short stories.
“We ended up running out of time. We wanted to have the whole magazine ready at the end of the semester, but we had to extend it to the spring semester with the design team finishing up the layout,” Crisler said.
After the lessons learned since the publication’s initial concept, Crisler said the upcoming team for the second issue of The Crambo will likely have a more cohesive experience.
“For this first edition, we were creating the entire magazine from the ground up,” Crisler said. “Now that everything has been set, the next edition should be much faster since they won’t have to create the website, boiler templates or all the initial things we had to do before dealing with submissions.”
Students can read and download as well as contribute to the next issue on their digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu.
