The California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) campus literary journal, In The Ords, is looking for new creatives to feature in their spring semester publication.
Once every semester, In The Ords publishes an issue comprised entirely of students’ creative works centered around the same theme such as poems, short stories, or visual art.
“We love visual art. We don’t get a lot of it,” said fourth-year In The Ords President Alanah Hunsdorfer.
“Our theme for this semester is ‘dive,’” she said. “Every semester, we have guiding questions to narrow down their work if they choose to submit it to us. So we’re just asking people to dive into themselves and what makes them who they are and dig deeper into the self.”
Club members helped to decide on the semester’s theme; Hunsdorfer expanded a bit on what that process looks like.
“Every semester, we get together as a team and we just spitball ideas. Last semester it was all about music, so someone said the music of you, and so we just took that tagline and narrowed it down to different questions,” Hunsdorfer explained. “This semester, someone was like ‘DIVE’ as we were like ‘yeah.’ We just yell out ideas and then write down whatever we were thinking, narrowing it down until we like the end product.”
She explained that while the officers are in charge of everything, they like to delegate roles to everyone, so there is no hierarchy and every club member gets to be a part of the process.
Hunsdorfer went on to talk about how she first became involved in the club and her journey within it since joining in the fall of 2021, mentioning that one of her professors was the advisor of In The Ords at the time. Daniel B. Summerhill, Monterey County’s poet-laureate and a CSUMB assistant professor, is currently the advisor.
“He just talked about it in class, and I was like, that sounds exactly like what I like to do. I’ve always wanted to be an editor, and I love creative writing,” she said. “I joined, and we weren’t a club at first, and then in spring of 2022, we became a club and that helps with funding.”
While club members get to be more involved with the process of picking a theme, any student is welcome to submit creative works for the final publication through their website, http://intheords.weebly.com/
On their website, heading over to the “submissions” tab will give you all of the submission guidelines, then at the bottom, the “click here to submit” button will take you to a Google form to submit your pieces.
Hunsdorfer also explained the submission process is kept mostly anonymous to avoid bias.
“We only have one person in our club who is in charge of submissions, so none of us know who’s submitted except for that one person, so we try to keep it very unbiased because we do judge the pieces as they come in and see if we want them in the publication or not.”
Students will have until March 6 to submit their creative works, however Hunsdorfer stated if there are any changes to the deadline and it is extended, they will mention it on their Instagram and MyRaft.
Once they receive all their submissions, Hunsdorfer said the process is “kind of hectic.”
First, the editors review all the pieces individually to decide if they fit into the publication.
“We’ll say yes to most of them, but sometimes it’s off-theme and doesn’t fit into the publication, we’ll say no. But then we’ll come together, and if there’s any confusion on any of the pieces, half yesses, half nos, or all maybes, then we’ll come together and talk about it in a meeting to decide if we want to accept those pieces.”
She explained that while the judging and editing processes are usually done individually, they will come together as a team to finalize everything and discuss how they want to structure the publication.
“We like to have the pieces flow into each other, so we get together and decide the order of things, and then we put it together,” she said. “We put it all together and then send it off to the printer, and that whole process usually takes about a month. It takes a couple of weeks to come in the mail, but then we start distributing them.”
Hunsdorfer also said this semester; they are planning to invite contributors to an open mic night reading in the middle of April, where they will distribute the final publication. They hope to have the event on April 17 but will update on MyRaft and Instagram with the finalized date.
Keep up to date with everything going on with In The Ords by following them on Instagram @InTheOrds or following the club on MyRaft.