What a year for the SUNY-wide literary magazine, Gandy Dancer, to be celebrating its tenth anniversary.
For the first time in the lit mag’s production, evaluation of submissions has been moved entirely online to accommodate COVID restrictions. Submission rates are down an incredible percent from last year—likely because of the pandemic since participation seems to be down across campus regardless of the organization. Lucky for any potential submitters, the deadline for submission has been moved to March 31, and the editors of the magazine strongly encourage anyone interested to submit immediately.
Gandy Dancer is produced at Geneseo by English courses 426 and 428, which are taught by professor of English and creative writing Rachel Hall. These classes happen every semester. Co-managing editor senior Rebecca Williamson has technically already taken three Gandy Dancer classes in order to work on the magazine three separate times, and co-managing editor Sara Devoe has taken a handful of iterations herself.
The process for deciding which pieces are allowed in the magazine begins in groups. Students in the class are asked to choose which genre they’d like to read: poetry, creative nonfiction or fiction. Then the class divides into genre groups to read over their chosen genre pieces. This year and spring semester 2020, the process had to happen over Zoom.
“Other than the in-person meetings with genre groups, everything else was [already] online before COVID,” Devoe said. “We read submissions from our computer, everything comes in on the computer, there's nothing printed out. Now we’re meeting on Zoom in breakout rooms with our genre groups, and although we weren't in person, conversations were as effective as they could be.”
The students don’t break up into groups to discuss art pieces because they are less likely to have any expertise in the visual art field. Instead, the class comes together to discuss art. Sometimes, Director of Sustainability Dan DeZarn meets with the class to discuss the merits of visual art, having authority on the matter as an artist himself.
“[DeZarn] is good at doing that for us, and he helps us understand what we should be looking for in art,” Hall said. “Like, that it's not just a pretty picture. That's one of the things that we have to often get past. Well, that's a really pretty picture of a bee landing on a poppy, but that could be a screensaver. It's not necessarily, you know, art that we want to showcase in the lit mag. So [DeZarn] sometimes gives us mini-lectures on how to select art.”
A challenge that creators of the literary magazine faced was eventually learning InDesign, which is used to formulate the magazine layout. However, Allison Brown—digital publishing services manager at Milne Library and Gandy Dancer production advisor—has been a wonderful resource for students who have never worked with the program before.
“We usually go to the South Hall computer lab to learn how to do InDesign, but we had to learn that all over zoom for the past three semesters,” Devoe said. “But Allison, who is kind of like the head of the magazine design portion, was extremely helpful in helping us learn how to do that on our own.”
If helping to create Gandy Dancer sounds like something you’d enjoy, keep an eye out for registration information to sign up for the class. If you’re more of the art-creator than the art-curator, remember to submit to Gandy Dancer by March 31.