Shenandoah Volume 62 Number 1, Fall 2012

As of this past Tuesday the third, entirely online and open issue of Shenandoah is out on the virtual stands. This issue features a host of impressive poetry, fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and recommended reading. What’s more, this issue features an brand new audio category that highlights works across all genres that have the authors reading their work aloud.

While I’d like to try and take credit for how the site looks, that is all Billy Renkl. Renkl’s work adorns this issue and his aesthetic is absolutely compelling. I really love his work. In fact, Rod Smith and I liked it so much that we re-themed Shenandoah’s homepage to remain consistent with this issue’s visual theme, we just changed up the colors a bit.

I have some more work to do on a few features for Shenandoah: namely making Poem of the Week postings more streamlined, including select blog posts on the homepage elegantly, and optimizing the site across all mobile devices. Being part of brining Shenandoah online over the past two years has been one of the more rewarding experiences of my professional life, and I look forward to making the platform much better over the coming years.


Shenandoah debuts online

It’s official, Shenandoah literary magazine has made the move from print to online-only. What’s more, it just so happens that I was integral in the process of moving this journal to WordPress—where else could it go? Martha Burtis and I came up with a pretty slick architecture for making this happen elegantly and easily. I will be blogging that out over the next month in a multi-part series. But in the interim I highly recommend you check out the first online issue of Shenandoah and leave a comment. I’m personally a big fan of Steve Scafidi, so if you do know his work check out a number of poems from his forthcoming book Lincoln Poems—there is even audio of him reading the poems. And what I love about the new format of Shenandoah is that it is free available to anyone with an internet connection—therein is the true revolution.


Working through Shenandoah –getting there?

This is my second update on the Shenandoah Literary Journal I am working on along with the editor R. T. Smith, his English 453 course, as well as Martha Burtis—who is doing the programming and developing for the theme design. I am kind of a last minute, annoying “concept” guy—so it has been nice to work with Rod who is quite the opposite. He is incredibly funny, but at the same time as organized as they come when it comes to his journal. He was sure to have me on the phone every week to talk about where we are and where we are going, and I found this has actually worked well to push me to develop on a regular basis rather than waiting. Sounds obvious to most, my working with someone like Rod allows me to get the work done in a much more quickly and gives us a bunch of time to build in a lot of possibilities beyond the original project. It is just good all around. What’s more the feedback from the students over the last weeks has been crucial, they all have noted a few things I will actually return to in a bit for advice.

So, as of now the site has almost all the poems, fiction, and nonfiction—which is close to 40 pieces. We still have a few things to finish (and I will list them below) but the site as a whole is coming together, and starting to resemble something close to a finished product. Here is what is left to do:

  • Links each work to a separate discussion page: this will be a space you can link to from a poem that will actually allow for discussion and feedback to the artists. It is not on the page of the work as a means of providing some space. Rod and I have talked about this, and I think moving it to a separate page is inline with allowing for commentary, but not letting it directly compete with the work—are there other ways to consider this we’re missing?
  • Category archive pages: Working on cleaning up the archives pages for each of the genres of submissions. Need to do some theme hacking, and will be working with Martha on these details.
  • Poem Category page list first line of poem –> Kinda like the idnex of books of poetry, etc. Another, neat way to organize the poems, and I am working on a solution for this via excerpt and line break.
  • About the Author–> Author’s Name If you look at a particular work you’ss see under it “About the Author” that will be changes to the Author Name with a smaller link to read more about the author which will lead to ajax box with image and bio.
  • Change Reviews On the Reviews, in order to avois confusion, we will be getting rid of “About the Author” and changing it to About the Reviewer and keep it at the very bottom.
  • Indenting lines easily. Particularly for poetry we need to indent lines easily (look at same basic tab) –> and I am working on some ways to do this. if anyone out there has a quick solution let me know. This should be sovled by April 1.
  • TOC Links in Aricles: Top and bottom of the page link back to TOC (think of this as a small, unobtrusive link back to the main issue homepage with the table of contents, or maybe even a universal info box like solution across all articles.
  • Randon Frontpage TOC: On the frontpage of the Table of Contents we will be randomizing 8 or nine works from the current issue, as a means to equally feature a variety of works form the issue (a much more democratic and thoughtful way at featuring). We are working on this as well.

Aesthetic/Usability Issue

  • Increasing the size of the font on the main page ( http://shenandoahliterary.org/) for the various articles on the frontpage (Welcome, Gallery, etc.). Additionally, we will be upping the size of the white font on the issue page for the TOC  and the author/bio area.
  • A big issue for many of the student interns is the menu at the top of the issue page. If you click the tabbed Shenandoah in the upper right hand corner of the Shenandoah site a menu should appear with the main site navigation. This isn;t working for the students at all.  I wonder if we need to show the tabs, or even use the admin menu bar that appears when you login as an upmost menu throughout the site (which is part of the new version of WordPress). Worth some thought, any ideas?
  • Finally, consistency of header images and background colors around the main site? Does the link jump from the 8 or 9 random articles on the main page of shenadoahliterary.org throw you off when you are in the actual issue? How might we solve this?

Bringing Shenandoah online

So over the last six months I have been working with Rod Smith at Washington Lee University on bringing the literary journal Shenandoah entirely online. It is a real privilege to work on this project because Shenandoah has a very rich tradition representing Southern literature. What’s more, it was started by none other that Virginia’s own Tom Wolfe while an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University. And when I first went to the Shenandoah’s office back in September I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and it was amazing to talk with Rod about McCarthy’s vision, and his quick wit and cutting insights got me excited again. Excited about great writing, excited about Southern literature (Faulkner remains my godhead), and feeling the future of publishing has never been greater, and resources like Shenandoah available to everyone for free online was never cooler.

Continue reading “Bringing Shenandoah online”


News reel featuring a young Flannery O’Connor

Introductory intertitle reads: “Here’s an odd fowl, that walks backward to go forward so she can look behind to see where she went!”

M/S of a little girl who the narrator tells us is called Mary O’Connor (note: this is American author Flannery O’Connor as a little girl) from Savannah, Georgia (at least that is what it sounds like). Mary holds a chicken which she lifts onto her shoulder. C/U of the chicken as it walks backwards. Narrator claims that this is the only chicken in the world that walks backwards.

It looks pretty realistic and then we see geese and ducks walking backwards too so it is presumably a camera trick using film reversal technique. Shots of cows and horses seeming to walk and trot backwards.