Week 6
Disclaimer: All individuals mentioned have previously given consent and have reviewed their inclusions.
This week has been an exciting one. To start, we had a meeting with our mentors who are helping guide us through the process of starting a publishing press, and it came to our attention that we have in fact been moving very quickly as a team. After some discussion, we realized that it was due to our default setting of college. Within the CW&P program, it isn’t unusual to have 1-5 projects due each week if not more and so we’ve developed this mindset of blasting through the tasks we have been assigned and to work none stop, especially when working from home. However, our amazing mentors reminded us that WW is not a project but a career, one that we hope to continue to develop and grow and which requires us to slow down and actually take our time and enjoy the work we do instead of rushing forward.
That is why we have decided to slow our tasks down and take more time to accomplish each one. We will still be releasing a November collection; however, we have decided that our December collection will instead take place in the spring/summer. We also changed our tactic of being a monthly publication to having our print runs more spread out to give each title more attention. For some, this slower pace might have been a more obvious path to take. However for those that know our team and the way we are each workaholics – some of us working over 60 hours a week either with WW alone or with other jobs as well – the rushed schedule we had originally created simply made sense.
With that said, we are extremely excited to have our next collection picked out and our authors acquired. We would like to introduce our readers to our new author, Rami Obeid, a poet located in Toronto, Ontario. For more details please check out their profile on our author page. This week, Obeid’s new manuscript has already received its first round of edits. Our Chief Editor had some words to say about the process:
“Working with Rami has been amazing. We seem to be on the same page about practically everything and I know that might sound cliché but honestly, we were so in sync that we might as well have been finishing each other’s sentences. He was so open to hearing my thoughts and I to his that we simply spent 2 hours bouncing off each other. He even loved our idea of featuring minimalist images with some of the poems.
Editing isn’t always an easy task, at times I struggle with the content because I don’t understand the direction the author intends as I’ve interpreted it differently or I’m not sure how to get a piece in the direction it needs or intends to be in. That is why for my first round of edits I like to ask a lot of questions prior to making a lot of edits or offer suggestions when I feel confident I’ve interpreted the piece correctly. I also prefer to have a meeting with my author, as I did with Rami, before they act upon my first round of edits so that we can discuss my inquiries and get on the same page.”
On that note, our amazing designer, Grace, has been working hard on delivering amazing images and cover ideas that would best suit the new chapbooks. Taking inspiration from both individual poems and the entire manuscripts as a whole, she has developed some very unique and fitting art that we cannot wait for our readers to see upon pre-order release which will also be coming soon so keep an eye out.
It isn’t only our print runs that we’ve been working on though, although we’ve decided to take things slower, that doesn’t mean our readers will receive less content. For instance, on Monday we released our author playlists which readers can check out to see the type of music that inspired our first round of authors back in October.
Our resident literary reviewer, Faizal, has also been hard at work and as of Thursday the 12th, readers can see his thoughts on author and poet Mikaela Lucido’s poem, “Bahala Ka” featured in the first issue of the online literary magazine, Savant-Garde. As with his last review, Faizal discusses not only the poem and its effects and importance to the author and reader but also mentions the importance of the community it adds to and builds.
That is all from us this week, stay tuned for next week and all the new content we will have.
Nate's weekly dad joke:
“Why don’t seagulls fly over the bay? Because then they’d be bay-gulls!”
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