Teaching the On-Line Literary Journals Class, the Next Generation and Why I Bought a 1958 Mercury Excelsior Letterpress

With Jim Groom’s help, I have now completed teaching three semesters of The Literary Journal: Professional Practice in Publishing and Editing, learning new things with each semester. I’ll talk about the positive experience the students share in learning creativity alongside the practical aspects of publishing a journal–and, as important, the art of collaboration. Because we spend so much time talking about the meaningful interplay of text and image, color and font, I decided to bring into the discussion of “technology” an older, uniquely valuable tool–a letterpress, and will begin having students learn to create fine arts broadsides as another way to think about text, paper, and the “limited run.”