by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor
On this Teaching Tuesday, and also just because I am so incredibly grateful, I want to celebrate NCLR’s Art Director, Dana Ezzell. When she was an undergraduate here at ECU, Dana was a student of NCLR’s original Art Director Eva Roberts. Some dozen or so years later, inspired by and building upon Eva’s ground-breaking notion of designing the contents of a literary magazine, Dana created our current look in 2009. And the accolades that started with Eva’s innovative layouts for our innovative literary magazine/scholarly journal continue to pour in, year after year, in response to NCLR’s style. After each issue is released, I receive emails from happy writers proclaiming their appreciation of how their words were presented. Which expressions of gratitude I pass on to Dana and the other designers, as well as to our Art Editor Diane Rodman, who is responsible for selecting complementary art for so much of our content.
But speaking of the graphic designers brings me to why I asked Digital Editor Devra to release this Editors’ Blog entry as one of our Teaching Tuesday posts on social media: first, both Dana and my previous two Art Directors, Mary Hatch Thiesen and Stephanie Whitlock Dicken, were students in the design program at ECU that Eva Roberts taught in. And now, our other two graphic designers, Karen Baltimore, for some years now, and more recently, Sarah Elks, were students of Dana at Meredith College (and Sarah was also a student of Karen, who taught for a while at Meredith). Karen’s first designs for NCLR were done while she was a student in Dana’s design classes, as Dana’s first were while she was Eva’s student. Eva, I hope you recognize your amazing legacy—and know that we do.
Typically, our Teaching Tuesday posts are about including North Carolina literature in the classroom, but given how significant NCLR’s unique design has been to our wide appeal beyond an academic audience, I want to give a shoutout to Dana, Karen, Sarah, Stephanie, Mary, and Eva. The thing I realize when I see their designs is how much they appreciate the literature and the art they are presenting to our readers. Consider how much today, in these times, when the Humanities are underappreciated, presentation matters. How do we attract an audience to our literary pages? I know from my own teaching experience how visually-inspired my students are. Words alone on a page might not draw them in.
Consider how much today, in these times,
when the Humanities are underappreciated,
presentation matters.
Case in point (and another reason this is a “Teaching Tuesday” moment), the instructions I created for NCLR’s student staff are step by step sentences. I’m a words person, often frustrated when students in my classes don’t read the syllabus or follow the directions of an assignment. A few years ago, for one of Assistant Editor Desiree Dighton’s editing and publishing classes, her students, who were also interning with NCLR, took my instructions full of words only and added screenshots – pictures – and these new guidelines are much more user friendly. Thank you to Desiree and these students (and I know the student staff and Desiree’s students who have followed are also grateful).
And another teaching moment: attention to details is crucial, I tell the NCLR students. And related to that, consistency of style is something I learned from Dana. Detail and style may not be something the reader notices, but I am guessing they would notice its absence in a publication. I do, and I don’t submit to publications that seem a bit careless if not downright sloppy in their presentation. I urge the students interested in going into publication careers, learn to pay attention to the details of the guidelines.
NCLR is a living laboratory for students in so many disciplines: in the NCLR office, students in creative writing, communication, and literature (mainly, but not exclusively) are getting an inside peak at how they might earn a living while writing and/or reading. In Desiree’s classroom, we’re using NCLR to teach students interested in publication in any field about format and style and the software tools they’ll use. And graphic design professors like Dana Ezzell are teaching their students to pull it all together to appeal to a visual culture while bringing those people back to the author’s words.