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The Suisun Valley Review was established as a way for the students of Solano Community College to learn the art and craft of editing a literary journal while putting together their own magazine once a year. Since the first issue was published in 1981, student editors have collaborated on over thirty issues of SVR, carefully selecting the contents from new and established writers from across the U.S. and abroad. The students are also directly involved with creating the overall design aesthetic and narrative of each issue. Each spring, all of their hard work and endless creative energy is repaid with a bound collection of prose and poetry, sold and kept as a testament to sleepless nights.
SVR's 2014 Submission Guidelines

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

There are only a few pieces left to discuss, and then we are on to design and the construction of the guts of the magazine.

This is a good thing, because we have a week and-a-half to put our book together.



At this point, the question arises: will it be possible to count all of the gray hairs that will be created before the end of this?

Monday, April 19, 2010

Winding Up To Wind Down

With five weeks left in the semester, until the SVR reading, things have officially become hectic. Our reading schedule has had the editors pushing through roughly four-hundred pieces in the last two weeks so that they may be voted on and discussed. With many pieces being more than one typed page (not to mention the short fiction, which often runs five + pages), the number of pages we have perused is, conservatively, double the number of submissions.

Not that this is meant to be a complaint - not by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it is meant to come by way of explanation for the recent and sudden drop-off in entries made to the SVR blog. Pretty much everything we are doing in class is too sensitive to post online (I can't say, today X and XX pieces got in, as there is always a possibility that the piece won't make it into the final book, for a variety of reasons - and I can't very well say Y and Z pieces were rejected either, and while I could say today, seven pieces got in. Such entries would be very boring and short, just as would a slew of updates about how the editors were talking to and interacting with each other twice a week.


That said, all in all, the editors are getting along, and the collective machine has been oiled quite well at this point.



There will definitely be more entries before the end of this semester, and at least one after the end, but there will not be many. Though there are not very many followers (compared to the potential audience this blog is meant to reach, that is) to whom this last message is addressed, it shall stand for posterity, as this is the second year of the SVR blog, and the second year it is falling into the same pitfall here at the end. Perhaps the next editor to take control of the keyboard will be able to glean something from the emerging pattern, and keep history from repeating itself in 2011.

Here's hoping,


Mahalo.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Crunch Time

The SVR class is on spring break, which is now half over. The majority of our reading gets done over these few days, and when we get back we will be waist deep in discussion pretty much for the foreseeable future.

It's the kind of exhilarating stress that makes one understand why we evolved the capacity to stress in the first place.