Ah, gentle reader. Last September, in a haul of buck bundles of chapbooks and literary magazines, I got two copies of the Wingéd Lion, the literary magazine (at the time) from Missouri Southern State College (now MSSU) in Joplin.
The issues are dated Spring 1975 and Spring 1978. I would have expected the freshman and sophomores to be present in both, but we really only have a contribution from Sharon Rogers, a junior in 1975 and a senior in 1978 (a part-time student or a long-time student).
Oh, man, did they remind me of my high school literary magazine, Pen and Palette.
Both are landscape (11″ x 8½”) and are on heavy bond paper with heavy covers. The art styles match almost match–the 1970s ones are more in line with its times and the Pen and Palette art represented a lot of good art class projects. But I wondered if the style was shared with a lot of small college literary magazines–Mama Joy, the sponsor of the Northwest Writers club, would have been just about the age to have graduated college in the middle 1970s. After all, 1987, or first issue, was less than a decade after 1978. But, no. I checked the masthead to see if I knew any of the people in it, but also no, although one name, the woman who was both the junior and the senior, seemed familiar, but I couldn’t make a connection.
Ah, those literary journal days. I thought I could make it as a poet and a short story writer, maybe also a novelist, coming out of high school and going into college to write. Here are my contributions to Pen and Palette:
1987:
“A Model Murder”, a detective fiction short story.
1988:
- “Fall”, a poem
- “A Shocking Case of Murder”, another detective fiction short story. I had a bunch using the same characters with gimmick twists.
1989:
- “Shepherd: For Hire: The Sharp Kidnapping”, a satiric short story about a high school student who thinks he’s a detective. Not a true story, but in middle school, I wanted to start an in-school detective agency. I was serious.
- “Sonnet of Spring” which might have been my first sonnet, actually.
- “Tyrone Jackson: The Search for Maynerd”, a short story that a group of us wrote in Creative Writing class. It was a story in the round sort of thing, where each group wrote a bit and passed it to the next group. We inserted Tyrone Jackson into all of the stories. I wrote our original story as it should be told, and eventually I wrote a whole collection about this character. I have, of course, told this story before. In 2004. Which is closer to then than it is to now. Man, I wish I still had that binder.
1990:
- “Adventures and Exotic Places”, a short story with a real Walter Mitty vibe.
- “Stopping of a Poem by a Thought”, a satiric poem making light of a Robert Frost poem.
- “The Vigilante”, an unrelated crime short story.
I didn’t have anything in the 1991 or 1992 editions because I’d graduated by then–no three year gaps between my high school junior and senior years–but my brother was still in the writing group, and my sainted mother sponsored for two additional years.
My college, sorry, university, had a magazine which put out a literary “edition” which was a small separate digest in 1991 and 1992, but was rolled into the regular magazine as a supplement in the spring.
I had a poem in the 1991 edition (“a brash young man, ideas set…”) and a poem in the 1993 edition (“Listening to the Night”), but, boy, howdy, look at the table of contents in 1994:
Two of the three short stories (“An Aluminum Dream” and “Shepherd: At College” featuring the same character from the high school literary magazine). Six of the fifteen poems, including:
- “Chance Encounter”
- “Homecoming: A Collage”
- “View from a Railcar”
- “Upon the snowy pillow next to me…”
- “Falling Snow”
- “Third Floor Eyes”
Four sonnets, a long free verse narrative, and on general poem.
I did not win either of the cash prizes awarded–one for fiction and one for poetry–so maybe the lesson I should have taken from my experience is that it was easy to get published, but not so easy to get paid. Although I’m not finding it easy to get published these days in existing outlets that don’t have “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” or “Musings from Brian J. Noggle” in the title.
Aside from that, though, the main thing (which will be far briefer in account than the lesser thing of Look at me! I coulda been somebody! is how we students were swinging for the fences. Trying different themes, trying different genres (well, everyone except me who stuck to detective fiction mostly), different rhyme schemes and forms for poems…. Reading college literary magazines these days don’t seem as freewheeling.
Or maybe I’ll change my assessment as I get into additional magazines in the stack upstairs–but most of them are college literary magazines where the contributions come from outside the student body (ahem–from people like me). So they might prove to be fairly homogenous and, well, common.
Maybe I should take up a new hobby of prowling for college literary magazine that might contain writers who went on to bigger things. Almost as interesting as collecting gentlemen’s magazines with Stephen King stories, but with a little less nudity. Which is its own reward even if the investment in obscurity does not pay out.
