March 31, 2021
The unique situation of having to work remotely this semester has not hindered our progress in creating a magazine that we are proud to share with the world, but (probably like most people) in the current quarantined environment, there is a general feeling of burnout because of the purely remote working situation. Friendships have been made among the staff and we’ve learned to work with each other wonderfully to produce the magazine. But the realization has hit that many of us have never met face to face, and hope that we can do so soon as many more people are getting vaccinated. The staff agrees in general that we want to share food or take a walk by our UNM duck pond together, enjoy the creative process with physical mediums and work with our hands once more, instead of just the computer screen. But the staff has also been able to laugh together, wow each other with incredible work and be excited as a whole that we are creating something to share art and literature with the world.
The spring 2021 semester so far has meant living in a world of zoom meetings, but the Scribendi staff has also had an eventful semester of learning the publishing and printing process! We’ve designed the magazine from scratch with the help of the editors and our wonderful professor Leslie donovan, and gone through many rounds of voting on designs, copyediting, proofreading, editing and proofreading again. A big part of getting Scribendi 2021 published has been voting on various aspects of the magazine. During the winter break a select group of staff members worked with the editors to create their own unique designs for the inside of the magazine, and the rest of the staff voted on which of them to publish at the start of the semester. A similar process of everyone designing a unique cover led to that round of voting, and once again voting was used to pick staff choice awards from the pieces that will be published. There was some tedium involved in these many steps, of course, with all of the careful editing of every piece of every page, to ensure that our magazine does justice to the wonderful submissions we’ve received. And all of that hard work is paying off as the staff is excited to announce that we will have a published magazine very soon! That’s right, our proofs of Scribendi 2021 have been sent to the printing press, and an online release party is scheduled for the near future.