Caesura: Inside “Echoes”

Since 1990, Indiana Wesleyan University has been the home of the undergraduate literary publication Caesura. The Caesura editing team publishes one issue a year. Planning occurs during the fall semester, while spring is dedicated to receiving submissions and building the year’s issue.

The Caesura editorial team has historically comprised three to five individuals, allowing the work to be shared. An editor-in-chief oversees the issue, while a design editor creates the cover art and manages layout. Co-editors contribute to theme development, promotion and the selection of written work.

Although the nature of college leads to a steady turnover of leadership, the practice of bringing in freshmen “interns” early on has developed, with the editor-in-chief traditionally being a junior or senior with the experience of a few issues already behind them.

This year’s editorial team consists of editor-in-chief Matthew Lacy (junior), co-editor and design editor Annie Lingren (sophomore), co-editor Clay Herring (senior), co-editor Ella McDivitt (sophomore), and co-editor Maya Hawkins (freshman). This team oversaw all aspects of creating the issue—including choosing the theme, selecting pieces, printing, and distribution.

“We went through the list of themes considered last year, and ‘Echoes’ had been one of the finalists,” Lacy said. “We had a couple we considered, but ‘Echoes’ was the frontrunner right from the beginning.”

Other potential themes considered included metamorphosis, inferno, entropy, and dichotomy. 

Each editor has their own interpretation of what “Echoes” means to them. For Herring, it evokes repeating patterns in stories. For Hawkins it holds personal value as a symbol for the way those she admires impact her future and the way she sees the world.

“To me, ‘Echoes’ means memory,” McDivitt said. “Once something has happened in your life, it leaves traces of itself for years to come. In the same way that echoes repeat your voice back to you, your memories repeat the story of your life back to you.”

The first challenge the team encountered while creating this year’s issue arrived when the submission platform Caesura had used for the past several years unexpectedly stopped working.

“We had printed off all these posters and prepared all the social media to tell people to go to this specific website to submit things,” Lacy said. “We had to print off little QR codes to go on all the posters across campus that redirected to the new submission link.”

Because of this unexpected challenge, the submission window was extended an extra week so that everyone who wanted to submit could do so through the new system. In total, about 80 submissions were received and 40 pieces published. Historically, cutting down the submissions has been challenging for each new issue of Caesura—with this year being no exception. While “Echoes” holds the distinction of being the longest issue of Caesura ever published, coming in at 80 pages, the expanded page count didn’t make it any easier to decide which pieces to cut.

“We were holed up in the Modern Language, Literature, and Communication (MLLC) division office until 12 a.m.,” Lingren said. 

“There were several we had as maybes that we had to come back to and discuss,” Herring said.

Across four-and-a-half hours, the editorial team discussed the various pieces merits both as individual poems and as part of the wider issue. The lengths of pieces and the number of pieces each contributor could have published were additional factors that had to be considered when determining what would make it into the issue.

“We also had to figure out what pieces would say about the magazine and how readers would interpret them,” Hawkins said. “Those were the most difficult discussions we had and the last pieces we discussed.” 

In addition to selecting which pieces would go into the magazine, the actual design of the magazine’s layout and cover art also took time.

“When we first selected ‘Echoes’ as the theme, we talked about what visuals could evoke that because it’s a very auditory idea,” Lingren said. “We talked about ripples in a pond mirroring that concept and that was the idea I liked best for coming up with the art.”

While the process of making both the cover and the issue was difficult—requiring Lingren to learn two new software programs—the final product ended up coming out well. Access to earlier issues’ design files as well as the help of professors also proved useful. 

“I hounded my design professor, Keith Lowe, for help,” Lingren said. “When building the magazine’s layout, he sat down with me for 45 minutes to show me how the software worked, and I went from there.”

The final major challenge for “Echoes” came when trying to get the issue printed.

“None of us had ever worked with the print shop before, so we put in an order online and apparently made a mistake, because the quote we got was about $1,000 more than they actually wanted to charge us,” Lacy said. 

Despite the confusion, the finished copies of the issue were delivered ahead of schedule. 

On April 10, Caesura held a poetry reading night at McConn Coffee Co. as part of IWU’s Celebration of Scholarship, thanks to the help of Jaye Holland, coordinator of events and special projects. During the reading, “Echoes” was publicly released and the 2023 issue (“Labyrinth”) was added to the Caesura website. 

“It was a really good year for Caesura,” Lacy said. “A couple of us were new, but we came together really well as a team.”

“That was something we all talked about,” Lingren said. “The team clicked really well. Caesura was one of my favorite things I did this year.”

“Echoes” is available for purchase at the MLLC offices in Elder Hall for $5 through the rest of the semester.