Students launch new online literary magazine

Vector Magazine, an online literary magazine dedicated to highlighting experimental, creative writing was published for the first time by Hopkins students on March 9. Although currently a functioning online entity, Vector Magazine began simply as the dream of a few Hopkins students in their freshman year.

“We would sit around and talk about starting our own magazine, something that had everything for everyone,” sophomore Jesse Shuman wrote in an email to The News-Letter. Shuman is one of the editors-in-chief of the magazine. “We wanted it to be a writer’s magazine — to force people to venture into mediums and experiences they hadn’t before.”

In fall of 2014, Shuman approached his friend Ruth Marie Landry to bring the magazine to fruition online. The two took on the roles of joint editors-in-chief and formed a staff of fellow writers and friends including Maxwell Gontarek, who also recalls the origins of the publication.

“The plan, as far as I was concerned, was to have these radical handmade zines to hand out to friends, each one a little different, layered collage kind of stuff with poems, manifestos, cartoons, etc.,” Gontarek wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “Eventually, Ruth and Jesse took the reigns sometime last semester and whipped our aspirations into tangible shape, and we brought in friends and people we admired from a distance from our writing classes, and then suddenly we had a deadline and a domain name and now we’re here.”

The editors-in-chief then began work on creating a website for the weekly publication.

“We, as Writing Sems majors, basically had to learn HTML and CSS from scratch to make our website,” Landry wrote. Though the overall look of the website has evolved overtime, the philosophy has remained the same, according to Landry.

This philosophy is centered on creating an open space for student writers to explore their abilities without traditional constraints.

“The main purpose in founding Vector was to avoid pigeon-holing people into any sort of niche journal or a ‘literary’ magazine,” wrote Shuman, “but to allow people an outlet to experiment with more magazine-style, post-Internet writing.”

The weekly publication is also interested in documenting the personal views and concerns of current students. According to the magazine’s online mission statement, “The articles featured in this magazine will constitute reflections and observations inherent to our concerns as inheritors of this modern age.”

Submissions for Vector are submitted to the magazine’s email address that can be found on the magazine’s website and Facebook page. The submission page of the website reads: “Now accepting essays, poems, short memoirs, anti-capitalist diatribes, ketchup stained love letters, blasphemous cartoons, tender manifestos, and anything else that can fit in a website. Make your grandmother blush and yourself proud.”

Though most submissions are currently fictional stories and visual art, Landry and Shuman are hoping to receive more submissions of non-fiction and personal essays.

“Someone send us a Neo-Communist Manifesto, g*ddamn it,” wrote the editors-in-chief.

In bi-weekly to weekly meetings, the staff of Vector hold roundtable sessions to edit, workshop and critique the submissions they receive. Currently most of the submissions received are from members of the Vector staff. However, Gontarek is confident that the source for submissions will expand over time.

“Once we get the locomotive going, others will be inclined to submit,” he wrote. “Plus we’re all badgering even more writers and artists we’ve admired from afar.”

Landry and Shuman have both worked on publications for Hopkins in the past, but noted a lack of useful dialogue between writers.

“I didn’t feel as though I got to work with people one on one in the way that I think is really useful for developing as a writer,” Landry wrote.

As a result, they decided that another focus of Vector should be to create a sense of community.

“I don’t want Vector to be a place where people just submit their work because they want to be published. We hope it will be a place where writers can communicate with each other,” she wrote.

Gontarek shares this desire to create a community network for the publication.

“Now that we’ve got a decent amount of outside submissions, the plan is to talk amongst ourselves about what we’re into and what we’re not into and relay the feedback to the submitters,” he wrote. “We want to form relationships with submitters so that we can work together to refine pieces before ultimately publishing them.” He hopes to create a “kind of thriving network for Hopkins writers, something more social, more alive.”

Vector is student-run and does not currently have plans to be affiliated with or recognized by Hopkins, but Landry says that may change in the future.