Earlier today, I shared a piece that I said was the first thing I had published in a print journal.
Later, I was working on a story partly set at a sort of proxy for my undergraduate alma mater.
When I came to campus in 1998, the website was in very basic html, and the college email ran on DOS (I think. It was text-based at any rate). 21 years later, there’s a fairly robust digital history of all kinds of things Ursinus.
I went down the rabbit hole.
Regarding the venue from this morning, what I should have said was it the first print journal run by people I didn’t know or go to school with to publish my creative work.
Of course, I hadn’t forgotten about the Lantern. Of course it was the first print journal to ever publish my creative work. (Alright, here again I’m wrong. In sixth grade, I was co-founder, co-editor, co-publisher, and staff writer for zine called ZAP! In middle school, we briefly considered relaunching as The Jolly Rancher, but it wasn’t meant to be.)
The Lantern piece, which you can find here, was written a few years before I got to Ursinus. I was about 16, broken-hearted, and listening to a shit-ton of Beck. That it was published alongside things written by 22-year-olds, and that it won the yearly prize for creative writing, has always meant a lot to me.
Chris Cocca 