Why, At Length

  This work needed to be done, primarily, because most of the materials, history, data, and accounts presented have been lost, or else are not easily found. For example, the journal's official instagram account has not been updated since April of 2020. It has one post on it. The links on the official UMass Boston Website take you to a website that will not load, or else reroute you to Japanese language malware masquerading as financial loans. The wayback machine, an Internet Archive project that holds snapshots of websites now long gone, has an alarming number of gaps in its records that successfully preserve the pages displaying 404 errors, as well as the period in history where one of the three websites founded by staff of The Watermark was hacked and redirected to more malware language. Or else a website called ‘femdomcity’, as best I can tell. Up until 2022, the website was still available as originally intended before its account was allowed to expire, one year before it ceased publication. 

Another reason this project is so important, and had to be done with the speed it was done, is that The Watermark appears to be no longer publishing under that title. After roughly 30 years of putting out the works of UMass Boston students, it no longer exists. Now is the time to begin compiling information while the materials and people involved in its final years still exist on campus. To wait any longer would be to court institutional memory fading, as it does with so many other student (and even faculty) publications across campus, until there is nothing left at all. 

This is a survey on The Watermark, with the occasional brief look at other projects from students and faculty as the situation arises. This work was born from the revelation that if a book is a physical thing moving through the world it can be tracked like an animal in the wild. And if you have a long-running series of books, you can track it like a national or political or cultural history, a sort of Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire but for a student undergraduate journal. The idea existed half-formed for about 1 semester until, like an engine turning over, it launched fully formed. As a result, the bulk was able to come together remarkably quickly, around 30,000 words in the span of two weeks over winter break of 2025. The rest was occasional refinement, and occasional adjustments to working theories throughout February to April of 2026. I then had to decide what I was going to do with it, an infinitely more difficult decision. 

This is not a traditional historical narrative. It is not a traditional history. I am, if we were to break out technical definitions, a participant-observer, and one with an agenda. This is not a memoir, or even a full autoethnography. It straddles the borderland between several genres, as I spent more time making sure I had the details down as best I could about The Watermark than about genre purity. In fact, there was a point where this book became as confused as the record was as facts were learned, abandoned, re-proven, and spiraled. It took considerable effort to even bring it into its current shape, which I hope presents a coherent and clear narrative with acknowledged structural gaps I try to flag as soon as they appear. 

Much of this work is focused on The Watermark, not out of favoritism, but because it is simply the best documented body of student publications that I have been able to access with the resources and infrastructure available to me as a graduate student. The biggest takeaway from that access, though, is this: a pdf is not a book. 

A pdf is not a book, and this is a central argument we return to over and over again. How do these things students make exist in the world? For example, I have several copies of Volume #12. Volume #12 is supposed to be yellow all around on the front cover, back cover, and spine. Several are, and then one copy I have is only yellow on the front cover, and back cover, with a white spine. I have multiple copies of Volume 16. Volume #16 is, also, supposed to have a soft- egg yoke yellow cover. One copy I own looks like the ink rank out on the printer, and they sent it anyway. These things matter enormously. Especially when similar patterns turned up in Volume #7, around a decade earlier across 3 copies I own. 

What we call ‘a quality control issue’ now is in book history called ‘mouvance’, and ‘codicology’. A theme we will return to again and again is the idea that student publication mimics manuscript culture because they both focus on low quantities produced, large amounts of work involved, low amounts of funding, and uneven distribution and survival. Undergrad publication in the 2020s has direct correlations to manuscripts from the 700s, in my humble opinion. 

This is further backed up by the publication of Volume #11.5. The ‘.5’ does enormous work, because it was not pre-planned. It was aspirational, worked for, and something the editors drove for, and they actually managed to pull it off. The trade off was printed in minimal black-and-white, with paper that feels like cardboard for binding and covers instead of glossy photo paper like its predecessor and successor. 

These differences matter enormously, and a pdf of just the editor’s note does not convey the full story here. 

I became a UMass Boston student in the Spring of 2016, and have been there up until the time of writing ( Spring, 2026 semester.) I have been an undergrad student, a graduate student, and simultaneously a TA or a Teaching Fellow. And on occasion across the long years of study, I have found a small book called The Watermark. Left without ceremony or real announcement in a stack in a corner here or there, The Watermark is (or was) UMass Boston’s arts journal made by and for students. In Volume 16, from the Spring 2007 semester, their distribution logic for the time is laid out quite cleanly:

The Watermark is supported by a yearly grant from the UMB Student Senate as well as a generous contribution from UMB's Graduate Student Assembly. Copies of the journal are free to students, staff, and faculty of the University and are available throughout the campus. 

When it is not possible to speak factually about the journal, I have attempted to fill in the gaps as best I can while still acknowledging that I am not the definitive authority on anything, but rather a concerned student with access to data that no one else seems to have (so far as I can tell.) I have also supplemented this work with extensive photographic evidence, first hand questionnaires with people who either worked on the journal, or knew of the journal, or exist in a departmental capacity at UMass Boston in the 2020s. Outreach attempts include people as far back as 1999. 

When my physical holdings are combined knowledge from private collections, digital ScholarWorks copies, and unknown and largely undocumented late-run shadow-archive holdings, I am reluctantly forced to acknowledge I might be one of the few people currently at UMass who knows exactly where all 36 volumes, both official and unofficial, diffused across multiple locations, institutions, or boxes,  of The Watermark are currently findable. In addition to this I know who has access to all of them either formally or informally. Meticulous documentation of my understanding of where copies of The Watermark are held can be found in the section titled ‘A Tentative Publication Record’. 

Furthermore, I attempted to reach out latitudinally to my peers across FaceBook, Discord, and Reddit to track down missing copies of both The Watermark but this was like screaming into the void. 

This website can be read primarily as an independent history of student publishing at UMass Boston. It was not commissioned by the University. The research was conducted independently based on current student  / former student  testimony, as well as publicly available data hosted on the UMB Mass Media newspaper website, defunct personal websites, and LinkedIn profiles.  Therefore, any factual mistake found here is mine, as is any grammatical mistake.