Fall 2022’s issue of The Watermark is, I believe, the last. And as such, it should be discussed. Part of the reason I want to discuss it is because I am remarkably fortunate to know the Editor-in-Chief, David Earl. Because he was an MFA student and I was an MA student, we don’t have a lot of academic overlap, but we met through a mutual friend and share some similar hobbies and literary inclinations, and got to talking, and over the course of our conversations it naturally came out that he was the Editor-In-Chief of the Watermark for a time. For a full accounting of our time spent talking about The Watermark, please see Questionnaire #6.
I asked David to fill out a questionnaire, the same one I asked every Editor, Editor-in-Chief, or Co-Editor to fill out. But David was unique among them in that he is still a peer, and a friend. As a result our off the record conversations about The Watermark were both more honest and more personal, removed by however many decades of separation from the labor when rose-tinted glasses get put on. I would like to quote to you the Editor’s Introduction to Volume #35 in full, which is not digitized and therefore unavailable online:
Well hello, I don’t believe we’ve met before! This is my first semester as the Editor-In-Chief of this storied journal, and it’s been…well, I won’t lie, it’s been a bit difficult picking everything up, especially after our long spell under COVID-19. But despite all that, it’s been an incredibly rewarding job and it’s been an incredible privilege to read and work with the creative side of the UMass Boston Community. Thank you to Chuck, our advisor, for both his firm, guiding hand and for giving us the creative freedom to do what we do. An eternal thanks to Tim, my managing editor (and resident goblin in the English Department) who, despite his endless list of campus responsibilities, has been invaluable for getting the word out on submissions and helping me put the journal together. Last but not least, thank you to our contributors, both new and old; we’d be nothing without you. I hope you all enjoy our magazine!
By the end, the list of staff in Volume #35 numbered three. David, Chuck the passionate admin member responsible for coordinating it and a million other unrelated things, and managing editor Percy. I would like to point out that by this point The Watermark migrated from living in Wheatley Hall to an office in Campus Center, the administrative headquarters of UMass Boston with a food court and five floors of offices dedicated to student affairs, like managing the locker rentals.
Repeating for a moment my earlier statistics, Spring 2022 had 14 individual contributors. Fall 2022 had 23, and had moved back from saddle stitched binding to being perfect bound. David would later tell me this was for two reasons. The first being that Spring 2022 just did not have enough contributors to make a perfect bound book. The second that he had moved back to a perfect bound format because he was trying to establish some standardization.
When looking at the acknowledgments of Volume #35, two people are mentioned. Riley Hammond, and Olivia Reid of the Mass Media newspaper. But they were thanked for their assistance on the level of their expertise. There is no mention of awards, faculty involvement from the English Department or MFA staff.
This suggests that, by the fall of 2022, there was no institutional transfer of Watermark memory. Indeed, our Appendix demonstrates this was occurring as early as 2014. The Watermark had, by this point, become a 2 person staff with 1 faculty advisor living in an open-floor room of Campus Center dominated by a giant whiteboard with the words Mass Media on it (speaking from personal experience, having seen the room.)
When Volume #35 was produced, the task of running a student journal had become somehow more insular and more herculean and it is a testament to the students overseeing it, who were, as I understand it based off of private conversations, under supported and under mentored.
And, it must be stressed, there were only two of them in 2022, an Editor-in-Chief and a Managing Editor, with no knowledge that in prior years the Watermark had bigger staff in the past. In fact, this is not just a 2022 issue, but an issue as far back as 2018 (please see Questionnaire #6 with Editor-in-Chief Joy O’Halloran). Contrast this to 2001, where the journal lists the following figures;
Editor
Kendra A. Fitzgerald
Assistant Editor
Matthew Breton
Gallery Coordinator
Samantha Palmer
Art Editor
Philip Nerboso
Poetry Editor
Thomas Olivieri
Prose / Drama Editor
Morgan Turano
Art Jurors
Samantha Palmer
Josephine Bottari
Elizabeth Ward
Maya Grogorovich-Barsky
Poetry Readers
John Rhilinger
John Black
Adam Garnett
Michele Lisio
Prose / Drama Readers
James Dow
Carmella Kearsley
Jonus Johansen
Jason Campos
The numbers speak for themselves. The fact that the staff on Volume #35 was able to put out a journal is, frankly, amazing and it happened in spite of, not alongside, the university. It must be noted that staff members had experience working in campus publications from Community College. Personally, after reviewing the full story of its creation (through both official documentation, unofficial conversations, and official conversations) I do not think anyone else could have done Volume #35. They had the right combination of experience with logistics and management, and drive to make a publication as hollowed out and dysfunctional as Late-Stage Watermark work one more time. There was never any effort to make a transition to a digital publication to both cut costs in order to redirect money to staff pay or contributor pay, for reasons I am unsure of, but the end of The Watermark was never for lack of student effort.
There was, outside of The Internet Archive and ScholarWorks, three different Watermark websites which hosted freely available pdf’s. One redirects to malware. One is an official umb.edu website that will not load. The third just wont load at all. I digress.
To illustrate this, David confirms there was an assistant editor, who was very busy and ended up having to leave their position due to their many obligations as a student. That amounts to 1/3rd of the entire literary ecosystem’s staff quitting, because this editor was shared between two student publications, Watermark and Writ Large.
By the publication of Volume #35 there were only two people left, an Editor-in-Chief per magazine.
However, just because the last issue came out in Fall of 2022, does not mean that was the official end of The Watermark. Historically, there was some time before the two journals were merged to make The Waterfront. The exact date is hard to pinpoint but we can reasonably assume that, based on The Waterfront editorial message and the confirmed timeline of Katrina Sanville the merger happened between 2022-2024, and that the first issue of The Waterfront was released in 2025.