We have, until now, almost exclusively looked at the English department, which gives the incorrect impression that the English Department is solely responsible for literary culture on campus and for student publications. This, again, is incorrect. The problem of archival collapse is systemic and institutional and cannot be cleanly laid at the feet of any one department. To illustrate this, let us discuss CHORD. It is a product of the Asian American Studies Department, as best I can tell. But we know that, at least around 2009, it had an office on campus that was clustered around the other literary magazine offices. Fascinatingly, this lines up with our Golden Age theory of The Watermark's history. We could, with some mild to moderate speculation, suggest that this was a Golden Age point-blank for student publications. This is because, chronologically, CHORD existed from 2005-2009(ish) which does overlap nicely with the 2003-2009 Watermark Golden Age. Furthermore, LUX was documented as operating with visible success in this period, as well. Recall from above, it did have a launch party for a volume in 2009 that was big enough to result in several photos making it into an alumni magazine. It also was relaunched into a formal magazine in 2006, placing it square in the middle third of the Golden Age. But let us return to CHORD.
Frankly, I had no idea CHORD existed until I researched funding for The Watermark. As an English student for 10 years at UMass, this was embarrassing when I saw the first reference. It was actually kind of haunting when I actually learned what CHORD was. As a trained English pedagogy student-teacher with an interest in ESL work and the international aspect of campus culture, what happened here was disappointing to learn there was an international student multilingual journal for speakers of other Englishes and English as a second language students. As a researcher, Mass Media journalist Denez McAdoo’s November 27, 2006 article was the point of contact linking CHORD to the UMass writing environment, and Denez is the critical point of contact that ensured memory survived until now. Another Mass Media article from March 2nd, 2008, provides the detail that, quote,“among some of the clubs receiving the largest amount of supplemental funds were LUX magazine, which received $4,500 to put out their spring issue, CHORD Magazine, which received $3,000 to fund their production costs.”
I believe that it is a departmentally sponsored magazine for the Asian American Studies Department, which the English Department shares a floor with in Wheatley Hall. The website is so old and untouched that it links farther back to an even older one when they were in an office on the second floor, and seemed to not have had an official UMass email, but a personal gmail account. In fact, it is so old that when you click on the ‘contact’ button for many of the names of the faculty listed under the ‘contact information’ tab on the right, the field automatically pulls up personal gmail and yahoo accounts instead of official UMB ones for then-faculty.
It was at this point I discovered it was student-built in 2004, and last updated in 2008. So the website which hosted CHORD been built on top of it, in a way, like opening layers of a nesting doll. The student website under the CHORD website had last been updated in 2008, and it is no coincidence in my mind that the last issue was digitally published in 2008, as well. There was some collapse present, either funding dried up or all the students involved graduated (remember, the 4 year lifecycle and institutional resetting of student memory.) Maybe it became too much to both run a magazine at Issue #5, and run what appears to be a custom website that hosts it. Or at least, this was my assumption up until April of 2026.
CHORD is fascinating and deserving of remembrance because it is doing double-duty lifting. It is a departmentally sponsored student publication, yes, but it is one specifically tied to non-native English speaking students, international students, and a distinctly ESL context. I would like to quote the entirety of the Issue #1 opening statement below;
ESL: Englishes as a Shared Language
“Chord” here means a combination of three or more tones sounded at the same instance making one harmonious sound. In Chord Magazine, therefore, we aim to present as many voices as possible, which, we believe, produce one America chord that sounds harmoniously. And, we also believe that including various voices from people of various backgrounds regardless of the quality of each voice will ultimately enable us to produce a higher quality of America chord.
We’ve been concerned that especially in writing field, Americans are not provided an equal space to publish their voices as well as an equal treatment toward their use of their own Englishes. For instance, writings by ESL students are often regarded “not good enough” because their Englishes present “grammatical errors” with which some people think a writer loses her/his authority over her/his work. In fact, with corrections on their Englishes, many ESL students who like writing are discouraged to write in their own ways and feel as if their writings would never be as good as standard English users. [emphasis mine.]
We rather think that those “errors” will strengthen her/his writing, for it insists who she/he is and speaks up her/his own voice. Our shared language should be “American” English, which of course includes any kinds of English that are used by “Americans”. Our English should reflect the diversity of United States. Although including various Englishes may make our communications difficult, we’d better be proud of the difficulty, for it proves our efforts of including and understanding different, yet equal “Americans”.
Thus, Chord Magazine is here to provide a space for us to publish our voices while also to show an equal value of various Englishes and encourage us to produce our own voices in our own tones.
02/20/2006
(unsigned)
If we look at the long arc of student publication that we have been discussing, CHORD is a very unique attempt at a student publication (on what is already a very diverse and international campus) because it is explicitly carving a space for marginalized voices. But in April of 2026, I would learn of the existence of one single hard copy of CHORD surviving in a private collection on campus. My eyes jumped out of their sockets and I laughed a little nervously when I saw which volume of CHORD it was in specific. I said to that the private collector needed:
“To put that behind glass immediately. Their website is 20 years old and abandoned now. I’ve downloaded everything, but the PDF releases only go up to Volume #4. I had no idea there was a Volume #5, as this is not something on the website. You have the only hard copy of this entire journal I have ever seen, and a non-digitized one at that.”
And that was the end of that conversation, and I have no idea what happened to the book after.
It would not be until early July of 2026 that I would find a hard copy of Volume #4.