The Consequences of a Recycling Bin, or, On The Waterfront. 


September of 2026 marks the final semester in which I am on campus before graduation. While it is sad, September always brings something far more important than student graduation from a purely archival perspective: faculty office clean-outs. As a result of this seasonal event, this essay will be split into two parts. 

Part #1: Following Money. 

At the start of the semester after passing this large recycling bin on the 6th floor of Wheatley Hall I noticed sticking out of it a black cover with polkadot letters I could not see from a distance. Instinctively, I knew this was Volume #2 Issue #1 of Writ Large. I took the two copies sticking out of the top, and went on my way. On September 19th, a Saturday morning, I woke up and asked myself: I wonder what else is in those semi-sealed boxes stacked inside?

So this is where I was at 8:30 AM, carefully pulling out reams of paper including:

And, crucially from the bottom of the topmost box, 10 pristine copies of Writ Large Volume #2 Issue #1. To reiterate, I do not believe this publication is currently held by the University Archives. I have searched through their processed holdings across their website and can find no direct mention of Writ Large. The library was already contacted [see this artifact] and did not have the one unrelated copy on hand the finding aid said they did. I believe that these 10 copies, combined with the others currently in my possession, make it the largest concentration of physical copies of this issue, potentially even this publication, currently easily searchable. 

I am uninterested in the graded student work. It contained personal or evaluative information inappropriate to collect, or reproduce here. Those materials are not analyzed here and were left for eventual destruction. I did take the copies of Writ Large, and the zine. Bluntly once something is in a box bound for a recycler, the message is clear: I do not need or want this, or else do not consider it something worth keeping. 

Luckily for the historical record, I do very much want these objects, and I do consider them worth keeping. 

We have already written extensively on Writ Large and I see no reason to do so now. It was as I was packing these books up and preparing to leave that another thought occurred to me: what if there are also student newspapers in here?

Again, luckily for me, there were. And this got me thinking rather aggressively about the student paper and its relationships to journals like Writ Large and Watermark and even their successor, Waterfront. Please note that, frankly, this section is based on potentially outdated information I received from 2025, editorial interviews from figures last on campus in 2022/2023/now, and I am decidedly past my undergad years, having been siloed into The English Department. 

I have never hidden my admiration of the student newspaper on campus. I have spoken on the record with several former Editor-in-Chief’s and student workers on it. I could not have done my financial reconstruction without their reporting. But the last time a student publication was covered at UMB by the student paper was in 2019-ish, according to their own website's publication record. The Watermark / Writ Large were actively publishing then and into the early 2020s. Why no coverage? I believe I can offer a tentative and preliminary hypothesis based on data now gathered across multiple contexts. 

This hypothesis is based, in part, off of the 2026 Alumni magazine (Beacons) and one line in it which automatically got gears turning. The line is in an article which is not carrying an author's name, but is extensively quoting Mass Media EIC Elijah Howarth in a sort of “five fun facts!” bullet point format. The specific line which has caught my automatic attention is this: “The Mass Media is financially supported exclusively [emphasis mine] by students and operates independently within the office of Student Activities and Leadership.”

Recall Questionnaire #1, Question #4 with Katrina:

Question #4: How much institutional support would you say that University Administration gave The Waterfront / Writ Large / The Watermark? 



Frankly, when Watermark entered the Mass Media umbrella, did it cease being perceived as an external campus organization for the purposes of Mass Media's own journalism?


Consider also Questionnaire #2, Question #3 with Elijah:

Email Question #3: how much communication and coordination is there between the waterfront and mass media?  Is the waterfront more of an independent student project / club? 



The chain of events becomes, as I see it, something like this:

Stage #1: The Watermark is funded by a variety of on campus sources for multiple years (as proven by our financial reconstruction) up until around 2009-2013/14, where it is revealed that the Watermark is funded by the optional student fees in 2013. 


Stage #2: By 2022-2023, the last year of production for The Watermark, it was run by two individuals (paid) and printing at or under 1,000 copies and, according to Katrina, “I also think upper administration had no idea it existed, since the publications printed so infrequently (and they weren't causing "trouble" the way The Mass Media was 😉)”


Stage #3: in 2023-2024 The Watermark and Writ Large merge into one publication. According to Riley Hammond, in the editors introduction to The Waterfront Issue #1: “The decision to fuse two publications into one was made largely by the Editor-in-Chief of The Mass Media, Katrina Sanville...I know that this decision was motivated by a perceived lack of student interest. Submissions for Writ Large were low, and many of them not formatted as an op-ed. The Watermark had many submissions, but many were from the same couple students.”


This new organization was, according to Mass Media EIC Elijah in 2026: “The Mass Media is technically in charge of overseeing The Waterfront, and we have some amount of budgetary control [emphasis mine] for the organization. However, in practice, they are basically an independent club and run themselves -- we don't have anything to do with their day-to-day operations.”


Stage #4: The Summer 2026 volume of Beacons confirms that The Mass Media is funded The Mass Media is financially supported exclusively by students and operates independently within the office of Student Activities and Leadership. 


Student publications at UMass Boston were student funded as early as 2013, and as recently as 2026. The predominant publishing apparatus on campus is the student newspaper. There existed from 1993-2023 several student papers which were prior to 2013 funded through a variety of means and post-2013 funded by student fees. This is established here. 

I would like to, with some growing confidence, suggest that these student fees were first routed through the student newspaper, and then into the journals based on: 




And that, as finances contracted and perception of interest declined, the literary productions fell to the side. I know also, for a fact, that the student paper was cut from a weekly to a biweekly format and that based on the 2026 issue of Beacons they can only afford to print, quote, “1,500 copies” per period. If the newspaper cannot even afford to be a weekly publication, and admin is (per Katrina) unaware of the literary publications because they are not “causing trouble like the paper was” I would theorize that the student journals were, bluntly, increasingly easy to forget. Financial scarcity forces prioritization and if the organization in charge of your budget is already facing budgetary issues, money is going to become increasingly awkward. 

Part #2: The Waterfront, a Brief History. 

In November of 2025 when I was thinking intensely about this project, I was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. This means I was listed as an ‘instructor of record’ online, and university databases listed me as ‘Professor Anderson’. 

Imagine my deep shock when I received an email addressing me as Professor and asking me if a few undergrads could come to my class and advertise submissions for something called The Waterfront. 

The honest truth was I couldn’t afford to help in the timeline they wanted. I had two classes of 16 and we were learning what ‘Exigence’ was. I had no time beyond an email blast to my students that I’m not sure got out because I, also was drowning in 3 graduate classes in the evening on top of the two undergraduate classes I taught. They were, according to my notes, soliciting submissions for Issue #2. The Canva powerpoint they have to advertise themselves during in-class presentations is still active and available to me, and I would like to post one quote from it:

“The Watermark is the Umass Boston’s bi-annual student literary and arts magazine. We’ve been around since 1979, celebrating the creative work of students and community members by sharing their pieces with the campus and the world. “

The students at The Waterfront considered themselves the direct successors to The Watermark, and consider themselves (if I understand this chart correctly) to be the direct successors of the original student publications on campus founded in the late 1970s, on to now. According to the emails I have, only 3 undergrads worked on it in the Fall of 2025. Once I resumed contact with the group, by Spring 2026 only two did. 

Furthermore, these private emails, which I am deliberately not releasing out of respect for the sender, had one interesting quotation I would like to excerpt: We have links as well to previous issues from previous years. However this is when the magazine was under a different name, The Watermark. We are currently working on a website to store all of the scanned issues. 

This website is, I believe, the ScholarWorks website ran by the University library / archives. 

However, after physically holding the master copy of The Waterfront Issue #1 signed by all the staff, I have some gentle reservations about accepting this claim entirely at face value, having by now looked at student and faculty publications across UMass Boston since 1970-2026. 

What is beyond essential for us to remember is that the Editor-in-Chief of the first issue of the Waterfront was Riley Hammond. Riley Hammond worked on both the Mass Media, and Writ Large. Writ Large is Decidedly, unequivocally, not The Watermark. This is an irrefutable fact that we have spent this entire website articulating from multiple angles, writers, and points of view. 

The physical hard copy of Issue #1 of the Waterfront then, unsurprisingly considering its editorial genealogy, takes the exact dimensions and shapes of Writ Large, which has always been a more stapled-magazine like publication consistently in a tabloid sized page. The Fall 2022 copy of Writ Large is 38 pages + 1 blank page at the back, of non-fiction and poetry, photography, and art. The Waterfront, which shares the exact same aesthetic saddle-stitched printing methods, is 45 pages + 1 blank page at the back of art, poetry, literature, and nonfiction. With all due respect to The Waterfront staff for their hard work, The Waterfront is from my point of view not a successor to The Watermark. It is the successor that Writ Large was trying to become, brought into existence by the last EIC of the Writ Large.

My personal belief is that The Watermark offered Waterfront a substantially more legible institutional ancestry than Writ Large did.It needed something it could point to and justify itself based on financially, historically, and culturally on campus. The Watermark had been publishing since 1993 and longer if you include the predecessor publications. It had real institutional memory including the ScholarWorks PDFs, copies on campus, faculty memory, and an admittedly large documented body online through the Mass Media and other independent sources. 

Writ Large had none of that. Writ Large lacked the same publicly accessible, durable, and searchable institutional record. And because of its stated-purpose as an exclusively nonfiction publication, it suffered obscurity in a financial environment that brought out competition for priority funding. 

Even if this hypothesis is incorrect, I am confidently stating here that, materially, The Waterfront has more in common with Writ Large morphologically than it did any issue or period of The Watermark. I therefore do not think Waterfront is adequately understood simply as Watermark under a new name. The surviving evidence instead suggests a merged succession: Waterfront inherits from both Watermark and Writ Large, while its first issue appears materially and editorially drastically continuous with Writ Large.

There is one further thing that, sadly, The Waterfront Inherited. Significant risk of information vulnerability and obscurity. Turning back to our histories and the questionnaires section, I had several peers on campus who took a class on editing and publishing. I asked them all one question, verbatim: 

 Have you ever even heard of Writ Large, The Watermark? And, Have you ever heard of the Waterfront? 

Here are the answers I got:





Two out of Three students in an editing and publishing class whose purpose in the class was student publishing had heard of the official UMB publication, from professors and other students directly. Not from any campus-wide infrastructure. For example, copies of Watermark were aggressively distributed via newspaper stands, photographs, and online advertisements, and posters. I have found posters for Writ Large in The English Department from 2017. I have never seen one for The Waterfront. Apart from poor campus ‘ambient circulation’ outside of word of mouth, The Waterfront also has the unfortunate reality of sharing a name with the UMB Waterfront Recreation Program. It has an instagram account, prominently featured on Google, with zero posts since May 12th 2025 and 80 followers, including the English Department and several other UMB clubs, but no real administrative organs like the MFA program, the English MA Program, or any other external creative writing source. Existing relationships did not necessarily produce broad or durable visibility.

It has a club page on official UMB digital platforms that has not been updated or maintained since Riley Hammond was EIC, but this platform seems to be defunct as I found a second student club platform with different contact information. The defunct platform states that: “The Waterfront is a student-led publication made by students for students. Publishing work does not need to be stressful, exhausting, or competitive. Submitting to The Waterfront offers the opportunity for all students to share their voice! We are always looking for contributors to help us capture the literary, artistic, and academic talent of UMass Boston. All majors, skill-levels, and mediums of expression are welcome. No experience is required.” I have reached out to the names listed on the current club platform.

Cumulatively, there are two additional facts I would like to introduce into the record. The first is the status of The Waterfront as a club. No other student literary magazine, to my extensive but not omniscient knowledge, has ever been registered as a club at UMass Boston between 1993-2026. Funding, while the record is fragmented, has always pointed to relationships like student government, external prize support, and Mass Media funding via student fees. 

If funding was scarce, the decision to register as a club at UMass Boston is ingenious because money is always set aside for registered student clubs by the student undergraduate and graduate governments. Now, it might not be a lot (ranging anywhere from $500, $1,000 dollars a semester) but for a resource-starved publication of 3 undergrads that can be an obscene amount of money that you control that did not first get filtered through the budgetary apparatus of the student newspaper. 

While we cannot prove it was an intentional decision, it does two things very very neatly:

This was organizational fact #1. Now let us turn to organizational fact #2. 

I have been told, and have documented in Questionnaire #11 and in several off-the-record conversations with alumni that the Watermark, Writ Large, and Waterfront were required to only accept current student submissions. This is why none of these journals appear on the broader internet submission platforms like Chillsubs, Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, and Leafminer (to name a few). Per Riley Hammond, who did write on the record: “The student status of our dedicated contributors was confusing. I believe one of the contributors was an alumni who attended UMass Boston decades ago, which was technically frowned upon by our advisor because he wanted us to include student work first and foremost. We also weren't supposed to include any professor's work as a student magazine, but I believe we did in the “Mind over Matter” issue. The previous EIC allegedly added works from non-students entirely. I believe an article from the New York Times is in the “Millennial Map” issue. I don't have a copy, but there was one in The Waterfront’s office.”

The Waterfront has inherited, sadly, the same underlying organizational structures which plagued Writ Large at a time where there was even less campus awareness and integration than Writ Large or Watermark. While it is understandable that UMB would want a UMB journal, limiting its funding, staffing, and even criteria for involvement seems deeply counterproductive. Take, for example, the MFA department at UMass Boston. 

It runs The Breakwater Review, a digital only publication with around $2,000 a semester in prize support and paid editorial cohorts that solicits guest judges and international submissions. It has, as of the time of writing, put out its 41st issue since its founding in April of 2009. In fact, The Breakwater Review has multiple things in common with the Golden Age Period of The Watermark. Funding, prize support, departmental integration, and a stable submissions base. The fact that The Waterfront does not have this implies a choice in organizational structures that operate within materially different structures inside the same university.