Very little has been said, in truth, about the Middle Period of Watermark history between the years 2009 and 2015 because of an absence of data in almost every point of the process, save Volume #21 and its strange history. A history so strange, that, the more one looked at it the more one became confused by it. 

Originally, I assumed it was a variation of an unprinted PDF. Then a while after,  I believed otherwise. Based on a quote from the undigitized Volume #23 that the true original had been “lost”. Quoting directly from page 337:

Interest in the student literary journal seems to go in cycles. Our few lulls in production – 1974, 1988, 2011 and a lost issue created in 2012 – illustrate the hazards of our quick turn over rate. Each of these journals is a product of self discovery. In 2012, Andria Ward assembled a volume of The Watermark that never printed. A year later her volume was redesigned and published as Volume 21 in the fall of 2013. 

This naturally gained my immediate attention. What does one mean by “lost”. “Lost” how? “Lost” when? An infuriatingly vague word used once in a 5 sentence paragraph, buried between photos of old Watermark Covers in the middle of a micro-essay about the history of the journal as they understood it in 2014 up to that point. 

The students of the time believed the original journal was gone forever, and that all that lived was the redesign that became Volume #21. I at once understood this to be a kind of Simulacrum, a copy lacking an original. And this got my near undivided attention for the 24 hours it took me to find the original Editor-in-Chief of that “lost” issue. 

Firstly, it must be noted that Andrea Ward was not the only listed staff member working on The Watermark in 2012, but she was the most influential and dedicated to putting out a journal. This pattern has significantly more in common with the Late Stage Period of 2016-2022 than it does 2012. 

The issue was confirmed to have been never released as it was originally built due to funding issues. I was told that, quote, “I was told I could order 150 copies of it as a concession for not getting a full print run, then when I got quotes for that they said “actually, make it 75.” Then,“actually there’s no money at all, PDF version!”

As an aside, this narrative neatly coincides with the quotation we will lean on later, about how 2013 also was potentially a digital-only release, before funding was somehow found by the school to put out the 2013 release of a new Volume 20, and what the modified version of the original Volume 20. 

What immediately concerned me was the fact that Andrea, as the 2012 Editor-in-Chief, told me via email she had no idea her work had been “reassembled” (to borrow the word used by the staff behind Volume 23.) As she recalled, she handed in her Volume, there was no money to print it, and that was that. Now, while she was credited as “editor” of the Volume #21 release, her own testimony confirms she did not know this was going to happen. 

So how could she have edited Volume #21, given the documented changes we are about to see? 

 There was also some initial confusion as to if her name had been spelled wrong in Volume #21 and #23. It is not “Andria”, as written, but “Andrea”. 

Andrea asked me for a link to Volume #21, and I sent her the only one available: the institutional ScholarWorks PDF. I articulated my position of trying to map the history of this volume given all the (at the time) little inconsistencies about originality and PDF’s, and she told me via email that no one told her this was happening to her original 2012 Volume, and that she would check to see herself if the ScholarWorks PDF is the actual original as she understands it to be, or not. She mentioned also, it might still exist as a PDF in a dropbox account. 

I politely requested if she was willing to share a PDF of the original 2012 Volume, should she find it in her dropbox and emails. I had low hopes given that we are now 14 years into the future from that date. Two hours later, I had it. And now we can do comparative analysis between the original 2012 version, the ScholarWorks PDF version, and the hardcopy. My suspicion was that we were presenting the modified hard copy as the “official” original copy from 2013’s Volume #21, but now I am interested in deeper history. What had changed between the 2012 assembly, and the 2013 reassembly? To that end, the bulk of what follows will focus almost exclusively on PDF comparisons, as the PDF of Volume #21that I have is the same as the print copy. 

Before I had done anything myself, Andrea confirmed three things about the Volume 21 staff:

Given the fact that this work is still copyrighted by the original artists, and I cannot track them down individually, I will only include photos of the table of contents of each volume, and we will do comparative analysis based off of this for as long as possible before I dig into the 2012  PDF’s specifics. But let me first highlight the oddity of the situation, where I now have the original pdf, the physical copy, and the modified pdf. I have the entire lifecycle of Volume #21 here, while the official institution appears to present a linear history. 

The first thing I noticed is the cover art. The ScholarWorks PDF / hardcopy exterior cover art is different, like historical manuscripts were occasionally rebound with different covers than what had been intended. The 2011 cover is included in the Volume #21 PDF interior, and the original editor’s note: 

Thank You

Donna Neal, Reshma Patil, Aaron Griffin, Amanda Huff, and everyone who submitted their beautiful artwork. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all.

Was not included. 

Something I also had not truly noticed until now was the typo on the front cover. The front cover of Volume #21 of The Watermark states “since 1994”. The first volume of The Watermark was released in “1993-1994” according to Volume #1, and released in 1993 according to the ScholarWorks PDF. Also, on the back of this formerly lost issue was “Volume XX”. It seems to me the issue was pushed back by 1.5 years Moving onto the table of contents, these differences between PDF’s will be listed in bullet point format. 

It looks as if most of the art which was cut ties directly into the boilerplate language and funding. The art was cut before the text was cut, but it does seem odd that original contributors were cut and replaced, such as Reshma Patil losing her photography and Christi Kim gaining 1. If there were budget constraints regarding printing photography, as Volume #21 states both in the hard copy and in the PDF, why were there changes between contributors? Why not do a faithful 1-1 release under a sort of “from the vaults” style situation?

However, when one lines this up against the data presented in the financial reconstruction, and an idle comment from Andrea, we can make a tentative inference. 

Quoting: “A January 25, 2013 Mass Media newspaper article (which does not list an author) states, quote “We don’t have the funding,” said Donna Neal, Assistant Director of Arts and Cultural Activity. The literary journal is funded through the $16 media fee. Students have the option to waive the fee, and in recent semesters more than half the student body chose to do just that. “I know there are a lot of mandatory fees on the tuition bill and things that students can’t afford. Money has been tight over the last couple of years for lots of people, and students will deduct anything they can. Unfortunately for student publications, they deduct the $16,” said Neal.”

It is possible to imagine, even potentially most likely, that the 2013 recounting was the culmination of a 2011-2012 Funding Crisis not well understood currently with the available data. Andrea herself confirmed there was no money to print the issue, and our bullet point lists shows that by this point there were structural funding issues. 

 Volume #21 also features things that the 2012 version did not, such as advertisements to join the MFA program and apply by January 15th 2014. Furthermore, the PDF I have of the unreleased 2012 volume is formatted in a 6x9 document. This puts it squarely in the aesthetic tradition of the Golden Age Period (2003-2009). The 2010 Volume is a saddle stitched magazine that is magazine sized, and Volume #20 and #21 are different dimensions entirely. I am now, in light of the documentation, inclined to view the Middle Period of Watermark history (2009-2015) as the moment when everything began to break, but nothing looked wholly wrong yet. 

Between the morphology between books, the funding cuts, and overall loss of then-recent history (such naming Andrea in 2012 as Andria in 2013/2014), all of the ingredients that defined The Late Stage Period of 2016-2022 were in place. But the resilience of the system coming from the Golden Age period, where there were thousands of print runs, large staffs, consistent student submissions numbering in the triple digits, and even off-campus interest meant that it would take time for the impacts to truly be felt. The system continued working not knowing that parts were falling out as it moved.