Questionnaire #3: With Lila Bovenzi, Prose Editor of Queeah (2025)

*Note: while not directly connected to The Watermark, Lila is an MA-MFA student at UMass Boston previously engaged with publishing and editing student work at UMass Boston. I hope their perspective on what is required to run a student magazine from scratch might be valuable ancillary data when considering what Late Stage Watermark felt like, to show that this is a systemic issue across almost every student publication on campus, and not a journal-specific one isolated to just one or two journals. 

Question #1: Tell me about the development of your magazine, how did you get the idea to do this kind of work? Is this something you’ve always been interested in, or did taking the class kind of feed your interest?

1. I can't really take any credit for the origin of Queeah, since it was technically a class project and I was not the editor in chief. I was never super interested in the publishing industry before last year, but I wanted to know more about it as a writer who hopes to publish someday. After my experience with Queeah, I don't think I want a career in publishing, but editing is amazing. I am now an intern at Consequence Forum doing reading and editing for their fiction team and I love it.

Question #2: Building off of that, I understand it, your magazine was done for a class with Professor Askold Melnyczuk. Can you tell me about this process, and about the class in general? How many “issue #1’s” did your class produce?

1. For my Literary Editing and Publishing course with Professor Melnyczuk (Spring 2025), our big group project for the semester was to create and publish one issue of a literary magazine. Everyone in the class had to put together a pitch for their own idea, then we all presented and ranked our favorite pitches. Mine actually didn't win (my idea was for a magazine that accepted only rejected work and I was going to call it Chopped Liver), so I got assigned to work on Queeah's team. There were four groups total, meaning four different magazines were launched by the end of the semester. One of them was a special issue of Breakwater Review (UMass Boston's lit mag) run by the current co-Editors, Sonja Nieuwejaar and Julie Petrini. Another is Literally, which is also still ongoing. Here's their website: https://www.literallylitmag.com/ The assignment was to publish one issue only, but our professor wanted us to create pitches with longevity in mind because we spent so much of the semester speaking to editors and people working in the publishing industry, learning how challenging it is to build something that can endure. I think the class was inspiring to a lot of the students (including myself), who see themselves working in some aspect of the industry someday. 

Question #3: On your first page, you list a number of donors. Would you be willing to talk about funding your student publication? Did you get university support, even informally?

1. We had to find all our own funding, so Brody started a GoFundme so that we didn't have to pay for printing out of pocket. We solicited donations mostly from friends and family. My parents, boyfriend, uncle, and a few of my friends all donated, which was really sweet. In the end we raised almost $700 and had plenty to print 50 copies of the first issue. We gave a free copy to all of our donors and contributors.

Question #4: Do you have any plans for an Issue #2? Why? What motivates you to do Issue #2 if yes? If no, then what would you need to plan / launch an Issue #2? 

1. Issue #2 was always on the table, but once summer came and our design person dropped out of the project, it was just difficult to execute the vision. I got really busy with work and Brody also had stuff going on post-graduation. To be sustainable as a lit mag, you have to set up so many different things like a submission portal, joining CLMP, finding distributors and stuff like that. It's just a lot of work and there were only two of us, so I don't think we were well-equipped. I would love to participate in a reunion someday though!

Question #5: How did you find contributors, and what was your selection process like?

1. We found contributors by soliciting from Brody's social media as well as asking family and friends for contributions. We received submissions over email, and we didn't charge. I ended up getting work from a few undergrads in my fiction workshop, and Brody got a few from poetry people that he knew too. My sister Grace gave us the beautiful photos, and my friend Anh designed the official Queeah logo. It was awesome getting contributions from so many people in our communities, but it did make it difficult to send out rejections. Luckily we only got a couple submissions that didn't quite reach our standards. Otherwise we tried to fit everything in and worked with the authors to lightly edit if they were alright with it. We got a pretty manageable number of submissions, so everyone read and gave their thoughts on each piece. This was by far my favorite part of the whole project. Reading everyone's work and getting to send out acceptance emails with comments was so much fun, and everyone was really excited to pitch in. We also had a launch party where many of our contributors came to read their work and it was a blast. 

Question #6: To the best of your knowledge, did anyone in the archive or university admin know about your work building a student-led publication? What would you have thought if someone from the archive or the university did show up to class and ask to learn about your class’s project as a student led publication? 

1. Brody actually worked (possibly still works) at Healey library, but I don't think he got any other university/archive people involved. We were thinking of using his connections to get flyers put up in the library, but since we only had a few weeks to put everything together, we just didn't have time. It would have been great if someone else took interest, but we were already so lucky to have the support of our classmates and communities. 

Question #7: During your class, did journals like ‘The Watermark’ or ‘Writ Large’ ever come up in conversation?

1. We obviously talked a lot with the Breakwater people since they were one of the teams in our class, and they were an amazing resource, but 'the Watermark' and 'Writ Large' never came up.

Followup email question #1: ​This is gold standard kind of stuff Lila, you have no idea how valuable all of this is and it confirms a lot of suspicions I privately hold about the state of student publishing on campus. I did have one two-part follow-up question;

Briefly, have you ever even heard of Writ Large, The Watermark? And, 

Have you ever heard of the Waterfront? 

1. I'm really glad this is helpful! I have heard of The Watermark, but not Writ Large. I thought The Watermark was an old lit mag at UMass Boston that went under, and that the Waterfront is sort of a student-run reboot/revitalization project. I actually have a copy of the Spring 2025 issue because a few of my peers from last spring's Advanced Fiction workshop contributed to the issue and invited me to its launch.