Questionnaire #4.5: With E. Rowan Mena, Reader /Co-Editor of The Watermark (2002-2006)

*Note: This might be the most important interview in the website, and it came about in March of 2026, after work had originally halted. It is the only editor interview I have been able to gather from the pre-2016 years, although not for lack of effort, and allows us to create a timeline that goes from 2002-2006 / 2013-2026, with a gap in the middle I cannot fill despite trying, that coincides with our Middle Period of Watermark history. E. Rowan Mena demonstrates what a “Golden Age” at a journal like The Watermark looks like not just in theory but in practice. Please forgive the nonstandard numbering, as this interview came significantly later in the process and had to be added in quickly.  

Question #1: Can you please introduce yourself a little and tell me how long you worked at The Watermark? How did you come to join the staff?  

1. I’m E. Rowan Mena, I joined The Watermark staff in I believe 2002-03 as a poetry reader. At the end of the year when that year’s editors were stepping down they asked if I was interested in taking one of the editor roles. At the time there were always two editors, usually one art student and one writer. My first year co-editor was an art student named Derek Mangus, and neither of us had any experience editing a journal so we learned it together. I stayed on until I graduated in 2006, co-editing with another writer named Amber Johns. I really loved the job – it was my favorite on-campus job I had at the time (I also worked in admissions, and for WUMB, during my time as editor at The Watermark).  

Question #2: What was the culture of the journal like at the time, to the best of your recollection? Feel free to include anecdotes or personal recollections as you like.  

1. I have a memory disorder, so this is mostly based on my emails from the time. It was a large group of volunteer staff, many of whom became friends during our time on the journal together. We had regular meetings on and off campus, hung out together at one another’s apartments (the campus was entirely commuter at the time), and celebrated together often at The Banshee (I think it’s still there…). We had a regular Friday afternoon hang out at The Banshee, along with our friends from other activities on campus (mine were mostly from the Student Senate and my Study of Religion study group). I remember it being extremely social and some of the readers and editors and I are still friends today. It was a group of mostly really involved students who cared a lot about art and literature and each other, and invested time and energy into building a community around these interests.  At one point we also had a writer’s club started by Brennen Molina called The Writer’s Circle, which met weekly on Fridays and functioned as a workshop for students to read and give feedback on each other’s work. Some of the work ended up published in The Watermark and even won some of the prizes. There was a nice write-up about it in the Spring 2006 issue of the English MA Program Newsletter. 

Question #3: What was student engagement like during your time at The Watermark, as best you can remember, how many submissions on average did you get per issue? How many people worked together to produce an issue?  

1. We worked really hard on engagement as a staff. I could dig through my old files and look for the submission spreadsheets, but to the best of my memory we got maybe 200-300 submissions per semester total across all genres and mediums, the majority of which were poems. We did a lot of outreach which included tabling, classroom visits to art and creative writing classes, flyers, and email campaigns (this was before social media). There was a staff of about 40 total, some of whom were more involved than others. Our core of super active staff was about 10 people, the genre editors and a few readers. Their charisma and dedication really drove engagement more broadly.  

Question #4: Do you have any memory of how many copies of each issue were made that you worked on? Some editors' notes say ‘This Volume had 4,000 copies made’ and others don’t track production rates. Even a rough guess would be super helpful.  

1. For the last issue I was editor for (Spring 2006) we printed 2500. For Fall 2005 it was 3000. For Spring 2005 it was 2000. I couldn’t find the records going back earlier in my email, but I could look for them in my external harddrive if it’s useful.  

Question #4.5: How were copies you did print distributed on campus?  

1. We had a release party where the books were distributed to contributors, faculty, and staff. We had book stands around campus that we shared with the newspaper and we stocked those for the last few weeks of the semester, and then for the next semester while we were in production for the next issue. Some copies were distributed to local bookstores and community writing spaces.  

Question #5:  What was institutional support for The Watermark like in your time working at it? What did UMass-provided expertise, mentorship, and support look like? 

1. My staff advisor through student activities was Donna Neal. She provided me with training on the process, and also organized a training for me on InDesign when I began as editor. She also facilitated us going to student literary journal conferences regionally which was very useful. The previous editors and Donna taught us most of what I needed, and then I endeavored to do the same for my successor Rosie Healey. I had extensive support from my faculty mentors Askold Melnyczuk and Lloyd Schwartz, as well as Joyce Peseroff and everyone else in the English Creative Writing track faculty. They offered mentorship and expertise in abundance, especially in concern with connecting to the writing community off campus which was one of my explicit goals for The Watermark while I was editor. We received significant financial support from the Student Senate, which I was also a member of during my time as editor. Many student senators were involved in promoting our activities, and came to our events usually. We were able to expand to two issues annually because of the financial support of the senate.  

Question #6: Some copies of The Watermark mention being able to buy copies online before the website went down. Do you recall if The Watermark had interest from people outside / off of UMass Boston’s Campus? Essentially, what was its reach?  

1. At my time we did not have a website or web store that I was involved in. We did distribute copies off campus through local bookstores and writing spaces, and occasionally got submissions from off-campus writers (including internatioally!). But it was mostly an on-campus community.  

Question #7: While you worked at The Watermark, was there an institutional memory of its past? By that I mean did The Watermark have an archival memory of itself and how it related to predecessors like Howth Castle, or was it more future facing towards producing the next issues?  

1. Sadly, not really. We had the library of past issues, but because of the nature of student editors and the high turn-over of the staff, our faculty and staff advisors were the best keepers of institutional memory for the journal and I suspect they still are. We were very focused on the next issue, especially during my time when we made two issues a year.