New Comm Ave

2009 marks New Comm Ave's fourth year in the business of publishing great student writing, and as in all of our past issues, we tried to favor not just the essays that students seemed to want to write, but essays we think students would want to read. In fact, this submission cycle generated lively (even amicably contentious) discussion amongst the editors, which I consider a very good thing…like a good game of Scattergories. I think it shows that the essays we're receiving are sophisticated and provocative, and if they made us stop and think, hopefully they’ll do likewise for you. We came, we read, we chose, and I think this issue is one of our best yet.

Decide yourself. We have an essay on marijuana—but wait!—it's no simple legal vs. illegal toke. There's one on the death of a peer—but no stereotypical sob story about ravaging guilt and pain—instead, it's about their eerie absence. There's one on the anti-cool coolness of being a videogameaholic, on sweating it all out in a Navajo sweatlodge, on the arguably racist message of a 1949 billboard, on how reality talent shows have turned people into products. One essay--a prose poem, really--takes as its setting a simple bike rack but pedals you so much further. And one goes down the rabbit hole and, well, just keeps going.

To my fellow editors—Bridget, Danielle, David, Jason, Laura, Nick—many thanks for lovingly reading, rating, and copyediting the essays. But highest thanks must go to the emerging writers who stuck their fists in the air (or at least tapped their fingers on the submission button), writing what they wanted to write.

After all, our journal is, at core, for the writers. One selectee, Donovan Sithan, accompanied his submission thus: “This piece holds a particularly warm and happy place in my heart because I never felt so much like a real writer when I wrote this.” He added, "I wrote the bulk of this in a Motel 6, alone, drinking cheap whiskey, smoking Top tobacco and watching white noise on a broken television.”

Now, I'm not advocating the Sithan Method of writing, not necessarily, but I'm unflappably happy for Mr. Sithan's—and the rest of our new authors’—arrival at the literary burning bush.

Enjoy!
Mark Fullmer
--Editor

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