Meet the 2018 Editor of Analecta: Austin Veldman

ANALECTA is IU South Bend’s award-winning literary journal. It is published once a year under the guidance of a student editor who selects the best poetry, fiction, drama, and artwork from IUSB students. The editor for the 2018 issue is Austin Veldman. Here, Austin answers a few questions about his new position…

Why did you apply to be editor of Analecta?

When I think about some of the decisions I have made over the last few years, I count moving from IU Bloomington to IUSB among one of the best. I have a lot of love for the English program here. While I have always been a writer, my majors while in Bloomington did not reflect this: from Recording Arts in the Jacobs School of Music to Telecommunications: Design and Production. My move back to South Bend coincided with a decision to study exactly what I loved: writing. I had a deep desire to get what I really wanted out of college and to become a better writer. With this major change and conviction to improve I began taking creative writing courses at IUSB. This elevated my hobby of writing into a focal point of my life. Analecta was a part of this perfect storm. My first publication of any kind, special for any writer, was in vol. 45 of Analecta. As a graduate student, I felt I had the skills necessary to take on the challenge of editing this special journal. It presented itself as an opportunity to be a part of the great energy that IUSB’s English Department and the students of IUSB have cultivated.  

What are you most excited about when you think of editing Analecta this year?

The first thing that I want to say is that I am really excited to design an Analecta that looks good. I want this thing to just look beautiful, to make you want to pick it up just by its cover. I want readers to not be distracted by the formatting when reading the art within; the format should contribute to the flow. I get a kick out of really well designed books in which, through their sharp cleanness and solid formatting, put on an air of professionalism. The design and formatting becomes art on its own. Besides this, I am of course excited to read new work for the first time. To have the opportunity to discover some great writing and to be part of a process that places it before a broader audience is a responsibility I feel honored to undertake. 

What kind of background experience​ do you have with writing, editing, and Analecta?

My personal journal with writing began in songwriting. I have been playing guitar and writing songs since I was thirteen. Also around this time in my life I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. It was this work, arguably the greatest work of creative fiction of all time, that made me realize that I wanted to be a writer. The sheer magnitude of the world that J. R. R. Tolkien created, along with his truly beautiful and poetic prose, sparked my desire and imagination. I wrote a lot of fantasy themed scenes throughout high school: great battles, journeys, and councils. I had a desire to write a novel, but a solid plot-line did not begin to emerge until my freshman year of high school. For five years I plotted and built my own world, beginning the writing of the first draft around the same time I began classes at South Bend. This first draft is now nearly finished, a long epic that is now 140k words (637 MS pages) and will probably cap out around 160k. This is perhaps too long, but that is what editing is for, right?

Perhaps most definitively, I took a poetry class with David Dodd Lee. For years I had been writing a form of poetry in songwriting, yet with poetry the ‘rules’ that came with writing a song were made to hit the road, so to speak. I learned to express with a freedom that sparked a love for writing poetry. I now have several publications outside of Analecta and am actively submitting my work to literary journals. I will be a life-long poet.

As far as editing experience goes, I have been helping 42 Miles Press by being a first-reader on incoming manuscripts. It was through this that I am discovering a love for the behind the scenes work that is involved with presses and is invaluable experience. Also, I have recently started an online journal: Twyckenham Notes (twyckenhamnotes.com). TN’s aesthetic statement was inspired specifically by the tangible energy and experience of living in South Bend. 

What ideas do you have in mind for the 2018 issue?

What is important beyond all else for me is producing a journal that emits professionalism in its design and quality of the art within. I want to help make something that we can be proud of. Beyond this, I have a desire to incorporate alternative media into the 2018 Analecta experience. One option is to have the winners of Student Writing Awards record high-quality audio recordings of their winning poetry, stories, or non-fiction. Pushing this further, we could have a video recording of said readings. I think that this could be a very cool and engaging way to bring the art to more students in a way that perhaps has not been done before. Overall, I am excited and honored to be editor of Analecta and I look forward to reading everyone’s wonderful work. We have something really great going on here at IUSB. If you are a student reading this and have some art, stories, poems, or non-fiction, please consider submitting to the coming issue of Analecta.

 

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