What is R2?

By Ruth Samuelson • Photographs by Jeff Fitlow and Ann Chou

That was the question posed on flyers circulated around campus last January. It didn’t take students long to discover it was the name of a stylish new undergraduate literary magazine.

Five hundred dollars is high pay for a beginning writer. For years, the George Guion Williams Prize awarded this amount to students for the best undergraduate fiction and poetry. But being paid for a piece of writing is only half the reward. The other half is seeing it published, and that was a problem. The prizewinning pieces rarely appeared in print, and that situation didn’t inspire students to labor over short stories and poetry alone in their rooms.

R2 faculty advisor Justin Cronin with 2005–06 editor in chief Searcy Milam and layout designer Ann Chou.

Creative writing professor Justin Cronin believed he had a better way to motivate young Rice writers. He proposed associating the Williams Prize with a student-led magazine that would publish the prizewinners and also provide a forum for other student writing on campus. “Writers always wonder: How do I put my work out in the world? How do I find other writers to talk about it with?” Cronin says. “The magazine would give young Rice writers just those opportunities.”

For a year, Cronin spoke to his classes about the idea, raised funds, and even came up with a name: The Rice Review, or R2 for short. In some respects, though, the magazine got its real start in England. Andy Dimond ’05 was studying there in fall 2004 when he received an email from Cronin asking him to be editor in chief. Dimond immediately jumped at the chance and, against all normal senior tendencies, found himself embarking on something new and exciting during his last semester. Throughout the fall, other students volunteered to work on R2 as well. When the editorial board first came together the next semester, it quickly established a broad goal: to not be another stereotypical undergraduate review.

“If you hear there’s a new literary magazine, you think, ‘Oh great, there’s a new clique of coeds in a basement printing something out,’” Dimond says. “For our first issue, we really wanted to produce something exceptional and establish the magazine’s presence immediately.”

There is, of course, an obvious way to have a great student literary magazine—great student writing. Yet without any reputation, the magazine needed some major public relations to attract submissions. To generate buzz, the staff papered the campus with the “What is R2?” signs and hung a huge bedsheet posing the same question above Fondren Library. The editorial board also held an open-mike night on campus, and board members continually begged their friends to submit pieces. A Thresher article helped to spread the word about the magazine as well.

R2 promised to publish fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, but until a few days before the submissions deadline, barely any work had arrived. Then, in a rush, 73 stories came in. For “the big read,” the staff reviewed submissions for more than four hours in the English department lounge. At least three people evaluated each piece anonymously before the group came together for discussion on what to include. A few days later, Dimond and prose editor Lamar White ’05 made the final cuts, selecting 10 stories, two nonfiction pieces, and five poems.

When it came to editing, Dimond and White did not expect to spend much time on individual pieces. But once they got started, it “snowballed,” says Dimond. To ensure the stories were fully developed and clear, both editors scrutinized every word of every piece and analyzed what elements could be improved. The magazine’s faculty advisors, including writer-in-residence Amber Dermont, sometimes reviewed the work, but ultimately, the students were responsible for organizing meetings and taking on editorial duties.

“We worked until the point of diminishing returns,” says Dimond. “I think that’s the best way to go: to just work until your work is not producing bigger and better results.”

R2

Significant revisions were sometimes necessary, and in those cases, the writers did all their own rewriting. Though they could reject the editors’ suggestions, most of the writers were willing to change their pieces, and some stories even went through two major revisions.

Collecting and editing the writing wasn’t the end of the production process. Thanks to generous gifts from Jane and James Rhodes ‘62 and support from the George Guion Williams endowment, the editors had the funds to give R2 a sleek, distinctive look. Architecture student Ann Chou ’06, then a junior and a veteran of two creative writing classes, joined the editorial board and worked mostly on style and layout. Though there were no plans for R2 to showcase student art in the same way that University Blue, the Student Association’s art and writing magazine, does, R2’s editors did hold a contest to select a cover design. The staff eventually selected a graphic of a dreamy gray prairie scene and also printed the image on a bookmark listing the Williams Prizewinners included in the magazine. After hundreds of hours of work, R2’s first edition was distributed in April 2005 at a party in front of Valhalla.

For the 2005–06 academic year, Chou returned to R2 with several of the previous year’s staff, including editor in chief, senior Searcy Milam ’06. Most of the group’s meetings were open to anyone who had taken a Rice creative writing class, and R2 had no trouble attracting new editors and staff members. The three-hour writing workshops, intimate yet intense, tended to bond students and create friendships since everyone had to share and discuss their own works. The magazine, Milam says, has become an extension of this experience—more like a special opportunity than just another extracurricular activity.

“To be responsible to a community of people who you really care about makes it that much more rewarding,” Milam says. “We could never let this project be anything but excellent.”

Interestingly, R2 is only one aspect of the expanding literary interest at Rice. Since arriving in 2003, dean of humanities Gary Wihl has established several new writing-related positions and programs. In addition to the three professors who regularly teach creative writing—Cronin, Susan Wood (poetry), and Marsha Recknagel (creative nonfiction)—there is now a new visiting writer each year. Wihl, Cronin, and Wood created the Parks Fellowship in 2004, which annually brings a new writer-in-residence from the prestigious Graduate Program in Creative Writing at the University of Houston to teach for a year. Similarly, this past fall, Rice welcomed U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky as the first speaker in the new Campbell Lecture Series, which brings distinguished guests in the study of literature to Rice.

In the future, Wihl hopes to form a relationship with Inprint, Houston, an organization that holds writing classes and hosts readings with renowned authors—recently including John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, and Louise Gluck. Through Inprint, Wihl would like to set up more workshop opportunities for Rice students. He also hopes to collaborate with the organization’s local ties to start a program where Rice students can mentor Houston high school student–writers. The School of Humanities also expects to add another course in creative writing in the near future.

Although this new growth may be a revelation to some, writing workshops always have been overenrolled, requiring writing samples and instructor approval for admission. When Cronin first started R2, he knew there would be strong submissions, and he had no doubt students would want to edit the magazine. Nevertheless, the first year did offer some surprises—in his experiences at other universities, he’d never seen students take on the full editing process or devote so much time to details. “I figured we’d get some things published and have a nice magazine,” he says, “but the staff made it spectacular right out of the gate.”

Now that R2 is off and running, everyone involved has new ideas about how to keep it growing and fresh. R2 received more than 90 submissions last February, and the 2006 magazine included a new section titled “Occasionals,” featuring brief interviews with several renowned authors, including short story writer Antonya Nelson and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn, and any other short literary pieces that didn’t fit squarely into other categories. Looking toward next year, the staff would like to bring more writers to campus for readings and meetings with students.

“I don’t want R2 to ever reach a point where it can’t change or grow,” Cronin says. “Every year, the students will decide what direction the magazine is going in.”