New Lit on the Block :: The Zinnia Anthology
In the symbolic language of flowers, the zinnia represents friendship, remembrance, and lasting affection, which is what inspired the name of a new online annual, The Zinnia Anthology. Here, readers can find short stories, poems, memoirs, and art focusing on human connections and relationships with each other outside of the romantic lens. “Specifically,” the editors note, “friendships and familial relationships that we often take for granted or easily overlook.” Indeed, the first issue, themed “Platonic Relationships” sets the tone of bringing marginalized issues to light and offers inspiration for readers to see their platonic relationships in a different light.
Each annual collection is themed in an issue the editors think is “underrepresented in the greater writing community.” Beyond gathering works for each issue, the editors also “wanted to make the anthology into a project where writers can find community and, as our second issue suggests, family. By bringing underrepresented relationships and marginalized issues to light, we hope to curate a creative space where writers feel safe to discuss and publish pieces around these issues.”
Creating Community
The inspiration for this unique approach was spurred when Editors Heeseo (Kay) Lee and Eva Yu originally met at Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, a writing program for high schoolers. “We took the same class, called Friendships in Fiction, and realized how marginalized the issue was in literature specifically. Both of us had to submit pieces to our workshop around this theme, and we spent almost two weeks just looking at the way friendships shift in different stories and scenarios. Writing and reading have always been the way we felt best to express ourselves, and we wanted to build a space where people like us felt comfortable doing the same. Like most writers, we believe deeply in the power of language and words, so starting a literary magazine was the best way to achieve our goal of shedding light on marginalized literary issues.”
Further adding to their background and experience, Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Kay Lee is a freshman attending Columbia University studying English. She is a poet and writer who has attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Kenyon Young Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Eva Yu is a senior at the Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. She was originally born in Beijing but now lives in the greater Boston area. She attended Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and Kenyon Young Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Bennington Young Writers’ Award.
Engaged Submissions Process
Writers and artists looking to contribute works can expect professional treatment in the submission process, though the editors note, “our response time can be a little long because for now, we only have two editors. If we don’t need to give feedback, we will most likely get back within 1-3 days, but when we need to give full feedback, it can often take between a week or two weeks.
“When we receive a submission, it will generally go to one of the editors first. Kay usually handles more poetry, and Eva handles more prose, but this is quite interchangeable. One of the editors will be mainly in charge of reading that submission, and usually about once a week or whenever we feel like there are a lot of submissions, we meet and discuss. Both of us will have read each submission, and we determine which ones we want to accept. Whoever read the piece at the beginning will be in charge of writing feedback based on notes discussed during our meeting. We offer partial feedback or full feedback, and that choice can be indicated by the author at the time of submission.”
Issue I of The Zinnia Anthology features works by Sadie Benjamin (including an audio recording), Zach Goldberg, Iris Cai, Angelina Tang, Jezabel Castillo, and Claudia Wysocky, with submissions open on a rolling basis for Issue II: “Unveiled: Stories on Found Family”
Lessons in Leadership
For The Zinnia Anthology editors, the start-up process was an experience in leadership and decision making. “At first, we struggled with how to run the publication. We weren’t sure if we should be a quarterly magazine because that seemed to be the most common approach, and we did make a lot of changes as we progressed through the first issue. We ended on a yearly submission cycle with a rolling submission basis because we decided that’s what gave the most flexibility to people. We didn’t want it to seem stressful or even competitive/prestigious, we just wanted to collect the best pieces and curate the best issue we could. We also started as a teen publication because we weren’t sure if we could handle giving feedback to people older than us, but we learned a lot from Issue I, and now we’re more confident in what to look for in pieces and how to give good constructive criticism.
“We also started off being very worried because we had set such a niche topic as our Issue I theme, and we knew not everyone was just going to have pieces curated for that topic on hand. We weren’t sure if people would feel inspired and write new pieces, but we’ve learned that the writing community is huge, and people from all ages and levels are interested in the same topics we are. It’s been a learning curve since the anthology began last summer, but we hope to constantly improve and make the submission process as easy for people as possible.”
Continuous Literary Improvement
That goal of improvement lends itself to helping shape the future of The Zinnia Anthology, as the editors share, “For Issue II, we want to do an audio feature where authors can read their pieces. We hope it will bring more authenticity to the pieces we accept and people will be able to hear them as they are intended to be read. We also hope to make the issue into a booklet form, because we feel like it’s much more grounded in the literary aesthetic, and also we love booklets. Lastly, we do want to hire more editors because sometimes submission cycles can be quite overwhelming, and we hope to retain both quality and speed when we give feedback.”
The editors offer this final commentary on the role of adding another literary magazine to the scene, “Many people always ask us why we felt the need to start an anthology instead of just writing more pieces and submitting them to other anthologies. In theory, they do the same thing by putting more works about these topics into the world, but for us, the sense of community that comes with a centralized project like this one is what we’re really searching for. We’re not a huge literary magazine, and we have a very small audience, but in a sense, this cozy sense of belonging and pride in seeing your work next to so many other great ones written by people who care so deeply about something you also love is what we strive for.”
