Saint Mary’s two literary journals, Chimes and The Avenue, will combine into one publication beginning this year, but the identities of both will remain intact.
“The Avenue will be inside of Chimes,” co-Editor-in-Chief of The Avenue and senior Jessie McCartney said. “It will have its own insert. The Avenue will keep its name, and it will noticeable that [The Avenue] is the journal of nonfiction, and [Chimes] is the journal of fiction, arts, and poetry.”
McCartney said the two journals possess noticeably difficult qualities, but will pair well together.
“The Avenue is Saint Mary’s journal of nonfiction,” McCartney said. “It features student submissions that are various types of nonfiction from personal essays to op-ed pieces.”
Editor-in-Chief of Chimes and senior Cecilia Greubel said Chimes traditionally accounts for the genres not included in The Avenue.
“Chimes is the literary art journal,” Greubel said. “The Avenue does everything nonfiction, and Chimes does everything else. It is totally student-run. We publish student work, sometimes alumnae work, basically anything from the literary community of Saint Mary’s, and sometimes faculty and staff submit things as well.”
This merge serves as the culmination of conversations that began in the fall semester, McCartney said.
“[The merge has come about] through a few different discussions,” she said. “At the beginning of the year, we had a lot of meetings together with [Greubel] and our faculty advisor Dr. [Dionne] Bremeyer, and Dr. Bremeyer actually brought it up first. [The Avenue's other co-Editor-in-Chief] and I were unsure about it because The Avenue was started by a student in 1990 and has never been backed by the [English], department so I wanted to keep her legacy and keep the Avenue as an independent publication.”
The underlying reason behind the merge is financial, she said.
“But at the same time, because we lack a certain amount of financial support, we needed more funds,” McCartney said. “We wanted The Avenue to be the best journal it could be, and merging with Chimes promised that. Joining our forces together ensured that we could do more with both of our journals together.”
Improving the quality and accessibility of both publications were also key considerations, McCartney said.
“A big thing is financially we get to combine our funds which makes for a better journal all around,” McCartney said. “The quality of both publications has been rising, especially The Avenue. Aesthetically, the journal will look nicer because we have more money to put into it. Another benefit is uniting the arts, so we have fiction, art, poetry and nonfiction all together. This way it’s more accessible to a larger [number] of people. Instead of having to print two journals and spreading them throughout campus we just have one so I think people are more likely to explore the different genres than they would have before.”
The hope of the merge is to improve the look of the journal.
“Overall, just modernizing,” Greubel said. “The two publications have been separated for so long, since The Avenue’s founding, and so I think merging and combining our budgets, we are going to be able to do a lot of cool and modern things with the magazine.”
McCartney said she is excited about the prospect of having one place for student work to be displayed.
“I am excited that it provides a chance for people to have all of these students’ works — all these students’ voices in one piece for them to read and share with others,” she said.
Greubel said she is hopeful about the future of what this merge will look like.
“We are really excited,” she said. “I think it is going to be really good for both journals going forward.”
