28 April, 2019
Literary Inquiry: Orion Magazine
Overview
Founded in 1982, Orion Magazine is a literary magazine dedicated in printing the finest in environmental writing. Whether it be creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, essays, photographs or visual art, the magazine is focused on pieces that exclusively highlight and explore individuals connecting with nature, as well as cultural concerns about climate change and our moral responsibility for the world in which we live.
The staff at Orion Magazine currently consists of ten full-time editors, and prints bimonthly issues, for a total of six issues per year. The magazine chooses a few pieces from each issue and highlights them online, but most of the content, including the “Lay of the Land” segments (reports and dispatches that strive to be personable and affecting in under 1,000 words) are only available in print, which you either have to individually buy or have a subscription to. The issues themselves are glossy, large, and full of colored photographs - some accompanying stories and essays - while the cover rotates between paintings and photographs of landscapes, people, and animals.
The magazine strives to invite readers “into a community of caring for the planet” and encourages them to think about how humanity may live justly and sustainably among nature. Its audience, as well as its contributors, are made up of individuals who have a passion and dedication in protecting and preserving endangered wildernesses, their animals, and their cultures, and many of Orion’s writers are environmental activists (both literary and non). These writers include, but are not limited to: Homero Aridjis, Yvon Chouinard, Nikki Giovanni, Jane Goodall, Paul Hawken, Amy Irvine, Pramila Jayapal, and Terry Tempest Williams. The sheer diversity of these contributors marks Orion Magazine as a pinnacle of inclusivity within the literary market, and creates a even submission platform for those who wish to write about environmental conditions witnessed today, as well as transformative connections with nature that can speak to a large audience.
Design & Formatting
Each issue of Orion Magazine is roughly between 50-75 pages long, with featured pieces typically ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 words. According to the editors, themes are not chosen, and instead works are selected that can “expand or challenge our understanding of nature, culture, and place”
The print is small, but rarely overwhelming, and most articles are accompanied by bold and striking imagery, all in color.
Articles that aren’t followed with relevant pictures or images are usually presented in a bullet point format, so that they are approachable and can be easily read. The effect is one that entices readers to take a moment, read the article, reflect on it, and hopefully teach them something in the process.
Everything from the stories to the poems, the essays and the art, are chosen and formatted to intrigue and strengthen awareness, as well as maintain an intuitive connection to the physical world, among both Orion’s active subscribers and those who happen upon their website or blog.
Submission Practices
Submissions are open up to four times a year, usually for a period of about three months, and all pieces are entered electronically through Submittable. Writers are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with past issues of Orion before submitting, and are limited to one submission per category, per submission window. Short stories, flash fiction, and essays have a limit of up to 6,000 words, and poetry has a limit of up to 40 lines.
Orion Magazine pays its chosen short story and essay writers five cents per word, but there is no information on duotrope or their website regarding pay for artists, photographers, or poets. Presumably, chosen artists whose work is selected will be compensated on an individual basis, allowing the pay-scale to be fairly broad rather than specific.
Recommendations for possible submitters include attending the Environmental Writers’ Workshop at the Omega Institute in New York, as well as acquainting themselves with past contributors and their works, both in the magazine and outside of it.
Literary Analysis
Don’t Tread on Me by Jaclyn Moyer was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Orion Magazine and represents what the writers and editors of Orion hope to achieve with every published piece: to make the consumer pause and think.
The author starts off her story innocuous enough, with a memory of nearly stepping on rattlesnake one Fourth of July morning. The details are so palpable, the transitions so smooth, that you feel as though you almost stepped on that rattler, too.
The story moves on, and we’re pulled back to the 2016 presidential campaign, and the clear division it caused among Americans. Another rattlesnake is mentioned, but this one is metaphoric and is coiled tightly across a bright yellow background with the words “Don’t Tread On Me” in black on the bottom. The Gadsden flag. First used during the American Revolution, the flag saw a revival during the 2016 presidential election, as people on both sides of the political debate felt as though the government were challenging their rights. You remember those feelings, and can recall that flag with startling clarity.
Then a gear-change, and the story takes another direction. Rattlesnakes are now losing their iconic rattles. Humans no longer back down when they hear the heart pounding shaka shaka shaka of the rattlesnake’s tail, but instead grab a gun or a shovel and dispose of the possible threat. So, the snakes are adapting. They’re losing their ability to tell you “Hey, I’m here”, and are instead keep still, waiting, and watching, until they strike. After all, a silent snake, is a safe snake.
One could simply say that this story is about rattlesnakes. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but you wouldn’t be entirely right, either. The story touches upon each of the three “pillars” that Orion Magazine touts: Nature, Culture, and Place. Don’t Tread on Me is, overall, a story about America losing its American-ness. It’s about having no sense of identity. Would you be able to recognize the rattlesnake without its rattle, from which it gets its name? Who are we, as the American people, if we allow the people elected to office to strip America of everything she is known for?
Featured stories like this, as well as the essays, poems, and art, are truly at the heart of what makes Orion Magazine such a special literary journal. It takes talented writers and gives them a platform that not only makes you look at the outside world, but also, at yourself.
- This project was written by Erin Hunt, a Folio staff member in Spring 2019. She's currently working on her AA in English, and hopes to one day work for a publication that lets her explore the outdoors. Her writing generally focuses on environmental conservation and nature, but occasionally, she just writes about her dog.
Founded in 1982, Orion Magazine is a literary magazine dedicated in printing the finest in environmental writing. Whether it be creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, essays, photographs or visual art, the magazine is focused on pieces that exclusively highlight and explore individuals connecting with nature, as well as cultural concerns about climate change and our moral responsibility for the world in which we live.
The staff at Orion Magazine currently consists of ten full-time editors, and prints bimonthly issues, for a total of six issues per year. The magazine chooses a few pieces from each issue and highlights them online, but most of the content, including the “Lay of the Land” segments (reports and dispatches that strive to be personable and affecting in under 1,000 words) are only available in print, which you either have to individually buy or have a subscription to. The issues themselves are glossy, large, and full of colored photographs - some accompanying stories and essays - while the cover rotates between paintings and photographs of landscapes, people, and animals.
The magazine strives to invite readers “into a community of caring for the planet” and encourages them to think about how humanity may live justly and sustainably among nature. Its audience, as well as its contributors, are made up of individuals who have a passion and dedication in protecting and preserving endangered wildernesses, their animals, and their cultures, and many of Orion’s writers are environmental activists (both literary and non). These writers include, but are not limited to: Homero Aridjis, Yvon Chouinard, Nikki Giovanni, Jane Goodall, Paul Hawken, Amy Irvine, Pramila Jayapal, and Terry Tempest Williams. The sheer diversity of these contributors marks Orion Magazine as a pinnacle of inclusivity within the literary market, and creates a even submission platform for those who wish to write about environmental conditions witnessed today, as well as transformative connections with nature that can speak to a large audience.
Design & Formatting
Each issue of Orion Magazine is roughly between 50-75 pages long, with featured pieces typically ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 words. According to the editors, themes are not chosen, and instead works are selected that can “expand or challenge our understanding of nature, culture, and place”
The print is small, but rarely overwhelming, and most articles are accompanied by bold and striking imagery, all in color.
Articles that aren’t followed with relevant pictures or images are usually presented in a bullet point format, so that they are approachable and can be easily read. The effect is one that entices readers to take a moment, read the article, reflect on it, and hopefully teach them something in the process.
Everything from the stories to the poems, the essays and the art, are chosen and formatted to intrigue and strengthen awareness, as well as maintain an intuitive connection to the physical world, among both Orion’s active subscribers and those who happen upon their website or blog.
Submission Practices
Submissions are open up to four times a year, usually for a period of about three months, and all pieces are entered electronically through Submittable. Writers are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with past issues of Orion before submitting, and are limited to one submission per category, per submission window. Short stories, flash fiction, and essays have a limit of up to 6,000 words, and poetry has a limit of up to 40 lines.
Orion Magazine pays its chosen short story and essay writers five cents per word, but there is no information on duotrope or their website regarding pay for artists, photographers, or poets. Presumably, chosen artists whose work is selected will be compensated on an individual basis, allowing the pay-scale to be fairly broad rather than specific.
Recommendations for possible submitters include attending the Environmental Writers’ Workshop at the Omega Institute in New York, as well as acquainting themselves with past contributors and their works, both in the magazine and outside of it.
Literary Analysis
Don’t Tread on Me by Jaclyn Moyer was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Orion Magazine and represents what the writers and editors of Orion hope to achieve with every published piece: to make the consumer pause and think.
The author starts off her story innocuous enough, with a memory of nearly stepping on rattlesnake one Fourth of July morning. The details are so palpable, the transitions so smooth, that you feel as though you almost stepped on that rattler, too.
The story moves on, and we’re pulled back to the 2016 presidential campaign, and the clear division it caused among Americans. Another rattlesnake is mentioned, but this one is metaphoric and is coiled tightly across a bright yellow background with the words “Don’t Tread On Me” in black on the bottom. The Gadsden flag. First used during the American Revolution, the flag saw a revival during the 2016 presidential election, as people on both sides of the political debate felt as though the government were challenging their rights. You remember those feelings, and can recall that flag with startling clarity.
Then a gear-change, and the story takes another direction. Rattlesnakes are now losing their iconic rattles. Humans no longer back down when they hear the heart pounding shaka shaka shaka of the rattlesnake’s tail, but instead grab a gun or a shovel and dispose of the possible threat. So, the snakes are adapting. They’re losing their ability to tell you “Hey, I’m here”, and are instead keep still, waiting, and watching, until they strike. After all, a silent snake, is a safe snake.
One could simply say that this story is about rattlesnakes. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but you wouldn’t be entirely right, either. The story touches upon each of the three “pillars” that Orion Magazine touts: Nature, Culture, and Place. Don’t Tread on Me is, overall, a story about America losing its American-ness. It’s about having no sense of identity. Would you be able to recognize the rattlesnake without its rattle, from which it gets its name? Who are we, as the American people, if we allow the people elected to office to strip America of everything she is known for?
Featured stories like this, as well as the essays, poems, and art, are truly at the heart of what makes Orion Magazine such a special literary journal. It takes talented writers and gives them a platform that not only makes you look at the outside world, but also, at yourself.
- This project was written by Erin Hunt, a Folio staff member in Spring 2019. She's currently working on her AA in English, and hopes to one day work for a publication that lets her explore the outdoors. Her writing generally focuses on environmental conservation and nature, but occasionally, she just writes about her dog.
February 2019
Editing Tips and Tricks
Editing Tips and Tricks
These are some tips I’ve gathered across my time on Folio, and I hope you, dear reader, are able to take these and make them your own. I am a firm believer that every person will have a different process, and that’s okay! We all have the same goal, and that is to provide a voice and platform for the students at Salt Lake Community College. Enjoy!
- Try and maintain the writer’s voice! This is the most important part of my process. Critically analyze the text and try to determine if something is a stylistic choice before you start messing with it. This is especially important for poetry. Also, keep in mind that their first language might not be your own. Do your best to think before you fix.
- Everyone has a different opinion on how body text should be formatted.There are two major ways to do it; putting a line between each paragraph, or indenting the first line of each paragraph. If you decide to go the indentation route, AVOID THE TAB BUTTON. The size of the indent is dependant on the size of the paragraph. Between a .3 and .5 indent is ideal.
- Dialogue can be tricky. Each new speaker needs their own paragraph. If an action is separate from dialogue (e.g. He gasped. “No!”) the action is its own sentence. If the action IS dialogue (e.g. He gasped, “No!”) the action and dialogue are one sentence… Make sense?
- Don’t be afraid to research and peek around to see what other editors are doing. The best part about this experience is that you don’t HAVE to be a professional. Learning and growing with the magazine was one of my favorite parts, and I hope it becomes one of your favorite parts too!
- This post was created by Stephanie Fletcher, Folio literary editor from Spring 2018 to Spring 2019.
December 2018
Folio Assistant Editorial Process
The beginning of this process began after Long Friday, once we had finished reviewing and selecting submissions to be featured in Folio. Stephanie provided me with a list of submissions that I was to review and edit. However, during the process of moving these submissions from Submittable to Google Drive, the format of the submissions had been lost. So, that became task number one.
I pulled up the Google Drive folder that contained the submissions to be edited as well as Submittable so I could review the original format of the submissions. With these two applications open side-by-side, I selected the first submission and opened it up in both windows. I compared the two documents with a mental list of qualities to check for. I first looked for any instances of faulty paragraph breaks, of which there were many, due to the file transfer. After reconnecting paragraphs, I then moved on to check the flow of a piece by reading it out loud and paying attention to the punctuation. I made corrections where I saw fit and moved on to other little issues such as improper capitalizations, extra spaces, improper spelling, etc.
By this point, the majority of the work had been done when it comes to editing the submissions. The only other issue left was separating dialogue from normal prose in a few submissions. With the completion of that, I checked in with Stephanie to let her know where I was in the process and to ask what else may need to be done.
With the completion of edits made to the accepted submissions, they moved on to Heather Graham so she could lay them out in what would become the print edition of folio. The transfer from Google Drive to the design software resulted in some of the same issues that arose with the transfer from Submittable to Google Drive. So, I was given access to a PDF of the magazine and was asked to check for paragraph formatting, italics, bolded text, or any other specifics that may not have transferred.
Very similarly to the previous step of my project, I pulled up submissions in the PDF and the original submission in Submittable. I went through a mental checklist, first checking for any instance of italics in the original submission, comparing it to the PDF version and if there was any discrepancy, highlighting and commenting on the section for it to be changed to italics. I did the same for bolded text, extra spaces, improper indentation, improper paragraph breaks, etc.
By this point in the development of the magazine, the majority of spelling and grammar issues have been checked for and ideally fixed. So, I didn’t thoroughly check for this issue at this point in editing, but I did keep an eye out and found a few minor errors.
After going through the entire document–all 47 pieces–I ran through the document again, checking almost exclusively for italics, bolded text, and paragraph formatting issues.
At this point, the PDF had been more or less completed in part by the work of myself and others on staff reviewing the document. It was ready for Heather to move forward on the printing process.
I was given a further task of helping edit a few submissions that were going to be placed on Folio’s website. This ran almost exactly the same as the prior editing except for one issue that may be of importance to address here.
One of the pieces that I had to review was written by an individual who’s primary or strongest language was not English. There were some issues with grammar, spelling, etc. and although I thought I had a pretty strong grasp on how much I should edit and how much I should stand back and retain the voice of the writer, it still was a learning process. I figured that the highest goal for editing another writer’s writing is to keep the voice of the author. Due to the voice being so bound up in the sentence structure and word choice of the author, I left the vast majority of things that could potentially be flagged as errors in place. The things that I certainly did edit though were any cases of incorrect spelling or word placement that completely obstructed the understanding of a sentence. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those, and the piece was able to stand strong on its own.
I pulled up the Google Drive folder that contained the submissions to be edited as well as Submittable so I could review the original format of the submissions. With these two applications open side-by-side, I selected the first submission and opened it up in both windows. I compared the two documents with a mental list of qualities to check for. I first looked for any instances of faulty paragraph breaks, of which there were many, due to the file transfer. After reconnecting paragraphs, I then moved on to check the flow of a piece by reading it out loud and paying attention to the punctuation. I made corrections where I saw fit and moved on to other little issues such as improper capitalizations, extra spaces, improper spelling, etc.
By this point, the majority of the work had been done when it comes to editing the submissions. The only other issue left was separating dialogue from normal prose in a few submissions. With the completion of that, I checked in with Stephanie to let her know where I was in the process and to ask what else may need to be done.
With the completion of edits made to the accepted submissions, they moved on to Heather Graham so she could lay them out in what would become the print edition of folio. The transfer from Google Drive to the design software resulted in some of the same issues that arose with the transfer from Submittable to Google Drive. So, I was given access to a PDF of the magazine and was asked to check for paragraph formatting, italics, bolded text, or any other specifics that may not have transferred.
Very similarly to the previous step of my project, I pulled up submissions in the PDF and the original submission in Submittable. I went through a mental checklist, first checking for any instance of italics in the original submission, comparing it to the PDF version and if there was any discrepancy, highlighting and commenting on the section for it to be changed to italics. I did the same for bolded text, extra spaces, improper indentation, improper paragraph breaks, etc.
By this point in the development of the magazine, the majority of spelling and grammar issues have been checked for and ideally fixed. So, I didn’t thoroughly check for this issue at this point in editing, but I did keep an eye out and found a few minor errors.
After going through the entire document–all 47 pieces–I ran through the document again, checking almost exclusively for italics, bolded text, and paragraph formatting issues.
At this point, the PDF had been more or less completed in part by the work of myself and others on staff reviewing the document. It was ready for Heather to move forward on the printing process.
I was given a further task of helping edit a few submissions that were going to be placed on Folio’s website. This ran almost exactly the same as the prior editing except for one issue that may be of importance to address here.
One of the pieces that I had to review was written by an individual who’s primary or strongest language was not English. There were some issues with grammar, spelling, etc. and although I thought I had a pretty strong grasp on how much I should edit and how much I should stand back and retain the voice of the writer, it still was a learning process. I figured that the highest goal for editing another writer’s writing is to keep the voice of the author. Due to the voice being so bound up in the sentence structure and word choice of the author, I left the vast majority of things that could potentially be flagged as errors in place. The things that I certainly did edit though were any cases of incorrect spelling or word placement that completely obstructed the understanding of a sentence. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those, and the piece was able to stand strong on its own.
- This was written by former Folio staff member, Oscar Roche, detailing his experience as an editorial assistant in the Fall of 2018.
