Meet the Editors: New Assistant Managing Editor, Robyn Earhart

For over twenty years, Water~Stone Review has been a collaborative passion project of students, faculty, and staff. While it is a staff member who holds the position of managing editor (Meghan Maloney-Vinz), and esteemed faculty (Katrina Vandenberg, Patricia Weaver Francisco, and Sheila O’Connor) who serve each issue as section editors, it is our current MFA (creative writing) students who work as invaluable editorial board members and graduate assistants. Led by faculty editors in a semester-long course, our editorial board members learn the art of careful consideration and in doing so curate the beautiful writing in our journal each year.

In this series of blog posts we introduce you to some of our incredible and accomplished student editors.  In this post we meet Robyn Earhart.

It’s been quite difficult for me to come up with a blog post to introduce myself as the newest and most recent Assistant Managing Editor for Water~Stone Review. Perhaps it stems from my Midwestern roots—that awkwardness of conjecturing some sort of self-promotional proclamation that feels both authentic and humble is something I’m uncomfortable with. Or, perhaps it’s because I’m unsure of how to follow in the footsteps of my predecessors—writers and editors who forged ahead through the thick and bramble of uncertainty in the publishing world, and in their wake, left behind their personalized, indelible legacies on this esteemed publication. I felt at an impasse to both preserve and uphold their past work, and to forge my own path, to which I am uncertain of what that will be.

When I first came to Hamline University—more accurately put, when I first attended an information session, led by Water~Stone Review Executive Editor Mary Francios Rockcastle, and considered coming to Hamline University to begin my MFA—I was offered a copy of Volume 19, that beautiful black and white issue, entitled Paper Bones, with its cover image of a woman with a gold chain overlay on her face. I went home, read several pages, and knew that I found my new home.

Water~Stone Review is the legacy of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in the unwieldy field of literary journals and independent publications. This journal—this printed, preserved account of intertwining written text and visual images—lives on when so many print journals and newspapers are shuttering their figurative windows and doors. Water~Stone Review continues to push and transcend the boundaries of form, composition, genre, and voice. It continues to promote new, emerging, and established writers—my comrades in times of turmoil and uncertainty. It has lasted this long because it belongs to all of us—writers, readers, academics, artists, and conglomerative members of a creative ecosystem.

As I continue to learn and grow in the production process of Volume 22 and begin to forge my own imprint on Volume 23, I hope you’ll appreciate the process of growth and change along with me. I’m indebted to the work of my predecessors, and I hope you like what you see in the publications to come.