The Beauty of an Undertaking
Sara Schaff
Executive Editor, Saranac Review
The way I once felt about running a lit mag was similar to the way I once felt about having children: ambivalent at best. I always loved children more than I loved most humans, but from years of childcare and teaching, I understood the magnitude of labor involved with creating a good home for a child. When it came to lit mags, I loved them, too—their quirkiness and charms, their adventurous energies—and I knew that keeping Saranac Review a good home for writers, in the middle of ongoing funding cuts at our university, would require parts of myself I’d not tapped into before. Stepping into the role of Executive Editor, after the tenure of my talented colleague and predecessor Aimée Baker, I felt daily anxiety about my responsibilities. Very quickly, I also found the work to be some of the most rewarding of my literary career.
The reward in the work is entirely because of the nature of the whole lit mag endeavor—specifically the community we’ve built together: our amazing contributors, our editors and guest readers, our student editorial assistants, and nimble SUNY Plattsburgh staff. For one of the only times in my writing life, I have felt truly part of something—and excuse my religiosity here—larger than my own work.
All our past issues were print publications, rich in literature and visual art both, and as much as possible, we wanted to replicate that richness online. Working with the wonderful Plattsburgh State Art Museum Director Tonya Cribb, we decided to feature the recently donated series of photographs by acclaimed photojournalist Donna Ferrato. “Behind Closed Doors” opened on the SUNY Plattsburgh campus in the fall of 2022, and SR’s editorial assistants were deeply moved by individual portraits and the larger purpose of Ferrato’s work: to shine a light on survivors of intimate partner violence, to inspire people to tell their experiences of domestic abuse, and to encourage systems to do more to protect our most vulnerable from harm.
When it came to selecting writing for our first online-exclusive issue, our goal was to find work that hit us as hard as Ferrato’s images, and we wanted that impact to leave us and our readers feeling activated, inspired, and hopeful. The poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction we’ve curated here delves into humanity in all its depth, including the devastation of abuse and the haunted nature of grief and loss. Our contributors explore the complexities of parenthood, the beauty of aging with a partner, the memory of joyful friendship long ended. Regardless of subject, when I read our Issue 17 contributors, I feel that little thrill of reading something so special you have to share it with someone else. And that someone is finally all of you.
This launch is made all the more special because of our SR staff. We couldn’t have put together this issue without Aimée Baker’s wide-ranging expertise, Gbolahan Adeola’s brilliant, expansive eye, Johan Robinson’s beautifully attuned ear, or Cheryth Youngman’s sharp insights. And of course our wonderful Saranac Review editorial assistants, students at SUNY Plattsburgh enrolled in our editing and publishing course. They threw themselves into the task of making something completely new to them, as well as new to our own magazine: a completely online literary experience. This was the first semester in which students got to see the submissions they read and selected become part of a finished magazine by the end of one semester, and they travelled that arc with grace, hard work, and care for all submissions to the issue.
Special thanks to Lauren Waldron, SUNY Plattsburgh English Department Administrative Assistant Extraordinaire and Jamie Winters, Wise and Calm Assistant to the Dean in the School of Arts and Sciences. (Not their exact titles!) I’m also so grateful to my former colleague and a founding editor of Saranac Review, J.L. Torres, for sitting down with Editorial Assistant Nina Serafini to reminisce and advise. We would not be here without Dr. Torres’s long-held vision for an inclusive and robust writing community on campus and beyond.
To be part of this new phase of SR, I have felt my life open up in the joyful and unexpected ways that good art and good company provide. Not a completely different feeling from the opening and expanding that comes with child-rearing. And yes, I did have a kid of my own, and she is a whole decade old now. Caring for her is every bit as challenging as I knew it would be, and even more glorious than I could have imagined.
Thanks for being here with us.