We're Back!

Hi everyone!

Bet you didn't even know Ubiquitous actually HAD a blog until you stumbled across the address, right? The blog is fairly new, but this year's staff is planning to make it as important as the published magazine. That means we need SUBMISSIONS, so send them in!

This year we're accepting any writing submissions, whether they be poetry, fiction, interviews, creative non-fiction, reviews, critical essays, or anything in between. That goes for art, too. Got an art piece with writing in it? Even better. Don't have time to scan your art pieces to send to us in jpeg format? Don't have time to take a photo of your art pieces? No problem. Just let us know you're interested, and we can take the photo or scan your art pieces in for you.

Send any submissions or questions to ubiquitous.submissions@gmail.com. You can even leave submissions on a disc in our box in Chapel Hall. Our deadline for the magazine is October 18th, but we accept writing AND art submissions year-round for the blog. Want to write something for the blog, but don't know what? Just let us know. We have a ton of ideas that need writers!

Think the blog could use a make-over? Most of us involved in Ubiquitous have little experience with computers (no, seriously--someone actually asked what a blog was during our first meeting) so if you're willing to help us out, drop us an e mail at the address above.

And now, to kick off the year right, here's a brief history of Ubiquitous from our very own academic advisor. We can't update if we have no submisions, so share some of your work with us!

-The editors


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Welcome to the new school year, UBIQUITOUS! As long-time faculty advisor, I’m in a good position to give a little background…

“Ubiquitous,” the name of Pratt Institute’s literary and arts magazine, means “it’s everywhere.” When I first started teaching in the English Department (I won’t mention how long ago – I’ll just say it was well before my current classes of freshmen students were born) the name was more than ironic. Student enterprises tending to wax and wane in a more or less cyclical pattern, the magazine had languished, clinging to a shadowy existence as a name-only entry on the roster of Student Activities.

“An art school without a magazine?! What sense does that make?” I kept thinking. I had worked on a number of journals (Megaphone, Birch Leaves, Artemis, Columbia, Parnassus – I’ll bet even you zine junkies have never heard of some of those) and I was determined to get Pratt back into the running. A colleague remembered a publication years previously called Snakeroot, that showcased work by faculty, students and writers in the community. For a few years I was involved with a publication in the English Department called Thought Lines (with a sub-heading by Hannah Arendt: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human”). It was an annual anthology of wonderful writing culled mostly from the Freshman English classes. But a bona fide, student-run literary magazine, that also had art, as befits an art school – well, what’s the opposite of “ubiquitous”?

Apathy on campus was rampant; Student Activities was skeptical. But I fastened my eye on an older student in one of my classes named Stanley, who had both publication experience and enthusiasm. With a small grant from the Mellon Fund through the office of the then-Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, novelist Richard Perry, and a price break from my friendly local copy shop, a small committee of dedicated students put out a photocopied, Velo-bound 88-page edition that brought Ubiquitous back into the realm of the actual, even if it could not be said to be “everywhere.”

That was in 1992, and so this is the resurrected Ubiquitous’ 15th anniversary! It has been thrilling for me to see the magazine, like a child, grow a little bit each year in stature and sophistication, and to feel pride in my contributions in shepherding it along the way. We’ve had a pocket-sized issue, a hand-bolted rhomboidal issue, an accordion-pleated one, and one that consisted of postcards in a hand-folded box. One issue was 15 inches long by 2 inches high. (The writing and art was necessarily rather attenuated!) We’ve had black-and-white covers, color ones, glossy, matte, and one that was painstakingly brushed with a circle of vegetable oil on each copy so that the second page showed through to complete the design. We’ve had covers featuring photographs, paintings, graphic designs and hand-set antique letterpress type from Pratt’s well-kept secret studio. We even had an issue on a CD.

The editors have been from fine arts, commercial arts, graphic arts, art history, and our relatively new major in Writing for Performance, Publication and Media. It is truly a pan-Institute journal, and it is beginning at last to live up to its name: it now has two issues a year, a chapbook in collaboration with the spring poetry contest sponsored on campus by the Academy of American Poets, and various ancillary readings and events. Even the posters are impressive, as are the behind-the-scenes efforts to get them prominently into the public eye.

Recently, at the first meeting of the new school year, a dozen students crowded into the Writing Center to hear about the editors’ plans for the fall issue. The students were especially wowed by the current budget, incrementally larger each year as it has been painstakingly pitched and won in the annual Student Activities budget process. It’s a big opportunity – and responsibility – to work with a budget now more than ten times that of Stanley’s issue fifteen years ago.

So keep an eye out for it, and more to the point, contribute to it! I can’t tell you what it will look like, or what kinds of genres, both verbal and visual, you will find inside, but I can vouch for the fact that it will be something Pratt students – a pretty special lot – will be proud of, and that it will reflect them in all their astonishing diversity and talent.

Liza McAlister Williams
September 2007