About five and a half years ago, I was beginning my senior year at Lewis University. In my senior year, I knew that I’d have to do some type of internship for my major, which was English (creative writing). The previous semester, my professor — Dr. Simone Muench — mentioned in class that she’d like Lewis to have a literary journal that was run entirely by students. We already had a journal that was run by the college and maintained by professors, but I agreed with Simone that we should have a student publication as well. After discussing this and filling out some paperwork, creating that student-run journal became my senior year internship.
I can’t stress enough how little I knew about where to begin. I remember spending afternoons just searching through other literary journals for design ideas, formatting techniques, submission information, and masthead hierarchies. After much research, I thought I had some ideas of my own, and one of those ideas was to begin a blog that would accompany the literary journal itself. Thus, the Jet Fuel Review blog was born. You can still go back and read the first post that went up here, a welcome post describing the blog and the journal. If you check out that post, you’ll discover a fun fact about our origins — at one point, we were tentatively called the Honeycomb Review. As you know now, that name didn’t stick.
Since those early days of the blog, we have grown immensely. Not only have we published ten issues of the Jet Fuel Review, all moderated and managed entirely by students, we’ve also continued to add content to this blog. I was worried at first that no one would want to keep up with the blog, or that it would simply fall away once the Review picked up steam. Luckily, that has not been the case. When the blog began, I was the only one adding content from day to day. Slowly, more editors from the Review began to take an interest, and now we have a truly impressive roster of writers here at the blog.
The whole reason for this retrospective is that something pretty prominent about the blog will soon be changing. We’ve had this blog layout since the beginning, but we’ve recently decided that it’s time for a change. Michael Lane, our other blog editor, suggested the change to me last week and, while I was reticent at first, I came to realize that this blog deserves a new coat of paint. After five and a half years of posts, it’s time that we begin displaying our content on a new, sleeker design.
I hope that you all like the blog’s new layout, and I hope that you’ll stick with us as we continue to post here for (hopefully) another five years.
— Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
