Letter from the Publication Manager and Online Editor

Hmmmmm… yes… The Wake… what do I know about this… creature?

Aside from the fact that The Wake is regularly bashed by The Minnesota Daily and every other type of tightly confined student journalist, I know that The Wake is unlike every other publication on campus. Here, at the meetings and within the printed margins, you can pitch and write literally anything with only your (assumedly lax) editor to answer to.

Burning political inquiries to runaway editorials, in-depth interviews to trembling poetry: it’s all here—ma - ny-handed, multifaceted, and put together by more people in more time than you think it would be.

Whatever, one of my roles is new. That’s cool I guess. I like to think I’m filling it well; I know in which ways I’ve made mistakes. But I care about this magazine, and improving something you care about is one of the coolest things you can do; growing beside something is a form of love, and goddamnit if I haven’t loved this magazine through every garbage, surface-level music review or in-depth societal critique I’ve written.

Historically, The Wake has been a medium for alternative voices and obscure takes; I try to encourage and live up to this in every pitch that I give, every edit that I make, or every ridiculously antiquated word I choose to write. Why? First, because it’s cool and because I love and care about this magazine and its history. Sec - ond, because the more perspectives that are offered, the more real and representative of our individual/ collective realities it becomes.

There is not one world, one objective reality, one correct way of being. In fact, there are no correct ways of being, no objective realities, and not one world—only an infinite nothing-hallucination, a soup of synthesis, a somewhat-shared fever dream of circumstance and special interest and beauty and pain and real emotion - al hurt; in the words of the band mewithoutYou: “It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright.”

But it’s more than “alright”—it’s more than me, it’s more than you, it’s more than mewithoutYou—it’s “all” and it’s “right,” alright?

Well, there are things that are not “all,” and plenty more things that are not “right,” but that’s beside the point. The point is that I ran out of time and print space and that you wish you were writing for us instead of upholding “““Journalistic Integrity””” or writing about the campus turkeys in the driest way possible for the billionth time (and you wish you could rant like I just did in your own publication (teehee loser)).

If you’re going to say something, say something; say something daring, say something new, say something unique to you, say something that will never be said again; say something because you are free to say any - thing.

(Just don’t waste your words ( or be a bigot either)).

Quinn McClurg

(she / they)

Publication Manager / Online Editor