Voice Recognition
November 22, 2011|Pursuits
MiddleWestern Voice, Elmhurst’s stylish, student-produced arts journal, is both a national award-winner and something of a local mystery.
Last month, the magazine won an Associated Collegiate Press Pacemaker award, sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of student media. Winning recognition on campus, though, has proven more difficult.
“I’ll tell people that I work on MiddleWestern Voice and they’ll say, ‘MiddleWestern Voice? I didn’t know you were in the choir,’” Creative director Annie Balavitch, a senior graphic design student from Muskegon, Michigan, said in the MWV offices in the basement of the Frick Center last week. “They don’t know we exist.”
Balavitch and the rest of the magazine’s staff are determined to change that. They’re hoping that the Pacemaker—MWV was one of just four publications of its kind in the nation to win one—will help raise the magazine’s campus profile. At last week’s staff meeting, one of the topics of discussion was a new batch of promotional posters and giveaway postcards that proudly tout MWV as an award-winner. It’s part of a campaign to encourage more Elmhurst students to submit work—fiction, poems, visual art, original music–to the annually published magazine.
“We want people to understand that it’s a big deal to have their work in the magazine,” Balavitch said, “The more work we have to choose from, the better the magazine will be.”
Not that it’s necessarily easy to win over an on-campus audience. In recent years, the magazine has tried everything from poetry slams to ugly-sweater parties to build name recognition on campus. (MiddleWestern Voice takes its name from Ursula Niebuhr’s assessment of her husband, the eminent theologian and 1910 Elmhurst graduate, Reinhold Niebuhr.) Balavitch remembers seeing an issue of MiddleWestern Voice for the first time as a freshman and being mostly unmoved. The following year, though, Assistant Professor of Art Geoff Sciacca urged Balavitch to join the magazine’s staff. MWV was just beginning to transform itself into a more ambitious, full-color magazine with layouts that displayed the graphic-design influence of highly regarded consumer publications like Wired and Nylon. Balavitch was hooked. She made up her mind that she wanted to help shape the magazine’s evolving visual style.
Last year’s prize-winning issue included short fiction by Megan Kirby about a young man’s self-destructive return to “the stained sidewalks…the pervasive smells of exhaust” of his depressed hometown; a portfolio of work produced for the Elmhurst campus by Professor John Pitman Weber’s mosaics class; and a playful cover illustration by Katy McEvoy inspired by the psychedelic lyrics of Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door.” (You can check out the entire issue here.)
“The magazine is getting more and more interesting and aesthetic,” Balavitch said.
She’s not the only one to notice. Pacemaker judges praised the award-winners for their “variety of topics and ideas presented” and for “layouts that dazzled.” MWV may even be winning attention, at last, on campus. Balavitch said more students are showing up at the magazine’s staff meetings to get involved. She hopes the endorsement of the Pacemaker award judges gives a welcome boost to the magazine’s profile.
“We’ve always been a little under-recognized here,” Balavitch said. “Maybe this award will help us do something about that.”
