The Kitchen Magnet Collective Editing Team
About Us: What's Our Deal?
Everyone wants to be proud of the things they've accomplished. Learning in school can be fascinating, exhilarating even, a place to foster new interests and passions. But passion can be a difficult thing to keep alive, and as interesting as school is, it can also be exhausting, weighed down by the torrent of assignments, projects, deadlines, and exams. Finding the time in between all that to sit back and take a breath can be difficult, and it’s not often we have the time to appreciate what we’ve accomplished and how far we’ve come already.
We at the Kitchen Magnet Collective started this journal as our own homework assignment, a semester-long project for our Editing and Publishing course at the University of Evansville. We worked hard to get it up and running, not simply to get it over with or to get a good grade, but because we were passionate about our vision and our work, and wanted this magazine to be something we would look back on years down the line and be proud of.
So, we decided, why not share that vision?
We want our lit mag to be a place where people feel free to share their work and their passions freely, in the least stressful, least grade-point-average-based way possible. If you’ve got something from an English class, say a short story or some poems, that you loved doing and want to share? We want that here! If you wrote an essay for any other class—history, science, art, you name it—and you absolutely need to share your knowledge? We want that here too! We accept past writing assignments of all kinds, anything that can be preserved in digital text: that also includes nonfiction pieces, books reports and media reviews of any kind! (We can’t accept any visual art pieces on our website yet, but we hope to be able to in the future!)
There's no shame, no stress, no grade here, and no hierarchy of subject matter: just show us what you like and be proud of your work!
Sincerely,
As of right now, we have a rough idea of how we want each "semester" to go down when it comes to opening and closing submission boxes, reviewing and editing pieces, and then publishing each new issue on the website. While the exact dates will change year to year, the general amount of time the submission portal stays open should be 2 months, and the amount of time between closing and publishing should be about 1 month. Also, the days that the deadlines themselves land on will usually be Thursday. Why Thursday? Because we like it that way. (and it's the only day all of us on the team are free!)
Our 2026 yearly plan is as follows:
For the Spring Semester, the portals will be open for homework-based submissions from January 29th to March 26th. We plan to publish by April 30th.
For the Summer Semester, the portals will be open for themed submissions from May 21st to July 2nd. We plan to publish by July 30th.
For the Fall Semester, the portals will be open for homework-based submissions from August 27th to October 29th. We plan to publish by November 26th.
For the Winter Semester, our team will be taking a month long break for the holidays. There won't be anything to submit to, but you may see some activity in different areas of the site, like a side blog about other lit mags, news about our growth, or some other odd update.
The current semester deadlines will be available on the Submission Guidelines page at the start of every season.