Creating this e-zine deeply involved all of the class , with certain students putting in surprising above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts. No doubt, part of what drove them to produce an excellent e-zine was their awareness of the potentially much larger audience on the Internet. Creating this e-zine was especially attractive to the students who wanted to publish and to the students with an interest in computers and the Internet.

This project has had reverberations beyond that initial semester. The e-zine was featured in  coyotE: An Undergraduate Interdisciplinary E-Journal  because it demonstrated excellence in undergraduate achievement. I also facilitated a second issue of the e-zine with a new group of creative writing students in the spring '98 semester.

Was there a downside to this project? Yes. Even though the students did most of the work in creating the e-zine, it still required many additional hours of work on my part to set up the committees, to assist students with doing final revising and editing, and to keep things running smoothly. Also, a few students resisted the idea of publishing their work on the web. We compromised by letting them publish their work anonymously.

I have not put together an issue of the e-zine with a creative writing class since that first year. I really needed time to reflect upon this experience, and writing this piece has helped me to do just that. If I initiate another issue of the e-zine, I will try to find ways to make the project less stressful for everyone involved. The good things that emerged from the completion of the first and second issues suggest to me that it is certainly worth another try.

I achieved my initial goals. The e-zine project did help students become much more committed to participating in the class and to improving their writing. What might have been simply minimal participation by students taking creative writing to fulfill their advanced writing requirement instead became a fascinating collaborative effort and a powerful record of their development as writers at that point in time.
 

Exposition and Foreshadowing

Heart of the Story

Resolution