Christopher Barzak is the Student Literary Arts Association’s founding and current faculty advisor.

In 2010, a group of YSU students who had been running a literary reading series with me here in Youngstown approached me to ask if I would teach them how to create and operate an online literary magazine. Christopher Lettera, who was the president of the group (The YSU Student Literary Arts Association, or SLAA) had a concept based on the city’s industrial past in steel production and manufacturing, also referenced in the title of the magazine (Jenny, after the Jeanette Blast Furnace, which was once referred to by locals as Jenny, and which is memorialized as the Jenny in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Youngstown). I had worked on magazines before, and for publishing companies, filling multiple roles, and so I began to work with these students to realize a literary magazine that would represent the voices and culture of the place we all inhabited, as well as serving as a bridge to other places, to locate Youngstown on a literary map, so to speak.

It was a hugely hopeful and inspiring time in Youngstown right then, when the community was focused on revitalization and one of the things those students and I wanted to do was to remind Youngstown that manufacturing and production isn’t something limited to industrial products, but also cultural products. We wanted to help create a Youngstown that produced more items than what it did in its industrial past. We wanted the people of Youngstown to be able to see themselves as a people who could produce culture as well as cars or steel. We wanted to inspire our community to think outside of its pre-conceived notions of itself, of who we are, of who we could be.

Those students who originated Jenny Magazine have returned to us in this tenth anniversary issue of Jenny to look back on what they made, and to pay homage to the students who came after them, who have kept the lights on at our Jenny over the last decade, and to look forward to what else our community will continue to produce in the future.

They were an inspiring group of students to work with, and they continue to be inspiring people in our community and in other communities they have joined ever since. I’ll let them speak for themselves in these interviews, though, and inspire the next generation of literary arts production in Youngstown to come.

Christopher Barzak,

SLAA advisor

Professor of English

YSU Coordinator for the Northeastern Ohio MFA Program in Creative Writing