VALLEY COLLEGE : Magazine Seeks Student Works

Manuscript, published at Valley College in Van Nuys, is the type of literary magazine usually found at universities.

Each year, over a period of several months, the magazine solicits poetry and prose from students. English professors Bill Wallis and Rod Moore, who direct the publication, read the proposed contributions along with an editorial board of students. They either accept them, return them for revision or reject them “with a note of encouragement,” Wallis said.

The college’s administrators like the magazine, which costs about $2,000 a year to produce, because it symbolizes quality, Moore said. “They like to show it to other colleges.”

Wallis and Moore say they have plenty of high-quality material, but in the last two years student participation has dropped significantly and they have been doing most of the work.

The professors would be happy “if we could just turn it over to the students and just be advisers,” Moore said. “It’s not that we’re lazy,” Wallis and Moore said, but they feel students should be doing most of the work on the magazine.

Beginning with last year’s issue, Manuscript has branched out to serve the many ethnic students at Valley. The issue contained poetry written in Farsi, Spanish, Korean and other languages. The poems included translations on facing pages.

“Their voices weren’t really being represented,” Moore said. “We’re just scratching the surface.”

Erika Abbott, a student board member of the magazine, hopes to continue seeking new voices by soliciting submissions from Valley’s disabled population. She said disabled students need a voice and she has written a couple of poems for Manuscript after receiving encouragement from Moore.