Welcome to the first print issue of The Colby Review, a magazine of new writing published by the Creative Writing Program at Colby College, here in Waterville, Maine, approximately 3,200 miles north of the equator and about 3,500 miles west of the prime meridian, depending how you calculate. “How you calculate” is a suspicious dependency in that sentence, and to be honest feels a little scary. It seems to imply that a totally different result is possible if one only uses a different method of “calculation,” which here can be taken to be a method of “finding out,” i.e. a way of “knowing.” In other words, knowing one way puts us in one place, while knowing another way can put us somewhere else, all because of how. From what we can tell this differential has something to do with the curvature of the earth, but we aren’t experts. We’re editors.

What seems most important and startling in this, though, is the idea that how we know might not be merely a function but in fact the primary cause of where we are. We might be here, or anywhere 250 to 500 miles away from here. So where are we, actually? Colby College? Waterville House of Pizza? The Bangor Mall? Another undisclosed Dunkin’ Donuts location, oyster farm, or rural cannabis dispensary? The Gulf of Maine? Mooseland, Nova Scotia? Further? How would we know? This would seem to suggest that finding out is not just some intellectual exercise (as one undertakes in a classroom) but a primary method for shaping and reshaping spacetime itself.

That’s one way of describing a literary magazine, anyway, which is the spacetime condensate with which we are most concerned at this current moment in curvature, specifically this first issue of The Colby Review. The magazine (or journal, which looks like a book, but isn’t, but how would we know) was newly started this year by the Creative Writing Program at Colby College, and produced in a class called Literary Editing & Publishing that ran during the Fall and Spring of AY 2025-2026. Over the course of the year, undergraduate students met once a week to learn about the structural dynamics and social histories of literary publishing and cultural production, and to study the amorphous matrix of professional activity and readerly craft we call “editing.” We wanted to find out if, channeling what we had learned, we could produce a literary magazine which served both as a vehicle for learning these things firsthand and a legitimate publication anyone would want to actually read. We made ourselves aware of the many problems and pitfalls of institutionally-affiliated magazines like ours, the biggest problem being that their mastheads change year-to-year, and the biggest critiques being that there are far too many of them and they far too often situate themselves as vehicles for professionalization and cultural capital ahead of their responsibility to a tradition of “little magazine” publication that reaches back at least a couple of hundred years, and intrinsically occupies positions of mutable and potentially difficult relation to institutional alignment, locations not always easily compatible with the academy, to say the least, and which take some degrees of embrace of multiplicity, instability, even negative capability to fully and authentically occupy. We wondered how we could engage with these problems meaningfully while also staying vulnerable to the critiques at hand, to the dangers of irrelevance and how we might utterly crumble under the weight of someone (anyone) else’s ideas of “quality” or “best.” We knew a lot of what we could do had been done before, yet it appeared what we could do that would actually be different would originate from a practice called learning, the complementary inverse of which is often called teaching, both of which constitute essential activities of finding out.

What we found out with this magazine is that you really can just put undergraduate editors in the driver’s seat, start from zero, and get somewhere cool. Usually this kind of editorial work is reserved for students in Creative Writing MFA programs, but with the right guidance and structure it is just as possible for students who have not submitted grad school portfolios to conceive of themselves as editors and collaborators in the same sense and learn the same lessons. We are all hungry for real food cooked over real fire, for work that is real. We found out what forms of this work we each like best, or feel most suited to, whether that’s copyediting, typesetting, reading submissions, building a website, sequencing a TOC, designing a cover, spreading the word, shipping orders, or some other of the million micro and macro tasks we haphazardly roll up into the Katamari of “publishing.” We figured out ways to collaborate with each other, to share labor and stay in conversation, to agree and disagree, for this to be our process. We’re not saying any of it is perfect, but it is ours, and we choose this ours-ness as the defining character of The Colby Review over comfortable legibility or correctness. Our assertion is that what we have made is novel and valuable because it could not have been calculated using any predetermined equation or method, that it is and will always be a product of our time and location, for as long as we are able to continue to produce it, and each time will be remade anew. We understand editing not as corrective reduction but an art of relational curation and expansion, generative collaboration, and context-creation. We understand publishing not merely as printing and distribution but a form of foundational community-making, a documentary practice, an act of shared attention and care, and knowledge production. The writers in this issue submitted work to us from all over the world, and we chose to publish what excited and challenged us the most; not just what was prettiest, most understandable, or agreeable, though there is ample beauty in these dissonant harmonies, this community of pages; as much as we could fit. We extend the tradition of undergraduate publication in the same spirit of experimentation and adventure that has long been the truest engine of contemporary literature and literary culture, the animating process by which the aesthetic impulses and discursive ephemera of now may become matters of enduring material and social record. In other words, yeah, finding out.

Zach Peckham
Faculty Editor
The Colby Review