"I am trying to be, if not a cup half full,/at least not a cup smashed into a thousand pieces/on the floor kind of person" -- Bob Hicok

Once upon a time there was a campus that supported its literary magazine and funded it through student activity fees, and gave that magazine an office. And the magazine did what it could to be a real magazine that published Pushcart nominees and also that campus' student work. And five years into that magazine's life, it was doing well. It was anticipating the drop of its fifth issue, two hundred and twenty-two pages of the best writing it had featured to date, and the cover was stunning in its four-color glory, and it was distributed to those students though local bookstores, and it was in the hands of more students than had ever held it before.

And then, one week before that fifth issue came hot from the printers, the student government said We don't think you should exist. You don't benefit us as students. If you don't agree, you have five days to get an appeal underway and appear in front of the student senate and tell us why we should fund you at all next year, because our recommendation is that you should not be.

And the editors scrambled to find people who didn't agree, and sent emails and flyers, and begged the chairs of departments on campus to tell their students. The editors were amazed by what happened next. In five days, they received almost a hundred letters from students, from faculty, from alumni. The editors had never met most of these letter writers. But the letters pleaded with the senate to not kill the magazine, that they read it, that they had come to be students at this particular school in part because it was a school that supported such endeavors. They were international students and non-native speakers, they were teachers and graduates and readers. A man who swims at a local gym wrote to say that he read it each year, and liked it. So many of the letters contained amazing things, and the most genuine sentiments, and testimonials that were enough to make the editors tear up a little.

The editors put all the letters in a binder and wrote a little speech, and their managing editor put on a skirt and brought the letters to the senate meeting today. She read the speech and asked the senate to reconsider, to give just .10% of the total student activities budget to the magazine so that it would not die. The student budget people protested and rebutted and skewed the facts. And right now the senate is deciding who they should listen to - the students, or the budget committee, and all some of us can do is be thankful that the letters are what we have, and to know that those letter's words were true, and written by people who do care, and that one day a campus senate will have the foresight to not deprive its students of the only literary magazine around.

*

What I can say is thank you, for your support and kind words and emails, and more often than not money will win out over art, but don't let it stop you from reading, and writing, and writing readers and writers to let them know that they matter to you. Because if there is one thing I have learned from all of this, it is that no matter what a bunch of business pre-law majors in ties may think of creative output, I know that it has changed some lives, and touched many others, and that is enough.

It has to be.