‘Prairie Schooner’ managing editor balances work with creating own women’s genre poetry

The "Prairie Schooner" office is located in room 123 of Andrews Hall. The front room reveals a reception desk and a table where graduate students read over the hundreds of submissions mailed to the office of the literary magazine each year.

Off-set from the workroom are two offices, one for the editor-in-chief, Kwame Dawes, and the other for managing editor Marianne Kunkel.

A poet herself, Kunkel is working toward a Ph.D. in creative writing with a concentration in poetry, with specific focus on women's and gender studies. She boasts four years of publishing and editing experience working at the University Press of Florida, Naylor Publications and the University of Nebraska Press.

Metal shelves stuffed with past editions of "Prairie Schooner" line a wall of her office, broken by a small table holding a coffee maker and a large flower wall-hanging.

As managing editor, Kunkel's job is to help set the first-year editor's goals for the journal in motion.

Since his arrival at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in August, Dawes said Kunkel has been helping him acclimate to the journal and to the culture of the campus itself.

The journal is published on a quarterly basis and accepts submissions from writers across the country and the world. Five undergraduate interns are charged with sorting the hundreds of pieces of mail they receive each year, and about 40 graduate readers look through the submissions, determining if they are eligible for the magazine. Dawes selects the final pieces, and Kunkel is in charge of the final edits and putting the poems through the publication process.

"As a writer herself, she understands the process of submitting work," Dawes said.

As managing editor, Kunkel's job encompasses tasks from handling the magazine's budget to answering phone calls and emails from prospective writers to actually editing the journal before it is sent to press.

She chats about various projects Dawes has proposed, including the website that will be launched in January. She said the new website will allow writers to upload and submit their work and mentioned she has repeatedly asked graduate readers to keep up with their work, reminding them that when the website is launched, submissions could increase by up to 50 percent.

"I think I've instilled fear in many of them," Kunkel said.

Aside from the technical aspects of the journal, Kunkel has been focused for much of the past semester on uniting the staff at "Prairie Schooner" through bribes of free food and T-shirts.

"Part of my fear of going online is we won't have as much of a sense of community," she explained. "It's still important for us to feel like a community, even if a lot of us are reading submissions from home." So far, she has seen a steady increase in the number of students who come in.

By reading, editing and binding hundreds of works into each journal, Kunkel said the literature is helping her become a better writer herself.

At age 5, Kunkel began writing books of songs and poetry, converting her home into a publishing house of sorts. At 8 years old, Kunkel began piano lessons, and during high school, she taught herself to play guitar.

As obvious as her passion for literature was, Kunkel did not have a set plan for college until her senior year of high school. She recalls one of her teachers handing her a poem by Marianne Moore.

"To have someone say, ‘Here's a poem that you should read and you immediately have this connection with this other great poet just by your name,'" she said. "It really focused my energy into poetry."

So she entered Auburn University as an English major specializing in poetry and never looked back.

She continued writing songs, ending up with a 20-piece repertoire. She declined to play in coffeehouses when offered gigs, saying she wanted to "focus her creative energy on poetry."

The same raw musicality of verse that snagged her attention at 5 years old also deterred her from a music career.

"The musicality and the verse – that's very important," she said. "I like the shape of it. I like condensing an experience into specific stanzas. I really like surprise in poetry. I really like taking risks. I really like humor in poetry. I love it so much."

Kunkel still holds her childhood years close, and in fact, her dissertation will be a book of poems that studies girlhood, some of them autobiographical.

She explains that it's easy to find poems that romanticize boyhood, but the phenomenon is less common when it relates to women and their youths. Boyhood is depicted as a sacred time, with numerous accounts of adventures and the camaraderie between a boy and his friends. On the other hand, girls are romanticized in a way that forces them to become women at a young age.

"In each way, practicing to be the adult is how children have traditionally been romanticized," she said. "I just find it very concerning because practicing to be a woman, traditionally, has pushed you into the domestic sphere."

Endless poems have been written about a woman's teenage years, motherhood or even statements on womanhood, but Kunkel's literary fascination is with the time that occurs directly before a girl is defined by puberty as a woman.

In this space of time, girls are very nearly gender-neutral and are in what Kunkel refers to as a "tomboy stage." In a way, the "tomboy stage" is the time when a girl decides she wants to live like the romanticized boy.

"It's cute to dress them (girls) up as women very, very young," she said. "Instead of writing about makeup and fancy clothes and romance and all that stuff, it is a period where girls can be children."

However, her exploration of girlhood is only minutely connected to any worry or fear she has for girls in today's society or coming societies, and not all of Kunkel's work is grave or serious.

She grins as she talks about some of her works-in-progress and ideas for future poems. Poems written from Shirley Temple's or Courtney Love's point of view or poems about a date with Abraham Lincoln are only a few.

"I know my end goal is to write really wonderful, high-quality books of poetry," she said. So far, the unpredictable idiosyncrasies of children have inspired much of her writing.

Through the endless hours of coffee and bagels, advertising arrangement and budgets, some of Kunkel's greatest lessons come from the mounds of content she binds into a journal every quarter. Being an editor for "Prairie Schooner" is one more step in her path to becoming a professional poet.

katienelson@dailynebraskan.com