Emily Velasquez has joined the Tab Journal staff and is now reading submissions. She earned her BA at Cal State Fullerton and is now a Dual MA/MFA student at Chapman University.
New Tab Staff Emily Velasquez
Emily Velasquez has written for Soapberry Review, an online journal dedicated to amplifying the work of Asian American writers and provide thoughtful critical analysis of their work. Soapberry Review was launched earlier this year by another Chapman MA/MFA student, Audrey Fong, with essayist and tech worker Sarah Sukardi.
July 2022 marks 32 years of celebrating Disability Pride Month, which began after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Tab Journal joins the disability community in appreciating and understanding the range of human ability and the diversity that can be found within the disabled community. We think it fitting to discuss the steps some of our staff are taking to create more inclusive experiences.
Tab Journal’s Creative Director, Claudine Jaenichen, piloted a course this past spring at Chapman University entitled “Disability, Accessibility, and Design.”
[This course] presents a body of work, methodologies, and creative scholarship from a diverse group of designers, creative practitioners, and researchers representing neurodiversity, sensory, physical, cognitive, and cultural diversity within the visible and invisible disabled community. The course uses project-based learning focusing on the foundations of design. Students learn the fundamental principles of accessibility and prepare for further study in inclusive and collaborative design work.
Creative Director Claudine Jaenichen is standing between a workshop attendee (left) and Editor Anna Leahy (right) as they look at the print issues of Volume 1 and 2.
Designing for the disabled community is important for representation and understanding. The human-made world in which we live is most often built with normative bodies and abilities in mind. Claudine Jaenichen’s class is exciting because it challenges these assumptions. Students are calling for it to become a required course in the Graphic Design major.
Meanwhile, Tab Journal‘s Editor, Anna Leahy, has spent the last two years heading the effort to launch a Health Humanities program at Chapman University. The minor in Health Humanities complements the long-standing Disability Studies minor, and the college’s annual Engaging the World program will focus on health equity in Fall 2023. Leahy committed herself to this effort while working on her article for The Washington Postcelebrating the 30th anniversary of ADA.
In addition, this year, Editor Anna Leahy and Creative Director Claudine Jaenichen have been awarded a Scholarly/Creative Activity Grant from Chapman University to explore “Crip Time, Poetry Curation, and Design Thinking: New Directions for Tab Journal” in 2022-2023. As part of this exploration, Leahy and Jaenichen are meeting with a disabled designer this month, considering how we can avoid putting time and effort into disability dongles (see Liz Jackson’s work), and investigating best practices for visual poetry. We’re also seeking out language and developing practices that reflect our varied abilities and schedules as staff, contributors, and readers.
Though Tab Journal has not explicitly recruited staff who identify as D/disabled, our survey last year indicated that many of our staff identify as having a disability. By representing the disability community in our staff demographics, we hope to ensure a range of perspectives and ideas at play in the literary community.
Did you like what you read in the Current Issue (July 2022) of Tab Journal? We want to share more of what our amazing contributors are up to, so here are some links to their websites, social media, and more.
Kirby Olson: Kirby Olson is a professor at SUNY Delhi in the western Catskills. His published books include Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern Illinois UP 2002), and Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (McFarland 2006) and Comedy after Postmodernism (Texas Tech UP 2000).
What is your favorite piece that has been published in Tab Journal?
Liz Harmer: I love the weirdness and ecstasy of Hilary King’s “Icebreaker with Neruda” in this year’s print issue.
Sam Risak: “Hop In, Clive” by Hilary King. As someone raised in rural Florida, I have spent a decent amount of time on golf carts, and I love how King calls out C.S. Lewis for not understanding joy by stating he obviously “never careened down / a Florida road, a tanned tangle / of cousins hanging off the back.”
Vesper North: For me, “Migration Seasons” by Dia Roth in the January issue of Volume 9.
Jay Dye: The Nuclear Shadows of Palm Trees by Nikolai Garcia. I picked it up on a whim at LibroMobile in DTSA [Downton Santa Ana] because I liked the title. Most of the poems are about LA, so it’s made me reminisce of the time I spent living there in 2016-2017.
Sam Risak: The Earth Is Not Flatby Katharine Coles. I picked up this collection at AWP, and while I have not yet finished it, I can already tell it’s a work I will read more than once. Coles wrote the book through the Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and each poem feels like it edges me slightly closer to seeing a landscape that we know so little about. Or, if not seeing it, then at least asking the questions such an overwhelming environment would incite.
Liz Harmer: I have devoured, several times, Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets. [And the review appears in Tab Journal Issue 2 (March), Volume 9 (2021).]
How do you get inspiration to write poetry?
Liz Harmer: Inspiration comes from small feelings and images or scraps of language that arise here and there. Something odd in the atmosphere or the view. A novel way of speaking.
Vesper North: Images will pop into my head–like a nebula or an empty highway or sometimes it’s an emotion that I visualize in color and shape, and I’ll think, I’ll try to turn that into a poem.
Jay Dye: I focus on what I have been feeling, reading, and thinking about lately. If all else fails, I silence my inner critic and see what comes out. With a little work, messy and uninspired drafts can turn into some pretty good poetry.
Sam Risak: I usually find inspiration before I know what to do with it. I’ll see or hear something that grabs my attention (which can be anything from an interesting texture of algae to some fact I heard on Science Friday) and take note of it with a photo or on a piece of paper. Later, when I go to write a poem, I think about how I can give language to that cool “thing.” It’s only once I have the language down on paper that I’m able to figure out why that “thing” mattered to me.
Let’s change the topic, just for fun. If you could choose to be an animal, what animal would you be and why?
Sam Risak: Raccoon. I’m a scavenger. I eat everything that’s on my plate and then try to steal whatever I can off everyone else’s. And, if I’m being honest, the food doesn’t necessarily even have to be on a plate. If it’s been thrown out but isn’t touching anything too suspicious, that’s fair game, too.
Jay Dye: I think I would be an octopus. Their powers of metamorphosis are incredible and they’re very smart. It would also be a lot of fun to explore the ocean.
Liz Harmer: My answer has always been that I’d choose to be a tiger, and I’ll stick with that out of loyalty to my childhood self.
Vesper North: Phoenix–what’s not to like about a phoenix.
From as young as three years old, I remember carefully reading ingredients on wrappers, bags, boxes, nutritional facts PDFs. My severe food allergies made me realize that, when my parents were not around, I had to rely on my own knowledge to keep myself safe. When teachers would hand out snacks at school, I would look at them suspiciously, turning the packages over in my hand and searching the label for keywords like eggs, egg albumen, lecithin (soy lecithin was okay), almonds, cashews, walnuts, peanuts, coconut, macadamia. Oftentimes, my teachers would gently remind me that I had this same snack just the other day and offer to open the package themselves, just to get me to start acting like a normal child, one who didn’t obsessively read and reread and reread cookie wrappers.
“I can’t be sure you checked. My parents need me to check.”
Every year, my mom would take me to the allergist to get the same sort of spiel about my allergies. Normally, a very elderly man with a clipboard and cold hands would ask me if anything had changed (it hadn’t), and then say, “It’s likely your daughter will grow out of her allergies. Many children are able to wake up and eat things they were allergic to out of the blue!”
I always sensed that “growing out” of my allergies was impossible for me. Maybe I thwarted the possibility through sheer frustration at how unlikely supposed mystery cures seemed, but I did not grow out of my allergies. My food restrictions are still severe: I don’t allow roommates to keep or cook eggs in the house (cross-contamination), I can’t go into breakfast restaurants (egg proteins travel in the air and give me hives, plus the possibility of cross-contamination), I don’t touch walnut wood (it makes me break out in a rash), I can’t kiss my boyfriend if he’s eaten anything that contains nuts (he needs to brush his teeth first), and much more.
Food Allergy Awareness Week is May 8-14, 2022. Find out more at FARE.
However, despite the severity of my allergies, I cannot imagine my life without them. In fact, my allergies taught me to read carefully and to read a lot. I constantly had reading material, and that material mattered. The words written on those packages were life or death for me. I learned to value words, even seemingly boring ones. It’s significant that words mattered to me from a young age, that I was trained to read and react accordingly. In a funny way, my restrictions and challenges intertwined me more deeply with my first and greatest love: reading.
Growth can be found in the strangest of places. For me, it was found on the ingredient labels I had to, and still have to, read. I wouldn’t choose to have food allergies, but they remind me that words matter. Even if I grew out of my allergies today (I won’t, I’m far too old for that) or if they were magically cured, I wouldn’t change my habits or mindset. And I think I’m satisfied with that because that’s part of who I am.
As part of our celebration of National Poetry Month, Tab Journal Communications Coordinator Lydia Pejovic posed a few questions to our new Contributing EditorsRuben Quesada and Lynne Thompson both about their own interests in poetry and about the larger culture of poetry.
What about Tab Journal interested you enough to join the staff as a Contributing Editor?
Lynne Thompson:Tab Journal’s reputation as a literary journal that not only values text but exalts that text by pairing it with original and ever-changing graphic design has always made it a top-notch journal in my view. In addition, Tab’s commitment to a practice of equity and diversity in selecting its contributors, making it a policy that becomes integral and systemic in its editorial policy, made me excited to take on this role.
Ruben Quesada: I’m impressed by Tab Journal’s visual elements. Fewer literary journals combine visual and literary aesthetics. I’m excited to introduce this journal to new readers and lovers of art and literature.
What particular perspectives or skills do you bring to Tab Journal?
Ruben Quesada: I’ve been editing literary journals for the past decade, and each journal I’ve worked with has taught me something new about editing. I believe that editing and composing an issue is similar to writing a poem. It is a practice of building an experience for the reader. With each iteration of an issue, I learn more about the importance of the editorial role. The experience reminds me of editing my work. As a jpurnal editor, I have the privilege of shaping readership and celebrating work that introduces me to new perspectives and reminds me about the beauty of life.
Lynne Thompson: Fighting for equity for the underserved and marginalized has been a tenet of my work, first as an attorney, and now as a poet. In particular, in my role as L.A.’s Poet Laureate, I’ve worked to hone my skills to bring the broadest range of voices possible to public awareness on my podcast, Poems On Air.
When you review and select poems for publication, what are you looking to see? What about an individual poem make an impression on you?
Lynne Thompson: I look, first and foremost, for the music in a poem’s lines. That music might be blues or Beethoven, might be Rhiannon Giddens or classical guitar, but whatever the genre, the music is always the most beguiling way in for me.
Ruben Quesada: As a critic and editor, I try to find the question a poem or collection attempts to answer. An individual poem may clarify something, but there aren’t many poems that do this with insight and grace. Language should be composed thoughtfully. I’m excited about poems that draw my attention to music and storytelling. Form and content vary, but I believe all writing is a form of storytelling.
What’s exciting about poetry right now?
Ruben Quesada: I’ve always been excited about a poem’s imagination and language. I’m interested when a poem moves beyond the mundane in content and form. Poems are about the meaning of language and the beauty of imagination. Writing poetry is a practice made simply for its intellect and style. Poetry is an art that is practiced and not a profession. Yet, anti-capitalists will decry the need to be paid for labor. What excites me about poetry right now is its growing loss of value. Poetry is too focused on the poem’s maker as a token of the art and less on the art itself.
Lynne Thompson: Despite the nightmare that has been the pandemic that is entering its third year, poets have been deeply ensconced in their craft as evidenced from the “gotta-buy-it” books from visionaries like Randall Horton‘s {289-128}and Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain, among too many other truly amazing books to name. I’m most excited that the creative impulse survives like a green shoot bisecting hard ground.
How can poetry connect us to our communities?
Lynne Thompson: The poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar recently recommended that poets write about communities other than our own. Her advice strikes me as a brilliant approach for us all to begin to understand and honor our individual communities and to look for ways to connect with them, to empathize.
Ruben Quesada: Over the past decade, I’ve become more interested in poetry’s intersection at various forms of media to create an experience that can transcend language and culture. In the early 20th century, poets responded to their age of the image. Long before film and television became widely accessible to audiences, poets created worlds of their own for readers. As communication becomes more entangled in multimedia, poetry will serve as a tool for literacy worldwide.
Submissions are open now but will likely close by the end of May as the Editor, Contributing Editors, and Creative Director make content decisions for the July, September, and November issues.
Tab Journal is excited to welcome Jay Dye to the staff as an Assistant Editor. Our assistant editors play several roles, including evaluating submissions and writing book reviews.
Jay Dye (she/her) is a writer and artist from Orange County, CA. Her work has been published in Calliope, Scribendi, and Sapere Aude. See more at https://jaydye.org.
We are also happy to share that Ian Koh has joined Narrative Magazine as an Assistant Poetry Editor. While this opportunity means that he can no longer evaluate submissions for Tab Journal, he is staying on staff as a book reviewer and to help out in other areas. Ian joins Chapman University MFA alum Mariana Samuda and soon-to-be-alum Paige Welsh on the Narrative staff.
Tab Journal welcomes Contributing Editors Ruben Quesada and Lynne Thompson as part of the editorial team for the July, September, and November 2022 issues. We’re grateful for the Poetry Foundation grant funding that supports these positions.
Ruben Quesada is the editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, out this year from University of Nebraska Press, and hosts the Mercy Street Readings. He visited Chapman University via Zoom last fall to speak with MFA students in the required Aspects of a Writer course. His energy and breadth of knowledge and experience made him a top choice for our new position. His latest poetry book is Revelations from Sibling Rivalry Press.
Lynne Thompson is the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and has visited Chapman University several times, so she has a good sense of what we’re trying to accomplish with Tab Journal and how she can make a difference. A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College. Her latest book is Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.
In our grant proposal, we wrote:
Tab Journal requests a grant from the Poetry Foundation specifically to continue our diversity and inclusion initiatives. A diverse pool of submissions flourishes based upon several factors: the journal’s self-representation, credibility of staff, integrity of equitable policies and practices, analysis of and response to demographic information, broadly written calls, expansive networks (visibility in BIPOC spaces), and incentives.
We consciously chose not to use the guest editor model, which too easily shifts responsibility for inclusion away from the organization’s underlying structures, policies, and practices. Instead, our contributing editors are part of the conversation about how Tab Journal reaches potential readers and contributors, how staff read and respond to submissions, and which poems end up in the published issues. We’ve defined the contributing editors as collaborators rather than advisors, and we’ve had some frank conversations about the challenges we face and the possibilities we envision.
One of the first changes we made was to add optional demographic questions to the submission form.
Submissions opened in February, with our greatest one-month influx of submissions. At least two staff read each submission anonymously, and those submissions that make it to the next round are read by the Contributing Editors, Editor, and Creative Director, who will collaboratively make decisions about what goes in which issue. The decisions we make together will be evident in the published issues later this year, but we’re also excited about how the conversations are shaping the way we do things and suggesting future goals.
In the last couple of weeks, submissions have slowed down a bit, so now is a great time to send something our way! Keep in mind that, because we give a lot of attention to design and production, we work several months ahead of each issue’s publication date. Once we fill the November issue, we’ll close submissions–and that could happen in May. So, get yourself over to Submittable this month.
After my traumatic brain injury, when I returned—pale and disoriented—from the flickering grey atmosphere of the hospital to the real world, I felt completely alone. With a passport stamped in my own blood, I sought to resume my normal life. But what was normal—and what of my life remained?
My relationships were scattered on the wind of my lengthy recovery. The wind moaned, pushing me toward my mother and away from my father. My father, with whom I argued violently over the telephone that night—the night I was injured. I recall one of us hanging up on the other. Was it me? Was it him? I don’t remember. I remember an overwhelming rush of silence filling the void at the end of our call—the statement implied by the force of a hand smashing a landline back into its cradle. The muted click as the call was severed. Yes, maybe it was him.
My mother blamed him for inspiring me to drink so much that night—the night a pair of strangers savagely beat me. The night that changed my life forever. When I was released, my father visited me. He posed with me for a picture in the grass outside my mother’s home, standing behind my wheelchair. I sat stiffly, feeling his hands on my shoulders. A few days later, we argued over the phone once more, and nine years passed before we saw each other again. Without him, I depended on my mother to guide me through the arduous depths of my outpatient therapy and my lengthy recovery. My mother and I became close for the first time. Later, when I exerted my independence by moving out of state with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, cracks developed in my relationship with my mother, opening the ground between us. I haven’t spoken with her in months.
Before my father and I fell out, and before that fate-soaked night, I lived with my two best friends. We were in a band together: a trio. We recorded and performed and made plans to tour the country together, to flourish beyond the anonymity of our day jobs together. They visited me there in my flickering grey room. As I looked up at them from my hospital bed, we talked about the future. When I was released, they moved away, taking our friendship with them. Twenty-two years later, I bumped into one. She said our other bandmate was officially homeless now, living somewhere on the streets of Los Angeles. The overwhelming rush of silence filling the void as I received this information reminded me later of that night when I held the telephone. She broke the silence to ask me what I was doing, gesturing toward the papers on the coffeehouse table. I said I was writing.
Reading with TBI. Writing with TBI.
I find my voice through writing and reading. I seek alternate worlds—not in deep futuristic space, but here—where I can live in someone else’s skin, where I can breathe the same air, sharing their triumphs and struggles, seeing things from their perspective. I inhabit the deceptively simple, sculpted sentences of Toni Morrison and the hideous suffering of her characters; I observe the muddled turmoil of humanity through the eyes of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s blinking tortoise; I soar like Wordsworth’s bees, murmuring by the hour in foxglove bells. I live again. And again.
Thinking of embodiment (and of empathy), I revisit the words of Gregory Orr. When Orr describes, in his poem “Trauma (Storm),” hunkering down within “the cave of self,” the place where he escapes the raging world, I see my trauma made flesh. I experience, again, the glowing pain I felt after waking from my coma. I feel the brusquely indifferent hands of nurses transferring my twisted form from gurney to gurney and place to place like a portable autopsy. I hear the monotonous beeping of MRIs and CT scans in arctic chambers of the hospital and the pathokinesiology study I underwent before a panel of puzzled physicians. The physicians took notes, muttering amongst themselves as they watched me hobbling in pain, crossing the room in front of them like a tortoise. By meditating on Orr’s poetry, I feel liberated from memories of my past by living in his skin, donning the mask of Cain he wore after the accidental death of his brother and—and by the subsequent death of his mother, two years later.
Orr uses poetry, he says, to survive the “emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and [the] traumatic events that come with being alive.” When I found myself in this same silent cavern of isolation, confusion, and guilt, I recognized that writing was my only way out in the years following my injury. And I find now, in Orr, a kindred spirit. His words remind me I’m not alone.
February is Low Vision Awareness Month. It’s a good time for Tab Journal to share our efforts over the last three years to welcome readers with low vision to the poetry we publish. Here’s an update, an overview, a trajectory–from Creative Director Claudine Jaenichen and Editor Anna Leahy.
Tab Journal‘s Vision of Low Vision
Because design has always been enormously important to how we approach poetry, Tab Journal isn’t like other literary journals. We consider ourselves designers and curators. When we say, “space before text,” we mean that design thinking extends both to textual content and to the space the work creates. We understand that form, format, and design of text and space can create various reading experiences. As part of our design thinking, Tab Journal is committed to creating an increasingly inclusive literary space, welcoming work that represents a variety of approaches and aesthetics, including work from those whose voices have been traditionally underrepresented in literary publishing.
Why consider low vision?
If you have high vision, it’s important to keep in mind that millions of Americans don’t. Many of us use assistive devices like contact lenses or glasses, but those devices don’t work equally as well for everyone. Take a look at versions of what those with age-related macular degeneration or cataracts see, and consider what these videos suggest about the various ways people see the world.
What does this have to do with poetry?
Tab Journal‘s January 2019 issue was printed on velum that allowed content from other pages to seep through. This meant that reading a page was filled with external visual noise that the reader had to negotiate. We designed an intentionally challenging reading experience in which ease couldn’t be taken for granted. Moreover, the type size was only 8 points. That’s small but not unusual for books and magazines (though visual size is more accurately measured as x-height).
As we reflect on our literary journal’s history and process, we look to this visually noisy issue as a pivotal moment. We realized that we had excluded readers who can, or would, engage with the poems.
At the same time, we were switching from the clunky Open Journals System platform to the current WordPress-based platform. We realized that our online issues—the PDF files of our archives—were impossible for e-readers to follow.
Access in the form of readability matters, perhaps especially in poetry. Because each word of a poem matters, readability is important.
What changed?
Beginning with our print issue in 2020, Tab Journal shifted the visual experience and design to prioritize low vision standards. Low vision standards for graphic design include clear headlines, color to ensure enough contrast and color pairing to accommodate people with color blindness, typographic legibility and readability, and printing surfaces that minimize glare.
Tab Journal now uses a standard type size range between 13 and 18 points in the annual printed issues and considers the fonts and weights (e.g. bold, medium, regular) can be applied for optimum legibility. Typefaces that are too wide or too narrow (such as condensed fonts) impede legibility. In the 2022 issue, we used Atkinson Hyperlegible font designed by Linus Boman with the Braille Institute. You can download the font for free at https://brailleinstitute.org/staging2/freefont.
Tab Journal is also minimizing the use of all capital letters. Using all caps can sometimes be read as individual letters by assistive technology instead of as words. That’s why we now use Tab Journal as much as possible instead of the official name (TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics) under which the journal’s ISBN is registered. We continue to consider the research on reading ease and speed as well as options for using all caps or other visual signals, knowing that WordPress.org defaults are also part of our constraints.
Readability is also based on line lengths and column width. In poetry, column widths and the line lengths are determined by the poem, and we make sure that typographic attributes represent the poem in the most legible format.
What does this mean?
We offer two issues below of examples that demonstrate both an inaccessible format (2019) and low vision complaint issue (2020).
What’s next?
As part of our effort to ensure an equitable experience of our journal for everyone, we are developing more training in 508-compliance to meet a wider range of adaptive and assistive technologies. Section 508 was signed into law as part of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 to ensure that access to electronic and information technology is created and accessible to people with disabilities.
This year, we have applied for external funding to further our efforts in low vision accessibility and other ways we can increase equity and inclusion overall in literary journal production. We recognize the need for the literary culture to account for accessibility when we consider resource allocation.
