WILL FIND PICTURES OF OLD AND NEW CAT'S FIGMENTS AND FINISH EXPLAINING THIS HISTORY IN MY OWN WORDS
With Etch gone, the Writing Center failed to promote their services to creative writers on campus. By 2005, the Creative Writing Corner existed, but few knew of it and its publication had vanished.
The only outlet for literary expression was a journal published by the Honors Program called JAR in memory of Jane Gentry Vance. JAR issued a campus wide short-story contest in the fall of 2006, but after selecting a winner—and promising a cash prize—the journal, like many before it, disappeared. The winning writer, freshman Eric Schlich, was left without both his cash prize and an explanation. Today, the University of Kentucky Honor’s Program website still features JAR as an organization in need of funding, but the journal has not existed for nearly a decade.
[NEED TO INCLUDE MORE INFO ABOUT JAR NOW THAT I'VE FOUND OLD COPIES IN GAINES LIBRARY]
Three years after his discouragement, Eric, now a Gaines Fellow, decided to fill the gap in UK’s creative writing program. As part of his senior fellowship with the Gaines Center for the Humanities, Eric produced a literary newspaper that undergraduate writers at UK use to publish creative work. The graduate English department sponsored a journal, Limestone, so why shouldn’t the undergraduate department? With limited support, mostly from the Limestone and The Colonel—a satirical newspaper started by Andrew Battista—Eric began assembling a team of editors for what he called a “litpaper,” The Cat’s Figment.
After sending, in his words, “a bajillion” emails to departments and clubs trying to recruit staff members, Eric ended up with about thirty volunteers. Half of these students took leadership positions. Four were managing editors of different genres (short story, poetry, creative non-fiction, and visual art) and five coordinated different extra-literary efforts: fund raising, community engagement, advertising, web design, and layout. The rest of the staff worked as ground level editors, individually reviewing submissions.
Eric got right to work. He secured a monthly, reduced bulk price, printing contract with Danville Advocate Messenger—the same people who printed The Colonel—and purchased a website domain hosted outside of the university.
Unfortunately, the first few editions of The Cat’s Figment only received about thirty submissions, and these of apparently low quality. This left Erich with two problems: he didn’t have enough work for his staff, and he didn’t have writing—he felt—worth printing.
To solve these problems, The Cat’s Figment decided to embrace its identity as a newspaper. Already printed like newsprint, The Cat’s Figment started to run stories like a paper. At least for the spring edition, the Cat’s Figment staff would supply the writing. Unfortunately, “[The staff] mostly withered then died after our first ‘meeting’,” Eric said, “and ended up only being three or four people and then mostly just me.”
With this model, they began printing close to 3,000 copies a month and sticking them into any building on campus staff members could access in the evenings and trying to convince local businesses to give them shelf space. For some time, the paper was widely read, but still received very little support from the university.
The Figment also encountered funding and branding difficulties. Despite support from the English Department (who donated a couple hundred dollars to help start the paper) and the Writing Center (who provided meeting space and a desk for Eric), the Figment needed outside support. As a monthly publication, the Figment relied on local businesses buying ad space in the paper. Staff members were asked on occasion to solicit ads from local companies. Sometimes, however, this was not enough.
Future Editor-in-Chief of The Cat’s Figment, Ashleigh Lovelace, said, “Unfortunately, because of its status as a relatively unknown, fledgling, student publication coupled with its rapid publication frequency and subsequent printing costs, on more than one occasion Eric (and subsequent Editors-in-Chiefs) had to call on the kind donations of their parents to support an entire issue or two, as well as dipping into their own pockets on multiple occasions just to keep TCF in print.”
[Insert thing about resilience of creative students. What follows is still in Ashleigh’s own words]
In late spring of 2009, Eric stepped down as Editor-in-Chief so that he could take an internship at Simon & Schuster for the fall semester, and left the magazine in the hands of the brothers Curry (Chris and younger brother John, I believe a junior and sophomore at the time) and Nick Walters, also a junior, who ran The Cats Figment as co-Editors-in-Chief, each also taking over the managing editor positions for fiction (Chris), poetry (John), and creative non-fiction (Nick). Though the creative non-fiction section really morphed into a features section with articles about cultural goings-on-about-town, they kept the publishing model and ultimately encountered the same funding issues as Eric (which is where the part where parents/selves funded certain issues comes in again). After one semester, John and Nick seemingly had a parting of ways with Chris about something or other and they both decided it would be best if Chris continued on as Editor-in-Chief on his own. After spring 2010 Chris decided he would be stepping down as EIC and appointed Ashleigh Lovelace as his successor.
At this point in time, our numbers had really dwindled. Though there were some really talented people on staff to begin with, the difficulty finding funding, the seeming lack of support from the English department community (this may have been in part because it grew out of Honors/Gaines and not directly out of English, who at the time, was not pursuing a creative writing arm as strongly as it is today), and the general feeling like we couldn't manage to find enough quality material to publish every month as only a small amount of people actually knew about or cared for the opportunity to publish, our ranks had really become divided by the time I took over. By that point, I had three people left over from the previous staff who wanted to continue.
We were sort of at a sad state of affairs by this point. Our mission had become unfocused, there was clearly not enough money to support our publishing schedule, and we were really lacking a strong submission base. All of these factors coalesced into the decision to make a major change to both the format and the publication schedule. Personally, I felt that our mission as a monthly creative writing magazine was not sustainable, and I looked to the then mostly defunct Honors program creative writing journal, JAR, as a model for a student publication that had actually worked for some time. I wanted The Cat's Figment to look respectable, and to have a truly sustainable publication model, so with the support of the staff, I made the decision to scale back. We would now only be publishing once a year, until the submissions and support from the university community proved that the publication schedule should be increased once more. Additionally, the staff and I thought that a saddle-stitched chapbook format printed in bulk from Kinkos at the end of the year would look much more legitimate as a potential core publication for the English Department, and went forward on a sort of trial basis for that year to see how it would work.
Fortunately, the response was quite positive. It looked more impressive than the monthly newsprint TCF, and by only publishing annually, we managed to generate a decent amount of prestige by selecting a much smaller batch of work to be published. For the most part, this increased the quality of the writing, though I will definitely admit that our ratio of submissions to selections was honestly little better than when were publishing monthly. But the point was to make it look better/gain traction in the new format with that issue and continue from there.
