WILL EXPAND AND INCLUDE PICTURES OF EACH EDITION OF ETCH, THEN MAKE AND UPLOAD DIGITAL COPIES OF EACH EDITION.
As these readings and weekly meetings continued, the coordinators recognized another opportunity they could provide these students.
Dan recalls, “It just became sort of the obvious next step to put together a simple publication.” The students jumped on board. In 2002, they named their publication Etch.
Funded entirely by the Writing Center’s limited budget, Etch was an annual (in 2004, semesterly) collection of writing by the members of the Creative Writing Corner. Etch was not a journal in the traditional sense. Members of the Creative Writing Corner not only wrote the pieces which were published, but decided as a group who’s pieces would make the final cut. In this way, the publication served as encouragement and validation for the members of the group, and could be used to attract new participants.
The money allotted to the project went entirely toward printing costs and less than a hundred copies of each issue were printed. Although cheaply financed, each edition of Etch boasted a full color cover and close to twenty pages of poetry and prose. The writers, apparently, distributed these copies to family and friends, and there is currently a copy of the 2002 and 2004 issue of Etch in the University of Kentucky’s Special Collection Library while the remaining two issues remain in the Writing Center.
Please enjoy the 2003 and 2004 collections below:
2003: Issue 2. Editors: Dan Elkinson and HD Bennett
2004: Issue 3. Editors: Dan Elkinson and Jeff Osbourne
Students involved with the Creative Writing Corner and Etch would go on to build new, student led publications like Shale and clubs like the Graphite Creative Writing Association.
