ENTRY 3: Journal Presentation

Journal Presentation:

Overall introduction and Journal Editors:

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. Each issue features a collection of beautifully crafted poetry, short fiction, and personal essays. This journal was founded in 2005 by its current editor, Leah Browning.

Content: (audience)

It covers poetry, fiction, essay; it also contains cover artworks which are used as a cover for every issue.

This journal combines different styles; it is unique and imaginative. The audience here is eclectic audience, who are willing to try new things.

It has only online versions.

Aesthetic:

Format/Layout

It is quite simple and clean, which shows a very concise beauty. It contains artwork at the top of the page, usually the pictures with painted figures and scenes. This kind of layout let audience easy to read. But it doesn’t have regular sections.

Genres:

Fiction, poetry, essays, artwork.

Publication platform:

It is published on the website where it is easy to read the journal. Also, it is a print journal which published twice annually.

Like:

We recommend this journal because this journal is very suitable for those who prefer the literary works. We like the cover artwork accompanying every issued journal, from which we can learn to adorn our own journal with several pictures to make the page more attractive. Also, we love the layout of this journal. This journal is simple and clean with concise beauty, which grabs the audience attention on the quality of the literature itself.

Don’t like:

Actually, apart from its advantages, there are also some disadvantages. This journal is not rich in the content. The sections of it are very limited. This journal is exclusive of various fields, such as history, politics or science. Also instead of specifically categorize the works by its genres, this journal simply collect all genres in one issue, just like a book. So for our own journal, we suggest that we can contain more things to make the content rich. In addition, though it has pictures, but the meaning of the picture can hardly be delivered as it is simply used as cover of each issue without accompanying text to explain it. So in our journal, we think we should use the pictures which are in accordance with the content of the poetry in terms of its meaning.

Sample piece:

The bees by Grant Clauser
First the bees disappeared
and the apple blossoms failed
to understand, so fell away
blown across the field.

The rivers shrank.  Dry algae
like dead skin, flaked off rocks.
Catfish settled into the mud
crusting over the roots
of weeping willows.

When milk stopped flowing
the mothers cried and everyone
noticed how quiet
the marsh had become.

We gathered the last books together
and told the children
to close their eyes
so they wouldn’t see
what was coming.

(image)

We choose this poem as it has literary appeal through many beautiful images, such as bees, apple blossoms, river, catfish and so on. It is very finely written.

This poem is also very accessible as it not only describes the natural scenes, but also connects the things with our human beings as what last two stanzas have described. It is very thought-provoking.

As we can see, the bees only appear at the beginning of this poem. But with the disappearance of the bees, the emergence of many things follows, and leads us from a very beautiful moment to a thoughtful level. This poem is consistent with the journal and can be a representative among his journal, as it is accessible, beautiful. Just as the name of this journal shows in the words “apple valley”, this poem is also full of imagination.

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