Every year, the staff of The Promethean has the same goals. We want to create a bold journal full of quality literature and artwork. We want to push the limits of both our contributors and our readers. We want to create a memorable journal that Concordia University-Portland can be proud of.
This year, we decided to accomplish these goals by going back to our roots. We decided that we would use the story of Prometheus, our journal\u27s namesake, as our inspiration. Prometheus was a god who saw that humans needed fire to survive. Against the will of the other gods, he shared fire with humanity. As punishment, he was chained to a rock and had to endure having his liver eaten by buzzards. Each day his liver grew back; each night the buzzards returned. We, like Prometheus, would have the courage to give the people what they needed - powerful, honest literature - and utter a shout of Bring on the Buzzards! to any naysayers who tried to stop us.
It has become tradition for The Promethean to have an annual writing contest. For our theme this year, we again stuck with the Prometheus legend. We chose Spark and told students that they could do with that what they would. We also continued the trend of the last few years by adding a challenge: writers could use only 500 words to craft their contest entry. This limit required writers to choose their words carefully, and work hard to craft a complete scene in a short amount of space. We were not disappointed. We received many submissions to our contest, all of which were well crafted.
We chose as our judge Concordia and Promethean alumnus Vanessa Wendland. All of the submissions Vanessa received were written with serious thought and intention behind them. The top three submissions received cash prizes as well as publication in this year\u27s journal. Three honorable mentions are also published in the journal. The contest winning stories are labeled as such, and the top three have a short paragraph from our judge, explaining the merit she found in the work.
As managing editor and a senior at Concordia, this edition of The Promethean holds a special place in my heart. I have been on the staff for four years and have seen many pieces come to our editors. This year we received more submissions from a larger variety of students than in previous years. Many of these pieces speak directly to either our journal or contest theme. The fact that we are reaching out to more students, inspiring them not only to write, but to have the courage to submit their writing gives the editor part of me great joy. For those who say that technology is killing literature, I invite them to read our journal, or any collection of writing from today\u27s generation, and take hope that the fire of literature is still burning bright.
I want to thank my staff for being so amazing, especially with the onslaught of last minute submissions. The fact we were able to continue having in-depth discussions under such time constraints makes me proud to be a Concordia student. This year, a large portion of the writing center staff served as editors, which led to a focus on making each piece the best it could be. This journal also wouldn\u27t be what it is without our wonderful advisor, Dr. Kim Knutsen or the support of the other faculty and staff at Concordia.
With that, I present to you the 2011/2012 edition of The Promethean: Bring on the Buzzards.https://digitalcommons.csp.edu/cup_archives_promethean/1035/thumbnail.jp
