Dave Drogowski is the founding web designer of the YSU Student Literary Arts Association.

How and why did Jenny Mag come into existence? What role did you play in it? What motivated you to be a part of creating an online literary magazine for and out of Youngstown?

In the Fall of 2010, I got really lucky. I was looking for something to serve as a senior capstone project for my Professional Writing & Editing major (what’s now referred to as Professional and Technical Writing). This project is meant to require you to create a significant high-quality written product. It’s meant to be a lot of work and to demonstrate a number of technical writing proficiencies. And I had no idea what to create. Scary times.

How I got lucky was that at the very same time and completely independent of me, conversations were already happening that the Student Literary Arts Association, which was at that time just a few years old, was interested in creating a fully student-coordinated literary magazine on YSU campus. There were and are other student-run or student-contributed literary productions on campus, but I think the real drive was to create the kind of magazine that we wanted to read.

At the time, as part of a creative writing minor, I’d taken a lot of courses in fiction writing, nonfiction writing, and poetry writing. I really fell in love with it, and I also met friends that I still have a decade later as a result. There is something really electric about spending time with people who are all passionate about something that you’re passionate about. It elevates you. It amplifies whatever that passion is. I think a love of written language and storytelling manifested itself in this small and dedicated team of people who wanted to make something that exemplified the best writing we could find and use that as a way to reach out to the world.

What was the original mission you envisioned for Jenny? What was it like to begin producing the magazine and introducing it through public celebrations over those first few years? Were there challenges? How did the public receive it?

We wanted to make, I think, a literary connection between this place that is special to us and the rest of the world, to export some of ourselves into the world and to import some of the world closer to here. We also wanted to plant a stake in the ground and say that Youngstown is more than a place that used to make things. There’s a little bit of defiance in it, I guess, but as the children and grandchildren of people that knew the city at the height of its powers, there was a clear desire to create something that celebrated what we have as a city instead of dwelling on what we’ve lost.

I remember not being sold on “Jenny” as a name at first. It’s hilarious to think that now, because I think it’s so obvious it was always the right idea. The name as a metaphor for this engine of creation, rooted in this place, something storied that casts a long shadow and is something like a ghost. Even the fact that it’s a person’s name is somehow just inherently inviting.

Someone had the idea to circulate flyers that simply said “Have you met JENNY?” with a scannable QR code that would launch our “Coming Soon” page on your phone. A little bit of viral marketing on campus, it worked really well. We started getting a LOT of hits, and a lot of interest. We received boatloads of submissions for publication. It was everything we hoped for. We had almost more written material than we knew what to do with, hundreds of pages of submission materials to review and select and edit and publish. It’s a good kind of problem to have.

When people came to our premiere and subsequent premieres, it was extremely gratifying. People were really engaged with the readings, truly absorbed in what people had written. We had found exactly the audience we were looking for, people who cared about this art much as we did. It really felt like the celebration that it was supposed to be.

Youngstown is still making things, important things that take the form of stories and songs and visual works of art that detail our lives, the things we value, the things we fear and aspire to, all of that. I’m grateful that ten years on, we’re still capturing these things and sharing them with a wider audience.

How do you feel literary magazines have changed (or not) over the last decade, since you introduced this one?

Well, some of them aren’t around any more for one. And if I’m honest, I don’t read them as much as I might have back in 2010, so I don’t know if I can exactly comment on the status of literary magazines in general.

What I can say is that Jenny came together at a time when everyone and everything was increasingly living online. We weren’t early to the internet by any stretch, but it was a very different kind of internet back then too. At the time, I remember we were particularly interested in a publication out of Pittsburgh called “Hot Metal Bridge,” and regarded it as a model. Their site seems to be down now, but I hope they come back. They were a great inspiration to us when we were getting started.

One of the barriers to creating and publishing a magazine was publication itself. You could print a zine yourself for relatively cheap, but maybe not create exactly the product you wanted. Or you could print something a little nicer, but then you’d always be struggling with the fundraising to produce it year after year. Online publication let us put out the work we wanted, the imagery we wanted, and share it instantaneously and freely around the world. That was a first for a YSU magazine. Hosting was cheap. All we had to do was learn as we went along.

I think one thing that is indisputably true is that more people now have more ways than ever to share their creative work. That’s a good thing, but it also might make it harder to find the work and the voices and the stories that really engage you. A good magazine should be one that you want to keep coming back to because it continually presents you with something new and fascinating, it has a sensibility that you appreciate. It’s my hope that people keep coming back to our magazine because we’re still producing something we want to read, and so will our readers.   

What makes Jenny stand out among other literary magazines for you?

I think one of our biggest successes is creating a home for stories that are really grounded here in Youngstown and in the surrounding areas. One of the things I love is coming across a piece that is set in that old bar I’ve seen a hundred times, or a story from a friend in a faraway former life before I knew them, or the familiar Youngstown graffiti phrase “Eddie Loves Debbie” given an imaginative new life. There are places and people in every issue of Jenny that are either plucked from a real place or shaped and informed by this place, and as a reader I feel a connection to it.

It’s real. I have heard it from people who have lived here and moved away, and people who have migrated in. For better or worse, Youngstown is unique somehow. It has a character and a sensibility. It’s hard to articulate and it takes different forms, sometimes rough around the edges and sometimes indescribably sweet. I guess that’s kind of what home is for everybody. You might not really be able to describe it, but you know when you’re there. Youngstown’s DNA is still very much a part of the magazine that we produce.

When did you know that Jenny Magazine was picking up speed and becoming a cornerstone of Youngstown’s literary culture?

I hope that it is. I feel like one of the things about making something, especially a magazine which is never literally done, is that it also more abstractly is never done. Never done growing and changing and trying to do something that means something. I would prefer never to be satisfied in that sense. Call it midwestern humility or call it pessimistic, but I think we’ll always be trying to prove our worth and that our goal of connecting this place to the world is a worthy one that we’re hopefully succeeding at.

What I do know more concretely though is that we still draw an audience. Hundreds or thousands of hits per month, even to this day. That for me is really significant. A project like this can ebb and flow, people’s interests are fluid, and there are highs and lows. But to this day, over the ten years we’ve been tracking site usage on jennymag.org, we still enjoy a huge readership. Tens of thousands of pageviews a year are logged every single year. Last month’s hits were 2,428, a new monthly record for the site. So from that perspective, I’m really happy. I almost can’t believe that ten years in, we’re as visited as we’ve ever been. And I’m hoping that means we’re still on the right track.

What is your favorite memory from your time creating and establishing Jenny?

I have a lot of them. Creating and establishing the magazine is for me so deeply intertwined with some of my longest friendships that it all bleeds together, tied up with nostalgia about my time at YSU, about being a kid in my 20s about town, all of that. The magazine only really occupied a year of my time at YSU but it feels like the whole thing. It ended up being so significant in helping me find what I loved, what I was interested in, and who my people were.

I remember the experience of hearing one of my favorite poems ever published in the Jenny as it was read in person at our Issue #002 premiere. The poem is “Less” by Bill Ebert. I knew I was in love with the poem when I first read it, a poem that so deeply evokes the unspeakable intensity of love in a few brief and excellent stanzas (read it here; it’s still mystical to me). I’ll never forget how moved I was hearing it in person. Less really is more.

Mostly I remember laughter, kindness, and generosity of the entire crew who were so good to me. I will always be grateful to everyone who made me feel so at home with them.  

Tell us about your Youngstown. The Youngstown from ten years ago, when a crew of undergraduate students decided to make a literary magazine and present it to the community here? What was Youngstown and life at YSU like then? What does it appear to be now, whether you are still nearby, or whether you have drifted further afield.

It’s difficult for me to say how different or how similar it is now to those days. The best I can do is try and paint a picture. For those that weren’t there at the time, there are places that no longer exist, bars and stores and regular events that no longer exist, and they were the colorful backdrop to so many memories. I’m sure that there are new ones. My hope is that the experience now is the same in character as the one I got to have.

I got to be surrounded by the smartest and most openly human people I had ever met and shared so much with them. I have countless memories spent sitting under the moon at the original Cedars Lounge on Hazel street, smoking packs of cigarettes and just talking for hours and hours after a long shift at the grocery store. Talking about art, about technology and science, about morality and justice, about who definitely should or definitely should not be president, about internet memes, about love and sex, about poetry and tragedy. Or maybe shuffling over to The Lemon Grove, eating a late-night sandwich and encountering something that you would never in a million years expect. It felt like there was always something to discover.

I think that the experience of YSU and of Youngstown for me is best described as getting very close to people, learning from them and understanding them and seeing the world through their eyes.

If that sounds like the fun, slacking-off part of writing and creating and building a magazine, it is, but it’s more than that. It’s a big part of being a social person, and it’s also a big part of writing. If movies are the empathy machine, as Roger Ebert said, writing and reading are something similar, trying really to understand and inhabit the experience of another in a way to live beyond yourself. Some people don’t particularly want or need that out of the world, I suppose. But I think for all writers the need to understand and be understood is a deep one that drives the whole process of writing. It’s the whole reason, somewhere under there, that we make art.

Buildings close, jobs move, your favorite TV show is going to get canceled. Life moves on. But I think where people retain a genuine curiosity to see the world beyond themselves, to explore the world through the lens of art, and to try and break down the boundary that exists between themselves and others, they find joy and love and purpose.

I think that’s always what the arts have been in search of. I think it’s the reason we created a magazine to connect ourselves to the world in the way that we did. I don’t think we’ll ever be finished. I think it’s a process we constantly want to be taking part in, over and over again.