Submit to the OWL!

Are you a creator? Do you have a manuscript or artistic work you’re especially excited about? Consider submitting to the OWL over Winter Break!

The OWL is OWU’s annually-published, student-run literary and art journal. This year’s editors are Symone Mann ’19, Chanel Cruz ’19, A.L. Davies ’19, Karina Primmer ’21, Becca Porter ’20, and Julia Melio ’20.

Who Needs Plot When You Have Alcott? By Emma Neeper ’21

As a writing exercise, I was once told to pick someone in the room and describe them — what they wore, what they looked like, how they spoke, how they moved  — and then to invent a “why” for each observation. Why is he wearing that shirt? Because he keeps forgetting to do laundry and this was the last shirt that didn’t smell rancid.

Tomes & Treasures: Adam Poe and the Freedman’s Aid Commission

Did you know that one of Ohio Wesleyan’s founders was a civil rights champion? This week’s feature is especially exciting, because you can go see it for yourself! On display outside of the Special Collections section of Beeghly Library is some of the literature of the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission (WFAC) and the Freedmen’s Aid Society (FAC).

Tomes & Treasures: Cruikshank’s Comic Almanack

George Cruikshank was a 19th century British caricaturist best known for illustrating his friend Charles Dickens’s novels, such as Oliver Twist. One of the more interesting (and amusing) of his works that we have in the library, though, is his Comic Almanack. A little bit like the The Onion today, it contained cartoons and sociopolitical satire.

Let’s Hear it for the Little Struggles: Lisa Kogan’s Adventures in What it Means to be Alive by Anna Davies ’19

There’s no shortage of seriousness in the modern landscape of creative nonfiction. Week after week, The New York Times’ Bestsellers List exalts narratives exploring the horrors of our world: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me at 84 weeks on the list, Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle at 436 weeks on the list, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy at 119 weeks on the list, to name a few.

Tomes & Treasures: Emma by Jane Austen

 Jane Austen is one of the most influential writers of the Western canon. She wrote novels which were, for their time, rather subversive, – depicting women exercising autonomy, highlighting class differences, and generally challenging the status quo. She was also the age of many college students when she wrote Pride and Prejudice, only 20 years old (which makes me feel like I really ought to hurry up and do something important).

Nervous Conditions: Reflections on the Diversity Summit by Adrian Burr ’19

On a warm evening in early September, approximately eighty Ohio Wesleyan Students and eighty faculty members gathered in the Benes Rrooms for the school’s first Diversity Summit. The two dozen round tables were littered with small yellow pads and pens, boxed dinners, and signs with labels proclaiming such topics as “coalitions across student groups,” “Faculty and Staff collaboration,” and “Intersectionality.”…