Greensleeves Plans An Alumni Issue

FOR several years now the campus literary magazine Greensleeves has been burdened with a staggering (for an undergraduate-run publication) Debt, but the latest managers, displaying a concern for dollars, cents, and public relations that appears to rival the creative urge, are determined to put Greensleeves in the black. And the project they have chosen to accomplish their aims should be of interest .to many alumni families.

Leading the quest are Greensleeves editor Tom Mitchell '65, a Philosophy major who is also president of the Dartmouth Christian Union (this past summer Tom was one of eight student tutors selected for the A.B.C. project), and business manager Ric Grefe '67. The Debt they hope to wipe off the books totals $823 and is owed to a very patient and understanding local printer. Although Greensleeves through advertise- ments and student-community sales is now holding its own financially, there has been, and probably will continue to be, little left over to use toward the Debt. The very nature of college literary magazines and their potential public keeps the price per issue down - and the profit.

Actually this is as it must be, Mitchell and Grefe believe, for the purpose of the college literary journal is not to make money but to give the budding possible successors to Hemingway and Frost opportunity to get into print. In the Saturday Review's annual report (October 10 issue) on the outcome of its contest-evaluation of writing in college student literary publications, it was noted that "Read sympathetically, the one poem, or one good short story, by a student writer can tell a good deal about what is important to the college generation, and how he copes with being irrelevant.

"There are thousands of silent wars and hundreds of minor faiths on camPus. These come to the surface on the Pages of student literary magazines. Basically, the struggle for relevance seems to require not only a minor faith and a temporary enemy to do battle with but also that provisional solutions be worked out on paper. Thus to a certain extent the student literary magazine becomes less a stage for the performance of characters than a platform for the acting out of identities."

But the bills also must be paid. Mitchell and Grefe recognize that Green-sleeves without "outside" help may have no alternative but to collapse under the weight of The Debt, and to make sure this doesn't happen they've come up with a rather unusual, and very worthwhile, project to raise some funds from "outside."

Next May Greensleeves will publish a special edition dedicated to Dartmouth alumni authors and containing prose and poetry works from alumni authors who have established themselves in the American literary scene and from others who have shown great promise. The editors already have manuscripts in hand from a dozen of Dartmouth's best and more are expected.

This special alumni edition, along with the regular Green Key edition of Green-sleeves containing what the editors consider the best in this coming year's undergraduate creative writing, will be sent to all who show they are extra-kindly disposed toward supporting student creative writing by subscribing $5 or more to help wipe out the long-standing debt.

The DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE will report after the first of the new year on the authors appearing in the Greensleeves alumni edition. In the mean-time those who have an interest in sponsoring the undergraduate outlet for creative writing, and in assuring receipt of what could be a rare piece of Dartmouthiana, may send checks to Greensleeves, Box 145, Hanover, New Hampshire.

Literary Editor