Tyler van Opstal- Some brief notes on Currents

    Christopher Newport University’s literature magazine, the Currents Literary Journal, is published around once a year. For its slow publication it is an extremely slim volume, comprising far less work than you might expect to be produced in one to two years by a school with a dedicated English department. The brevity of its contents is further made mystifying as Currents also features work from Tidewater region authors who have no affiliation to CNU. A possible explanation of course is that the standards of the Currents editorial board are particularly high and exponentially more work is submitted to the magazine than is published, but I think it is more likely a symptom of poor marketing for submissions and a university population that would like to write as little as possible. 

    Last year’s issue of Currents, dated 2024, comprises ninety-one pages and thirty works (twenty-three poems and seven works of prose) by seventeen writers (ten CNU students/alumni and seven non-affiliated writers). Eight of the works are by members of the editorial board, one of which was given the ‘Editor’s Choice Award for Poetry’ (p. 90). The magazine benefits from eleven donors. The 2025 issue was published three days ago, but I have not picked up a copy yet and so cannot review it. 

    I don’t write this with the intention of speaking ill of Currents or its Editorial Board. I am certain that they are doing as well as possible with limited resources and minimal interest from the university community, which is probably the most important resource for a magazine. After all, ninety-one pages for the 2024 issue is much better than the thirty-six pages of the 2017 issue. Nor is it meant to be a complaint to the many fine writers at CNU who do not submit any work to the magazine for review, I imagine many are wholly unaware that CNU even has a literary journal and those that are aware may be justifiably unenthusiastic about submitting to a publication with such low readership. If this is an indictment of anything it would be that the University does not do more to promote the publication of, according to the Editor’s Note in the 2017 issue, “CNU’s oldest campus organization (p 1).” If CNU truly prizes its status as a premier liberal arts university, it should invest more resources into the production of its literary journal. Though on a positive note- Currents is in much better shape than ODU’s Sonder Literary Magazine, whose website is unfinished and whose social media has not been updated since 2020.