GRACE: Hello, and welcome back to another semester of GradPod. We are so excited to be back, kicking off a new semester and a new academic year, and we have some great episodes lined up for the weeks to come.
We’re starting with a little trip to the more artistic side of the VCU grad experience, and soon we’ll be exploring graduate mentorship, grad school finance questions, fellowships, and more.
As always, if you have questions you want answered or you have a topic idea for a GradPod episode, email us at gradschool@vcu.edu. We’d love to hear from you. And now, let’s get on with the show
GRACE: Hello, happy Tuesday, and welcome back to GradPod. Whether or not you’re a student in one of VCU’s nationally ranked arts programs, our campus is full of opportunities to express yourself and to enjoy the creative work of others. This week, we’re joined by Anna Leonard and Trey Bernhardt-Hall to learn about one of those opportunities for expression, VCU’s literary magazine, Blackbird.
GRACE: Hello. Hi. Hey. Welcome. How are you guys today?
ANNA: Lovely. Yeah, doing great.
GRACE: Would you like to take a moment and introduce yourselves? Anna?
ANNA: Sure. Sure, I’ll go. My name’s Anna Leonard. I am entering into my third year in the MFA program studying Creative Writing, and my concentration is in poetry.
I am also the associate podcast editor for Blackbird and moving into the managing editor role for Blackbird, so I’m a big fan of the journal and excited to chat about it.
TREY: And I’m Trey Bernhardt-Hall. I am entering my third year of the Creative Writing MFA, and I’m studying creative nonfiction and poetry, and I am the lead editor for the Blackbird Literary Podcast.
GRACE: And you guys are doing some really cool work over there. But before we talk about the podcast specifically, for those who might not be aware, do you wanna fill me in on Blackbird’s sort of whole deal? It’s been around for quite a while, I understand.
ANNA: Yeah, we were founded in 2002 as one of the premier completely online journals. We publish poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, interviews, craft essays. We have an art feature, and we’re slowly moving into incorporating more mixed media in our flights, which is what we call our issues.
We recently moved to a different platform. We were previously in the sepia HTML, very 2002-coded website, and now we’re hosted by WordPress. So we have a totally different look as of, I’d say, two or three years ago, I think, is when we made that switch. And now, we’re continuing to try to grow via the Blackbird Literary Podcast, which Trey can talk a little bit more about, and incorporating more video essays, sound-based literature that we’re hoping to publish in a fully mixed media flight later this summer.
TREY: All right. Moving all the way into the year of our Lord, 2026.
ANNA: As we go. Yes.
TREY: Yeah. Blackbird is special because, you know, it was launched at a time when people laughed, like the thought of an audiobook or even a Kindle. There, there’s a real hesitancy to trust the digital movement towards art and, that interfacing between the public and the access that that would create.
And, you know, I think that Blackbird was really cutting edge for understanding that the- I mean, print media will always be treasured by everyone who loves literature. This is not like a better or worse. But I think that they were really forward-thinking and understanding that by publishing online and being able to hold a massive archive, that it really does create a more accessible platform for journal, literary journals.
And that was part of what fueled the concept behind the Blackbird Literary Podcast, is thinking about the vehicle of sound as an entrance ramp for those who maybe do not sit and read poetry or literary fiction, or see themselves as being part of, like, a literary community. The art of podcasting mimics the intimacy of music or other media that maybe is more readily available and maybe meet somebody where they are. And so that, I think that aligns with kind of the birth of the magazine.
GRACE: Yeah. I mean, that’s great. And I think people d- I mean, do you think that people feel sort of intimidated by the kind of concept of a literary magazine, maybe in a way that they’re not by a podcast?
TREY: Yeah. I mean, I would. I think that- So I’m from Appalachia, and I’m from, like a working class family, and the you know, the irony of that my mom, read me Shakespeare when I was a kid.
So class stereotypes aside, you know, my mom was an English teacher, so I was definitely exposed to literature, and my great-grandma was reading, like, Hemingway and Virginia Woolf back when they were being published. But from, like, a class dynamic, I think many people just don’t see themselves in the things that represent, like, ivory towerism or, like, you know, bourgeois culture.
And so I think that, like, a lot of the, you know, friends and family I have back home who did not hit the ground running hooked on phonics or, like, you know, in that space that, you know, a portion of my family was, has a lot of skepticism or even just, like, alienation of that, like, high art, quote unquote.
And, you know, I think that that’s also seen through, like, learning disabilities. You know, my grandma is dyslexic, right? And so, like, the page was not a place that she found comfort, you know? And so I think that it’s common, whether from, like, a class paradigm or, like, a lot of different vantage points for just some people to not fully see themselves in literary magazines or publishing.
GRACE: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That’s a great point. And, sort of jumping off of that, so Blackbird is largely staffed by graduate students, right? And you are both, as you said, graduate students. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that works from a student perspective?
ANNA: Yeah, sure. So the lead editorial team and associate editors of Blackbird are all within the graduate programs of either the MFA in Creative Writing or an MA in English. So our MFA and MA students are able to join in as associate editors, which doesn’t offer any stipend boost. But then our lead editors are able to join Blackbird for their graduate teaching assistantship, because it is also largely an internship, an internship program for undergraduate students.
So in a given year at Blackbird, there are 35 undergraduate interns who join our various teams to get work experience, volunteer experience working for a literary magazine. So the groups that they can join are poetry, fiction, nonfiction, if they wanna read our submissions and help us discern what best fits the taste of Blackbird. So they really, like, are our tastemakers, along with our lead and associate editors, which is a really exciting opportunity.
But then we also have a lot more, I would say, practical aspects that they can join in on, such as media. I previously was serving as the lead media editor for Blackbird. And I guess I still am through the summer, but we’ll see how that goes. And they can also help with our copy editing team, and our art team. We also have an art feature, like I mentioned, in every flight, and so we have a pretty small art team. But they can get a wide variety of experiences and really help with a lot of the labor of the journal.
And outside of working in these small groups, our undergraduate interns also have a weekly seminar. So we’ll have experts from the field come in to talk to them about various subject matters, such as a publishing expert, an editing expert, an author, a local author, an author who is from Africa. We had a Namibian author come and visit us via Zoom, which was a real treat this past semester.
And our lead and associate editors, so the graduate students who really run the journal and do the bulk of the administrative work for the journal, will also give presentations. So it’s a sort of teaching opportunity for all of the graduate students, a learning opportunity for the graduate students and the undergraduate students, and it’s a really enriching experience for everyone involved.
And then we also have Jessica Hendry Nelson as the faculty editor, Devin Walker-Figueroa, the faculty poetry editor. And then from the podcast internship angle, most of our interns came from partnering with Kinetic Imaging and the School of Music. And then we’re starting to also explore partnering with the Robertson School in media production. And so that’s such a wide lens if you, if you think through the podcast interns and the, you know, the standard, the, the traditional Blackbird internship. It’s a pretty wide swath of the university, which is pretty exciting.
GRACE: Yeah. I mean, that sounds like a really unique opportunity for them, for the students involved. And so forgive me for asking, but the work that you are publishing, so it’s, you know, staffed largely by students. You guys are putting it together, you’re getting it out. Is, is the actual work itself, is that largely students, or tell me, tell me what you’re putting out.
ANNA: So it’s, it’s no VCU students, faculty are able to submit to the journal, so very much so it is a non-local gig that we are operating under. We have a variety of emerging and established writers that we publish. Yeah, not, not majorly students. I don’t know, Trey. Trey, you add. Yeah. You add.
TREY: Yeah, yeah. So we really publish from, like, Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim, like, top echelon household name l- literary figures directly beside first-time publication. Even those either operating outside of academia, like working writers, all the way through folks post MFA, who are cutting their teeth, getting- ‘Cause Blackbird is really considered a heavier hitting publication. We’re one of the top-ranked journals in the country, especially within our poetry, and then that also kind of informs the type of prose that I feel like we gravitate towards and that gravitates towards us.
And the fiction can be extremely experimental. And so, you know, I think that it’s, it’s lucky because also it publishes a pretty large amount of translation, so there’s really a global conversation happening through a local internship slash, you know, community program. So it’s a local entity with a global output relationship and community.
GRACE: So a project that is curated by our graduate students, but that is global in scope in terms of its output and aiming for an equally global audience it sounds like.
TREY: Absolutely.
GRACE: What a, what a lovely thing. So last question, when is your next episode? And if you can, each of you, in a word, what is the vibe?
TREY: The next episode is almost done being mixed, and then it will be mastered. The release date is to be determined because next week I’m leaving the country for three weeks. So unless we have an extremely expedited, literally logistically impossible- turnaround, it will be likely late June. Once- so that I can return and we all think through the release rollout, get all the platforms updated, get the media things lined up. And so we’re on the home stretch, but there are so many moving parts that we are hanging on for dear life. Joyful dear life. And Anna, anything to add to that before my word?
ANNA: I’m, I’m stuck just thinking so hard about what my word might be. I think this, the episode, it, it’s so multifaceted that it is so hard to find a word, but it sounds like Trey has it all figured out. So Trey, I need to hear your word before I can even comprehend a word on my own.
TREY: Oh, I was just gonna shoot from the hip.
ANNA: See, that’s where we’re diff- we have a different approach. Same problem, different approach.
TREY: I was gonna do- All right. Neil Young, first thought, best thought. And I would say that this next episode for me, and listeners cannot see the, the eyes of floundering movement, but I would say in a word-
ANNA: Trey, would it be appropriate to share the title of episode three?
TREY: Yeah, I was gonna just use the, the, that was my initial- I thought you might.
ANNA: Yeah, it’s- Maybe we could each take one word.
TREY: Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I would say ascent.
ANNA: Ooh. And I would say the accent.
TREY: Oh-ho. Whoa. Good. Good cheat code. We did it.
GRACE: Would either of you like to elaborate, or you just, we’re just leaving it there? You’ve done it.
ANNA: I think, I think you’ll, you’ll completely understand when the episode comes out if you choose to listen, which I hope you do, we featured quite a few different accents. And I think that that has been- Now I’m trying to really spin this into a beautiful sentence with both words. The accent has allowed us to have some kind of ascent-
TREY: Uh-huh.
ANNA: towards greater meaning about the conversation of access that I think we’re always thinking about and involved with in doing something so multimedia, so avant-garde. I think that’s like a, an important word that we use often, especially when we’re speaking with our interns who we work with to create something so abstract and strange, yet emotionally resonant of trying to get them to think outside of the box of what kind of sounds feel appropriate and- won’t disarm a listener, but will instead arm them with the ability to better understand the text that we’re giving them, which may be more challenging, as we’ve been talking about.
TREY: There we go. There’s those MFA tuition dollars at work. Yeah. And to, just to further Anna’s point, to challenge that notion of appropriateness, I have a vocal disability and, you know, I think that that’s made me- I’ve had long bouts of silences where I didn’t know if I would talk again, and that makes the materiality, the components of identity and experience and selfhood that generally we materialize or represent with the notion of a voice really became clearer.
And I think that when you listen, I mean, to al- almost all media, you’re hearing the same thing that people have critiqued within visual culture of th- the, the politics of the body on camera. The politics of the voice through sound have the same ableism, the same heteronormativity, the same white supremacy. All is captured in the voice. And so we’ve really prioritized the materiality of voice to be as diverse and representative as the texts are in the journal.
And so, when we were especially thinking through this episode, the concept became really visible really quickly because as I was recording one of the readers, they m- they kept apologizing for their accent, in the same way that previously, a reader has a vocal disability and kept apologizing for her vocal tremor. And the thing they’re apologizing for is the, is part of the value that makes them human and makes their voice special.
And so I think that this episode is just a small articulation of a subtlety that we’ve already been doing and plan to continue to do, is to push the possibility of what folks envision a voice on a podcast or in an artful representation can be and who can and should be visible. And so it’s kind of, it’s articulating a thing we already valued, but we really wanted to spotlight and cluster an episode around that.
GRACE: Oh, that’s great. I cannot wait for this to come out. And, listeners, watch this space. When we have a release date, or maybe when we have a released episode, we will post about it and send out a little, little update on the Substack. If people wanted to see the work that you’ve already put out, where would they find that?
ANNA: They can find that on our website at blackbird.vcu.edu. We’ve got a tab that says Podcast where you can listen to our first and second episodes. But otherwise, you can find us at Blackbird Literary Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
GRACE: All right. You heard her. Go check it out. And we will all be waiting for that episode later this summer. Thank you both so much for being here today. This is a project that I’m really excited to share with our listeners, and I can’t wait to hear the finished product.
TREY: Thank you. Yeah, thank you for facilitating all this and being such a great interviewer.
GRACE: Oh, well, gosh, that’s so nice. Appreciate you, and thank all of you out there for joining us this Tuesday. We will be back in a couple of weeks with more grad, grad content. Bye.
ANNA: Bye.
TREY: Bye.
CREDITS:
GradPod is produced by VCU’s Graduate School. Haya Hamid is our host. Our producer and editor is Grace Alberton. Our theme music was composed, performed, and recorded by Austin Sullic and Claudia Andrade, students of Felipe Lettow, Assistant Professor of Composition and Sound Design at VCU School of the Arts.
Do you have a question for us? Email us at gradschool@vcu.edu and we may answer your question on an episode!
Blackbird can be found here: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/ and episode three of the Blackbird Podcast, “Ascent, Accent,” is live now
