We know that things have happened because we have some artifacts, some evidence. But HOW things happen is a bit murkier because HOW involves the confounding forces of circumstance. And while some of these forces can still be seen in the artifacts, others can only be divined by memory and factored by imagination.
So how did Pensworth come into being forty years ago? I don’t have them in front of me now, but copies of the early issues still exist. And those pages indicate some of the circumstances of its development. Its initial issues were edited by Tom Fish and Tom Frazier and sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society whose local chapter came into existence during the same period as this journal of student writing. In addition, the student authors of the various pieces identified in the first issues obviously contributed to the journal’s birth.
These details hint at how Pensworth was a product of an evolving new community in the English Department of Cumberland College in the late 1980s. Younger faculty were coming up through the ranks, some who had themselves been students at the college, and new faculty were coming to campus from other regions. Under the leadership of a new department chair, Rayford Watts, himself a product of the college’s best traditions, the English Department was on verge of new growth in the number of its majors and the focus of its programs. Included in its programmatic growth would be writing tracks in the English major. At the heart of this emerging new community was a noteworthy spirit of collaboration not only among faculty but also between faculty and students.
The idea of publishing a journal for student writing emerged in an informal writers’ roundtable started by students and supported by several faculty members. As this idea germinated, the group realized that a journal needed a name. As I recall, a general call for suggestions went out to students. Eventually during one session of the roundtable in a dark little room upstairs in the library, Travis Brasel, a non-traditional commuter who worked for the railroad, suggested: “What about Pensworthy . . . or Pensworth?” And so it was, and so it is! A student’s pennyworth contribution has been compounded over forty years into a Pensworth of creativity. A great bargain.
As Pensworth moved into production, the opportunity for a broader artistic focus emerged by including cover art and illustrations. Over the years a partnership with art faculty and students developed. Some of the early cover illustrations may have been primitive and idiosyncratic. (One was just the name of the journal typed over and over without any spaces.) But I fondly remember a pen-and-ink drawing by art major Tracey Hamilton with an inkwell and a hand holding an old-fashioned steel pen. An iconic cover for Pensworth.
Of course, the contributions of many other students to those early issues have been compounded into the quality of Pensworth today. Some of the most important contributions did not involve artwork or wordsmithing. I recall two students as representative of many others who literally made the journal: Linda Prewitt and Kerrie Shahan.
Linda was another non-traditional student who served as first president of Sigma Tau Delta and also as departmental secretary. In those capacities she did much of the typing of the master copy of several early issues. A daunting task in the pre-PC, pre-word processor era. Once a master copy was turned into printed pages, those pages needed to be collated, stapled, and folded. That was Kerrie’s job as part of her work-study responsibilities. I remember climbing steep, narrow stairs into the upper reaches of Gray Brick to find Kerrie in her little warren of a workspace, surrounded by two-foot-tall stacks of paper. There she sat, sorting and stapling and folding, sorting and stapling and folding, hours on end, preparing for a future in journalism!
As I have been thinking back on all the human collaboration that contributed to the beginning of Pensworth, I have realized how much has changed in forty years and how much Pensworth is an artifact of a world gone by. The roundtable’s strange little room in the library, with a conference table and a kitchen sink, has vanished into new office space in a library that has been renovated and expanded twice since then. The departmental office where Linda Prewitt prepared master copy on a Smith-Corona typewriter was part of an invisible, not-yet-restored Gray Brick Auditorium. Kerrie Shahan’s workspace, along with a whole floor of other little offices, has literally vanished into thin air – up near the rafters of the now-restored auditorium. The printing office in the basement of Gatliff where Bill Lynch and his crew turned typed copy into mimeo masters and then into printed pages has been transformed into part of the space for IT. Cumberland College has become University of the Cumberlands.
But Pensworth is not just an artifact of a vanishing/vanished past. Like all creative, artistic endeavors, it has always been a harbinger of the future as well. So now, after forty years of achievement, the sponsors, writers, and contributors of Pensworth are changing and adapting to new technologies and new audiences, seeking new opportunities to explore our enduring and evolving human experience. I can only wonder HOW that will turn out. ◆
Dr. Tom Fish is a retired English faculty member and former Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Retention, and Assessment at University of the Cumberlands.
Pensworth 