Launch Party Podcast

Please scroll down for a word from our director, supervisor, and professor, Dr. Jim Cihlar.

Stream our podcast on your favorite platforms below, or visit our episode pages on this website to stream directly from us!

The Tower is the University of Minnesota’s undergraduate art and literary magazine. It is edited and produced by students enrolled in a two-semester class offered by the English Department. I’ve taught this class for eight years; we study both the theory and practice of publishing. While we learn to navigate the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style as well as the intricacies of InDesign, we observe the role that publishing plays in civic discourse. We also solicit and review submissions, staff tables at the student union and the Twin Cities Book Festival, attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual conference, maintain an active online presence, write grants and budgets and schedules, collaborate with the Weisman Art Museum on the annual ArtWords contest, and host, with WAM, our launch party.

Editing and publishing are incremental tasks, with many moving parts and requiring much coordination and dogged determination. The staff of the 2020 edition of The Tower innovated in many areas while sustaining a solid foundation. Working with our campus partners, we ran a monthly writing workshop for students, including a session devoted to the first-year-experience course; we established underwriting initiatives with local businesses; we launched a new event, a spring gala, which drew together staffers, contributors, and friends from multiple years into what we hope will become an annual reunion; we found new sources of funding to support our programs; and we’ve launched our podcast.

This year, when our class said goodbye before spring break, we did not know that it would be the last time this semester that we would physically be in the same room together. When the word first came out over break that classes would shift to alternative delivery methods due to the emerging public health crisis, our staff didn’t miss a beat. We were instantly in touch with each other, planning and collaborating to ensure that our work continued. We committed to addressing this situation with creativity and ingenuity. We devised new systems of sharing work, we reached out to our partner organizations and our student contributors to let them know we were moving forward, and we kept each other’s spirits up. In short, we upheld a longstanding tradition of innovation.

The Tower originated in 1952 as a column, “The Ivory Tower,” in the Minnesota Daily. It soon evolved into a magazine insert, which ran until 1969, staffed by what would become a who’s who of arts and letters in Minnesota and beyond. The magazine was revived in 2006 and reimagined as a literary publication connected to an English Department course. In the fourteen years since, alumni of this second iteration have gone on to work in publishing and communications, to found their own companies, and to publish their own work.

We see The Tower as a community in addition to being a magazine or a course, with a mission of supporting free, artistic, and creative expression on campus. The Tower is a location on the map of the university’s character. It represents that shared space that houses our differing views, experiences, and backgrounds but where we always recommit to collaboration.

Typically at the end of April we celebrate the culmination of a year’s work of putting together a magazine with a launch event. This year, that celebration takes the form of this podcast. Although everyone’s lives changed in March, the 2020 staff rose to the occasion. Nimble, entrepreneurial, and indefatigable, they delivered. The Tower’s editors, artists, and writers have every reason to be proud of what they’ve accomplished. Their contributions are evident in the quality of work in this podcast as well as in our print and online editions, and in the indelible spirit with which they have imbued the living history of The Tower.

— Dr. Jim Cihlar