LAST WORD

Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer 2020

The Last Word

This Special All Student Edition of the journal marks our 6th year of publication. We are proud of this milestone and humbled by the trust put in us by the more than 120 visual artists, creative writers, and project creators who have previously allowed us to tell their stories in the JCAM.

And, as with all JCAM publications, this issue has been a significant learning experience for our staff. As our essays in the front of this issue have suggested, we could never have foreseen the variety and breadth of our interactions with those with whom we discussed the JCAM, nor could we have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, nor the powerful social unrest we are experiencing at this time.

This publishing effort has all come to pass in ways that we never would have believed when our developmental efforts first began in 2014. We began this online publication with the idea that we could, without significant funding or a large staff, reach out online, through mostly no-cost tools, to connect with creative writers and visual artists internationally. It has worked in many positive ways well beyond our original plans.

We regularly hear from JCAM artists who have begun to collaborate in some creative way. We regularly receive updates from previously published artists and writers whose work has later been presented in another exhibition or a journal some place on planet earth. This is very gratifying indeed. It is wonderful to see an ambitious plan put into action and produce such positive results.

The JCAM staff is always interested in how we might betters serve the online art and writing community. What other kinds of features would you like to see in future issues of JCAM? What are the names of the contacts to whom you might direct us? Let us hear from you.

Margie Labadie John Antoine Labadie