I Have a Vision—Just Not Literally

Written by Kat Boskovic

When I wrote my first blog for Your Magazine last semester, I was apparently too consumed by rage to introduce myself. Instead, I spent approximately 600 words berating the Emerson student body for refusing to pitch to us, accused you all of getting outworked by ChatGPT, and briefly considered if waging war on the undergraduate population was an effective recruitment strategy. In my defense, we really did need pitches.

So perhaps, now that we’ve finished our first round of excruciating pitch cycles and I’m granted a two week break by the Your Mag gods from prostituting myself to writers, I can finally introduce myself: As Editor-in-Chief of Emerson College’s only monthly lifestyle publication (a feat I will be milking for the remainder of my college career), somewhere between writing and editing articles I get to participate in the strange collection of decisions that eventually becomes the magazine you see on Instagram and pick up around campus. And, for reasons I’m still not entirely sure anyone thought through, I also get this blog—a small corner of the internet where I can tell you about those decisions after they happen and reveal just enough of YourMag’s internal operations to remain employed.

Which brings me to this summer. While most of you were hopefully doing normal things like going to the beach or seeing Obsession at the drive-in movie theater with a Hinge date who apparently considered it a rom-com, I was visiting my dementia-ridden grandmother’s retirement home and developing an alarming fixation on the Greek plays in the library database. 

However, there was one minute thing no one had told me in my interview for the position back as a baby first-semester sophomore: when your Creative Director quits via Google Form in May (this is both completely true and, I think, an important piece of YourMag institutional history), creating the themes for each issue fall upon no other than the Editor-in-Chief. One slight problem: I can’t see pictures in my head. 

Supposedly the medical term is aphantasia, but only the devil who plagued me knows I don’t need yet another diagnosis. Ask me to close my eyes and picture an apple, and I can tell you everything there is to know about the apple. It’s red. It’s shiny. There’s probably a little green leaf attached to the stem if we’re going for the platonic ideal of Apple. But do I actually see the apple? Absolutely not. There are no apples in there. There is only the knowledge of apples.

As a writer and editor, this is generally not a problem; I have long accepted my fate as a one-trick-pony (and I’ve even written about it). It becomes slightly more inconvenient when you are suddenly responsible for producing three themes capable of dictating the visual identity of an entire magazine.

So I did what any good Editor-in-Chief would do: I ignored the “visual” part almost completely. The wonderful thing about developing unhealthy hyperfixations is that you can make them everyone else’s problem. 

By August, this meant Greek mythology. More specifically, the juxtaposition of Dionysus and Narcissus who had somehow become recurring characters in my summer despite both having been dead—or fictional, depending on how annoying you want to be about it—for several thousand years. Armed with my Emerson login and apparently nothing better to do since I had quit a treacherous Dunkin’ Donuts crew member job, I spent afternoons taking notes on Dionysian ecstasy, ritual, and destruction while my grandmother participated in considerably more wholesome scheduled programming down the hall. Bingo was not in the cards for me. 

Eventually, though, I had to turn my summer brainrot into three actual magazines. A theme can’t just sound cool: it has to generate 20+ articles without producing the same pitch twenty times, give Style, Living, Romance, and Arts & Entertainment sections somewhere to go, offer our creative team something to actually create and, ideally, not sound embarrassingly dated six months later. Most importantly, writers have to want to pitch it—what we all know in the Emerson magazine ecosystem is our equivalent of what the Catholics call hell. I could devise the most intellectually rigorous theme known to man, but if I announce it and thirty people look at me like I’ve assigned them summer reading, we’re fucked. And unfortunately, that is absolutely something I would do. 

Somewhere between Dionysus, Babylon and the screams echoing through the halls of my grandmother’s retirement home, that process gave us CATACLYSM. I was less interested in destruction itself than the excess immediately before it: the last feast, the party at the end of the world, grandeur with something rotting underneath. That was when I knew I had something—not because I could picture the magazine—obviously that’s what hours scouring Pinterest is for—but because I could think of more directions to take it than we could possibly publish.

But Cataclysm was not the first kernel of an idea. That distinction belongs to our upcoming print theme. It started with something vivid, relevant and recognizable—an homage of sorts—and, after several months of picking at it, became something much stranger. Drumroll, please…

[REDACTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS]

I know—huge if true. Exclusive information, only on the EIC blog.

By the third theme, I was losing steam. I had officially exhausted my summer supply of divine inspiration, Greek or otherwise, and had begun to suspect that perhaps three distinct, visually interesting, editorially viable concepts do not naturally occur to one person within the span of a few days—yes, because I procrastinated this. My late-night Notes app was filling up with words that sounded vaguely evocative until I looked at them the next morning, at which point they read less like magazine themes and more like names for overpriced candles.

So the third took longer. I can tell you that it exists. I cannot tell you what it is, why it exists or which increasingly tenuous chain of associations eventually got me there. I can tell you that I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about it, which, as you may have gathered by now, is usually how things end up in Your Mag.

I can also tell you that after two weeks of resume-skimming and interviews, we have hired a Creative Director–one who hopefully won’t leave us hanging on a Google Form this time. After one summer, three themes, and an amount of Pinterest screen time I refuse to disclose, I am officially relieved of my accidental creative directorship.

Whether any of these ideas will look remotely like what I imagined is now someone else’s problem—which, considering I couldn’t imagine them visually in the first place, is probably for the best. Over the next few months, they’ll pass through writers, photographers, stylists, designers and an actual Creative Director until the vague associations I drunkenly typed into my Notes app become real magazines.

In other words, I come up with the problems. Now we have someone professionally designated to make them pretty. And apparently, much to everyone’s dismay, part of making them pretty involves me not spoiling them on the internet.

So before I violate any more E-Board confidentiality in the name of journalistic transparency (AKA my pathological inability to keep my enormous mouth shut), I’ll leave it there. You’ll see the rest soon—and trust me, you’ll want to.