First off, congratulations to Danielle Sadiq, the winner of the best piece under the changing rooms theme with “Changing Rooms,” and to Ellen Dorrington for the best off-theme piece with “Biscuit”.
Now that the winners are out and all students have been notified of their place in the anthology, we’d like to share a look behind the scenes of the process the RiPPLE editorial team went through this year.
The main thing that RiPPLE did differently for 2019/20 was having a theme, changing rooms, which we chose in partnership with Community Brain and their renovations of the changing rooms for the Corinthian-Casuals Football Club.
The head of Community Brain, Robin Hutchinson, who I interviewed in the autumn, was excited to see what changing rooms meant to Kingston students. All of his initiatives in the borough operate around the idea of planting ideas and giving opportunities to people, and then seeing how they apply their skills to grow the ideas into a reality far greater than he could have imagined himself. The 2019/20 RiPPLE anthology would be another example of this, a collection that reflected the creativity of the Kingston community, and would be especially poignant to students moving to university and experiencing a lot of change.
However, not everything has gone as planned.
“We ran into a kind of interesting obstacle with the anthology this year,” said Paige Mader, the managing editor for RiPPLE. “About a week before the first deadline for the call to submissions, we were seriously worried we were not going to have enough submissions to fill the anthology.”
In response, RiPPLE extended the December 6th deadline by a week and opened up the anthology to off-theme submissions. The competition was also adapted to include a winner for the best piece outside of the theme.
While the team had to deviate from the original plan, it has been a valuable learning process. Sometimes an idea resonates with a community, but perhaps the members of the community aren’t sure how to realise the idea or, understandably bogged down with schoolwork, don’t have the time. I know that I myself struggled with creating a theme-related painting, despite having a lot of feelings surrounding the theme itself.
In the end, what is important is that this anthology mirrors the ideas of the students that form our community. RiPPLE will be a real reflection of what speaks to Kingston students and what creative processes we go through. Sometimes you have a burst of creativity, sometimes you have to dig out an old piece because nothing strikes you. Sometimes you have plenty of time to write, and sometimes the mountain of other assignments buries you.
Ultimately, RiPPLE is of and for the students, and so this endeavour has not been a failure, but an adaptation to the real needs and skills of our community—which is what the Community Brain is all about.
“The challenge now,” Paige commented, “as we finalise the manuscript and the order of the pieces, is to decide how we will reconcile the two separate streams and bring them together harmoniously under the RiPPLE umbrella.”
By Gabriella Buckner