I can’t remember the last time I was on a field trip for school. Once in a theatre undergrad class we were scheduled to go to the Lyric Opera House to see the inner workings of the place, but I think I called in sick that day. Prior to that, I remember many class trips from kindergarten up through high school to places like the Robert Crown Center, both Chicago zoos, myriad museums, and especially the Wonder Bread factory. I thought the days of field trips were long gone. Then I came to Columbia College Chicago.

In this, my first year as a graduate student, I’m going on field trips in two of my three classes. First up will be required attendance at Women and Children First, the famed bookstore on the far North Side in Andersonville. For my Nonfiction Workshop, we’re attending a reading by our instructor, distinguished writer-in-residence Aleksandar Hemon.

Interior of Women and Children First bookstore

Sasha, as Hemon prefers to be called, will be reading a nonfiction treatment of interviews with a relative of his who survived the Soviet Gulags. In class, we’re taking true stories and fictionalizing them. We’ve previously read Sasha’s fictionalized take on these interviews. We’re not just idle observers at the reading – we’ll be thinking about how reading in front of a live audience adds a level of performance to a nonfiction manuscript. We’ve spent lots of hours with Sasha discussing these things, and you better believe he wants profound inquiries from his class during the Q&A part of the event.

My second field trip of the semester will take place as part of my Literary Journal Editing class. Everyone in this class is an assistant editor of Punctuate, Columbia College Chicago’s nonfiction literary journal. Each week we deliberate over a batch of five submissions. We’re learning what makes a publishable submission stand out from the slush pile.

Our instructor is Ian Morris. Ian is the Managing Editor, the “ME,” of Punctuate. He also spent considerable years as the Associate Editor at TriQuarterly. In addition to teaching us the editorial processes involved in running a literary journal, Ian devotes time each week to making sure we have a commanding grasp on the history of these “little magazines” with an emphasis on the touchstone periodicals that have made the genre special.

That’s why we’ll be heading up to Wicker Park on a Tuesday afternoon closer to Thanksgiving. We’re going to Quimby’s, a neighborhood mainstay since the early 1990’s. Quimby’s remains a Mecca for anyone serious about “Zines,” as small alternate press periodicals are called. If we’ve talked about it in class and it’s still being published, chances are we will find it at Quimby’s.

So there you have it – two field trips in one semester. Far from being some kind of novelty, these field trips allow us as graduate students to gain firsthand knowledge of the industries we are entering. We’re examining what nuance the fictive act of performing adds to a nonfiction work and visiting a major distribution point for literary magazines. I’d say it’s pretty special that Columbia College Chicago allows us these opportunities.