As we start our new edition of KLIO, I am so excited to begin my time as this semester’s Editor in Chief! My name is Amanda Nurse, and I am a senior English major from Chalfont, Pennsylvania. Besides working on KLIO, I am an intern with a start up called Alphy, where I write content about advancing women in the workplace, and I am a member of our sister journal Kalliope’s fiction, nonfiction, and copyediting committees. I love to read and write in my free time, but when I’m being unproductive I watch Gilmore Girls, Grey’s Anatomy, and Marvel movies on repeat.
When perusing the past editions of KLIO and seeing which piece I would want to feature, I ended up with about 20 tabs open on my computer. All of the work published holds so much importance and merit, but when I narrowed down my choices to my top two, they were both written by the same author.
Collin Van Son’s St. Murray’s Institute for Comedic Therapy was funny, insightful, and ironic in all the best ways. Van Son’s use of the phrase “laughter is the best medicine” as his premise was genius, as he frames the story around a group of interns coming to work at what seems to be a cross between a hospital and institution where laughter is used as the way ill patients are healed. The identifying phrases that named the characters, the simplistic jokes, and the well-defined setting all contributed to the short story’s uniqueness.
My second piece, also written by Collin Van Son, can be found in the Klio 2017 nonfiction section. The piece, titled The Pistachio Man, recounts Van Son’s meeting with one of his grandparents’ Florida friends on the beach who taught a young Collin how to eat a pistachio. Later in life, here at Penn State, Van Son ended up meeting the Pistachio Man’s granddaughter on the large campus of forty thousand students. The simple ending ties the semi-comedic reflection into a tidy ending that I couldn’t help but enjoy.
Collin’s bio offers much about his involvement at Penn State and the fact that Van Son is a triple threat: he majored in physics and minored in English and mathematics while at Penn State. He was also a member of the Schreyer Honors College, where his thesis was actually a short story collection titled “If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry.” After graduating, Van Son participated in a semester-long program at the University of Chicago and is now a science writer in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
I loved these pieces not only for their wit and language, but for their ability to get a message across while being concise. They don’t feel the need to be too long, only taking about 3,000 words or less for each piece. As an editor and writer myself, I appreciate the brevity as something that is more enticing on the web (and something we look for in submissions!).
Over the next few days, the rest of our staff will introduce themselves and give recommendations for pieces from past editions of KLIO. I am excited to start reading submissions this week and to get KLIO submissions rolling out over the next few weeks. Hopefully, this year’s edition will be just as exciting and well written as the last.