The Babe Lincoln magazine, Wheaton’s only student-run magazine that focuses on politics and culture, was created in 2015. As said by Faheem Dyer ’19, the magazine’s current Editor-in-Chief, “with the Wire‘s news focus, and Rushlight‘s focus on creative writing, but no publication dedicated primarily to commentary and criticism, Pia Parisi-Marcoux ’19—then a writer for the Wire—saw a gap in the previously existing outlets for student writing and sought to fill it. As I understood it from her back when we were freshmen, the broad goal was to channel all the political and intellectual energy at Wheaton into accessible, dialogue-raising content in a tangible way.” Marcoux is the founder of Babe Lincoln and has served as Editor-in-Chief in past years.
Dyer elaborated on the magazine’s goal in a campus-wide email: “It is our goal to cultivate a varied network of voices committed to challenging apathy, insularity, and each other and I think we’ve done a good job in years past. Writers for us have used their writing to do things like get published in national journals and win prestigious design awards.”
Though Babe Lincoln is still a relatively new magazine at Wheaton, its staff has spent the past years growing and improving its publication process. “In our fourth year of existence, we have more or less formalized how we operate,” said Dyer. “Our Spring semester is always the more intense one, as that is when we publish a print issue (our web platform will publish year-round once it goes live). For our print issue, we spend roughly a month fielding submissions from writers. Then after copy edits, our staff spends roughly three weeks working through the content of the pieces with the writers personally. After all the articles are finished, our design team formats the magazine and then we go through the process of getting it printed and distributed on campus.”
Babe Lincoln accepts mainly opinion and commentary writing and all students are welcome to submit their writing for a chance to be published in one of the magazine’s many categories, which ranges from the United States to culture and science. Writing submissions are emailed to the Editor-in-Chief. “To become an editor with us, you can either be invited on board or have an application for a position accepted. The best way to ensure either of those is to have an established body of work either inside or outside of class (what would really make us like you is having pieces published in Babe Lincoln),” said Dyer. “My favorite part of Babe Lincoln has been watching it, its staff members and its writers in action over the last four years,” reflected Dyer. “This magazine does occupy a distinct space on campus and that would be something special enough, but thanks to the dedication and talent of all those involved, it has consistently delivered more than just some words on some paper. At the end of the print semester, we’ve always put out a product that everyone can be proud of and I love to see that.”