The Editors are not Robots (Part Six): Aubin Thomas

Aubin Thomas is the Art Director of Words and Images and is currently in her third year at the University of Southern Maine.  Although she is majoring in English, her main passion is the creation of art using mixed media such as music, video, paint, collage, etc.  A connoisseur of popular culture, she also enjoys doing amateur research on the icons and somewhat forgotten figures of decades past.  This hobby often leads her on strange journeys to find such people’s gravesites, former residences, and other interesting pop culture and historical locations.  When she isn’t searching for new dark cabaret music and recreating famous photographs with her digital camera, she enjoys collecting pins with interesting subject matter to them and hanging out with her incorrigible two-year-old nephew, Max.

The Editors are not Robots (Part Five): Caroline O’Connor Thomas

Caroline O’Connor Thomas has lived in too many locations in the Boston area, including: Somerville, Revere, the North End, Cambridge, Medford. She has slept under beds, in beds and on floors. Prefers night, but thinks day has some excellent qualities. Likes mountains as much as skyscrapers. She takes music courses that do not have anything to do with her major in English. Being the poetry editor of Words and Images 2009, she enjoys reading and writing poems. Favorite poem as of today: Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else by Denise Riley. It does not take much prompting to get her to dance/ make a fool of herself. Her favorite feeling is indescribable but it includes being a stranger in a crowd/ a small thing in a stream.  Despite the heading of this post, Caroline may actually be a robot. The previous sentence is a lie, as Caroline is secretly sensitive and romantic (please don’t tell anyone). Enjoys adventures in cars with friends, particularly if it involves going to the 76 Diner in Latham, NY past midnight. Does not exclude rap or country music from the blanket statement “I like all kinds of music.” Caroline is going to England next semester, where she hopes to acquire a British accent, meet Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh and single handedly destroy Stonehenge (just kidding). If you are a poem that looks sparse on the page but features heavy words that bend their very definitions and like long walks on the beach, soft caresses and the song “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies, please contact Caroline, as you may be her soul mate. Take a chance, buy her a drink, read her poetry – you’ve got nothing to lose.

Those interested can read a few of Caroline’s poems here: (LINK!). Her thoughts are also available for mass consumption: (LINK!).

The Editors are not Robots (Part Four): Benjamin Rybeck

Benjamin Rybeck is the publishing director of Words and Images; from 2007-2008, he served as managing editor. He considers his most important job to be finding the right people with whom to work, and being as he has put together a staff replete with editors who are smarter than he, his job sometimes seems almost ridiculously easy.

Rybeck is a full time English major at the University of Southern Maine, interested in interdisciplinary studies. He is especially drawn to the following: the films of Paul Thomas Anderson and the French New Wave; the stories of Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and Charles D’Ambrosio; “Winesburg, Ohio”; all things James Bond; and the TV series The Wire.

He’s hoping to find fiction and poetry that all those other idiot literary journals have missed; after all, tons of great stories and poems go to sleep unpublished each night. He’s not looking for “perfect” work, because “perfect” work lacks the rough edges where the soul of the artist can be seen bursting out, trying to struggle free from under a pile of technique, trying to breathe again. Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” a novel with a million digressions, is preferable to Geraldine Brooks’ “March,” a perfectly controlled story, because “The Corrections” has energy in its imperfections, and “March” seems overworked and smoothed out until it lies dead on the page.

Sometimes he has trouble finding the time to exercise.