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 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poetry that all those other idiot literary journals have missed; after all, tons of great stories and poems go to sleep unpublished each night.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.

The Editors are not Robots (Part Three): Jill Jacobs

Jill Jacobs is one of the two fiction editors for Words and Images 2009. By day, she is a Piano Performance major who studies under Laura Kargul; under the cover of night, she writes, and feasts upon literature to such a fiendish extent that her room currently resembles a library. Though Jill’s two passions seem disparate, she finds each process to be a fairly similar journey towards perfection; both require manic amounts of analysis, and an obsessive, unyielding eye for detail.

Jill’s literary tastes fluctuate according to her mood. Sometimes, she finds she must immerse herself in history books on the Napoleonic Wars; sometimes, she must binge on Russian classics, or partake in a spot of science fiction parody. Jill likes mysteries, be they of happenstance or character, and endings that surprise her. She believes many of the best books sit unnoticed in children and YA sections around the world. For the most part, genre does not influence her; she is willing to love any story, so long as it moves her.

Outside of classical music and literary pursuits, Jill enjoys listening to bands that no one has heard of, watching fabulously cheesy 80s movies, and indulging in retail therapy.

After the completion of her undergraduate degree in Spring 2010, Jill plans to flutter off to graduate school, where she will keep up on her reading and writing, and eventually be overcome with madness when she attempts to apply Schenkerian analysis to anything by Robert Schumann.