It is spring 2006 and the Beanswitch magazine staff was back at its first regular meeting Thursday, Jan. 26 with plenty of new ideas ready to go.

“With each issue we take it a step further,” said Executive Editor Emily Anderson. “But with this issue it will be several steps ahead of the previous ones.”

With all its progress of becoming a semiannual issue instead of annual, adding some color to its cover pages and improving its paper quality, it has come a long way from what it was only three years ago.

“It used to be a stuffy, cardboard literary magazine with very little artwork and no ads,” laughed Leslie LaChance, assistant professor and magazine adviser. In 2004, Beanswitch officially became a member of the Office of Student Publications; therefore it was able to take a more modern populist approach to its content.

“Each semester the magazine is a little bit more different because students always want to try out something new,” said LaChance. “So truthfully I don’t know what to expect. They always surprise me.”

This semester it will open up to an even broader range of genre, including short non-fiction, comic strips and screen plays. Aside from those, it welcomes all the previous works of art including written text: essays, poetry, short stories and visual arts – photographs, drawings, paintings, sketches, etc.

For the second meeting its members and anybody else who wishes to participate, will be making Bean pods, where students put their own or prominent verses of others on a piece of paper and decorate it with visual effects, usually magazine clippings. Afterwards they spread them all over campus to let the Beanswitch magazine be known to all.

During the semester, Beanswitch hosts several campus events, the most popular of which is the Poetry Slam. It is open to public, not just English and Art majors, where people come to admire student works of art and later listen to the talented poets of the campus. To the contrary of being thought of as a classic poetry night, Slam is as down-to-earth and open to the popular culture as much as it can be.

At the beginning of the first Thursday Beanswitch meeting a couple of new student members came over to check it out and they were glad they did.

“I was surprised by how liberal the content was,” said junior David Hampton. “I thought it might be very literature-oriented, and I found the content was more modern. That really caught my attention.”

“It’s very informative,” said sophomore Randall Shadburn. “It shows me that the magazine is sprouting from where it was, getting much better. That makes me someone that’s not part of the magazine wants to be part of the magazine.”

Anybody interested in joining the magazine staff should contact Beanswitch Executive Editor Emily Anderson at eminande@utm.edu or Leslie LaChance at lachance@utm.edu.