We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erin ONeill Armendarez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Erin , appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

In 2019, I was a tenured Associate Professor of English on a small branch campus of a large university. I had worked hard to build that career but was bored and frankly somewhat disillusioned by so much of what the job entailed. I loved my students, my subject, and I was proud that I served on the board of a national organization and participated in things like writing white papers that solidified best practices in the profession. I had written some chapters for some books. I was passionate about my teaching. Still, I began to feel stagnant, as if my choices were about safety, not growth. I had gotten married in 2012 to a man who lived in a different town. I decided to resign from my associate professorship after winning a prestigious teaching award. I should have been putting together my portfolio for the rank of full professor, but at that point, it felt hollow. I decided to apply for and accept a position teaching English at a high school in the town where my husband lived so that we could live together. There was and still is a critical shortage of teachers in this town.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I have learned and grown from taking this particular risk. I tossed off a mantle of predictability and safety and put myself into a situation that was entirely new, teaching in an inclusion classroom, working with students ages fifteen to eighteen, learning how very different these two types of institutions actually are in the way they attempt to carry out their missions. It was humbling. Nobody calls me Dr. anymore—it’s
“Mrs.” Full-time, tenured university positions are very difficult to get right now. Many of my colleagues thought it was bad judgement for me to give mine up when I did. At the same time, our nation is in dire need of qualified, energetic, empathic teachers. It felt right to go where I was truly needed.

Our school was the first in our state to go face to face during the covid pandemic. This was an exceptionally trying time for teachers and students, and I am proud I was able to serve my community in this way. My Quality Matters training for online teaching at the university was very useful during those years. From taking this risk and seeing it through, I have learned that intrinsic motivation is most powerful, to be awake to strong intuition, to be open to what’s next. It may not be the path others expect. That’s okay. It’s important to get up in the morning ready to engage in an authentic way, to be open to the unexpected.

As a high school teacher, there are nights when I sit exhausted in front of my computer, having
just completed another week of lesson plans, or having graded that week’s assignments. I’ll go to the submissions platform for the magazine, open a submission, and it is as if a portal to another universe has opened, and I am all alone with something amazing, something beautiful, something that causes me to apprehend the moment in a completely new way. For my teaching, this connection seems vital. My students are capable of creative excellence. I am
likewise amazed sometimes as I sit in silence reading their work. There are few things in life that bring that kind of recognition, that kind of satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if anyone remembers it. What matters is that the human experience is elevated, that we are able to imagine ourselves as creatures beyond consumers and workers in an economic system, that we value and celebrate honest expression and imagination as worthy of our time and our energy.

In doing this work, I have become a very small player in the wonderfully vibrant, incredibly complex world of artists, musicians, writers, photographers, and graphic artists. I am honored to inhabit this small corner of the creative realm called Aji Magazine. Will this iteration of my creative journey continue? This is a question that needs to be answered by November 2023. I am learning to accept ambiguity, uncertainty, and change, grateful for the opportunity to have
published and to have featured the work of so many writers and artists. For me, the deep inward look is essential. If I am patient, if I have courage, and a sense of play, I am confident something special will come to fruition in the future, even if today I am not certain what that will be. All artists give birth in this same way. Many require years of silent
reflection between creative ventures. I’m hoping it won’t be that long before the new focus becomes evident, but I am willing to wait until I am sure I’m moving in the right direction.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I came to poetry and the arts through education and teaching, having earned baccalaureate, masters, and PhD degrees in English with emphases in creative writing, both fiction and poetry. As a PhD graduate, I was hired by colleges and universities to teach composition, technical writing, general education literature, and eventually served in administrative positions, academic dean, writing program director, director of assessment, where I honed my executive and leadership skills. Having done this type of work in Minnesota, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, and New Mexico, I have learned to use my portable skills in a variety of situations and to work with all sorts of people. Colleges and university professionals are expected to collaborate with agencies in the communities they serve, offering free services like advising community organizations, writing and administering grants, participating in creative performances, and so on. Consequently, I have become quite comfortable donating my time and creative talent toward a defined goal, something worth doing. Anyone who produces deliverables knows it can be tediously reductive parsing the monetary value of their work. Human beings enjoy producing things. We don’t always need to be paid in money, and I worry that this is an impulse our society may be losing.

The Aji Magazine brand is somewhat unique in that it is a noncommercial enterprise, depending solely upon the dedication, talent, and hard work of volunteers. The magazine features emerging and professional writers and artists, and has been a fresh, contemporary convergence of voices and perspectives. Early on, I realized that it would be difficult to publish a magazine that reflected the diversity of our nation, and even our world, as our publication is
international in scope. I paid careful attention while considering submissions to prioritize diversification. Over the years, the magazine has been able to showcase talent from Egypt, India, China, Africa, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and beyond. The art and writing we have published includes work that some other magazines might have excluded, work we believe is important and worth offering to our readers.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

How did you come up with the ideas?

Aji Magazine began as a creative experiment. I honestly didn’t know if it would work or not. Worst case scenario, I’d end up with egg on my face, colleagues and other professionals laughing at me, or criticizing our product. But by following the positive energy—the joy—I mean this sincerely—the magazine has grown almost beyond our capacity to sustain it. We’ve accomplished everything on a shoestring, paying for our submissions software, a few
advertisements, our website and domain.

I realized while working as Director of Assessment for a small community college that I was missing something. Looking at data, creating charts and tables, pointing out trends and identifying areas for improvement, I missed what had brought me to my career in the first place, a love of literature, of poetry, of fiction, of writing. I missed the community of artists. Over the years, I had developed a network of colleagues whose abilities and passions I knew: I wondered. Could we build a magazine, a commercial free space online for artistic expression that was peer-reviewed, a space that would be taken seriously by professional poets, fiction writers, artists, and photographers?

I trusted these colleagues. I emailed them all, shared my basic concept, and asked them if they would be willing to help. Some had talent in design, website development, and others could serve as reviewers. It was important to me at the start to have some educated lay reviewers, because I believed the magazine should be accessible to anyone interested in reading. Everyone I queried was in from the start—I sent them a draft statement of mission and concept, the basic processes for our work, and everyone agreed to take up the tasks I offered them. This is how Aji Magazine came to be. It was the result of the kindness, talent, and devotion of a handful of hardworking professionals who already had day jobs. The magazine work could count as service work for their tenure and promotion portfolios (most worked for universities). I will always be grateful to this original team as well as to those who became regular staffers later on as the magazine evolved.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Going from Idea to Execution

The first thing we needed was a name, something memorable, short, something that would reflect the spirit of our magazine and our creative venture. Let me tell you, I googled my share of names. I settled on Aji (a type of chili pepper), checking with the team to see if they thought it would work well. We registered our domain. Turns out there is actually—and I think it came later, queried them once with no response—a French cooking magazine with a very similar title. It’s tough to name anything uniquely—but after that, I drafted a very basic list of deadlines, a work cycle, processes, etc., and asked the team for approval and input. Once those were solidified, we needed to invite submissions. Someone suggested I email Louie Crew Cray, an English professor/poet at Rutgers who would post calls for submissions on a university page if submissions were free. We had no intentions of charging a reading fee, so the call went up, and the work began to come in. I also published ads on NewPages, and I will always be very grateful to Cray, who died in 2019, and to NewPages for taking our little magazine seriously before we had proven ourselves. Without their help, we probably would not have been able to get noticed in the broad field of literary magazines, presses, and online publications.

Building a Team/Hiring

The Aji Magazine team began with simple email invitations to colleagues with varying types of expertise. I shared the basic concept and asked if they’d be willing to devote some time and talent to getting the magazine up and running. All were very gracious, doing excellent work from the start. Since then, some team members have gone on to other things, which is understandable. This is volunteer, unpaid work. I have published classified ads on NewPages looking for additional staff and have encountered some wonderful people that way. In addition, I emailed local universities to see if they had graduate students interested in reviewing for the magazine. I have been amazed and heartened at how much time and energy this team has devoted to the magazine, meticulously analyzing literary and artistic works,
making recommendations, and writing interviews. The magazine is currently facing a crisis in terms of a design team. It may be unrealistic to expect qualified designers to do volunteer work at this point, as most are interested in monetizing their creative efforts. I’m not sure how we will move forward given this challenge.

The team has exchanged ideas. We are currently on hiatus. As the magazine has evolved, I have had faith in creative synergy and in positive intuition. The right things come at the right time if we are doing what we should be doing in the right mind frame. Uncertainty is part of any creative endeavor—and this is where the team is now. One caveat we have had from the start: If it’s not fun, we’re not going to do it. We are all volunteers, so it has been important to value and to respect what individual team members want to bring to the magazine, to allow them to make decisions and to have ownership of what matters to them. So much of what we have published has been the result of the creative
inspiration of a team member. They email their ideas, and I marvel at what they produce every time.     

Contact Info: 

• Website: http://www.ajimagazine.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ajimagazine.us/
• Other: [email protected]