An Unexpected Journal's Superhero Launch Party
For those of you who follow An Unexpected Journal, where I serve as Managing Editor, I hope you saw that we just completed an epic live stream event to promote our most recent issue of the journal on superheroes. I do not use the word epic lightly. It was nearly four hours long. It consisted of six thirty-minute sessions with a few intermissions to give away some free books.
Some of you might know that I wanted to be a journalist when I was in high school. I loved sports, and I saw that as a way I could be involved in the game even if I could not participate. I wrote for some local outlets, and I had a great time doing it. One of the more significant pieces I did was not even about sports. I conducted interviews with several people with disabilities in different lines of work to highlight how disability certainly does not need to hold anyone back from their career ambitions. I had enjoyed doing those interviews so much because it was fascinating to get a glimpse into people’s lives. Asking questions and learning intrigued me, and it still does.
Today I got the opportunity to ask more questions with so many of my friends. I was the interviewer for half of the sessions, and it was a bit of a challenge because our articles, while all focused on superheroes, were quite diverse. Creating interview questions that could encompass two or three different articles and find common themes between them was a little bit of a challenge. However, the threads were there, and that made for some very engaging content.
Bringing together so many wonderful writers is my favorite part of working on our publication. I have often written about community on this website, but I have to admit that today was especially sweet because we got to see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices. Sure, I would love to have everyone over to my house for a fire where we could discuss everything in person, but this was a pretty sweet alternative. We had people from all over the United States coming together to talk to each other about superhero movies. However, more importantly, we got everyone together talking about ideas. We talked about everything from cults to the multiverse to justice to humility. And, somehow, the entire thing fit together into a coherent whole.
If you are interested in checking out our efforts, you can do that either on our Facebook page, which you should like and follow, and I am embedding the YouTube video here from my cohost’s Carla’s YouTube channel. This was an amazing effort by so many people, and I cannot wait to do it again for the next issue. It was a successful experiment.