When rejection becomes an invitation

Old Ottawa East couple launch a new literary journal for writers finding their way

Off Season is an online literary journal that celebrates the rough patches of creative life and turns author’s dry spells into opportunity

LORI GANDY

Old Ottawa East resident Sophia Ross Eckert says she knew six months after graduating from the MFA program at George Mason University in Virginia that she wanted to create a literary journal.

“I knew I wanted to start something that would allow me to reconnect with the literary community I enjoyed at George Mason. I reached out to my friend Susan Muth, a poet in Northern Virginia who was also in the program. We worked together on the program’s literary journal phoebe for two years. She was the poetry editor; I was Editor-in-Chief. So we have both a personal and a professional relationship. I knew she’d jump at the chance to be involved and do the work just for the love of it.”

Enter Off Season, an independent quarterly literary journal, the inaugural issue of which launched on November 10th.

“We hit on the name Off Season – because we wanted to create a journal that celebrates the rough patches of a creative life, when the rejections roll in and we aren’t being inspired or productive,” says Ross Eckert. “These fallow periods are as much a part of the creative process as creating itself.”

Off Season invites submissions only from writers and artists who have not received a literary journal acceptance in the last three months. Ross Eckert hopes this will create a way for people to feel excited about getting rejected, because they get to submit to Off Season.

As a new literary journal, Off Season entered a fairly crowded field of literary journals competing for people’s attention.

“I didn’t want to come into that space with just another literary journal,” she explains. “I wanted Off Season to feel like a distinct place.”

Judging from the response to the submission call for the first issue – 85 submissions – Off Season is off to a great start.

“That was more than I expected,” says Ross Eckert. “We had a good mix of emerging writers, where this would be their first publication, as well as established writers with credits from bigger journals. A very positive response.”

Starting her own literary journal has been a dream come true, made even more special because of the people she has gathered around her.

“Community is super important to me, and I wanted to make sure I had people that I knew and trusted,” Ross Eckert explains. “The Off Season team is a virtual community, with many people from my Master’s program that I’d worked with on phoebe, and I wanted to work with again. Also, some good friends. And my husband, Thomas Eckert. It’s a true labour of love for everyone as they are all volunteers.”

Off Season publishes literary fiction – prose, poetry, creative non-fiction and personal narratives. Each issue will also feature an artist. The first issue showcased ‘Sunday Crossword‘ by Greta Jarani, a printmaker, painter and ceramicist from Vermont.

Future plans include a craft blog, essays from contributors, readers and editors about overcoming creative roadblocks, virtual craft seminars, and possibly an annual print issue compiling the year’s content.

Another goal is to eventually pay contributors. “We might add a tip jar to the website, which a lot of journals have – with funds going towards paying contributors,” says Ross Eckert. She is also looking into registering as a nonprofit in Ontario, which would allow fundraising.

Ross Eckert’s husband, Thomas Eckert, a software engineer by day, built the website in the evenings over about two weeks.

“My primary goal was to design a site where published contributors would feel proud to share their work,” says Eckert. “The content itself needed to shine and everything else needed to get out of the way. I worked with our designer, Nicole Brate, to select specific fonts, colour palettes and layouts that would elevate the work.”

“Thomas is a watercolour painter, and he has a really good eye for design,” says Ross Eckert. “He sees programming and building a website as an art form.”

Eckert’s artistic eye is reflected in his attention to every detail.

“Poetry sometimes has specific layout requirements including spacing, indentation, and emphasis,” says Eckert. “The meaning of the content is imbued in the style itself.” 

So Eckert rewrote a whole chunk of the storage system to save the content with complex and consistent styling. The result: a visually stunning inaugural issue.

Another creative project Ross Eckert enjoys is a series of creative writing workshops she gives at the Old Fire Hall on Sunnyside Avenue. She is currently delivering her fourth workshop, and a spring session is being planned. More information can be found on the Old Ottawa South Community Association website at: https://oldottawasouth.ca/.

To find, follow and submit to Off Season, check out their website and social media sites:

https://www.offseasonmag.com; Instagram: @offseasonmag; Bluesky: offseasonmag.bsky.social