What Is riverrun?
Begun in 1971 by Dr. C. Kenneth Pellow, riverrun has been an avenue through which UCCS artists and writers have been able to express their voices. The journal is designed in the riverrun Literary and Arts Journal course (ENGL 3170) and is published at the end of each spring semester. UCCS students are welcome and encouraged to enroll in the course and participate in the editing and publication of the journal. Any UCCS student may submit original, creative work to the publication. riverrun is proud to have published works by writers and artists who have gone on to critical acclaim, including Yusef Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994; Marc Weber, an award-winning poet; and Sally Mankus, a photographer, sculptor, and mixed-media artist whose works continue to be exhibited throughout the country.
Why “riverrun” ?
Dr. Pellow and his first group of students working on the campus arts journal decided to name the journal, riverrun, in honor of the first word in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The book’s innovative style of reinventing the English language, as in the word riverrun, represents the paradoxical necessities to merge differences and to keep changing. The book is also written cyclically, with the very last line feeding back into the book’s opening word. This fluid, cyclical nature implies that both convergence and divergence from the norm are vital for survival. Thus, the word “riverrun” must never be capitalized, as it is not capitalized in Finnegans Wake.
For information about submitting to the journal, please visit the Submissions page or More About Us page!
“… riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth’s castle and Environs.”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
James Joyce (1882-1941) by Berenice Abbott, c. 1928.
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