Interview with Callie Lambard
In your own words, what sparked the idea of The Ginkgo?
When I started working in the Office of Sustainability in 2020, The Ginkgo was already up and running. Katie Runk, ‘23, was running it with the then-coordinator, Derek Martin. I submitted to it a few times before taking over in 2022 during my senior year. The Ginkgo always took all kinds of writing on sustainability: academic papers, poetry, photo journals, interviews, fiction. I think the idea was to create a hub for SU’s environmental writing.
What was your primary goal when you took over The Ginkgo? Was there anything specific you hoped to accomplish?
When I took over The Ginkgo, my main goal was to increase submissions. We weren’t getting much of anything, so I started advertising to the creative writing department. As a double major, I felt that we had an untapped resource in the writing students. I also started writing more frequent, casual articles to try to increase what we had.
What was the process of receiving submissions and maintaining the website like? Were there other hands on this project as well?
The website was handed down to me, so I didn’t have to change much in the way of that. Katie worked to make it look really beautiful, so I was lucky she had put the time into it that we did! I proofread and uploaded the submissions myself, so there wasn’t much of an editing team! Many of our submissions were from other student workers in the Office of Sustainability, though. We had some trouble branching out.
Did you feel like you grew closer with and provided a forum for the community through this project?
In a way, yes. While we didn’t get many submissions, I tried to spread the roots further throughout campus and involve students in the humanities as well. In the beginning, it was mainly essays and non-fiction writing, and I really wanted to publish a poem or something in there! The Office of Sustainability didn’t have the capacity for a student worker to continue this after I graduated, so I leaned into that writing community when trying to find a new home for The Ginkgo. I saw its potential, and I didn’t want it to go away after I graduated.
What do you hope to see from The Ginkgo in the future, as we make the shift from a blog to a more traditional publication?
Honestly, when I left SU, my greatest hope was that it would simply continue. When I saw that the Ginkgo team was publishing a physical magazine and presenting it at Making Public, our school’s publication release day, I was ecstatic. To have sustainability represented at such a writing-focused event meant a lot to me. A lot of my work is trying to bridge the gaps between sustainability and the humanities in peoples’ minds, and the Ginkgo team that took this on has taken a massive stride in that. My hope is that this foundation leads to even more environmental writing taking place on SU’s campus. I hope The Ginkgo can become a place for environmental thought and creativity to flourish.