From the past co-editors:
Dear UNC Asheville,
Before I transferred to UNCA, I worked at a factory.
There were a series of rooms inside this factory, tucked onto a side street parallel to downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. A few of the rooms anchored those needing a place to relax, like an indoor basketball court and a break room kitchen. The other larger rooms held several employees doing different jobs like screenprinting, embroidery and administrative tasks, as well as customer service and graphic design jobs.
Prior to working at the factory, I held a host of different jobs. In 2021, I had eight W-2s to consider when filing my taxes. I was very lost while the COVID-19 pandemic was winding down and did not feel I had a set place in society after dropping out of art school, which had once been my dream, at the start of the pandemic.
Working at the factory, I was in quality control. For eight hours a day, I would snip threads, fold hundreds of t-shirts and package items for shipping.
During this time, I was saving for a house I could never afford and was writing a novel I have since tabled. For months, I worked and worked, and after work, I would head to an outdoor coffee shop named after a blue cup and write well after the sun went down.
I wrote about love in elevators, whimsical hallways in a dormitory in the heart of Chicago and a girl who had ambition for the future.I wrote about who I wanted to be but kept getting stuck on what I didn’t want to leave behind. My descriptions dripped with too much honey and my dialogue was impersonal.
My prose were all over the place, like my life, stuck in the same rut I dug for myself.
To fight with the monotony of my schedule being the same every day and to drown out the middle-aged man who would go out of his way to hit on me at my station, I turned to podcasts and audiobooks to keep my mind busy while my hands worked.
If my words weren’t enough, others helped keep me afloat.
After a time, I told the man, the same age as my dad, he inspired me to go back to college. He waxed monologues of how he was happy to have done something for someone so young and beautiful and continued on about how much he would “miss my sweet ass.”
*
In fall 2022, I went back to college.
I was finally chasing the drive I wrote into my characters and would use the gumption to free myself of the dark mist that settled around me while I was not in school.
It was finally the beginning.
Making it through a Mass Communication degree at UNCA, the school my childhood friend just graduated from in the spring, was my new dream.
I initially chose UNCA’s Mass Communication department because I was interested in video and social media analytics. Once I took MCOM 201 Basic Journalism with Michael Gouge in the spring of 2023, everything changed.
I was uplifted in a way I wasn’t in a long time. I was told my writing had potential, given the tools I didn’t have previously to spin engaging stories and shown a platform to publish I had never considered, The Blue Banner.
*
Serving as The Blue Banner’s Co-Editor-in-Chief this semester, with Brandon Washington, Banner staff and Gouge, as the faculty advisor, at my side is a dream come true.
Even after the city I’ve called home the past three years was decimated by Hurricane Helene, my home at UNCA and with The Blue Banner held firm.
For me, The Blue Banner is the beating heart of UNCA.
All I have left to say is thank you. Thank you to The Blue Banner, the staff who continued to pump out content this semester despite challenges, and the contributing writers who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Thank you to the readers of the paper, and most of all, thank you to all those who built me up over the years, who were there to catch me when I fell and support me through some of the most challenging years of my life.
I have loved my time as co-editor at The Blue Banner. Now, it is time to pass the torch and allow others to feel as special as I feel, with the Blue Banner as my home.
Good luck, editors. You can do it.
With love,
Sarah Booth
*
Dear UNCA,
To me, journalism is all about expressing people’s unique stories through the lens of the written word.
It allows us to share perspectives and stories that might otherwise go unknown to people. When you share stories, it opens up a dialogue for people to relate to one another and grow closer together.
It’s also a means to affect critical change whenever the situation necessitates it.
I’ve been deeply honored this semester to serve as one of the co-editors in chief along with Sarah Booth. Getting to be in such a position is so much fun for me, personally.
It can be exhausting at times for sure, spending long nights mulling over people’s submissions and the articles our staff writes up, going through and editing each one so that we all understand the standard The Blue Banner wants to put forward, but in the end, it’s worth it.
I’m ridiculously proud of our staff from this semester.
I’m a slightly older student. I turn 30 in a week, so I often feel pretty disconnected from the rest of the student population at UNCA. Being on the banner staff makes me feel welcome, and my fellow staff members are so good at making me feel even more accepted here.
I regret feeling like my time as co-editor-in-chief was a bit short. Hurricane Helene made a pretty big impact on us all, but my time was fulfilling regardless.
We had a great staff who were active and helpful in getting information out even during the crisis. Two staff members will be co-editors-in-chief next semester, and I couldn’t be prouder of them.
Abigail Cutler, who kept our social media up and running with constant updates during the storm’s aftermath, and Emily Moosbrugger, who’s a very talented writer and even helped me volunteer at one of the riverside cleanup sites after the storm! They’re both excellent at what they do, and I’m so excited to see how they will do as co-editors next semester.
Go with honor,
Brandon Washington
*
From the future co-editors
Dear UNCA,
I came back to college in Spring 2024. I was nervous I would be making the wrong decision as I had done once before when I graduated high school. I took journalism with Gouge during my spring semester, and he was the source of encouragement I needed to know I was in the right place and doing the right things this time around. He told me the Blue Banner needed more writers like me, and I should consider taking the class in the fall. So, I did.
I joined this semester and started managing The Banner’s social media, which turned into something I really enjoyed doing because it forced me to read articles I would normally take an interest in since I had to post about them.
I think being a co-editor-in-chief next semester with Emily will open a door of leadership that I haven’t gotten to utilize since high school. I think there are so many stories to tell and I’m only one person, so having a team I can work with is a great opportunity to get the coverage we need.
The Blue Banner has been getting a lot of traction ever since we started posting on social media, so one of my goals is to further display the skills our amazing staff possess through social media marketing.
Being a co-editor will be a good learning experience for me because I don’t know everything. Everyone in the newsroom is learning as we go, making the environment more welcoming to intermediate and advanced writers.
The UNCA community is stronger and more supportive of each other than ever. There are so many untold stories, which are unwritten now but will unfold as next semester develops. I know the UNCA community will welcome these stories with open arms as we remain inclusive and curious while we recover and discover ourselves.
It’s going to be a great semester.
I have an incredibly talented and amazing co-editor-in-chief by my side. I can’t wait to see the new and familiar faces in the newsroom to help bring new stories to life.
Talk soon,
Abigail Cutler
*
Dear UNCA,
In coming to UNCA in 2022, I did not plan to be involved with the Blue Banner. I enrolled in Professor Gouge’s Intro to Journalism last spring, with only the experience of briefly writing for my high school newspaper through the journalism elective, which was my favorite course because it allowed me to leave class to interview students in the cafeteria.
Having no set expectations, Professor Gouge’s class reintroduced me to journalism and very quickly demonstrated how unique of an experience it is getting to share people’s stories. I learned so much through conversations with people and the perspectives I was shown. It instilled in me a deeper appreciation for the school and community I was newly a part of.
To say the very least, this semester was a difficult and heavy one for everybody at UNCA. I felt extremely lucky that despite the tragedies they’d faced, so many people gave me their time and allowed me to share their inspiring stories with the UNCA community through the Blue Banner.
I am so excited to continue working on the Blue Banner staff alongside Abigail Cutler as Co-Editor-in-Chief. I hope our community will continue inspiring one another as we move forward. I am so honored to be given this role and to work with such a hardworking, supportive group of students.
Sincerely,
Emily Moosbrugger
