Eidolon went live almost exactly one month ago. At the time, I resisted the urge to talk too much about what it was that I was hoping to accomplish with the publication, what I thought we were doing, what we were planning for the future. The manifesto and the articles spoke for themselves. (They still do, but I have more news as well.)

Eidolon published six articles in its first month:

Michael Fontaine compared the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid with the Israel/Palestine conflict in Aeneas in Palestine
Curtis Dozier explored the resonance of Snickers’ choice to use the image of Medusa for their ad on the back cover of Sports Illustrated in Hungry Eyes
I questioned (and eventually championed) the possibility of feminist scholarship on the male-dominated genre of Greek tragedy in Not All Tragedians
Spencer Lenfield argued that Alcaeus deserves more attention than he gets in The Other Poet from Lesbos
John Byron Kuhner looked to Cato’s De Agri Cultura for instructions on how to grow cabbages and instead found advice for how to manage slaves in Of Cabbages and Kings
Chris Childers made the case for the influence of Horace’s Odes 2.10 on Thomas Hardy’s poem to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic in The Convergence of the Twain

Eidolon’s content covers a wide span of topics and tones: humor, current events, personal essays, meditations on classical scholarship and reception. Although the schedule hasn’t yet been inscribed in stone, the June articles should represent a similar range, from references to classical texts in hip-hop songs to topographical allusions in Virgil. There will also be a few articles comparing approaches to controversial issues (such as gay marriage) in the ancient and modern world. Our goal in writing about these issues isn’t to fabricate easy identifications — the ancients, unlike celebrities, were emphatically not “just like us.” Instead, our writers will attempt to find meaning in the uneasy resonances.

In Eidolon’s manifesto, I wrote that we expected and hoped to be surprised by what people submitted. This wish has already been fulfilled: in the last month, Eidolon has received dozens of article pitches by scholars across a broad spectrum of interests, nationalities, and stages in their careers. The volume of submissions has been high enough that we’re switching to a twice-weekly publication schedule for the month of June. Starting next week, you will now find new content on Eidolon every Monday and Thursday.

We’re also introducing a new way to receive that content: directly in your inbox. Last month the only options for following Eidolon were Facebook, Twitter, and Medium itself (which requires a Facebook or Twitter account). Since not everybody uses social media, we’re introducing a new alternative: an opt-in monthly newsletter with all of Eidolon’s articles. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

So far, the articles on Eidolon have been completely new material, drawn from scholars’ lives rather than from their previous published work. Although I expect the majority of the journal’s content to conform to this model, there’s also an opportunity for scholars to submit another kind of piece that might be more organic to the rest of their research: a shorter version of a published, peer-reviewed article or book that has been rethought and rewritten for a more general audience.

One of the most interesting articles I read this past week was a post here on Medium by Patrick Dunleavy called “How to write a blogpost from your journal article”. The whole piece is worth a read, but this paragraph particularly resonated with me:

So having explained all this to blogging sceptics, the question I ask is — ‘You’ve put eighteen months or two years of your life into doing the research in your article. You’ve devoted months more to writing the paper and sending it to journals, dealing with comments, doing rewrites and hacking through the publishing process. Why would you not spend the extra couple of hours needed now to pull out from your journal article the key bits needed for a good blogpost?’

I don’t necessarily share Dunleavy’s optimism that writing a good shorter version of your article will only take a “couple of hours.” In my experience, it can take a few days to give careful thought to what your piece will say, refamiliarize yourself with a few key pieces of relevant scholarship, and write your reformulated argument in clear prose. Time is a scarce and highly valued commodity in academe, but writing for a venue such as Eidolon rarely requires time-consuming tasks such as an exhaustive literature review. And the time spent writing is repaid swiftly in the immediate reception of the article, which feels more like the kind of lively discussion that follows an engaging lecture or conference paper.

Dunleavy’s argument reminded me of the Article Remix, an excellent idea introduced almost a year ago by Katie Rose Guest Pryal. Whereas Dunleavy imagines the blog post as a way to point scholars in your field toward your published work, Pryal sees it as a way to reach a broader audience:

Take your amazing scholarly work, and write about it in on your blog or on a guest post on another blog. Avoid jargon. Keep it short. Make it meaningful to people outside your field. Show us how we can use your ideas to make the world a better place, even in a small way. Then tweet a link to the post using the hashtag #articleremix.

(Neither Dunleavy nor Pryal address the idea of writing remixes of monographs, but I think the idea has even more relevance in relation to longer scholarship. If you can’t describe in 2,000 jargon-free words why your book is exciting and interesting, you may have cause for concern.)

Eidolon is precisely the kind of publication to which scholars should be sending their remixed articles. If you’re looking to publish pieces that will point other classicists toward your formal scholarship, an open-access journal like this one can certainly help create a conversation. And if you’re interested in writing for a non-specialist audience, our best-performing stories have well over a thousand views after only a few weeks online.

Whether you’re trying to raise your citation index or become a public intellectual, writing for journals like Eidolon is a natural choice.

Thank you for helping make the launch of Eidolon a success, and please continue to send pitches, thoughts, and questions to eidolon@paideia-institute.org.

Happy reading!

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Read more of her work here.