About

About SWAMP

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How SWAMP began.
In 2008, Patrick Bryson and Peter Bower were musing over publications and the lack of postgraduate student run publications for postgraduate creative writers. Patrick thought it would be a great idea to start one, and pitched the idea to Peter to create an online publication. Together they built SWAMP, which operates out of the Callaghan campus of The University of Newcastle. Like the university, which is partly built over the wetlands, SWAMP takes a tentative step out of the murk of creative writing workshops towards the clean air of the academy.

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Publication Statistics
With our first issue published in June, 2008, SWAMP has successfully published five issues to date. At the start of April 2010, prior to Issue #6 going online, the site exceeded 23,000 views across the website from people around the globe.

Our first six issues saw submissions from 166 students from 48 universities across 7 countries (Australia, New Zealand,  England, Scotland, India, Canada and The United States of America). From these 166 students, we had the pleasure of reading 243 poems and 139 prose pieces. We felt privileged to publish 94 of these pieces from 67 contributors — which is 25% of our submissions.

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Archiving The Site
Our intention is for SWAMP to be around indefinitely, with fellow students stepping in as each editor graduates. This is our ideal situation. But, regardless, SWAMP is archived by the National Library Of Australia’s Pandora Project. It is a government initiative to preserve Australian online publications indefinitely to prevent publications being lost when/if websites ever die.

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SWAMP
ISSN 1836-0106