Editors Desk
Each summer, the shared office space at The Interim, Campaign Life Coalition and Catholic Insight are enlivened with the presence of some (at least) half-dozen high school and university students. This year, we have been blessed with an unusual degree of help and I thought it would be nice to let you know a little bit about them and the contributions they made to this paper the last few months. Some of the names will be familiar because their bylines have appeared in the paper recently.
Shannon Kalyniak, a York University graphic design student, has brought a keen eye to making our pages more reader friendly. Her suggestions on how to improve layout – larger pictures, the use of illustrations, more white space, the spacing of headlines – will, I hope, influence how we put the paper together long after she returns to her final year of study. She has also provided several illustrations this summer, when she wasn’t busy developing promotional material (pamphlets and brochures) for several on-going Interim projects.
Ronnie Cote, who will begin studying at the Ontario College of Art and Design, has been doing our editorial cartoons and some of the story illustrations this summer. We have had a lot of positive feedback on them, so I am glad that he has promised to stay in contact with us in order to continue drawing cartoons for us while he is in school.
Theresa Matters, an English major from St. Jerome’s College at the University of Waterloo, has assisted the work of our circulation manager, Dan DiRocco, this summer, but has also written several stories. She, too, will continue working for The Interim when she returns to school, writing news stories and features when her schedule permits.
Dina Kok is a summer student for Campaign Life Coalition, but has taken several writing assignments. A Childhood Studies student at Brock University, Dina has pro-life running throughout her body – her Oma is Joanne Dieleman (see page 12) and her aunt is Deny Dieleman, The Interim and CLC’s office manager. She brings a well-tuned eye to pro-life issues.
Paul Jalsevac is studying law at Ave Maria University in Michigan and left our offices in mid-summer to get married. But we were extremely fortunate to have him in the busy June and early July election period. He wrote a number of bylined, “Interim staff” and newsbrief articles in those months. He was able to bring to the stories he wrote and researched a critical eye that certainly improved our coverage of continuously developing stories. He also helped with a lot of election-related research for my stories.
Stephen Tardiff, a literature and philosophy student at St. Michael’s University at the University of Toronto, is not a new contributor to The Interim. He has written articles, reviews and editorials for us on and off since 2001. This summer, just as he did in 2003, he was willing to stay late to write a story or an editorial, or to find and edit a suitable LifeSite story, often the night before we went to press, as I realized that there were several holes in the pages that need to be filled.
Six students, all in their young 20s, made significant and much-appreciated contributions to The Interim over the last three or four months. It is certainly encouraging for everyone in this office to see that kind of commitment and skill among the young people who pass through our doors.
If these talented students stay involved in the pro-life movement, the future of pro-life will be very bright, indeed.
– Paul Tuns
