Steven Silvestri’s Anonymous Crusade
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“I wanted people to express themselves without shame,” said Stephen Silvestri, the creator of Hunter Anonymous. “Really great writing can come out of people when they don’t hold themselves back.” He began Anonymous to provide students access to an unedited, unbiased forum where their written expression could be published anonymously.
The idea for Anonymous occurred in the summer of 2007 when Silvestri was frustrated at the dearth of pubications available to student writers at Hunter. “There weren’t many outlets,” he said. “The subject matter was too narrow and not useful. The Hunter community’s power wasn’t being realized.” From this frustration and an obsession with the concept of collective consciousness, the idea for Hunter Anonymous was born. Silvestri, 21, an English literature major who doesn’t consider himself a writer, said he wanted to appeal to the largest number of students possible and have them participate in the publication. He wanted to see what would happen if students were guaranteed to have their words printed exactly as they submitted them, in their language of choice.
That summer, Silvestri, who grew up in Long Island but now lives in Brookyn, began his mission to make the idea a reality. The first step was to pitch a proposal to the Hunter Media Board. “I was so gung ho, so psyched about the idea,” Silvestri said. Fortunately, Media Board President Tania Dudina shared his enthusiasm, and helped him with the chartering process, the paperwork, and all the necessary steps to get funding. Dudina also helped Silvestri create business cards and a website for the publication, hunteranonymous.org. “It was only the summer,” Silvestri said, “so we got a head start.”
Early in the fall, 2007 semester, Silvestri persistently promoted Hunter Anonymous, posting flyers asking for email submissions as well as tabling, the time honored Hunter student tradition of soliciting attention and funds by setting up a table along the third-floor corridors where students travel to classes and destinations in the North and East and West buildings. Silvestri was such a ubiquitous presence that anyone trudging along the corridors during the fall of 2007 would had have to have seen him at least once, handing out flyers or trying to strike up a conversation about the publication. “I was determined to make it a success,” Silvestri said of his zealousness.
“I set out to establish a bedrock of rules for Anonymous,” he said. This process involved speaking with Associate Dean of Students Michael Escott about libel. “Since nothing is authored,” Silvestri said, “legally, the writing printed in Anonymous is my own. It is, therefore, my responsibility to make sure that nothing incriminating gets published.” Incriminating items include the use of specific names or locations not in the public domain or anything explicitly threatening towards a specific person or group of people. “There can be things that are offensive,” Silvestri said, “as long as they are not violently threatening anyone.”
Submissions filled his email-box. Silvestri said he received about 40 from “extremely unique individuals.” Using email helped him track the submissions, which he printed like journal entries in a uniform font in the order he received them. The idea was to distinguish each person as an individual, Silvestri said. Thus, if someone sent him multiple submissions, he compiled them all in the same “entry,” and listed them under the date and time he received the email. This idea of the individuals creating the collective was enhanced, in his opinion, by the fact that the entire publication was unedited for grammar, spelling and punctuation. “If that’s what’s intended, why not print it?” Silvestri said, “People knew that whatever they sent me was guaranteed to be published. The typos and format reflect who each person is.”
Contributors were allowed the option of having their names printed in the beginning of the issue for a bit of recognition. It was not a list of “writers,” but rather “supporters of the magazine.” The list is cumulative, so the names carry over from issue to issue. Silvestri said that there were over 50 “supporters.”
“I wanted it to be open ended enough that anyone could pick it up and be like, ‘I don’t have a problem with this. This isn’t trying to prove anything to me,’” Silvestri said of the magazines’ bare-bones design. “Visual style was out,” he said. “Just words, nothing else.”
The Fall 2007 debut issue of Hunter Anonymous included a foreword by Silvestri: “Dear Readers, the publication you hold in your hand is the product of an experiment conducted on the Hunter community – to give people free reign to publish anything in the written form they please, given they agree to anonymity.” The submissions ranged from short fiction narratives to political dissertations, and a large number of them were confessional in nature.
“I’m terrified of you,” read a submission listed simply as Oct 12, 2007 11:50 PM:, “You reading. You an all your friends and all your family. I walk through the hunter hallways. You’ve probably seen me. Usually I’m muttering to myself, angry over the bureaucratic labyrinth that is our school, or staring at my feet to avoid eye contact with any strangers. I don’t really like social interaction.” Another, Nov 5, 2007 8:22 AM, said, “I wind up in his sheets because I am looking to interrupt a week’s worth of loneliness with his lips and the sex is good but mainly I’m just weak and apathetic …”
The first finished product of Silvestri’s experiment reflected the diversity of students on this campus. The feedback following the first publication was also quite diverse, ranging from pats on the back to criticism that the work published wasn’t of a high caliber.
In an article in the College’s independent student newspaper, Envoy writer Insanul Ahmed criticized Hunter Anonymous for allowing typos and other grammatical errors to be printed. Ahmed said that the errors prevented readers from understanding the authors’ visions. He wrote that Silvestri should edit Anonymous grammatically to make the authors’ messages clearer. Silvestri defended his choices in a Letter to the Editor, saying “these mistakes function to reveal the level of attention that authors feel they should pay to their submission, as well as lending a very unique, human character to the publication as a whole. As I expressed in the preface, I strive to present these individual voices to my utmost ability which, in my opinion, means that their words are completely unadulterated by my criticism – however small or minor the ‘error.’ I wish to reiterate that these typos actually work to strengthen the purpose of Anonymous, and that I believe Ahmed fell short in fully interpreting this admittedly unconventional concept.”
Silvestri said he also received feedback that his publication should be online rather than in a print. Silvestri said, however, that he felt the tangible form immortalized the writing, whereas an online posting system would be more “spontaneous and impermanent.” “By having a human, me, behind it, it’s not just some system taking in posts,” he said. However, Silvestri did utilize the Anonymous website to compliment the publication and added a downloadable PDF file so that people can read it online.
Submissions more than doubled for the second issue of Anonymous, which was published in spring, 2008. After receiving 85 submissions, Silvestri said he appealed for more funding in order to print the issue. After he was granted the money, he also reprinted a thousand copies of the previous issue. “I didn’t want people’s words to just disappear,” he said. “The evolution of the publication is the most important thing, to see where it was then and where it is now.”
The spring 2008 issue was equally as diverse as the first. A submission labeled Mar 12 6:49 PM: reads, “Youn nan peyi ki pi pòpilè nan Amerika se Etazini.” Mar 26 12:15 AM: says, simply, “diapers. endless diapers.. and that is..a fact.” Apr 24 11:38 AM: reads, “Thank you in advance for the allotted time for me to the vent and pose questions. I just want some answers: why are textbooks so hideously priced? Who determined that a hardcover book be $175 dollars?”
As president of the newly rejuvenated WHCS Hunter Radio station, Silvestri has been busy, but has not neglected Anonymous. He said that he was ready to make a few changes to the publication for the third issue. First, he said that individuals will get their own pages. “Even if a submission is only three lines long,” Silvestri said, “I will just increase the font, so that it’s more democratic and does not overflow to other pages.”
He also said that an index was to be added in the beginning of the issue. If a piece has a title, he will use that. Otherwise, he plans to type the first sentence, followed by an ellipses, guiding the reader to the piece. Silvestri wanted to continue the minimalist design and black of white font of the publication, but had a slightly different design idea for the new issue. “I want it to open like a notebook,” he said, “where you can read it one way and see all of the submissions, but if you read it from the opposite end, there will be an informational guide to the CUNY system.”
This guide, Silvestri said, would provide biographical and contact information for important people within the CUNY system, starting from the top of the hierarchy, then working down to the individual department chairs at Hunter. It would be information already available in the public domain, “yet has never been printed in such a format,” Silvestri said.
Silvestri said he hoped Hunter Anonymous would continue publishing after he graduates. He wants to pass the editorial leadership to an individual who supports the tenets of the publication.