You may be surprised to know that other literary magazines have their roots in the University of Massachusetts Boston besides “The Watermark,” especially one that receives submissions from all around the world. George Kovach, previously an MA and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) student the year that UMass Boston’s MFA program first launched, actually first came up with “Consequence” magazine for a literary editing and publishing class assignment. Now, the magazine is releasing its ninth annual issue this coming spring.
“Consequence” focuses its interests on warfare, particularly the “culture of war.”
“We don’t think of war as just combat. We think of war as a subject that’s been around forever that needs to be approached from many different angles—from the point of view of not only the soldier but of the witness, those people that are victimized by war, and then the general populous that are concerned and write about it,” Kovach said.
The culture of war encompasses the impact war has on individuals, whole societies, and the global community existing between nations.
Kovach is no stranger to the war zone. A Vietnam war veteran, the editor-in-chief was diagnosed with PTSD in 2003. As a result, he had to leave his job in financial services and decided to come to UMass Boston for the MA program in Creative Writing and the newly minted MFA program. He received his degree in 2009 in poetry. 
During the last year of his three-year program, Kovach took a course with professor Askald Melnyczuk that asked him to start a literary magazine for homework. Kovach and his partners decided to focus their magazine on war.
“There is very little quality dialogue on the subject of war in this country. Part of the problem is that the subject is very much steered by interests like those of the large broadcasters and major networks. Many have a political leaning, and even when they present their view on war, we receive a very narrow presentation,” Kovach said. “Before we run into these conflicts all over the world….the citizenry, the people that elect these representatives, need to understand what they’re getting into.”
Each issue runs to about 270 pages, and includes anything from poetry and non-fiction to interviews and visual art. Having once received monetary aid from the William Joiner Institute, headed by Kevin Bowan at the time of the magazine’s birth, the now-independent magazin hosts a panel discussion with its yearly release to discuss the contents of each issue.
The magazine has dealt with narratives by writers from Israel and Palestine, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and devotes about 100 pages of the magazine to translated pieces from international writers. 
But why literature? Kovach believes it has a special power that other sources lack.
“Literature…gives you not just intellectual but emotional access to very difficult things. So because we’re publishing literature and not journalism, it enables our readers to get closer to the true pathos, to understand the extremes of human behavior. And by doing that, we hopefully will raise the level of the dialogue. You have to look for discussions about war. We don’t see it at all in the media,” Kovach said. 
Besides giving writers a platform to express their experiences with violence, regardless of their fluency in English, Kovach’s staff of volunteers helps him conduct workshops for veterans with PTSD at the Brockton VA Center.  
“We get a lot of submissions. We publish less than 10 percent. Every year we get more. I have to give credit to the faculty at UMass Boston. They’re the ones that motivated me in the beginning and they’re the ones that supported it, helped us. I was thrilled that I was a graduate student here and came up with this with a lot of help,” Kovach said.
To learn more about “Consequence” magazine, check out http://www.consequencemagazine.org.