Students of Camosun’s Creative Writing 159: Editing and Publishing class (CRWR 159) last winter made Camosun history with the rebirth of Beside the Point. The new course takes students through the process of reviewing, selecting, and editing submissions for the literary journal.
“The journal started as an online-only journal that was not connected to a class, so it was volunteer faculty and volunteer students,” explains Camosun English instructor Jodi Lundgren, who teaches CRWR 159. “Then, it just kind of fizzled out. When it’s based on volunteers, and students come and go, it’s hard to keep something like that going.”
CRWR 159 is a requirement of the college’s Comics and Graphic Novels program, but it is open to others. Advocates of the school’s phased-out journal saw this new class as an opportunity to bring the publication back to Camosun for good, letting the class members of each semester run the show.
“So they’re working on a real-life project,” says Lundgren, “and also fulfilling the learning outcomes of the course. As for the faculty members, it’s part of their workload and the students are getting course credit, so it’s a win-win.”
Last winter, those students created a new vision for Beside the Point. Comparing outside journals, the students decided how to position the publication relative to its competitors. The new mantra for the journal became “pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable.”
“One of the main things they wanted to do was to include genre fiction, so not just literary, realistic fiction,” says Lundgren. “They wanted to make sure that they were going to be able to work with that kind of fiction, and also comics.”
Each of the pictures in the journal is created by a student in the Comics and Graphic Novels program and is paired with a written submission.
“Writers got the experience of seeing their work represented visually, and then the students in the program got a chance to practice illustration as a skill outside of creating comics,” Lundgren says. “You might see artwork in other journals, but it hasn’t come out of this process of the artist reading the work, reflecting on it, representing it.”
Lundgren says there truly is diversity to the journal.
“There is some very deep poetry and some very sort of soul-searching creative non-fiction essays in there,” she says. “But then you flip the page and you go to this comic or horror story.”
Former CRWR 159 student Rachelle Bramly benefited from the professional experience of participating in editing and having her own work submitted. She is now in the Writing program at UVic and believes her time at Camosun helped her.
“I think it’s a great experience to have,” Bramly says, “but also, if you’re really serious about pursuing writing as more of a career, then it’s a smart idea to start putting together a resume and start to get real-life experience—it’s a great place to start for that.”
As a, students learn and share advice while still respecting the work of others.
“I think you need to know how to express your opinion but remain encouraging,” says Lundgren. “You have to be critical but courteous.”
The theme of this issue of Beside the Point is “community.” The process of working together to create the newest issue of the journal really invited the students to look outside themselves and help and support one another, creating a community of their own, says Lundgren.
“This is a different kind of course,” Lundgren says, “because it had this common outcome. So it wasn’t just each person individually working on their writing to try to become individually better writers; everyone was working together as a team to produce this journal, and it really did create a different dynamic of being part of a community and not being isolated.”