Camosun students and staff are getting ready to launch the latest issue of the college’s literary journal, The Point. The journal is set to feature a number of creative works, including poems, short stories, and photographs, all of which have been submitted by Camosun students, faculty, and alumni. And for a lot of the writers, this will be their first step into the spotlight.
“For many people, it’s the first time that any piece of creative work by them has gone through that process, and it can be hard to do it for the first time,” says Camosun Creative Writing instructor Micaela Maftei. “But I’m going to say—and this is, like, my educated guess—99.9 percent of people who have their work in The Point find it a constructive, helpful, and fun process. So it’s nice to be a part of that.”
This launch—which takes place from 5:00 to 6:30 pm on Wednesday, April 8 in the Young Building’s Gibson Auditorium—will showcase the journal’s first issue under its new name, having recently shifted from Beside the Point to simply The Point. The new name strives to complement this wide collection of creative work more meaningfully.
“‘Beside the point’ does basically mean irrelevant, or not primary,” says Maftei. “So, I mean, it’s a clever name, but, you know, that is what it means. And in discussion with the group that really spearheaded the name change, we started talking about lots of different understandings of ‘the point’… For a lot of [students], the point of what they’re doing is to publish their own work, or to work in editing and publishing… That’s the point. That’s why they’re here. That’s why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
Creative Writing student Mel Ozard is a perfect example of this, as it was her love of writing that led her all the way to Maftei’s classroom, where she assisted in publishing The Point alongside the rest of her CRWR-162 classmates. And in just a few months spent behind the curtain, her perspective on the creative process has changed immensely.
“You tend to assume that there’s rules in place and that people, you know, like their structure. But really, it’s so subjective,” says Ozard. “Somebody… likes one piece [that] three other people might absolutely hate. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve come to see [while working on The Point], just the subjectiveness of everything.”
This year’s theme has proven to be quite subjective: “brink.” And while one might think the possibilities of this prompt are vast and many, the submissions have told a different story.
“I thought ‘brink’ was just as open to kind of positive, lighthearted interpretations as maybe darker, heavier ones, but there’s been a real trend to the darkness,” says Maftei. “There’s been a great breadth of ways that contributors have seen it, and there have been some more positive ones, but there is a lot of intensity. And that might really reflect how people feel about the world right now.”
Those feelings do differ from person to person, with factors like identity, culture, and experience all playing their part. And while the initial process of selecting work for publication was anonymous, the content itself has ensured a level of diversity that represents as many students as possible.
“We know there’s definitely some queer voices that are being represented,” says Ozard. “Women’s voices, as well. The college itself has a lot of diversity… and people tend to be drawn to what they know, right? So I would like to think that we’ve created a journal that represents a lot of different voices.”