April 30, 2019 brought people together to celebrate the University of Massachusetts Boston’s two student literary magazines releases.
Authors and fans of prose and poetic fiction alike gathered in the Harbor Event Space Tuesday evening to celebrate the release of The Watermark’s 28th issue in the most fitting manner possible: sitting around relatively silently, and reading.
The event began at 4:30 p.m., by which time the space was outfitted with three long-tables covered in prints of the new volume, as well as a fourth containing plenty of food and drink. At the height of the festivities, 22 people bustled through the room, grabbing pizza and salad, reading short-stories and poems, sharing their favorite lines and pieces with friends at their tables. Throughout this time, Editor-in-Chief Joy O’Halloran and Associate Editor Isabelle Racette bounced around from table to table, talking about what went into the new issue. Everyone present at the event seemed excited to grab a copy. Contributors eagerly flipped through to find their own works, while many non-contributors expressed the desire to submit next semester.
Established in 1979, The Watermark bills itself as “UMass Boston’s Arts Journal,” and provides a place for students to submit short, creative writing pieces, as well as photography, drawings, and paintings, and other forms of literary and visual art. The new 100-page booklet features 23 works of poetry, 19 works of prose, and 13 visual works, and 22 pieces from last semester’s Six Word Story Contest—all of which cover many different genres, styles and even languages.
The Watermark accepts submissions year-round, and you can grab the new issue with its psychedelic cover on stands around campus now through next semester.
Writ Large released its new issue on Tuesday. Printed once a semester, Writ Large is a non-fiction literary magazine with each issue having a theme, this one being: “The Everyday.” Always looking for people to write, students and faculty are all encouraged to participate, though students take precedence. The illustrations paired with the writings are also student produced.
Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Grover and Managing Editor Farrin Khan welcomed a small crowd in the Point Lounge on the third floor of the Campus Center. While serving lemonade, pizza, and brownies, music played in the background. Grover started off the ceremony while the attendees ate food and skimmed the new issue. She talked about how this issue has more narrative pieces than previous publications while Khan explained the meaning of the cover and read the poem in the beginning which explained each essay.
Both Grover and Khan were happy to answer student questions about the issue and what they did to produce all the copies. Grover stated that she is “especially proud of this edition because I feel like the theme is really important, ‘The Everyday.’ It’s important that you recognize what people struggle with everyday, what you go through in life everyday. I think that, that focus is really important to consider.”
Khan went into how they choose each topic. “We bounce around a lot of ideas. We want to make it broad enough that a lot of people can write on whatever topic they want to do; but we also want to make it specific because there is a theme that we want to focus on—that is encompassing everything that people want to talk about.”
Contact Farrin Khan or Elizabeth Grover to get involved with Writ Large and to submit a piece. The email, [email protected], is the easiest way to submit new essays or to ask any questions on the fly.