Camosun’s literary journal Beside the Point is returning this year with its ninth edition, which will be launched on April 14. Students in Creative Writing 159, taught by Micaela Maftei, have been working through the semester to select, curate, and edit submissions, all of which were sent in from Camosun students. This is Maftei’s first year teaching the course, and the journal is returning after a year on hold because of the pandemic.
“It’s my first year doing it and it’s been wonderful,” says Maftei. “There’s been some changes, a lot’s been happening behind the scenes, and now we’re back in business. We are very glad to finally be back, have a class, have a journal, have a hard copy, and have a launch where we can share it.”
At the beginning of the semester, Maftei released a call for submissions that was published online and printed on posters that were distributed across the campus; however, the impact of the pandemic made promotion difficult.
“It has been quite difficult for the past two years to promote it consistently because there’s been a lot of change, and people’s attention has been pulled in many different directions,” explains Maftei. “We’re coming into a new… well, returning to, a new era.”
Maftei says “returning” because that’s the theme of this year’s journal. And, despite the hurdles, she’s very happy with the variety of submissions that the class was able to collect.
“There’s creative nonfiction, there’s fiction, there’s poetry, there’s artwork, there’s a fantasy piece,” she says. “The theme this year is ‘returning,’ which we thought was kind of an interesting one given how the course is returning, the journal is returning, and there’s just a lot of things coming back. And there’s a lot of really interesting ways that writers and artists have approached that theme.”
After the submissions came in, the class then had to select which ones to include in the journal. Maftei says the selections are based on a variety of factors, including how the piece relates to the theme and whether they fit cohesively with other selected works. Following that, students split up into committees, based on genre, to begin the editing process.
“Once we have decided what submissions we’d like to include, students will perform some editing,” she says. “The big, more significant, macro edits they’ll articulate in a response to authors. We’ll work with authors for maybe more structural edits that we think would benefit the piece, and then the committees will also do micro-edits.”
Student Kaylee MacQueen was part of the fiction committee. She says that her goals for the course—getting more experience with the fundamentals of editing—were met, and says that she enjoyed the collaborative process.
“Having some communication with the original author, and having it be a group standpoint was great because then I had people to bounce off of, people to agree with, and provide more suggestions for how we wanted to improve the pieces,” says MacQueen. “We have a diverse array of different types of writing, so it’ll be great to see that in the journal.”
The class will be hosting the launch event on Thursday, April 14, at Na’tsa’maht Indigenous Plant Garden on the Lansdowne campus, where attendees can purchase a copy of the journal. The launch will include live readings and art showings of pieces featured in the journal. Maftei says that they are in the process of working with the Lansdowne bookstore to ensure they have some copies available for purchase as well. See camosun.ca/beside-the-point for more info.