This year’s annual Marquette Literary Review Magazine is for the first time accepting not only creative writing and artwork, but also videos.
Among numerous publications Marquette sponsors and publishes, the Marquette Literary Review Magazine provides students with an outlet to express their more creative sides, through creative works such as prose, poetry, short stories and essays, as well as artworks like photographs and drawings and now video.
The publication has been published online every year in the spring since its beginning in 2009. This year, for the first time, the editorial staff introduced a new website that allows the magazine to publish videos as well as other forms of visual art and writing.
“We accept a huge range of stuff,” Myers said, “(Now), we also look for photos (and) artwork and we can also accept videos and work that in. It’s a really multimedia magazine now.”
The magazine is a student-run organization with oversight from the English department and English graduate student Jason Myers. It will be released May 2.
“Genre-wise we don’t discriminate, so the content is based on what we receive,” Myers said.
Because publication is online, Myers said there is no limit to the number of works that can be included in the magazine.
The Literary Review receives creative works from the whole of the Marquette community, including alumni, professors, graduate students and undergraduate students.
Anna Story, a senior in the College of Communication, is a poetry and prose editor for the magazine. In the coming years, Story said the magazine is hoping to get more people from outside the English and communication departments of the Marquette community to submit their work.
“We are hoping to include people from all majors across campus who want to draw or write or create,” Story said. “We want people to know there is a place on campus for them to put their work out.”
Myers said after receiving the content from members of the community, undergraduate staff members read the content and vote yes or no to a piece based on simple criteria, including whether a piece is well written or well composed, whether it expresses Marquette values, and whether it is creative and interesting. The pieces that pass through are then reviewed and published by the editorial board.
Myers said this year he and his staff have begun to not only expand on the type of media the magazine publishes, but they also have future plans to work toward expanding on the magazine itself. Myers said it is his goal to publish two issues of the magazine in print within the coming years, and even open up the magazine to submissions from people outside of the university community.
“We need Marquette to know (the Literary Review) is a thing,” Myers said. “It gives people something to write for and a chance to publish their work. We are hoping that because we have so much to offer, we can appeal to many people. We want it to be something the community can be proud of.”
Carolyn Lewis, a senior in the College of Communication, is the second undergraduate editor for the magazine. Lewis spoke to the power of the Literary Review to offer a morale boost to beginning artists and writers by letting them see their work get published. She had works published twice in the Literary Review, a poem in 2017 and a short story in 2018.
“At the Literary Review launch party, I read my writing out loud to an audience for the first time,” Lewis said. “Now (as an editor) I just want to make sure a platform that encourages artistic vulnerability is alive and well on campus.”
Story said she agreed with Lewis that the magazine not only gives people a voice on campus, but also represents the state of Marquette. It gives the whole community a voice.
“I think writing, especially creative writing, is very personal,” Story said. “So whatever the (artist) chooses to write represents our Marquette values and each person’s personality. I always love to look through the old Literary Reviews to see what content and ideas were influencing campus in the past. I think it’s a good representation of who we are as a campus beyond our majors or our dorms or our hometowns.”
The Literary Review is currently accepting multimedia pieces to be published online in the spring. Submissions can be sent to [email protected] by March 4.
