While reading the University of Calgary English Literature Students’ Society’s new publication, NoD, you may wonder how, exactly, do you pronounce its title? The little line above the O is a macron, and yes, it’s “node”, not “nawd” or “nood.” This is important information to know as enjoyment of the innumerable literary pieces within could be severely hampered by that nagging doubt at the edge of your mind, eventually driving you to actually get up and find a dictionary pronunciation guide, thus wasting valuable reading time.
“The idea for the magazine first came up in a meeting of the creative writers’ research group,” said Editor Colin Martin. “One of the concerns was that the only magazine being run out of the campus community right now is dANDelion, and undergraduate students at the U of C are not allowed to submit work to [it]. We wanted to craft something to fill that niche.”
The magazine will contain a wide variety of work, from prose to poetry to visual art, selected from 20 contributors both on and off campus. The publication strives to be a grassroots Calgary endeavour, with aims of distributing exclusively through independent bookstores in the area. As well, editors provide valuable feedback to the authors who submit to their magazine.
“We accept work from just about everybody, but if they just send one or two small pieces or something and they’re pretty rough and we don’t have a really good idea what they’re doing, we offer to give them some critical feedback so they can take a look at recrafting that work or have some ideas going into their next piece so they can submit something for the next issue,” said Martin.
The first issue of NoD will be 60 pages and comes out Thu., Dec. 1. Students can purchase a copy from the ELSS office, located in Social Science 1025. While the first issue is black and white, Martin stresses that it’s not a hastily-Xeroxed art-zine.
“What we’re printing is a really high-quality, perfect-bound magazine,” he said. “It’s going to be a small book, actually.”