Last Tuesday marked the release of the 2009 fall edition of Gustavus’ literary magazine Firethorne. The Courtyard Café was host to students involved with, published in and fans of the publication.

Many students read their work aloud and discussed the inspiration and themes involved.

“[The best part of being on staff] is reading all the submissions. Some are great, some are terrible. But there’s always at least one that really makes me admire the artistic ability of Gustavus students,” Senior English Major and Firethorne Prose Editor Ryan McGinty said.

Each edition includes works of poetry, prose and art by students of the Gustavus community. Each section (poetry, prose, art) is comprised of a section editor and several section assistants. All submitted work goes through a complex and time-consuming process in order to decide what will be published.

“All submissions are judged anonymously. The managing editor goes through the painstaking process of coding everything. They then send each anonymous submission to its respective section editor [poetry, prose or art],” McGinty said.

“It’s the section editor’s job to distribute submissions to their assistant editors. After everyone has a chance to read everything, we hold section meetings. Here, each editor gives a thumbs up, thumbs down or neutral to each piece. If it’s a unanimous vote, we scrap it or publish it. If there is dissension regarding a certain piece, we argue it until we reach a majority vote.”

Students can submit their work to firethorne@gustavus.edu.

“This semester, we received over 300 submissions from over 60 students. This is a great credit to the large number of students on campus who are interested in the literary and graphic arts,” English Major and Managing Editor Abby Travis said.

“Students who submitted are from over 20 different majors; many people think that a literary and arts magazine caters to only the humanities, but this is entirely untrue. Even some of our staff members are from majors beyond the humanities.”