On October 16, Emerge, a collaborative work by some of SFU’s most talented writing students will debut. Emerge is an anthology written by participants of The Writer’s Studio, a program at SFU focused entirely on book production. Guest editor Daniela Ezla will open the launch event at Harbour Centre, during which contributors will perform readings of their works.
Current student and contributor to Emerge, Cormac O’Reilly, describes the process of creating and publishing the anthology. SFU students in the four different cohorts of The Writer’s Studio — poetry, speculative genre fiction, creative non-fiction, and literary fiction — collaborated on this anthology, explains O’Reilly. These students spent the year receiving feedback from both peers and mentors, culminating in their final project, Emerge.
Emerge is the name of the anthology and the class, the class being an elective offered through The Writer’s Studio program. This semester, 17 students took the course, learning to produce and write books. O’Reilly sums up the program aptly as a class that teaches students how to publish a book.
An anthology is released each year by The Writer’s Studio class and usually contains short stories and poetry. For O’Reilly, the process of putting the whole thing together has provided him with “a deeper appreciation of other genres” and allowed him to “learn about different types of writing.”
The Writers Studio is a part-time program based on Iowa Writers Studio, says O’Reilly. This program guides students through the process of self publishing, as being published by a third party is extremely difficult, according to O’Reilly. Students “learn more about the publishing process,” eventually leading to the publication of their original works in the anthology. O’Reilly continues, “Emerge, the course, is a good way to find out how things get to print. There’s a story to how the stories come out.”
The process is especially exciting for the students, says O’Reilly, as for many, it is their “first chance to be published, first time to be heard.” The anthology has an open theme, with an emphasis on helping to establish “emerging new voices.” O’Reilly says that the “payoff is both the process, and the end result” noting that, by working with his classmates on the project it “becomes more of a collaboration.”
In the speculative genre fiction cohort, O’Reilly describes his work as “everything else that doesn’t fit into literary fiction.” Members of his cohort write historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. “I’ve tried dystopian fiction this year,” he says.
In the anthology, O’Reilly’s contribution is entitled “Valentine’s Day Dinner.” He wrote this piece two years ago and has recently revised it. “[It’s] about a scene that unfolds in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day [. . .] it’s supposed to be dramatic,” he explains.
O’Reilly describes the Emerge launch event as the “first chance to share [the Writer’s Studio] experience with others.” He explains that “The Writer’s Studio is designed for people who don’t have time to write” in their everyday lives. He adds, “A lot of us are working other jobs. [Emerge] establishes that hobbies can be more than just a hobby. For some people, maybe myself included [. . .] the idea of seeing something you’ve created in print form is an extremely powerful experience.”
