By: Gabrielle McLaren
SFU-based, student-run magazine Lyre launched its eighth edition on Thursday, November 2.
Lyre Magazine is an annual publication that has published short fiction, screenplays, poetry, translations, and photographs since 2009. The magazine is edited, designed, produced, and published by a team of student volunteers from different programs and faculties at SFU. This year, the Lyre’s theme was “Questioning Memory and Nostalgia.”
“It’s a topic very close to my heart,” co-editor-in-chief Iulia Sincraian said. “I find nostalgia very interesting, in the way that people look at the memories that exist and how they reconstruct them through time.”
The Lyre’s editorial team had its hands full while putting together this edition in particular as over 200 submissions poured in. Contributors came from all different walks of life and majors, and were based anywhere from SFU and UBC, to other Canadian universities; there was even work from New Delhi’s Indian Institute of Technology.
“This is huge for a student-run magazine that’s associated with a fairly small program [World Literature],” Sincraian said. “That’s a lot of people who have trusted us with their work and with their memories, and what’s closest and deepest to them, so I think that’s really beautiful. And it’s a great example of how literature brings people together.”
One such contributor, second-year English major Brittany Barrell, had her short story Set in Stone published in this year’s edition of the Lyre.
“I really wanted to get something published and so I was like, ‘OK, what kind of publications are there around SFU?’” she said. “And at first I was kind of disappointed because I couldn’t really find anything for fiction or poetry, and then I found the Lyre.”
“I think it really encourages students to write and to become involved,” Barrell said when asked about the merits of having a student literary publication on campus.
The Lyre’s launch party was combined with a gala celebrating a decade of World Literature (WL) at SFU, as the program turned ten years old this fall. Contributors and WL students were invited to mingle and celebrate with refreshments, book raffles, and literary trivia.
You can read Lyre Magazine: Questioning Memory and Nostalgia through Open Journal Systems online, and printed copies can be picked up for free outside the World Literature offices in the humanities department on the fifth floor of the Academic Quadrangle.
If you’re interested in publishing your own work in the Lyre Magazine, the next call for submissions will be going out sometime in Spring 2018.
