By: Clara Xu, SFU Student

The Lyre Mag, one of SFU’s longest current running undergraduate journals, published their 16th edition in October 2025. Operating out of the department of world languages and literatures (WLL), the “student-led literary journal” publishes annually, featuring undergraduate student work spanning “poetry, prose, translations, and visual art.” The Peak sat down with The Lyre 16’s editors-in-chief Isobel Sinclair and Callie, and editorial designer Yoona Charland, to discuss their experiences during the editing process.

The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

What type of work did you do for The Lyre? 

Isobel: Callie and I, as EICs, had meetings every week, planned what should be discussed in the meetings with the associate editors, and we made sure we were in line with the timeline we created at the beginning of the year.

Callie: I started out as an associate editor, which is like our reviewers, for all of our submissions. It was a nice intro into working with The Lyre. Basically, you go in there, they assign a piece, you review and give feedback for the piece, but it’s very community oriented, which I liked. When you actually go in with working with The Lyre, you work with a faculty liaison. We have Dr. María Barraza; she’s wonderful.

Yoona: As editorial designer, in the summer, I put the magazine together front-to-back and sourced images, and put in some of my own artwork if needed. And then Isobel and Callie gave their input. I think we went through four rounds of edits. We really wanted to execute our vision.

What was the inspiration for your theme, “Passage?”

I: For a while, we were trying to make the theme “bridging” work. We settled on “passage” after distilling it more.

C: We were looking back at old issues and the first five were completely different. It had a different logo that we noticed. Some of us weren’t sure what it was.

I: We looked at it and were like, “Is that a chicken?” It’s a lyre bird, which is a bird whose tail looks like a lyre instrument.

C: In the first edition, there was an explanation of, “What is a lyre?” — it can be a bird, it can be an instrument, but they wanted it to be up to your interpretation. I thought that was a nice core message that The Lyre is student-shaped, and it can be whatever you want it to be. 

I: And that we could remould it.

C: It was something we wanted to return to, as we were talking about our new logo design. As we were doing all that, we were really thinking of this experience with the passage of time and looking at how things have changed throughout the years.

Y: Since we’re in the world literature program, we were also thinking about how passage can have a lot to do with time, with physical passage like migration.

What was it like to work with multiple languages?

I: We’ve got a great team coming from the WLL department, and from hiring associate editors that know an additional language. 

C: This year was a really strong year for translations, since WLL brought back a translation theory course that hadn’t been taught in forever. We went into that class and were like, “Everyone here will have to submit a translation to The Lyre!” Translation is such a creative process because of how you choose the translated words. How close do you want to be to the source language? What are the creative decisions someone made to get to this translation?

Y: Speaking on the design side of it, it was just finding all of the fonts. I remember the first copy: the Cantonese font I used didn’t have all of the correct characters.

I: It’s not just making sure you have the correct translation; it’s also making sure that, when we have it in print, that it’s doing justice to the text and to the translation. That’s for all pieces that we have submitted, part of the design process isn’t just laying it out nicely, it’s also making sure that you are keeping all of the line breaks, and the layouts of everything that has been submitted, so that they retain the same intent.

What editing process do your submissions go through?

C: Everyone gets feedback, they’re heard even if they don’t get published. It’s like they have a sculpture, and the editors are collaborating to help chisel it into the same vision the writers have.

I: Once the associate editors have gone through a couple stages, then we compile everything into one big spreadsheet. We read them all out together, and discuss whether we feel they fit with the theme, if we enjoy them on a thematic or visual level. Then we whittle down our shortlist until it becomes the final list.

What impact do you wish for The Lyre to have on SFU undergraduate students, and on the SFU community?

C: We did an interview with the founders of The Lyre, Daniel Poirier. It’s cool to see how he went from EIC to being a creative writing instructor at Langara. 

I: It’s a sense of communication — connecting yourself with others, and connecting yourself with your own sense of self. 

What do you hope to see, or work towards, in The Lyre’s future?

Y: I’m continuing next year as EIC with Callie since Isobel’s graduated. Callie and I were talking about having copies of The Lyre in local libraries for free. 

C: I want to keep up the direction we had this year, since we made a lot of changes last year with the logo and cover.

I: More short fiction! Even if it’s just a little excerpt. Even if you’re working on something and just want to submit a couple pages of it.

If you had one piece of advice for the writers and artists of SFU, what would you tell them?

I: Submit! When we go through the submissions, even if it doesn’t get accepted, there was someone in that room that liked it. Keep trying if you don’t get in — you might get in next year.

Read The Lyre, including all previous issues, digitally at journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/lyre. You can also pick up a physical copy on the “fifth floor of the AQ in the corner closest to the Trottier Observatory. Prints are stored in the display case outside of AQ 5121.” For more information, please email [email protected] or visit their Instagram, @thelyremag.