Portal 2010 a complete success!

On Tuesday, the fourth year Publishing class finally launched our baby into the world! Portal 2010 is a literary magazine that showcases the best writing of VIU students (from what is submitted), and this is Portal's 15th year as a class-run literary magazine; one of the only magazines like it in Canada. There are many other university literary magazines, but not many that are published in-class, so this experience is very unique. The class sees the magazine all the way from business plans and acquisitions, to ad sales, layout and the launch party.

This year's launch was an enormous success! As the final featured guest of this year's Poets on Campus series at the university, Kate Braid read from two of her books, A Well-Mannered Storm: the Glenn Gould Poems, and Turning Left to the Ladies, accompanied by cellist Allannah Dow. A favourite moment of their performance was when Dow began to sing lines from Rumi at the end of one of the poems. It was so unexpected that the audience was looking around to see where the enchanting voice was coming from!

Awards and scholarships for the Creative Writing department were given out, and Kevin Roberts was honoured for his many years of teaching at VIU since its conception as a small, community college. Kevin Roberts, who is retiring this year for the second time, was instrumental in the conception of VIU's Creative Writing department, having created many of the second year classes.

The launch part could not have run any more smoothly and I am very proud of the conduct of our class, and the product of all of our hard work. I would like to invite everyone to pick up a copy of Portal 2010. Until Friday we will be selling it in the library, and it will of course be available in the VIU bookstore. You can visit our beautiful new website created by our web designer Liliana Gaeta, where our new cover will be displayed as well as audio recordings of some of the works in the issue.

Thank you to everyone who had a hand in making this experience memorable, and good luck everyone on your exams next week!