We all get the urge, at least occasionally — the desire to write or draw something unusual, out of the ordinary. To create a work of something that, if you were to show it to a group of your peers, at least one person would be kind enough to dub “art.” And when we get the urge, there is a means through which we can share that work with the world — several means, in fact, in the form of the many literary magazines on campus today.

Six student editors gathered in the newsroom of The Michigan Daily in the middle of a Tuesday to talk about their magazines and the role they play in fostering creative expression, even in a world where anyone can use blogs or WordPress to self-publish their writing.

Fortnight co-editors and LSA seniors David Kinzer and Sarah Doukakos, sat on one side of the table, along with two representatives from Xylem Literary Magazine: the copy chair, Dena Cohen, an LSA senior, and assistant submissions manager Cecilia Jaquith, an LSA sophomore. Opposite them were LSA senior Jackie Cohen, editor in chief of the RC Review, and LSA and Engineering senior Powell Perng, editor in chief of the upstart publication Blueprint.

With the exception of Xylem and Fortnight, which are run by the same organization, most of these editors were discovering each other’s publications for the first time.

If you wanted to share your story, poem or artwork with your peers in the University this year, your piece — a piece that you had to work up the nerve to pluck from the cozy insularity of your own mind to subject to the critical eyes of strangers — probably had to go through someone sitting around this table.

“I think it’s a pretty incredible feat to have students putting together a magazine,” Jaquith said.

“It’s a great feeling to pick up a book and see your name in there,” Dena Cohen added.

And somewhere in that mysterious gap between your submission e-mail and the day the publications go to print, whether or not you will experience that feeling is decided.

So Many Magazines

When gathered into the same room, each of the editors was surprised at just how many other literary magazines were functioning on campus.

Even the University’s world-renowned medical school is home to its own printed creativity outlet — a publication named The Hippo, which accepts submissions both medically and non-medically themed from its campus community.

Second-year Medical School students Priya Rajdev and Owen Albin, co-editors in chief of The Hippo, who were unable to participate in the roundtable conversation, wrote in an e-mail interview that they see value in providing such an outlet to some of the hardest-working students on campus.

“We think The Hippo brings a therapeutic outlet to people who want to exercise their artistic impulses,” Rajdev and Albin wrote. “If anything, The Hippo brings a small amount of intellectual balance to the medical school. For some people, it allows an opportunity to explore their interest in medicine in a very different way, and for others, it allows the opportunity to spend time doing something completely different (from medicine).”

Those ideas of therapy and balance were equally verbalized by the editors around the table, who see their publications as gateways for students to immerse themselves in the world of literary creativity.

“I think that our literary magazine is really just promoting people to get involved in literary arts,” Dena Cohen said.

This involvement comes through events like readings, workshops and, in the case of the RC Review, a rummage sale that made $500 for the magazine its first year.

Most of the workshops are intended to help interested students prep pieces for possible publication in a magazine, though things don’t always pan out this way, much to the chagrin of the editors.

“The last workshop we had, there was one person who was working on a really fantastic poem,” Kinzer recalled.