By James Keller
We volunteers and editors spend so much time working at the Gauntlet for many different reasons, but we have one in common-most of us love to write.
However, we’ve realized-not that it was much of a revelation-that we’re not the only people on campus who have the skills and the ability to write. After all, not everyone wants to write journalism. There’s more to the written word than reporting the news and disseminating opinions. Writing is a creative art form that can inspire instead of inform and emote instead of rationalize. While campus news, sports recaps and movie reviews have their place, a week later they’re old news. However, creative art can last for years and remain relavant for ages.
This ability to create works of fiction, be it through poetry, prose or a hybrid of both, is something that few people do well but many can relate to. Moving thoughts and emotions from the mind to the real world-whether through words, images or music-requires a willingness to share oneself with that world. It’s putting yourself in the spotlight, both for public viewing and public criticism. Please keep this in mind when reading the work of the featured writers.
This said, all of these writers are from the University of Calgary student population, and the 2002 Gauntlet Fiction Supplement as the result. What follows is not an exhaustive collection of written talent on campus, but rather a small, modest sample of the multitude of talent that lies within the arches of the U of C.
We recieved a lot more stories and poems than what made it within these eight pages, however we couldn’t fit everything. In choosing what we did run, we tried to offer a broad spectrum of the type of material we received. Once that decision was made, we limited editing of the pieces to a bare minimum, preserving the work as much as possible to what the writer intended.
This supplement features a wide range of topics from religion to nature and from choosing a major to choosing life. While not every style, theme or topic may be of interest to everyone, there’s bound to be something here for you to enjoy.
Thanks to our amazing illustrations editor, Alison Gowling, and each of her illustrators, Katrina Bergstresser, Demitri Lesniewicz, Dave Mitchell, especially Falice Chin, who created the amazing cover. Also, thanks to Ken Clarke for the beautiful ads and posters-see what happens when you get to do real design and not just mess with files? Special thanks go to all the writers who submitted, with apologies to those we could not run. Those submissions can be found online.