A Grand (Prose) Slam

Kublai Khan might have built a pleasure dome in Xanadu—but Jim Weatherall ’05 and Runal Mehta ’03-’04 have their own big designs in the works. The two have been working for months to found the new campus magazine, Xanadu, which will feature creative student fiction and non-fiction.

In their search for funds as part of the group approval process, they say they came across the Arts First grant application and decided to participate in the weekend’s festivities to get the word out.

Xanadu will sponsor a prose slam (public reading of prose) in an effort, according to Weatherall, “to distinguish ourselves from other magazines on campus. We wanted to figure out some kind of performance art that focused on prose rather than poetry.”

The actual line-up of performers is still up in the air, Weatherall says, but the number of people interested in writing for the prose slam this weekend and throughout the year indicates to him that more forums for exhibiting their work are in order.

“I don’t feel like there are enough places for undergraduates to publish prose-fiction, personal essays, all kinds of essays,” Weatherall says.

He envisions Xanadu as the prose version of the poetry publication, The Gamut. Both are alternatives to the city-on-a-hill-like Advocate, which “has its place,” Weatherall says, though he’s not a fan of its selection method.

“But I think the process by which work is accepted and rejected is terrible,” he says. “You put your work into a box in the Woodberry Poetry Room and weeks later get an e-mail in response.”

Xanadu’s organizers say they want to provide more feedback in the publication process, and they plan a series of writing workshops to underscore their approach. “It won’t be just submitting to this black box and getting or not getting an answer back later,” Weatherall says.

The workshops, which will comprise just one of the roads to publishing in Xanadu, should provide an arena for the discussion of undergraduate writing that’s less formal than creative writing classes but more structured than meetings in student common rooms.

So far, a number of writers have agreed to present at these workshops, including novelist and Radcliffe Institute Fellow Zadie Smith, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English and American Literature and Language Patricia E. Powell, and expository writing program Preceptor Joshua Barkan.

Weatherall and Mehta say they aren’t alone in wanting new campus publications, as recent years have seen several such attempts.

“I think the fact that these efforts keep getting made implies that a lot of people think there’s a niche for more student work to be published,” he says. “There are a lot more people writing than are getting into print, than are even submitting things…There’s no reason why only a small percentage of student work [should be] exposed to a larger audience.”

—Xanadu will perform at 1:30 on Saturday in the Carpenter Center, Room B04.