A literary reading took place last Wednesday, hosted jointly by Zeniada and JMag, the school's two undergraduate literary magazines. Students read their poetry, prose, and essays that had been published in both magazines, and Writing Seminars Senior Lecturer Tristan Davies topped the evening off with two short works and a thought-piece about Taco Bell. By all accounts, the event was a success. About 45 people showed up at Arellano Theatre to enjoy a sampling of Hopkins talent, and the pieces read were by turns satisfying, stimulating and thought-provoking.
While I was promoting this event, handing out flyers on the breezeway, I discovered that Zeniada and JMag are by no means ubiquitous on this campus. Few people have heard of them, and even fewer have picked up a copy, which is a shame because both are free and fantastic publications. Zeniada is a traditional litmag, publishing the best undergraduate poetry, prose and artwork from a pool of submissions. It usually comes out once a semester, and its deadline is fast approaching on Oct. 29. (Works can be submitted electronically to Zeniada@gmail.com.) JMag, the newer of the two, works on the concept of themed issues -- the theme of the issue now in the works is "Refined" -- and publishes undergraduate literary efforts as well as several non-fiction essays and the occasional rant. Their deadline is Monday, Nov. 1.
Lack of awareness is a problem for many student organizations, but in the case of our undergraduate literary "scene," awareness seems to be nonexistent outside the Writing Sems and English departments. Says Liz Hodes, a Junior in the Sems, "We're basically just reading each other's stuff." It's understood that the Hopkins tendency is to become insulated in an intellectual bubble to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, but this apathy towards literary endeavors is strangely endemic to a school with a strong literary tradition. Hopkins boasts one of the best writing programs in the country -- its graduate program is notoriously competitive -- and its professors have won more awards than Audie Murphy. This is compared with, for example, Brown University, which has no undergraduate writing programbut puts out about a dozen widely-read and highly competitive literary magazines. Why, then, the Hopkins apathy?
Anthony Paletta, a junior in the English department, notes that the Writing Seminars program is not viewed as an incubator for literary talent so much as a repository for angst-ridden adolescents, and that the writing its students produce is "automatically grouped with the whole genre of insipid young-adult literature." Indeed, there exists almost an antipathy towards the Writing Seminars in this school, which probably springs from the tension between the tactile sciences for which our school is known and the perceived loftiness of creative writing. In order for writing to matter, states Paletta, "it has to be canonical." Therein, however, lies the fundamental paradox of undergraduate creative writing: you ain't good until you're published, but you ain't published until you're good. I don't know any of us whose literature has been published, but that's the goal we're working towards. (Catch that, Farrar, Straus & Giroux?)
Both Paletta and Hodes see the conflict as fundamentally irresolvable, but I disagree. The arts, particularly literature, have never been more significant than they are now. We live in the Age of Autobiography, the Era of Me: everyone has their story to tell, and each is (probably) significant. By writing, by adding to the cultural dialogue, the students in the Writing Seminars are achieving -- just like the premeds and BMEs -- something resembling progress.
