Every spring the English Department offers a Projects in Writing and Language course. In this class students are able to work together to create Winona State University’s “Satori”. The “Satori” is a collection of artwork and writing that are submitted by students and organized into a printed book by students in the class. When the “Satori” releases this semester, it will be the 55th edition.
A Communications, Arts, and Literature Teaching (CALT) major, Madeline Avila, in the class talked about the process that the students making the “Satori” went through. Avila discussed how they were able to get students to submit their work.
“The first thing we did was make posters and send emails so that we’d actually get submissions,” Avila said. “So we kind of conquered and divided with that. We had a couple different styles of posters and sent out emails to ask people to please send us your writing.”
After the class was able to get submissions, they divided into subcommittees, for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art committees to sort through that works they received. By sorting through the works that they received they were able to decide what would go in the print edition of the Satori and send out acceptance letters to the students.
Ashley Shorba, a 4th year student taking Projects in Writing and Language, discussed the different committees’ process for selecting pieces to go into the printed collection.
“We only have a certain amount of pages we can do price wise, so we kind of have to look at and read everything first,” Shorba said. “Then be like, ‘okay, out of these, what themes do we like the most?…What can we throw in for variety?’ What works and photos really call out to us as editors and readers. Then try and [put] them all together in a cohesive way between photography and the fiction, nonfiction and poetry.”
Even for works that were not selected to be incorporated into the printed version of the “Satori” they will be placed into an online version of the “Satori” which is called “Nokomis”. This will be a new site, while the last few years online version of the “Satori” was Irotas.
Jack Mulvaney, another 4th year student taking the class discussed how they were able to look at the older editions of the “Satori” to get inspiration and to come up with an original version of their own “Satori”.
“I feel like we’ve put together a really unique piece this year.” Mulvaney said. “Not to say that the other ones aren’t, but we just kind of crafted out our own little spot in the tradition of Satori.”
The Satori Literary Magazine will be out this Friday, April 25th for students and community members to enjoy now and the years to come.
