The launch for the tenth issue will be held at Felicita’s Pub on March 9
Photo accessed via Facebook.
UVic’s interdisciplinary journal, The Warren, is releasing its 10th issue this spring. True to its catchline, the journal is breaking new ground in the campus arts scene.
This year, The Warren will publish its annual issue in book format for the first time. The change brings solidity and longevity to the publication, which is usually printed as a paper zine.
Warren Editor-in-Chief Kate Fry and Executive Editor Gina Hay hope to put a new emphasis on the “interdisciplinary” in “UVic’s interdisciplinary journal.”
“What we’re always trying to court from our submitters is interdisciplinary art,” says Fry. “But also critique and things that you would maybe have trouble finding a home in any of the [other] journals on campus … If someone wanted to pitch us science, that is something that we could look into.”
This won’t be the first time The Warren has published unorthodox art and writing. Fry recalls one of the most memorable submissions in her time at The Warren — an article that critiqued the video game The Oregon Trail. “Deforming the Oregon Trail” focused on a mod for the game that included the originally absent American Indigenous peoples as characters. Its author, Katherine Goertz, sought to show how the mod “decolonized” the video game.
Fry attributes this freedom to The Warren’s lack of affiliation with a department, which she sees as one of the journal’s greatest assets.
“Every other journal on campus is attached to a course union, so they get funding from a department, and there’s an expectation that they uphold the values of the department or prioritize the department’s understanding of methodology,” she says. “We can kind of look at methodology from a variety of different lenses.”
Fry’s willingness to include many perspectives characterizes The Warren’s engagement with the arts community on campus. With recent events like the “Bad Art Show,” which playfully showcased undergrads’ self-defined worst art, the journal means to break down the walls between disciplines.
“The humanities and fine arts don’t have the same numbers that they used to, and it’s hard to feel like you have a community on this campus, especially when it’s so spread out,” says Fry. “So, [we’re] trying to build community that’s not just built around your department, that can be an interdisciplinary community, that can just be about celebrating art from various different genres.”
With submissions now closed, The Warren encouraged students from all backgrounds to submit to the tenth issue. As the only open-concept journal and the only journal on campus that publishes undergraduate work from universities across Canada, they were certainly ambitious. And they wanted submitters to share in that ambition.
“A fair amount of the writers who were first published here have gone on to publish books or have gone on to work for professional art institutions as gallery curators,” says Fry. “This is definitely a good place to go if you’re looking at trying to start an artistic career.”
The launch for the tenth issue will be held at Felicita’s Pub on March 9, and will feature live music and cake for all. Fry has booked Vancouver punk-rock band Wet Cigarette — a choice that fittingly contrasts the event’s formal dress code to evoke the journal’s interdisciplinary nature.
For more information on the tenth issue launch, visit the Facebook event here.
