All around campus, there are posters of an antique doll on plenty of bulletin boards. These posters are actually advertising the “Belletrist,” which is Bellevue College’s online literary magazine.
Laura Burns, who is the primary contact for “Belletrist” and a tenured faculty member of the English department at BC, said that “For decades Bellevue College had a print literary and arts magazine called ‘Arnazella.’ However, many problems with printing, distributing and maintaining staff developed in the past 10 years. Three years ago, the English department decided to try an online medium, and it has proved to be a success. Online publishing has allowed for a wider range of submission possibilities, a shorter time frame for developing the magazine and free access to anyone who would like to read the magazine.”
She went on to describe the process of getting “Belletrist” up and running by describing how a platform needed to be selected for the magazine. “We are currently using WordPress, which is the same platform used for all student activities, such as the Associaged Students of Bellevue Collete Constituion and student clubs. We’re still working on the most efficient ways to receive submissions and store them for review, but overall WordPress seems to be working well, as it gives the staff options on different layouts we can experiment with each year,” said Burns.
Burns says that throughout everything, one of her greatest fears for “Belletrist” “comes about two or three weeks before our submission deadline, which is coming up on Feb. 11, when we’ve received hardly any submissions. But it always happens that a huge number of submissions come in during the last week. So there’s a bit of nail-biting, but it’s always seemed to have worked out.”
However, when Burns was asked about what she loves best about “Belletrist” and what it has to offer, she said, “The variety and diversity presented by an online medium is wonderful. I’m excited to have us continuing to expand our video and audio publishing. The fact that an online magazine is accessible to everyone, with no need to search for it in the back racks of a bookstore or pay for it, is also significant.” Her greatest hope or goal is that “Belletrist” will continue to expand in the diversity of literary and artistic works that it publishes and hopefully, that it can grow into a publication that produces an edition more than once a year.”
Check out the magazine at http://studentweb.bellevuecollege.edu/belletrist and submit your work by Feb. 11, at belletrist@bellevuecollege.edu.