You’ve probably seen posters around campus encouraging you to submit your fine poetry, prose or any kind of artwork to Chanter. If you are a student enrolled in English or Art department classes, you’ve probably had some attractive, if somewhat dweeby, student come into your class and accost you for submissions. If you like playing chess in Campus Center room 206 at 10 p.m. on Thursday nights, you’ve had the Chanter staff interrupt your games of strategy with their literary and artistic rabble-rousing. (Sorry about all that.)

In case you’ve been living under a rock this semester and don’t know what this Chanter business is about, Chanter is an art and literary magazine that has reportedly been in existence since 1958. It hasn’t been printed in recent years as a result of a prolonged change in personnel (i.e., the people running it graduated and no one started it again until now). An enthusiastic group of people, including myself, breathed life back into the publication last spring, which brings us to now.

A lot of people have asked what the magazine is going to be like. Chanter, as you may have guessed, will publish creative fiction and nonfiction, poetry, photography, paintings, prints, drawings, as well as film and literary criticism. The magazine will publish not only student work, but faculty work as well.

Many people are curious about Chanter’s timeline. Due to the dishearteningly small amount of submissions we have received, we have pushed the deadline for submissions back to Nov. 1 so that all you artists, writers, poets and critics (we know who you are) have Fall Break to get your act together and send in your work. The magazine will come out at the end of the semester. There will be a release party immediately following our publication with student readings, food and, hopefully, music.

An art and literary magazine is an invaluable forum for creative expression on a college campus, but it can only exist if the artistic and literary communities on campus support it. Hopefully we will be flooded with submissions in the coming two weeks and will put out a really great publication.

Submit to Chanter. Please SPO submissions to Anne Marie Werley or e-mail submissions to awerley@macalester.edu before Nov. 1.