A History of Literary Arts In The Link

Fringe ArtsAlex Manley — Published March 29, 2011

The Link’s first dedicated literary arts editor—known then as the “literary coordinator”—was Phil Moscovitch.

Though the paper had been covering the literary arts since its inception in 1980, it wasn’t until Moscovitch was voted in, in the Fall semester of 1988, that Lit officially branched off from the other arts to become its own section.

This week, Lit transfers back from its own section to a subsection of the Culture Editor’s mandate. I have no doubt that the new Culture Editor, Alex McGill, will faithfully continue to include Lit content in her section—for one thing, I’ll be around to help provide it—but any encroachment on the few remaining literary establishments that still exist in Canadian media must be frowned upon.

I’m no stranger to the numbers involved; I know it’s not financially realistic for The Link to have a dedicated Lit ditor on top of all the other new editorships we’ve created. I hold out hope that, in the future, by some means or other, The Link will have enough money to pay someone to focus purely on Lit. Stranger things have happened.
In the meantime, please enjoy this page composed of snippets from Lit sections past. I have done my ardent best to create some sort of coherent strand. Perhaps this is best exemplified in the poem “Poetic plagiarism,” taken from The Link’s final issue from Volume 27. See how many lines of it you can recognize!

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 28, published March 29, 2011.