Approaching the gateway: a look at portal magazine and the publishing of the 2017 issue

This paper stems from the unique opportunity I was given to instruct the fourth-year Portal magazine publishing workshops at Vancouver Island University (VIU) for the fall 2016 and spring 2017 semesters. The primary objective of these courses is for upper-level publishing students to produce, at the end of two semesters, VIU’s annual literary magazine. This project report looks at the history of Portal magazine, the course design, learning outcomes for students, and the other particulars of publishing a university-based literary magazine, but the intended focus is the changes introduced for Portal 2017. The paper evaluates the reasoning for these implementations and recommends which changes might prove useful to the Portal publishing courses moving forward. It also addresses areas that were purposely left unchanged and the reasoning behind those choices.