In 2018, lumière secured second place and in 2019 placed third in the Community College Humanities Association 2019 National Literary Magazine Competition (CCHA) for small colleges in the Eastern Division. In 2023, MassBay students earned first place in the categories of short fiction and song lyrics.

 

lumière, has been awarded the prestigious rank of Superior from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in their 2023 Recognizing Excellence in Arts and Literary Magazines (REALM) contest.

The REALM program publicly recognizes excellent literary magazines produced by students with the support of their teachers and professors. REALM is designed to encourage all schools to develop literary magazines that celebrate the art and craft of writing. Schools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, Canada, and American schools abroad are eligible to submit their magazines for entry.

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LENA SEBUGWAWO
I had been thinking about creating a magazine for our non-profit organization, Suubi Community Development Organisation, for quite some time, but I wasn’t sure where to start and felt hesitant about taking the first step. When I came across a course that involved working on Lumiere I knew this could be the perfect opportunity to learn the process of magazine creation and gain the skills needed to bring my idea to life.

Working on Lumiere was a major undertaking that involved brainstorming, discussions, designing, and organizing. Every team member had the chance to contribute their unique skills, ideas, and perspectives, making the 2024 edition a true representation of our college community. What I appreciated most was the variety of tasks—each member had a specific role, from updating the website and designing the magazine layout to promoting submissions, organizing events, and selecting the pieces to be published.

I won’t lie—the process required a lot of time and dedication from so many passionate individuals. One moment that stood out to me was when a woman from the community, who wasn’t a MassBay student, submitted her photographs. Her father accompanied her to the launch party, and seeing their pride and excitement was truly inspiring. That moment made me realize that a magazine isn’t just for the readers—it’s for the contributors as well. It gives people a voice, a sense of recognition, and the motivation to share their creativity with the world.

By the end of the course, I had not only gained the skills to create a magazine but also the motivation to finally start one for Suubi. Our magazine focuses on encouraging students and young women in their faith. I invited older students at our school to contribute, and now, a group of children in rural Mubende, Uganda, has a magazine filled with their own pictures and their own words. I hope this will not only strengthen their faith but also inspire them to develop their reading and writing skills, empowering them to share their stories with confidence.

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DAVID EARL​

When Matthew Walsh (whom I still call “Professor”) asked me to write about how my time at Lumiere affected my path beyond MassBay, the answer was at once simple and impossible. It’s affected everything, because everything started with Lumiere and the creative writing courses Professor Walsh offered. But when I do look back, the point A to point B nature of “where they are now” seems to not tell much at all. If you must know, I’ve ended up in the Masters in Fine Arts graduate program for creative writing at UMass Boston. On the way, I was briefly Editor-in-Chief of its undergraduate literary magazine The Watermark and I’ve interned at Arrowsmith Press; currently, I’m taking a course on publishing, with the hopes of getting into the business, whatever becomes of it in the future.

 

These are all the beads, neatly clacking together on a string, whose origin point I can reasonably call “the time I spent at MassBay.” Fine for a cover letter, perhaps. But thinking back, what strikes me most about Lumiere was what a clear view it gave down the road trodden by those who are driven, passionate, and deranged enough to curate, edit, typeset, print, promote, and propagate fiction. It let us sweat in the labor of nurturing writers, giving them a voice beyond their voice by giving mere written words the bones, flesh, and blood of a corporeal book, bound in glue, thread, or saddle-stitched and rolling off a press.

 

Let it be clear that Lumiere, like all literary journals, is a sausage whose processing should remain unspoken of in polite company. But that gristly churning and cranking is what I now find reassuring, for it said we, the editors, had done the work right, that we cared about the writing and the people who submitted it to our mercy. And the editor’s work is as artful as it is crude; we are caretakers and butchers who raise, brand, and slaughter our writings and writers. Do not think of the rejected writing: the smarmy political tirades drifting like gristle in lukewarm cynicism; the cloying piety and enthusiastic enjambments of incompetent poetry; and the reams of derivative drivel whose serifs seem purposed for scraping skulls clean of grey matter. When we smite down such poor writing, smugly mouthing “no” to a manuscript, do not think of how we sear shut the lips of people, snipping their disembodied vocals cords. As the launch date approaches, do not think of typesets, fonts, serifs, the clutter of running heads, paper weight, contact lists, launch parties; all hamstrings wont to shear at the very breath of the inopportune. Least of all, do not think about that clangoring demon-mascot of an Editor’s symbolic capital: the “matter of taste.” Taste—biased, irrational, sentimental taste—is the temperamental engine that powers any literary forcemeat, the tendon that brings down the swing of a culling axe. The only thing more king is simply the will to care about such a publication, a belief that it matters. And we the editors do think it matters; all this haranguing we slog through just to look for those voices that piece us, that take us around an unseen bend, move us so much that we feel awe at the very fact that it is our lowly little selves that are handling the priceless.

 

That is what I carry most from Lumiere—from Lumiere! Not AGNI or Ploughshares or Salamander, no, at a little literary magazine serving a community college off Route 9 in Wellesley. And magazines like these matter deeply; it’s both a miracle and no miracle at all that Lumiere continues to this day. It gives voice to those that we feel deserve to be heard for those that might not have the opportunity elsewhere; gives the MassBay community something of value, to say that we have a publication, corporeal, flesh and blood, of our own. And it’s the editing team and the venerable Professor Walsh that ensure that the most deserving voices are heard, because it matters. It’s that spirit that I carry that with all the grace I can muster towards an ever-uncertain future. And it all starts here! Right on this page!

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Faisal Murad

It’s been over four years since I left Lumiere behind, but the experience has stayed with me ever since. In many ways, my love for writing and my belief in building writing communities were born in Lumiere’s meeting room with its long wooden table and a ceaselessly whirring humidifier that was a valuable member of our team. Now, when I teach writing at the University of Massachusetts, tutor students in the writing center, read submissions for magazines, or write my own stories, I constantly draw on that love. In fact, one specific, very comic, image is etched in my brain. It was our campaign poster for Issue 5 of Lumiere: An artist Uncle Sam, wearing a beret, holding a pencil, soliciting submissions from writers. “I want your stories,” he seems to be saying on that poster. Now, I seem to have embodied that image.

What I cherish most from my time at Lumiere is the love for stories that I found there. When I transferred to UMass Boston, the first thing I did — alongside a dear friend — was build a creative writing club. The idea was borrowed from the first creative writing club I was a part of, run by Lumiere’s Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Matt Walsh. I am happy to report that our club at UMass is running strong. Pen in hand, finger pointing, I am still approaching people to ask for stories. That feels good, like a steady, sure step towards a society connected through stories.

I also teach creative writing at Umass Boston. Though there I don’t have to directly seek out stories, my outreach radar is still alert. Every semester, I read many student pieces and try to guide my students to give their stories the shape they had envisioned. Occasionally, a story grabs a hold of me, and when it does, I make sure the students know which of our own creative journals at Umass Boston could be the right home for it.
 

I will leave you with this final thought: correctness, grammar, and other sentence-level concerns are all useful in their own way; and when I work at the writing center, teach academic writing, or polish my own stories, I do love shackling those run-on sentences, merging fragments, fixing misspellings and the like. But, if there is one thing I learned from my time at Lumiere, it was this: stories are so much more than the sentence-level concerns. They are emotions, histories, struggles, tears, laughs, love — the good things that connect us all. If you want to chase something, chase that connection.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have fiction to write and typos to pretend I never made.

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