About Us

The Garden Statuary (TGS) is the new UBC Undergraduate Journal of English, operated and peer-reviewed by UBC undergraduate students. Embracing a wide range of creative and academic work, we publish: essays on literature and language studies, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, stage/screen play, visual art, photography, musical recordings and short films.

We’re pleased to announce TGS will become a print publication this year! While we will continue to publish online once at the end of each term, both issues will be combined into an end-of-year print edition.  We hope that this dual format gives TGS the distribution, accessibility and longevity needed for its future.

If you are interested in submitting work for an upcoming issue, please consult the submissions page. We welcome all contributions and we’d be excited to receive your work!

Mission
To provide a platform for creative and academic undergraduate student work and to strengthen the community of UBC English and Arts students.

The English Students’ Association (ESA)
As of last spring, we are now officially part of the English Students’ Association! Thanks to the ESA, we are able to fund our print edition and do more to expand the journal. Please see the ESA website for more information.

Reviewing Process
All work submitted to The Garden Statuary is peer-reviewed by our board of editors. To prevent potential bias during the editing process, submissions remain anonymous until after the final selections have been made (this is why we ask all authors to include their name only in their email message, not in their actual submission). Only successful authors’ names will be revealed to the editors.

At least three editors are sure to read your work. We individually assess its merits and then come to the editorial meetings ready to make our selections through collaborative discussion.

Authors whose submissions are not selected are always welcome to request feedback on their work. While we may not be able to reply very quickly because of time constraints, we promise to get back to you with our comments if you request them.

Faculty Advisory Board
The Faculty Advisory Board represents the faculty of the UBC English Department and offers support and feedback for the journal.

Get Involved
We look for new editors and execs at the beginning of the school year and we’re always happy to hear from people who are interested in getting involved! Feel free to contact us at thegardenstatuary@gmail.com. You can also find us on facebook at www.facebook.com/thegardenstatuary and Twitter @UBC_TGS.

We encourage you to sign up for our joint TGS-ESA newsletter. You will receive the latest updates about submission deadlines, editor and exec positions, literary happenings around Vancouver, launch parties and more!

History

The Garden Statuary was founded in the spring of 2010 by a group of English honours students and has so far published two issues during the 2011-2012 academic year. We are a relatively new publication but part of a much longer tradition. The first undergraduate journal to come out of the English Department was Arc in 1979. It evolved into the short-lived Whetstone in the early 90s and then Roots in the mid-90s. Uprooted, the most recent literary journal after TGS, made a brief appearance in 2005 and 2006.

We often get questions about the name of The Garden Statuary. Google “garden statuary” and you will find pictures of mostly classical sculptures decorating some mostly pretty gardens. A little whimsical, a little ironic, a little odd, the name in fact originates from a comment that a professor wrote on one of our peer’s essays: “this paragraph is like a garden statuary: pretty, distracting and useless.” We loved it.

Is The Garden Statuary pretty? Yes. Distracting? Yes. But as for “useless,” you could say we’ve proven otherwise. We consider the work we publish to be very, very valuable indeed.

2012-2013 Team

Laura Ritland – Editor in Chief
Laurel Rogers – Submissions Manager and ESA Secretary
Sara Shayan – Design Manager and ESA President
Katie Stabler – ESA Treasurer

Editorial Board
Elysse Bell
Alex Duncan
Stephanie Fung
Javier Ibáñez
Daniel Mackwood
Carolyn Nakagawa
Cameron Paul
Jane Shi
Daniel Siracusa
Rachel Robinson
Jessica Wallin

Design/Illustration
Gabrielle Lim
Anne Tastad

Faculty Advisory Board
Dr. Miguel Mota
Dr. Michael Zeitlin