ABOUT
Portal is an annual full-colour 96-page literary magazine that offers a gateway to accomplished short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, scripts, interviews, art, and photography by emerging writers.
What makes Portal so portentous? It is a portrait of literary talent in the making, a portable guide to the view from here. Enter Portal’s literary universe and discover worlds and futures ready to unfold.
Portal has featured interviews with high-profile Canadian writers such as Fred Wah, George Elliot Clarke, Gary Geddes, Dennis Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst, and Dionne Brand. Each issue of Portal features a Q&A with VIU’s Gustafson Distinguished Poet of the year.
We’ve also had the pleasure of being one of the first places to feature the works of authors who have gone on to publish wonderful literary titles across a variety of genres. Many Canadian authors including Margot Fedoruk and Délani Valin are Portal Alumni.
W o r d s t o t r a n s p o r t y o u
Our responsibility is foremost to our reader to provide writing that illuminates, engages, and inspires.
Our values include respect, truth, honesty, tolerance, and responsiveness to the views of people who are part of any conversation we have.
Our team pledges to work respectfully together across roles and difference to encourage and support one another inside and outside our work on these pages.
Our focus is on our relationships with each other, our writers, the arts, our national and international community, and our planet.
Our goal is to be the greenest publication possible, using recycled paper, vegetable-based inks, and leaving as small an ecological footprint as possible in all our activities.
CREW
Our publication is an awe-inspiring portal nested within Vancouver Island University’s Creative Writing and Journalism (CREW) program.
Faculty
Kathy Page
Susan Juby
Sonnet L’Abbe
Rob Wiersema
Jay Ruzesky
Robert Hilles
Craig Taylor
Stephen Hume
Alisa Gordaneer
Joy Gugeler
Our faculty members support the writers on our pages as extensions of their workshops on Nanaimo, Duncan, and Powell River campuses as well as their own literary networks.
Past CREW faculty associated with Portal include its two former publishers Rhonda Bailey (1993-2009) and Ron Smith (1991-1992) as well as Marilyn Bowering, Keith Harrison, Steve Guppy, Richard Dunstan, and Kevin Roberts.