his will be my final year as chief editor for The Advocate OSC’s literary magazine, and if all goes according to plan, the busiest. The Advocate’s past model has been holding two to three literary competitions a year each with a prose and poetry category, having each submission judged by a published Sri Lankan writer and then publishing the best of the competition in a digital publication, though we have occasionally done physical publications as well. We do work with the writers to edit their work for small flaws before publishing, but not before the pieces are judged for the competition.
This will be the busiest year partly because of a minor shift in the judging model, we will be gathering a board of English related teachers in the school to help judge the pieces rather than finding a writer. But the greater change this year is the addition of a photography category, fundamentally changing The Advocate from a purely literature club to a more general arts magazine. This decision was taken after debate, however the benefit of encouraging photography in OSC as well as the pragmatic benefit getting images to beautify the physical edition of the magazine won over.
We are as yet in the preparation stage of preparing the board of teachers, and spreading awareness of the upcoming competition deadline. Our advertising takes three forms, emails to the whole secondary and middle school, morning bulletin notices, and posters set around the school. Creating and maintaining awareness of the competition is a challenge that we have been able to take on with constant reminders and notices for the past several weeks, but as yet competition awareness is still not as high as would be liked. As a final effort we will also be leaving small invite letters in the lockers of the whole secondary body, before the one week October break. We would not have been able to take on so many different efforts if not for being able to collaborate in a group with each member taking on different sides of the advertising campaign.
I will reflect on the success of the competition after November first, by which the judging board should be finalized and the submissions should be in. At this stage considering all our different efforts and results from previous competitions, I would take 50-60 submissions minimum across our different categories as a success, aiming for a third of the whole secondary body.
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