Written by Abigail Censky
Cellar Door will be the newest addition to Colorado College’s student publications. The magazine started as an idea in the dorm room of co-founders and sophomores Gabe Fine and Leo Turpan.
They chose the name ‘Cellar Door’ because of its linguistically pleasing nature. “[Cellar Door] is often referenced by linguists as a purely phonaesthetically pleasing combination of sounds… one of the more beautiful collections of sounds in the English language,” said Turpan.
Cellar Door is a self-described “small scale poetry and arts publication.”
“It also ended up being a really cool metaphor for what any sort of printed collection is: a door that you can enter,” said Turpan.
The idea rose out of a common problem for Turpan and Fine. Both students are involved in the arts community on campus, Fine as an English: Creative Writing Track major, and Turpan as a Studio Art major, yet both feel that the community is tough for “outsiders” to break into.
“There is this whole art scene on CC’s campus not spreading their art around,” said Fine.
Turpan concurred. “We thought there was room for a different type of publication that could fill a different niche,” he said.
Using Turpan’s Block 3 experience of taking a printing press adjunct for creative inspiration, they decided that the time was right to create something new.
Cellar Door is comparable to the Leviathan in content, featuring art and poetry produced by CC students. However, Fine and Turpan are quick to note that the approach and structure of Cellar Door is starkly different from Leviathan or Cipher. They hope it will provide a “different kind of environment. One that is less scary and intimidating and really community oriented,” Fine said.
Fine and Turpan wanted to create a publication with a different theme per issue and a rigorous selection process, without the traditional call for submissions: a cycle that, as they put it, can often be intimidating.
“[Cellar Door] opens [opportunities] up to artists and poets in a more approachable way,” said Fine.
Cellar Door also seeks to provide a more personalized experience for readers, having been designed with the feeling of intimacy in mind.
The publication will be featurette style, with three to four artists featured per issue, and will be less frequent than Cipher or Leviathan. The size of the physical copies will also be smaller than other campus magazines.
Junior Hannah Fleming, junior Andrew Kirvin-Quamme, and sophomores Abby Wigdale, Sophia Hanes, and Valerie Hanna are the poets and artists to be featured in the first issue, which is due out later this block.
The artists and poets featured each issue will be selected by the past poets and artists from the Cellar Door community, or by Fine and Turpan, as in the upcoming issue.
Fine and Turpan admit that this can initially come off as a bit selective, seeing as they’ve relied exclusively on mutual connections for the first issue. However, they expect the process to evolve as new issues come out.
As far as the release, don’t expect to see stacks lying around campus. Fine and Turpan plan on distributing Cellar Door directly to Worner Boxes with the recipient’s name included on the back page.
For this first issue they’ll distribute to a pre-selected list of people they think would enjoy the publication, but both founders encourage people that are interested in a copy to contact Fine or Turpan via email with their name and Worner Box number.