A Brief History of the Literary Guild

At UC Irvine in fall 1994, a group of students led by Linguistics major Suzanne Clegern created the Literary Guild, a club focused on reading and discussing literature and critiquing each other's work. It met throughout the quarter, but dissolved the following winter.

The next school year, English major Kelson Vibber contacted Suzanne about rebuilding the club. After a few projects by e-mail to get interest going, a website was built, a mailing list was created, and meetings began again in March 1996.

[Cover of Behind the Blue Wall] Over the next few years, many of the club's writing projects were collected online. These ranged from individual works sharing a common theme to fully collaborative stories. These projects culminated in the club's first publication, Behind the Blue Wall, in spring 1999.

During the 1999-2000 school year, declining membership led to the club's second demise. The president and vice-president (Katie Foreman and Jason Lomeli) helped found UCI's RPG Club, however, which to my knowledge is still active.

Archived

UCI's Spirit Accounts kept the site available for 2½ years past the club's dissolution, until February 2003. With the original site gone, I reposted the Writing section here, with a few modifications to the layout, links, and site information.

The archive sat largely untouched until December 2005, when I received an email from a former club member who wanted her work removed. I started rethinking the purpose of the archive, and decided to cut it down to only the major collaborative writing projects.