IWU’s own literary magazine Casuera is set to publish their 2026 issue “Sonder” April 23, accompanied by their annual Spring reading.
“Caesura is a creative outlet for everyone,” Ella McDivitt, head editor said. “It’s open to everyone on campus, not just people in the MLLC division. It’s a way for people to share their work when otherwise they wouldn’t have a chance to do that.”
McDivitt currently leads the student-run magazine for her third year on the team.
“It’s an outlet for people who maybe don’t have an outlet anywhere else, but they can have it on the IWU campus,” McDivitt said.
This year’s publication opens that outlet to high-school students.
“Casuera, a long time ago, actually had a high school competition, but it went away after a while,” McDivitt said.
Reimplementing the competition, McDivitt worked alongside Assistant Professor Mark Abdon.
“I’m somebody who enjoys the world of literary magazines, which is a super niche and strange world overall, but one I’ve come to know and love,” Abdon said.
Coming into the university in 2024, Abdon took notice of the magazine.
“Upon finding out that, of course, we have a long running literary magazine here, it was then very natural for me to come alongside and see what I could do to just be helpful as they put together every annual issue,” Abdon said.
Abdon now serves as a faculty advisor for the magazine alongside Dr. Paul Allison.
“Prof Abdon was really interested in the idea of getting it going again, and it being a great opportunity for high schoolers to kind of have experience with IWU and to learn more about our major, and to have some interest in coming here when they graduate,” McDivitt said.
Selecting submissions, the majority of the magazine was saved for IWU submissions.
“I decided that I really only wanted it to be a small portion of high-schoolers,” McDivitt said. “I love seeing everyone’s work from IWU, from all of those different majors and all of those different disciplines. And I think it’s so important for IWU to have that creative outlet.”
Members of the Caesura team look to get more submissions from IWU students for future publications.
“What’s fun about a literary magazine is that it gives a venue for writers of all levels of experience to see their work in print and be published,” Abdon said.
McDivitt points to size as one reason for lack of submissions.
“So our division, slash major, is really small. It’s really hard to get traction sometimes and to spread the news about ‘Hey, casuera is open. This is what it is,’” McDivitt said. “We are a really small editorial team. We don’t have a ton of resources, so it’s really difficult to get the news out there.”
Working through hurdles with changes and submissions, the original deadline for submissions was extended for IWU students.
“A lot of just technical headaches that kind of went into not getting as many pieces as we had wanted. But we did end up being very close to the number of pieces accepted that we had last year,” Annie Lingren, current art and design editor, said.
Lingren is a junior double major in studio arts and creative writing. She will be stepping into the role of head editor next year.
“We have an official Submittable account now, which is fantastic. Most all literary magazines use it,” Lingren said. “But it was also a transition year, because we were learning how the heck this all works. We’ve never done it before.”
Looking to next year, Lingren looks to the delegation that will come with her new role.
“Typically, our fall semester is pretty light. That’s when we’re deciding on the theme for the year,” Lingren said. “and we do a reading later on in the fall semester that is more of just an open mic night, just to get people aware of what Casuera is.”
It is at this event that the theme for the year’s magazine is announced, along with the deadline for submissions.
The spring reading is more formal than its fall counterpart.
“That reading is specifically for people who have gotten into the magazine. If they want to read one or all of the pieces that they have gotten published, they are free to do that,” Lingren said.
The magazine features a variety of different written mediums, along with visual art.
“It’s just a way of processing things that other avenues can’t,” Lingren said. “Words have always been powerful for me. And growing up reading classic literature and things like that, I personally find poetry very therapeutic.”
Causera looks to give light to all perspectives and topics.
“We don’t try to whitewash over difficult topics,” Lingren said. “We are careful with what we submit or what we publish, but we definitely don’t exclude those things, because we want to show students’ experience and what’s happening. So we encourage people to be vulnerable, but we do also just have to keep our eye out for if there are any immediate red flags or things that we just can’t publish per IWU guidelines.”
Following IWU guidelines, submissions do not have to be faith based.
“We would look for pieces that don’t have profanity, for example, that might be a little different than an average literary magazine, but the writing doesn’t need to be specifically Christian in nature either,” Abdon said.
Each magazine’s theme serves as a guiding factor for submission.
“We want the theme to be really open ended, so people have the opportunity to play with it and to kind of experiment with their writing and see how they can fit the theme in,” McDivitt said.
“Sonder,” the theme for the 2026 issue, was thought up following last years’ senior communications presentations.
“It’s essentially the idea that you realize that someone else lives just as rich and complex of a life as you do. And it’s simultaneously connecting, but also isolating,” McDivitt said.
The reading will take place at 7:00pm where physical copies will be available for purchase.
