Thursday nights at the Grad Lounge are quiet. The flat screen TV is just loud enough to match the volume of the conversations circulating through the lounge: the exchange of thesis ideas, or recommendations to a gig by some unknown artist coming to town.

A group of undergrads begin to gather. They resemble the type of group you wouldn’t normally see together outside of a classroom. Even so, the group members don’t have a problem with sharing a pitcher of beer – for academic reasons, of course.

While the staff discusses plans to meet up at the next Something Every Friday before the meeting officially begins, Charles Thompson, a University of Massachusetts senior, wonders where all the writers are. As the editor in chief of the student-run undergraduate literary journal, “Short Cuts,” Thompson has been eagerly waiting for the flood of submissions to come in. By this time last year, the submission inbox was overflowing. This year, he only remains skeptical and anxious for the next batch of short stories.

“It’s a great mystery why we aren’t getting a lot of short stories,” he said. “I think we have been doing a lot more advertising this time than last time around, and last time we had three times as many.”

It’s true. The staff has been working hard to get some new forms of publicity within the campus. Aside from putting up fliers and tabling at the Campus Center, Thompson has appeared on WMUA’s Saturday night radio show, “Two Birds and a Stone,” to talk about the journal. Staff member Norman Billipp even silk-screened the journal’s logo, a black typewriter, onto T-shirts and distributed them to the staff for additional publicity.

“Short Cuts” began 10 years ago when two students, John Lawrence and Matthew Maggiacomo, decided to gather and publish short stories, which they had written for a comparative literature class. At the end of the course, the two students approached their professor, Therese Pasquale, and asked about starting a journal for undergraduate short story writers. Pasquale then contacted her former students, who became the first “Short Cuts” staff.

Thompson believes that after a decade, “Short Cuts” has “broadened their scope,” now reaching out even to the students in the computer science and engineering departments. Even so, the lack of submissions has been discouraging to Thompson, who sees much potential in the students of UMass.

“I always like to think of UMass as a sleeping giant,” he said. “All of these students with various talents either don’t know where to put it or they just don’t.”

Thompson said there are currently many great opportunities open to students, but many people don’t work at obtaining them. “Not that many of us are willing to go out of our way to make our time here worth something,” he said.

Thompson’s biggest concern about the lack of submissions is that students aren’t seeing the opportunity, but acknowledges that there is not much that can be done.

“You can’t coerce someone to write; either they write of they don’t. If the campus isn’t writing, then there’s nothing we can do, we are just an outlet for it,” he said.

Alice Lee can be reached at [email protected].