They say God created the universe in seven days, but can college students build a magazine in 48 hours?

This weekend, a group of students, led by Ben Soloway, Piers Gelly, Dan Nass, Ali Ellerbeck, and Laignee Barron, all ’13, will lead a frenzied team of students to write, edit, design, and publish a magazine dedicated to writing and art, all in the span of 48 hours. There will also be a website featuring additional multimedia content.

According to their statement of purpose, the goal of the project is “to show not only that print remains a valuable publishing medium, but that online technology and print publishing can complement and enhance each other.”

The project is funded in part by the Shapiro Creative Writing Center and received support from Director of Writing Programs Anne Greene. They also received small contributions from ResLife and the College of Letters.

“All our donors were pretty on board with the idea from the start,” Gelly said. “They figured we knew what we were doing and that we would do a good job with it.”

The group plans to publish student-submitted work, including poetry, photography, fiction, non-fiction, and other types of artwork. The pieces published will also draw inspiration from an organizing theme chosen by the editors and announced at the start of the 48-hour insanity.

“We want the magazine to have a distinctive editorial tone and identity, which will mean creating content throughout the editorial process,” Soloway said.

The magazine’s website, besides hosting all articles online, will feature exclusive content not available in the print version.

“The web content will be mostly the same as the print content, but there will be a few things exclusive to the web site: a handful of articles and some multimedia content, including audio and video,” Nass said. “We’re hoping to have people go out and conduct simple interview videos. We’re also toying with the idea of having original music, which would also be created during the 48-hour period.”

As insanely ambitious as the project may seem, the idea was inspired by a similar project: Soloway served as copy chief at Longshot Magazine, a larger 48-hour project, over the summer.

“We wanted to do this at Wesleyan because this sort of event has the potential to build an instantaneous creative community,” Soloway said. “We wanted to give students the opportunity to participate in a frenzied dash through all of the steps of the creation and production process, without requiring the usual time commitment.”

These students plan to follow a packed schedule from Friday at noon to Sunday at noon in order to make the magazine come to life. At noon on Friday, the overarching theme of the publication will be announced through email, Facebook, and Wesleying to the students who plan to contribute. The group will also staff a table in Usdan from noon to 8 p.m., where passers-by can write short pieces on the spot.

“We have a bunch of short prompts, some of which you could answer in a paragraph, others in a word,” Gelly said. “Hopefully we’ll get a large number of smaller pieces, and a bunch of people responding to one prompt. We want to get as many people involved as possible.”

Longer articles will be due at midnight on Friday and selected for publication Friday night going into Saturday morning. Saturday will be devoted to editing, designing, and starting the website, along with shaping the overall identity of the publication. From then until the deadline at noon on Sunday, the brave and sleepy publication team will work on layout, art, design, and copy editing.

Most of the creation process will take place in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center Lounge, and those interested in helping out can drop in at any stage of the process, whether it’s for forty-five minutes or several hours.

According to Soloway, the process will likely be long and hard.

“I expect exhaustion, tantrums, technical difficulties, and [problems] keeping on schedule,” he said.

But at the end of the weekend, sleep-deprived and bleary-eyed, contributors will have achieved a truly impressive feat and may have even participated in a new campus institution.

“The magazine’s website will be up for at least a year, and if all goes well then the website will expand and include next year’s content,” Nass said. “We don’t have any concrete plans, but if it’s a success we would love to do this again.”

Features Editor Alex Wilkinson contributed to the reporting of this article.