Considering this is my blog I have decided that I am allowed to brag a little bit on it, and today I chose to make my bragging topic to be my biggest high school achievement: Publishing this literary magazine full of works of art from some truly talented individuals.
I joined the creative writing class my junior year of high school, which also happened to be the year that I felt almost entirely out of my shell. Now I still wasn't the most social animal, but I had a few solid friend groups from different walks of the high school, and I no longer felt like I was just wasting away in this oppressive institution. It felt like people respected me, thought I was smart, and wanted to hear what I had to say, which was very refreshing to the 17 year old version of myself. So I think at some point I decided that I was going to just enjoy my time in the creative writing class, I was going to really let go of some of those inhibitions and create what I really wanted to create (and since I couldn't draw to save my life, this was the outlet of choice).
There I met my friends Keenan and Noah, we already ran in similar friend groups but I hadn't gotten to know them until that class, and I'm really glad I did because they are two of the most interesting creative minds that I have met so far in my life. (sidenote: Keenan currently has a book out on amazon, it's called The Friday Night West Texas Deadkillers Club by Keenan Evans, and you should really check it out: https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-West-Texas-Deadkillers-ebook/dp/B07L4317HS )
So even though a lot of the hype around the lit mag had died by the time I had joined the class, I was just happy to be there to have an opportunity to help publish my work, as well as the work of a bunch of other talented writers. I had this strange new found confidence that I had never really had in my other electives like debate and theater. Maybe I wanted to impress people, maybe I just wanted to make them laugh, but regardless of the reasoning, I was talking and taking charge and making things happen for basically the first time.
That was a great year, Keenan was the editor-in-chief that year and he really worked with all of us to come out with the best product we could with our very limited time frame and resources. The next year however, was even better, but mostly because I was in charge (no offense Keenan, you did great too but I just really wanted to spearhead this project). I put so much time into getting the work, promoting the magazine, formatting, cutting, working with everybody on working out all the issues, and making sure that this project with my name on it came out looking as good as it could. As I'm sure you can image, that was REALLY hard, and I have probably never been more stressed out about a project in my entire life. Senior year I was also in theater doing shows and having to do those theater assignments and projects, but none of those stressed me out nearly as much as making the lit mag (And also running and hosting the monthly open mic nights). In theater, I knew I was going to do well, I got my part figured out and I did my job, easy, no pressure. In my head, there was so much pressure to make this magazine as great as I possibly could and get it out to publish within our time frame. I think one of the last things I ever did for the magazine was write the introduction that I was obligated to write since I was the editor-in-chief. I cannot even read that introduction anymore, not because it's necessarily bad (even though it's not exactly great either) I can feel just how tense, stressed out, and frustrated I was when I was just trying to pull everything together.
All of that being said, I wouldn't change that experience for the world. I proved to my teachers, my classmates, and myself that I could actually make this happen, and lead a whole team of seemingly disinterested teenagers to publish an 80 page collection to distribute to the rest of the school or whoever else wanted to buy them. We made what I consider to be a great product, the whole experience showed me a lot of things, one of those things being that sometimes in life you get what you put in when it comes to work. If you put in a lot of good, solid work, you come out with a good, solid product. So if you happen to impart anything from this blog post, I hope it's this: don't give up, get it done, it will be worth it in the end, and more importantly take pride in your work, even if it isn't exactly how you envisioned it to be.
Thanks for reading, have a great day. Check out Keenan's book, I saw the story in its infancy and the final draft and it's all really great.
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