Young Bloggers

Preface Stone Soup has been an inspiration to me for a long time, from when I first starting reading it as a ten-year-old, never even considering that I could submit and have the chance to be published, to now, when I have been published in the magazine several times, have attended countless Writing Workshops and Book Clubs, and have been interning with Stone Soup for the better part of a year. Therefore, it is no surprise to me that Stone Soup’s presence in my life certainly played a role in my decision to try and found a literary journal at my high school this past winter. I have learned a lot from Stone Soup—how to write agendas, how to plan meetings, how to organize a website, how to analyze creative writing, among other things—all of which helped in the formation of South High Community School’s literary magazine, The Apricot Journal (named The Apricot Journal because South High is on Apricot Street). This is the story of The Apricot Journal. The Coverby Melissa Truong The Idea The idea of creating a literary magazine at my high school in Worcester, MA was something I’d been thinking about since the beginning of the school year. As previously mentioned, I was inspired by my internship with Stone Soup; and I knew that this, a literary journal, was something I was interested in creating in my own community. I didn’t get around to actually putting forth the idea, though, until late November. That was when I reached out to my English teacher, Mrs. Eressy, (who would become one of our teacher advisors) and told her what I was thinking.  She was very supportive, and immediately suggested another teacher who would also be helpful in creating our literary journal: Ms. Bishop. Ms. Bishop became our second teacher advisor.  Mrs. Eressy also suggested that I ask a peer to help run the magazine. Following her advice, I reached out to Emma Robeau, a tenth grader who I’d gone to school with since elementary school. Emma was excited to work on the project, and so she and I became the founders and Editors-in-Chief of what would soon be called The Apricot Journal. The Editors’ Noteby Anya Geist and Emma Robeau The Beginning That No One Ever Knows About What does it mean to build something from the ground up? With the exception of community service projects in middle school, where I had to come up with an idea and then implement it, I don’t think I’d ever actually created something out of nothing until The Apricot Journal. There is a lot of work involved in making something exist, especially when, as in our case, school was (and still is) entirely remote. Nevertheless, Emma and I launched into it. Every detail that might be taken for granted, in fact requires a lot of work. Forming a shared Google Folder that now has subfolders within subfolders within subfolders, we spent time working on a submission form, making sure we were asking our submitters all of the questions we needed to—and actually, just the other week we realized we’d forgotten something. We came up with a name, which was a surprisingly harder process than we’d anticipated. We thought long and hard about exactly what we were publishing; do we accept essays as well as stories and poetry? What are the word limits? There were also a lot of questions about: what is our website going to be used for? How will we send The Journal to everyone at school? What jobs need to be filled (this one was particularly important), and what responsibilities will be entrusted to our staff members? Additionally, there were certainly a few hours spent writing the standard acceptance and rejection letters that would be sent out to our submitters. Furthermore, there were random, random things that we wouldn’t have thought of until we were actually confronted with them. For example, Emma and I quickly learned we couldn’t activate the Google Meet link in our Google Classroom by ourselves; a teacher needed to do it for us. There was also a brief moment of confusion when we couldn’t access the mock submission we’d submitted to make sure the submission form worked, though thankfully, it sorted itself out. At any rate, you get the idea. Building the inner infrastructure of a club, an organization, whatever you want to call it, is a lot of work. However, once we had the majority of that in place (for the work never really is finished), we could begin to spread the word around our school community that The Apricot Journal was something to be excited about. Making Ourselves Known There were two things we needed to do to be considered an “actual club.” First, we needed to get the approval of the Principal. Second, we needed proof that at least twenty people were interested in our idea (this would be determined by the number of people who joined our Google Classroom). Our principal, Mr. Creamer, gave his official approval, and with that in hand, we set about informing the rest of the school of our existence. Since South High is remote this year, it has a “morning announcement slideshow” in place of actual morning announcements. The slideshow is a forty-something-slide Google Slides presentation, filled with information about schedule changes, sports, and clubs. So, we designed an advertisement slide, and had it placed in the morning announcements to draw attention to ourselves. It basically said, “Do you like writing? The Apricot Journal is South High’s new literary magazine! We publish stories, poems, and essays by the students of South High! We also plan to host a virtual writing workshop every two weeks!” (This was something we’d decided would encourage people to write, and would foster a community of writers.) We have edited that advertisement slide several times now, to add deadlines and new information (“We accept submissions in multiple languages!”), but it remains largely the same. Additionally, we created a Google Classroom