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Episcopal High School's Literary Magazine 'Light and Shadow'

By Sara Koch, Episcopal High School, School Buzz Editor | February 27, 2017

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Margaret Connelly, junior and prose editor, holding 2015's magazine, Playing in Twilight and 2016's The South Bank.

Each school year in May, the Advanced Creative Writing class presents its literary magazine Light and Shadow that they have worked on during the course of the semester. The students do the vast majority of the work. They pick the theme, the title, the paper, the cover, even the font. They decide whether they accept student and teacher submissions or just student. The students hold two bake sales in the semester to raise extra money for the magazine, though the school gives them a budget.

Margaret Connelly, a junior, says she decided to take Advanced Creative Writing to be able to express herself through writing creatively and to be able to explore different forms of writing that is not common in regular English classes.

Light and Shadow also gives great leadership skills, as each student in the class has a role in the magazine. There are poetry editors, prose editors, PR editors, the art liaison and the production editor. Every position is important, and when one person does not do their job, it hurts the whole team. The submissions do not have the student’s name on them, so when the editors are reading each submission, they are unbiased. The editors do not find out until the magazine is published who wrote what.

Towards the end of the semester in early May, the Light and Shadow editors give a chapel presentation for the magazine, where they showcase the magazine, talk about how the theme was picked, and have people read their submissions. The magazine is submitted to a national competition in which EHS has won an award of excellence for the past six years.

Though it is rather an unknown part of the school, Light and Shadow and the Advanced Creative Writing class gives students an opportunity to harness their skills of writing and gain leadership experience by working to publish a literary magazine. It also gives students the chance to have their work published. A diverse group of students submit every year, and it is always a surprise to many that their friends are actually very talented writers.