Annual Soundings magazine provides platform for student artists and writers

On Friday, May 18, instead of the usual Saratoga Falcon newspapers, classrooms received stacks of the school’s art and literary magazine Soundings, a 32-page publication featuring work by 23 students.

Three months prior, the editors and curators of Soundings began accepting submissions.

Journalism students usually run the magazine because they have experience with layout and design. Seniors Kyle Wang and Lillian Zeng were the editors this year. Senior Sarah Auches was the art curator and senior Varun Viswanath was the poetry curator, while Wang was the writing curator.

This year’s theme was Meraki: a Greek word meaning “to do something with soul, creativity or love; to put something of yourself into your work.” The content of Soundings — whether art or writing, whether published anonymously or under a name — all seem to reflect Meraki, as the intention that shapes a submission often requires artists and writers to leave a piece of themselves on the page.

According to Zeng, around 65 percent of submissions was writing and the rest was art submissions, including a greater number of photography submissions compared to last year. While most writing submissions were poetry, there were short stories and essays as well.

Soundings received around 120 submissions in total through email after encouraging students to submit by advertising in the school Facebook group; posts included links to the Soundings website for further submission instructions.

For the past two years, the creative writing class read and voted on the writing submissions.

This year, however, because there is no longer a creative writing class, Wang sent the writing submissions to a group of seniors in newspaper and yearbook after compiling and removing the names from the submissions. He then asked the seniors to vote on their top choices.

According to Wang, the tentative plan was for 10 to 12 writing submissions to fill the magazine, in the hope that readers would “see a balance between the media and the writing.”

Wang said the number of submissions used depended on how they decide to structure the layout, while keeping in mind how physical arrangement may affect the pieces.

“Ideally if you have a photo, or a photo selection, you don’t really want any text on the photo,” Wang said, describing the combination of different submissions. “Let’s say you have someone’s poem: you want that next to [the photo] just because you don’t want to mess with the photo’s composition.”

Referencing last year’s magazine helped the editors plan this year’s Soundings, Zeng said, because they observed the formatting and various sizes of last year’s work.

No matter the size, length or message of a piece, Soundings allows students’ creations to become available to a wider audience.

“I think it’s really cool that we do something like this because a lot of people might have good work that doesn’t get recognized anywhere,” Zeng said. “They might not get interviewed for newspaper or be in the yearbook for it, or featured anywhere else. This is kind of an open opportunity for everyone to share what they’re doing.”

And this opportunity, as the character Tracy says in senior Charin Park’s story “Finding Waldo,” is an invitation to “Tell me your stories.” The magazine invites the entire school to listen to students’ stories — whether fictional, true or a mixture of both — the importance of which the editors of Soundings recognize.

“The very point of creating any work is for people to be able to read it,” Wang said, recalling what English teacher Ken Nguyen said, when Nguyen was trying to persuade his students to read their poetry in class. “So if you can be the next Steinbeck, the next Stephen King, the next whatever, it doesn’t matter if no one ever reads your work.”

In addition to Wang, as an artist, Zeng has noticed the way different perspectives can unfurl from a single piece.

“Sharing your work with someone turns your work into something,” Zeng said. “It’s not just personal; it becomes something that’s owned by everyone else as well, and you start thinking about how your work looks through the lens of someone else’s eyes.”