Lately I have been feeding my identity as a Latino writer by way of absorbing as much Latin American literature as possible. It has been a daunting but rewarding task. In my quest, I have read books of fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, such as the renowned 100 Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and currently Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Though I have mostly read fiction, I hope to delve into the realm of poetry fairly soon. When engaging with Latin American texts the common thread of Magic Realism begins to make itself known. This particular genre is very rich and vivid but not for everyone. Due to its fantastical nature and imaginative leaps some claim that it is far too unrealistic, unreasonable, and makes little sense. However, many Latinos agree that the perspective and tradition of Magic Realism speaks directly to their people and collective voice. In Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, it is perfectly acceptable that ghosts should appear to give the living company, or that butterflies should follow a character faithfully and, in turn, follow his lover. For me, the beauty of the genre borders poetry, with its slow lulling narrative, and truth concerning matters of life and love. Having been to Mexico several times throughout my life, the genre matches the rhythms and rituals of living and the way people interact in that country. The tradition of this kind of writing fascinates me.  I have tried my hand at writing in this way and will continue to experiment with this style. For me, it seems that reading and writing about the Latin American experience is not only refreshing and exciting but rings true to preserving my culture. -Aracely Medina, Senior Poetry Editor

Key is excellent at producing a smile or one of those laughs that slip out unexpectedly. His work has that quality to it that grandparents, or an older relative contains in which you want to know everything about their words and their stories, and that essence is especially strong in his memoir: The World’s Largest Man. Within his memoir, Key recalls growing up with family from the Mississippi and breathing in Memphis—and all the unusual characters that make up his life. He shows us his “questionable” family make-up and his ponderings regarding if the universe had gotten everything wrong and he actually belonged to a different family. It’s relatable, yet the fictional progression of the story leaves you yearning to know about Key’s particular set of circumstances. Creative nonfiction is an overlooked medium of writing, though Key has made me appreciate the form again. I’ve recently gone back to my fiction roots, and I’m learning new elements to the craft and I adore how much of it is intertwined in Key’s work. I knew that creative non-fiction and memoirs could be compelling when done right, and Key has me itching to write some of my own childhood memories and left me wondering what’s going to happen in my future that I can painfully and comically write down. I only was able to read excerpts of The World’s Greatest Man and I’m completely surprised at how it has changed my perspective and sparked an interest in type of writing I thought I didn’t need. That’s what writing is supposed to do though. I constantly forget that the written word can change your perspective which is something funny and “shocking” to say, considering I am a well, writer. But I think that when I do have these realizations I’m once again amazed and I fall in love with writing and I can be in awe of its magnitude. I am so happy I got to experience, even if just a taste, of Key’s work. The diction itself is enough to keep one compelled. There’s a bluntness in the words, as well as a child like wish to know more tangled in with that slight dissatisfaction and fondness of life. It’s complex, even within the first few pages. The specificity of the details drive the memoir forward, as if Key was trying to grasp every piece of his memories to make them as cohesive and beautiful as possible. I think that I also try to achieve a similar voice within my own work as Key and that’s what drew me in deeper to his own story. Even into the acknowledgments page, the voice there is in ways who I saw before and very, truthful, and it’s poetic too. I think in our heads, there are specific genres and it’s hard to see the elements of others mixed up in it but it makes me so happy I perused writing because it’s a constantly discovery playground. Key has the wit and cleverness to make anyone turn up the corners of their mouth, it’s bound to happen and it cannot be denied and it’s so perfect to know that in every way that someone can still do that to you when you’re wrapped up in the mundane aspects of life. -Kiara Ivey, Junior Layout Editor

Oral tradition is defined as “a community’s cultural and historical traditions passed down by word of mouth or example from one generation to another without written instruction.” In other words, everything we know about our parents (and their parents, and their parents, etc.) we learned from stories told through what they wore, what they drew, and what they made. My mother tells me stories about the crazy 80s fashion she went to high school with, but my father tells me about growing up in east Eritrea with dirt walls and no roof. Writing these stories down lends privilege to the lives we’d otherwise forget. Textbooks take down facts, writers take down the heart. As we close in on Élan’s 30th consecutive year in publication, it’s important to remind ourselves why we have made it this far and why we will continue to publish in the future. Through writing, we get to see what others left behind, and through our own writings we do the same for the readers who come after us. No one was there when the world began. I will never see my mother’s crazy 80s fashion and my father’s dirt walls. We have unanswered questions about how the world began and why we’re here. We’re all born into our own reality (our own truth) that’s continuously shaped by our experiences. With each story told, we chip away at that Truth. Élan does so much more than share the works of young writers. It keeps tradition from slipping through the cracks. It shares the stories we love hearing and forces us to listen to ones we don’t. Storytelling helps us cope with the unknown. It finds joy in those questions. Sharing our stories makes us a part of a larger one, and while we may never put our Truth into words (perhaps we were never meant to), storytelling makes that Truth accessible. In the last three decades, Élan has held onto those values. We have been a consistent, reliable, and important source of stories for the last thirty years and will continue to be so in the future -Tatiana Saleh, Senior Layout & Design Editor

When I was a high school freshman, I came to the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival with pens packed in my pockets. With each step I took, the paper from my empty notebook clashed against my fingers. I remember rubbing my eyes because the night before I stayed up and re-read each author's bio over and over, re-read pieces I already analyzed because how could one choose a workshop to attend with such an abundance of good writers? I remember being beyond eager to take a “real” workshop from published writers and college professors. Schedule in hand, I had messed up the times and ended up in a poetry workshop. I thought to myself, “Poetry. Yeah, right. The only thing I can do is write nonfiction.” My palms sweat, my stomach clenching, I sat down. This wasn’t any poetry workshop; this was the workshop of Patricia Smith, the woman who could make Hurricane Katrina beautiful, all through fresh lines packed with imagery and diction. Ms. Smith stood at the podium moving the hair out of her face. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was going to ask me to write the most difficult exercise I had ever done. To write a poem where the person you have had a difficult relationship with is dead in an empty room, laying on a marble slab, and you had to dress them. For starters, at this point in my life I had never written a poem I was proud of, or even considered writing something this complex. Ms. Smith just kept telling us, all we had to do was try. By the end, I had dressed my father in an Armani suit and leather loafers. Towards the end of the workshop, a couple of people shared what they had written, a couple of people cried. I didn’t write a great poem, or something that would make anyone cry, but I did write something real, something packed with emotion, and thoughtful decisions on why I chose the words I did. After the workshop I bought Patricia Smith’s book Blood Dazzler, and fell in love with the way her poems made me feel. She signed my book and, as I write this now, I look at it and am still as inspired as I was that day to become a poet. It reads: “Mary, I hope you find light here.” I realized that it wasn’t poetry I was afraid of; I was afraid of the journey poetry would take me on. Two years later, with several portfolios of poetry I am proud to say I have written, I look back on that day and am thankful for the exposure it gave me, as well as the inspiration. With the 2016 Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival line up full of amazing writers, I anyone who attends can have the same experience I did, if they just try. You too can find light here. - Mary Feimi, Junior Editor-in-Chief

It’s the beginning of the new year and that means we at Elan have begun our preparations for the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival. We’ve been collecting excerpts from our distinguished guest writers and posting these with their biographies on the Festival website, dawritersfest.com. All of the reading I’ve been doing for the Festival excites me, as it does all of my peers, all of my teachers. Reading the work of a new writer is always exciting, but it’s even more exciting when you know that the writer is coming to your school and reading the same pieces to you, discussing how they were written and how you can write better. It reminds us that the Writers’ Festival is part of a great tradition that generations of Creative Writers have taken part in. Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol-Oates, Billy Collins, and Richard Ford have all been keynote speakers in past festivals, and now we have the privilege to hear from more amazing writers. For the first time in Festival history, we have two keynote speakers—the nationally recognized educator and novelist Ron Carlson and President Obama’s own inaugural poet, Richard Blanco. We’ve entered a new era of the Festival, where we’re big enough to expand the stage for speakers. I am reaching the end of my time at DA, but I am able to be part of the Writers’ Festival this one time, and being part of its beginning is almost enough to make up for the pain of leaving it all behind. -Jacob Dvorak, Senior Fiction Editor

The Élan classroom is filled with a gentle hum as editors, public relations teams, and web designers run scatter-brained ideas by fellow peers. I look up from my work to see students glued to computer screens, each individual delving deep into editing for the upcoming edition of the magazine. All the while, white walls echo with the chatter of deadlines and press releases, suggestive of a real newsroom. The editors-in-chief move to the front of the class, as the clacking of keyboards subsides. Students take their seats to begin the oh-so-familiar routine of a staff meeting. Merely teenagers, members of the Élan staff are already eerily acquainted with the cycle of the working world. Every other day we come together for an hour and a half, toiling away on individual assignments, deadlines in sight, and then we gather in the front of the room for group discussions. There is constant pressure to satisfy our editors, be the best, edit the best, and choose the best pieces, all within a very thin time frame. We work together as one large, simultaneously moving body to reach an ultimate goal: publishing a professional literary magazine three times a year. Being on the Élan staff is all about pushing the publication and sharing innovative ideas. It’s impossible to thrive without a voice, and I think that is one of the greatest lessons I can carry with me to the working world. Through dozens of staff meetings, I have learned the importance of speaking up for what I believe in. If I don’t open my mouth, voice my opinion, share my thoughts, a door may close for the magazine. One unsaid sentence can mean a missed opportunity. My involvement in Élan has prepared me for a world beyond high school on a monumental scale. With the experience and life lessons gained in this class, I feel I can walk out the doors of Douglas Anderson with a sense of confidence I did not previously possess. Because I am given so many responsibilities on a daily basis, I have discovered newfound independence and personal direction within myself. Student-run literary magazines are popping up all over the country. They are the future, a prime ingredient in creating a more driven generation. –Emily Jackson, Non-Fiction Editor

Authenticity: n. The quality of being authentic; genuineness On my first day of Senior Fiction, my teacher asked me to write down my personal definition of this word. For a Monday, starting my final semester as a senior in high school, I thought this was pretty heavy duty thinking. But after sitting at my computer, watching my cursor disappear and reappear a million –well, more like seventeen- times. To me, being authentic is what babies are: one-hundred percent human, one-hundred percent embedded in their emotions—what they feel precisely in a singular moment— and completely uninhibited by what others do. If a baby wants to cry, no amount of food or rocking or begging on one knee will stop them from being heard. That’s what telling an authentic story is like to me. While reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, I found myself fluctuating between two extreme emotions: awe (the man is a philosophical genius and an incredible wordsmith) and a high level of discomfort. One of my favorite quotes from this book is “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself.” It is always my greatest fear that I won’t tell a story honest, that I’ll sugarcoat a character or over exaggerate the plot. Doubt is the number one killer of good writing and after four years of trying to find my own voice in my writing I completely understand why. To doubt your writing is to, by extension, doubt a part of yourself. There is no greater justice to telling a story than by telling it how you see fit for it to be told, and this is the best way to be sure that you will be proud of what you produce. To be authentic is tell all parts of a story— the beautiful, the ugly, the stuff your mother should never know about. And in the end, that— the moment when you no longer fear what your voice has to say— is one of the most defining moment of a writers’ life. -Shamiya Anderson, Nonfiction Editor #Authenticity #Craft #Blog #Writer #CreativeNonfiction #Editor #TheFireNextTime #Baby #HighSchool #Human #JamesBaldwin #Voice #Relationships #Truth #Fiction #Senior #Writing

Growing up, my street never changed. In the summer, zinnias bloomed. In the fall, acorns would brush against the concrete pavement as my car glided onto the driveway. Winter lights flashed as dead leaves piled on our porch, and in the spring, bees and pollen and mosquitoes from the river would dance outside my window. I grew up in a community where people lived in the same house for years. Where neighbors would let me pick the grapefruits and oranges off their backyard trees, and tell me the garage code to let their dogs out when they were at work. My neighbors came over for Christmas, knocked on my door for butter, asked me to pick up oatmeal when they knew I was going to the store, and invite me on fishing trips or bike rides along the river.  When I say I live in Arlington, people react as if they had just bit into a lemon thinking it was an orange. I hear “ghetto,” “ruined,” “integrated,” and “trash,” as if my side of town is just a landfill for everyone's negativity. People often forget the beauty, the people, the history, and culture that is right at my fingertips. The Fort Caroline National Memorial holds the history of the Timucua Indians, one of Florida’s first settlers. Walk through and find mounds of oyster shells that touched the hands of these ancient people. Blue Cypress Park holds soccer games, play grounds, nature trails, even a pier to see the St. Johns River where one can bike ride or just sit and watch the sun set. One of my favorites is the Jacksonville Arboretum, where every year they have an annual gathering with music and food that after helping clean the park, one can join in. People often forget the little stores like the Plant Place Nursery, where the owner allowed my mother and her autistic student to volunteer, giving her student the chance to feel as if he was a part of something and have a job. The community of Arlington holds a necessity to Jacksonville’s history and culture, and no matter where one is from, their community does the same thing. -Mary Feimi, Junior Editor-in-Chief

I was a kid of a thousand careers. Growing up I pretended to be every job imaginable. I tried my hand being a gardener, tending to the over grown flowers beds in my front yard.  I took the role of a priest, breaking half a loaf of wonder bread and giving out swigs of apple juice to my small pretend congregation. I used my mother’s old college text books and scribbled on a chalk board pretending to be a teacher to my stuffed animals. I was a nurse checking the blood pressure, listening to hearts, and administering shots to any willing patients. But eventually I traded these imaginative days with academic classes and hours of homework. As I go through senior year with the illuminating expiration date of my time at Douglas Anderson flashing over head I feel pressured to have it all figured out. The biggest thing that I feel compelled to have mapped out before I graduate is what career path I want to chain myself to for the rest of my life. But in these dwindling hours of high school I draw inspiration from my childhood and how I would get caught up in a whirl wind of imagination filled passion. Through the fog of stress that is senior year I see my childhood imagination as a beacon of light guiding me through the never ending pages of college applications, numerous activates, and the dwindling  year. -Chrissy Thelemann, Submissions Editor

This year’s transition of genres was especially hard. Last year, I hardly noticed.  Moving from fiction into poetry was a prize at the end of the road. Junior year’s second semester opened the door for my voice. A voice, that in the first semester, I didn’t even know was there. And this year, I felt the hinges break off. Of course, beginning with the immersion of poetry gave me a taste I wasn’t ready to let go come January. I was scared that all of the progress I made in poetry would fall excruciatingly short in comparison to fiction. I am unbelievably happy that I was wrong. All that I’ve learned in since January has truly surprised me. And it hasn’t all been in the classroom either. Before this year, ideas for stories never came to mind like poems did. Whenever I go out now, I find a character in unintentional eavesdropping, a setting at a stop light, and conflict everywhere I turn. The pages in my journal now hold something other than line breaks. Fiction, dare I say it, is beginning to feel natural. The way I see it, poetry is a well leading to an underground reservoir. Each line plunges you farther and farther to the source, the intention, the purpose of the piece. Fiction, on the other hand, is an in-ground pool. Its depths and shallows are chosen very specifically. There’s room to swim around—even a patio to socialize and sunbathe. Fiction allows you to take your time. But in any sense, lazily. This room promotes emotional investment that poetry’s brevity sometimes prohibits. Fiction is a second home that always reminds me of my first. The childhood house that felt like a fortress to get lost inside. Fiction is not wanting to find my way out. -Mariah Abshire, Editor-in-Chief

My mother cannot read the same book twice. She just can't do it. She has made exceptions for franchises like Twilight and Hungry Games, but only as a refresher before she goes and sees the movies. She is constantly looking for new material to entertain her, new characters to meet and new plot lines to follow. I, on the other hand, can't put a good book down. The first time that I read "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell was in sixth grade. It's 1,024 pages long and I finished it in a weekend. Since then, I've consistently read it again once or twice every year. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or am feeling entirely uninspired in my own writing, I'll flip to the part where Rhett steals a horse for Scarlett, or where Frank Kennedy falls in love with a girl dressed in drapes as if that's where I'd left off, and read on from there. I'm not a fiction writer. I write fiction, sometimes, but it's not how I identify. I am, however, a fiction reader. I love analyzing the same plot line over and over again; I love crying when my favorite character dies or losses love all  over again. I enjoy it just as much as I enjoy finding new literature to read. I think, in part, it's because I understand how much a writer has to go through to create something like this. To write a novel, or even a poem or a short story, a writer has to know their characters fully. We don't usually make things up as we go along. We usually plan things out, we think about who our characters are; we think about how and why these things are happening to them. To a writer, their characters are real people. So to me, when I read about them, these characters are real people too. The best part of writing is that it encapsulates humanity. I think that I read the same novels again and again because I can relate to them, even if the story does take place in Georgia during the Civil War or in a constant loop of reincarnation. I see myself in the characters and in the lessons they learn. I want to see their triumphs, to laugh at the funny things that happen in their lives and even to relive their heartbreak. Novels remind me that everything ends, but also that everything can begin again. It's kind of hopeful. And so, I can't ever really move on from a story that truly touches me. Do you have any novels like that? -Savannah Thanscheidt, Web Editor

I have read countless quotes, excerpts, and lines of poetry that have inspired me. But, no line of poetry, no paragraph from a fiction piece, no “quote of the day” has ever resonated with me the way Richard Blanco’s poem, “América,” did. This poem discusses a Cuban family’s struggle with balancing, and accepting two cultures. I have a strong attachment to this idea because I often find myself in the same situation. I, like the characters in Blanco’s poem, am Hispanic. My mother was born in La Habana, Cuba, and my father in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. I was born in Jacksonville, as an American, but my parents raised me with their Hispanic customs. We celebrate Hispanic holidays like Three Kings Day and Hispanic Heritage Month the same way Americans celebrated Veterans Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But we never celebrated them both. It was either Veterans day, or Hispanic Heritage month. As I got older I began to reflect on my past and realized the significance in all of these differences. I began expressing interest in learning about my background as an American Citizen. I’d spend my entire childhood embracing the Hispanic side of me, so I never got the chance to explore the American. My family soon tried to adopt the beliefs. Simple things like having turkey on Thanksgiving, and putting American Flags on our lawn during Veterans Day. Studying American history and culture in so much detail that it became engrained within us in the same way Hispanic culture was. After this period of self-discovery, I realized that balancing both cultures was harder than I thought. My attempts, though genuine, did not feel natural. I could not be only Hispanic or American. I am a Hispanic American, and I'm allowed to be both. The cultural resonance and applicability of this poem gave me justification in my realization. Blanco expressed to me, with excruciatingly vivid detail that is hard to balance two cultures at once. That it is impossible to rid of my roots. But that it is possible, to learn to accept both cultures for what they are, and how they play a role in my life. This poem completely captivated me and gave me a sense of self-realization that I had never experienced before. Now, when someone asks me where I’m from, or what I am, I tell him or her, with pride, that I’m a Hispanic American. I embrace my roots and enlighten others about my Hispanic and American heritage, rather than hide it. I now celebrate all holidays not just “the Hispanic way” or “the American way” but both ways. I wear red white and blue to display pride for America, and also for Cuba and Puerto Rico as well. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and America all share the same colors on the flag, and I share all the same colors in the complex, layered concept of my identity. -Briana Lopez, Junior Social Media Editor Read it here! Follow the link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245318