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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

I have always been a regular of libraries, often running around in the children’s section when I was younger, and musing over poetry in nonfiction when I was of age. But it did not occur to me until I was older that libraries were an establishment that played a vital role in my own community.  Not only promoting literacy, but hosting community workshops which inspire and educate. In the children’s department, they put on an event, “Superheroes Read,” where kids dress up as superheroes and keep a list of the books they’ve read. Running around in capes, they come to associate reading with a positive memory. For teens, they host writing contests, where submitters write a story to a theme, and volunteer at the library to be considered eligible, thus fostering artistic creativity. There are also valuable services for adults. In the main library, they hold classes for speakers of other languages to learn English, which give adjusting immigrants the opportunity to learn to communicate and be articulate in our society. All of these things in combination show that the library is a valuable resource for the people, as well as a place to check out an interesting book, and sit down leisurely to crack it open. It hurts me to see cities and politicians not respect the roles libraries play. Indeed budgets to fund the libraries are tightening in an unmerciful fist. Where else would impoverished kids with homework, but no computer, go to type assignments? Where else would the homeless go to relax and read? Where else would free knowledge be made so readily available? Whenever I go to the library, I browse bookshelves with new-found interest and stop when I see a book about healthy cooking, cultural revolutions, or classics. I take it off the shelf, and I read. -Aracely Medina, Senior Poetry Editor

February is a month set aside in remembrance. It is a month to remember historical leaders of the past, and to remember those we love. It is a month of showing passion about the things for which we care. Check out this month’s Vlog, where the Elan staff tells you just a few things that they love. What are some things that you love? Is it writing, like us? Or something else entirely?

1. Catch up on any missed assignments. Those zeros may not seem like they are hurting your grade, but the trick to feeling good about yourself is commitment and not leaving any loose ends. 2. Plug into the last few lessons of the year. I know you’re probably already accepted into college and got the score you wanted on the SAT, but that doesn’t mean you can give up now. Finish strong. 3. Don’t take this as an opportunity to skip school. Pretty soon, you won’t be required to sit through school for eight hours a day and you can suffer through it for just a little while longer. 4. Engage in conversation with your teachers. They are interested in what you plan on doing after graduation. They have become “substitute parents,” and in just a few short weeks you won’t see them every day. Thank them. Thank them even if you weren’t their biggest fan, because it takes a certain type of person to spend their weekdays with teenagers. 5. Take pictures. In a few years, these last memories will fade and you won’t remember who you sat with at lunch or what your style was. That’s the magic of pictures. They ignite those gray areas in your brain and will spark hours of conversation about the “old days.” 6. Go to your senior prom. Ladies, strap on those high heels that you can barely walk in and fix your hair until you feel beautiful. Guys, get that suit or tux ready. Try to have as much fun as possible so you have a story to tell your kids one day. 7. Attend all meetings and rehearsals about graduation. There will be many things to remember in the coming weeks and you don’t want to miss out on spending time with your senior class. 8. Spend as much time with your friends possible. School has made it convenient to spend numerous hours of the day with them, but make time to meet up after school or on the weekends. With the end of school comes the parting of ways. The friends you have now can carry you through the rest of your life. Confide in them. Go places with them. Listen to them. Laugh with them. 9. The morning of graduation, wake up knowing that after that day your life will be changed forever. You won’t be told to go to school, you won’t have busy work assignments to catch up on or have to wake up at the crack of dawn everyday. Spend that day in relaxation doing whatever makes you happy. 10. The night of graduation, put on that cap and gown with pride and let your parent’s take pictures of you. In their eyes, you are still the baby they held 18 years ago. Smile when your name is called and they hand you your diploma and try not to think about the possibility of tripping. Be proud of what you accomplished. Soak in the atmosphere. That will be the last time you will ever be in the same place with these people again. 11. Don’t be afraid to cry. In these last days, you may be upset thinking about how you will never do any of these things again. Cry because you are sad, but also cry because you are happy. This is a mile stone in your life and is just the beginning of so many firsts. --Makenzie Fields, Submissions Editor.

For the past seven years of studying Creative Writing in school, I’ve never thought of myself as a poetry person. I’ve always connected more with fiction writers, like Rick Moody, George R.R. Martin, Khaled Hosseini, and Markus Zusak. I’ve always found more inspiration in their stories of suburban America, a fantasy world of thrones, children playing under a burning Afghan sun, and a young orphan learning to read in a basement in Germany. Through their stories, I’ve been able to find myself in the lines, discover facets of myself that I couldn’t uncover anywhere except through words. I’ve learned to weave my own stories, create characters that reeled me in and still haven’t let go, reach into my childhood and extract truths that I needed to express. I always thought that fiction held more truth than poetry. Then this year happened. I discovered that poetry was more central than I thought last year at the Dodge Poetry Festival, where poets like Nikki Finney, Taylor Mali, Patricia Smith, and Rachel McKibbens exploded my small world of understanding to smithereens. When I got home, I wrote pages and pages of poetry and told myself this is it, this is what being a poet is. Then I got stagnant. I forgot about intent and speaker and line breaks and poetry. I forgot everything, and when I returned to school I studied fiction, and got pulled back into the longer form of writing I’d always loved. Halfway through the year I switched to poetry, and the first lesson was essentially a slap in the face. We were to write on whether or not poetry was dead, and I didn’t know how to answer. I struggled with poetry through the first month or so, navigating this strange land of technique and style with the grace of a bull. I had no idea what I was doing. Then I wrote a poem exploring the myth of Medusa, and everything clicked. I connected to her pain, her ambition, her refusal to back down for what she wanted. From there on out, poetry and fiction equaled in truth. In Fiction, I can hide. I can spin stories that don’t clearly show myself in them. In Poetry, there is no shelter. Each poem is some extension of myself, some exploration of emotion and memory. Poetry and Fiction have become equal for me. Depending on what story I need to tell, I craft paragraphs or stanzas, but both show my identity in an equal light. Both are ways of telling my story, in whichever form that story needs to be told. --Emily Cramer, Editor-in-Chief

Writing is built on relationships. Writing is composed, constructed, resurrected, and thrown together with a relationship in mind. In literature, readers -myself included- are quick to judge the characters without in depth analysis or benefit of the doubt to the situation unfolding. As readers you place your struggles and the concepts of your own personal relationships into the text, sometimes letting it overshadow the new way of thinking the writer wants you to experience. For example, last year, I read the book Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston. This book is sewn together with beautiful language as it follows the life of Janie, a mixed race woman in the early 1900s. Though I connected to the strength and determination the main character had the entire time in the book, I couldn't understand why she stayed married to a man who abused her. Even after reading this book, I weighed the argument that Janie had a nice life married to a pastor but was muted into submission by him. I didn't understand why she didn't just pack her stuff and leave. As a senior in high school I have already begun to mentally pack my bags for college and have grown to understand Janie. I've learned that even when the front door is open it's hard to leave the people and the place you've called home for so long, that there is a relationship you have to even the drippy faucet you'll only notice when you're gone. As the year progresses I take the idea on relationships Hurston gave her character Janie and now look for it in other stories. Relationships run deep. They don't need to be subjected to a list of archetypical characters. In the long run, they are really hard to walk away from. -Chrissy Thelemann, Submissions Editor