Senior Elizabeth Done and junior Kyle Peltier pose with "Backroads of the Mind: Volume Three," the lit mag they worked on in their creative writing class this year.
SEELEY LAKE - Students from Seeley-Swan High School launched their literary magazine "Backroads of the Mind: Volume 3" on Saturday, June 2.
The magazine is the culmination of a year in Creative Writing class. This year, the project had nine students working on it. At the launch Saturday, June 2, several students gave speeches, read their work aloud and signed magazines for attendees.
Chief Editor Elizabeth Done said this year has been different from previous years because the funding the class received for the project did not set the same requirements as in years past.
"Because we wrote a grant with the [Seeley Lake] community foundation, we didn't have any rules laid out by our sponsors," Done said. "We based our publication after the Aerie at Big Sky High School, which doesn't have a theme so we decided to follow that and allow content without a specific theme to it."
Done and another student, Kyle Peltier, said that one difficult aspect of working on the magazine is including spoken word pieces, which are traditionally never published in a written form.
"I do spoken word poetry," Peltier said. "We went to our first poetry slam and thought it was cool, but it can be a challenge to get the emotion of the pieces across in the written word."
Another reason this particular iteration of the magazine was meaningful was because the students who worked on it finally gained the ability to letter in Creative Writing. After a long process that included obtaining lettering standards used in other Missoula County schools and receiving approval from the country, Done, Peltier and Amber Leetch were the first students at SSHS to letter in Creative Writing.
As a graduating senior, Done said that she hopes the students in creative writing next year continue to make the magazine.
"I hope the younger kids keep doing it because they should have that opportunity. It's one that didn't exist when I first came to school here," she said.
The magazine is available for purchase at Cory's Valley Market and the Grizzly Claw Trading Company.
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