By Izzy ’22
At Harvard-Westlake, there are an abundance of opportunities to become involved with writing. With this blog post, I thought I would focus on the one area that had the greatest impact on me as an HW student: our literary magazines.
To begin, the Middle School is home to The Tenth Muse which publishes student produced art whether that be visual or written. Mr. Greenberg leads the team of about twenty students from grades 7-9 who work to curate their yearly publication. I first became involved with The Tenth Muse when I was a ninth grader. My friend was the leader of the club which met during break, so I thought I would check it out one day. Immediately, I was hooked.
When I moved to the Upper School campus as a 10th grader, I took my love for creative writing which The Tenth Muse cultivated and translated it as an on-staff editor for Stone-Cutters. This Upper School collective has a rich history with the institution spanning 25 years. We have won national awards for our Spring Annual, one of our 3 yearly publications. We have editors-in-chief, literary genre editors, visual art editors, on-staff contributors, and our faculty advisors, Ms. B and Mr. Gonzalez. Our most important job is soliciting submissions for each publication from artists in the student body and working to curate each seasonal magazine. This year, I am a co- editor-in-chief with my dear friend, Joie Zhang. Together, we lead the staff, host open mics, and plan workshops to help students create new pieces that we can hopefully publish. I am so grateful to have attended a high school that values creative writing because it helped me discover the thing I love most in the world. There are so many schools out there that dismiss creative writing and art in general as illegitimate academic disciplines. Harvard-Westlake’s support not only validated my passion, but helped it grow and flourish. The college I am planning to attend recruited me through their creative writing program because of my work on Stone-Cutters and the pieces I have drafted from our workshops. It is mind-blowing that an extracurricular that began as just a meeting I thought I’d attend to support a friend in 9th grade turned out to be the biggest guiding force for my college process. This is all to say that I am so proud to have attended a school like Harvard-Westlake that supports its students in any and all academic pursuits, regardless of how niche and non-traditional they may be.
