The club Calliope meets every Tuesday after school for a short meeting in the reading point room 1250.

Although it only meets once every week, Calliope is one of Niles North’s oldest clubs. For decades, Calliope has been showcasing the artwork and literature created by Niles North’s very own students in their literary magazine, which comes out at the end of every year.

The annual literary magazine is a project that Calliope members work towards throughout the whole year. Boxes are placed throughout the school for students to drop in anything from poems and short stories to photographs and drawings. Students can also submit their artwork through an online submission, which sponsors will print out for Calliope members to analyze among other student submissions. When submissions are brought before the members, names of students are covered to maintain anonymity while their submissions are edited and critiqued in order to remove bias that may obstruct members from basing their decisions purely on a work’s merit. However, only so many artistic pieces can make it into one annual literary magazine; high-quality pieces can be omitted if there’s is not enough room for it or if it simply does not fit into the theme of that year’s literary magazine.

When addressing this point in the process of producing the literary magazine, sponsor Jean Ordonez said, “here you have a bunch of photos and a bunch of literary pieces and what this talented staff does is they try […] to have this thread that links them all together. It takes a lot of time and they are very conscientious; they really want to respect each artist’s work and not just slap everything together.”

Once certain corelated submissions are selected, Calliope members begin formatting the pages of their literary magazine. During this process, they handle issues ranging from deciding which pieces of visual art best accompanies a piece of literary art to scanning the final product for errors and inconsistencies between fonts. The final product that is then sent to the printing press is not complete without this mindful staff beginning each with an introduction written by one of their own to both set the tone for the magazine and explain the purpose of Calliope’s magazine for those who are picking it up for the first time.

As one would expect, the style of Calliope’s literary magazine has changed through the ages, but its goal and its contribution has remained the same: providing the community with an outlet for self-expression as well as a compact final product to share the fruits of that self-expression.

If you wish to contribute yourself, you can submit writing and artwork here:

https://docs.google.com/a/d219.org/forms/d/1vyjRe17Z7ll1PYwcjFtzq98heUlL4ho8MMXG6gTl9cA/viewform?usp=send_form