During a normal October tutorial, English 11 Honors and Creative Writing teacher Amy Keys’ classroom was filled with students. Throughout the 50-minute period, students on the editorial board of the school’s art and literary magazine, Soundings, discussed upcoming deadlines, finalizing theme choices and future fundraising possibilities.

Since 1986, when it was first created, Soundings has featured students’ submissions that go beyond the standard English and art curriculum. It provides an opportunity for students to showcase their creativity in areas such as poetry, short stories, photography and art.

This year, the magazine is led by Keys as the adviser along with three seniors who are the editors-in-chief:  Christina Chang, Anastasia Panidis and Shaan Sridhar. Soundings will have two issues: one in the fall semester and another in the spring. The magazine during the fall semester will be an online publication — due to the cost of print issues being high — while the spring semester one will be produced in hard copy.

Funding Soundings has been challenging in recent years. According to Keys, the magazine was printed and published using the excess money the yearbook program had after printing their issues. However, due to COVID-19 creating financial issues for the yearbook, the magazine staff needs to fundraise in order to keep the print issue alive.

A typical Soundings magazine costs around $3,000 to print, so the outreach team — led by senior Dyne Lee and sophomore Anika Kapasi — is coming up with various ways of fundraising, some of which include selling boba and fundraisers with local food places.

Keys hopes the magazine can be on a better footing as a result of the efforts this year. In the past, Soundings has had a small staff with little to no publicity within the school. Keys, with a more extensive team this year, wants to make it a better-known group within the school. In light of this, she is requiring her creative writing honors students — those taking the class for more than one year — to submit stories to the Soundings magazine and other publications.

Before the pandemic, Keys noted that many students who were a part of the Soundings were also a part of the Falcon newspaper staff — this was largely due to journalism adviser Michael Tyler being the adviser of the Soundings magazine before Keys.

“A lot of the people on the staff, because they were already a part of [the Falcon], already knew how to create a task ladder and an organized schedule detailing the submission deadlines,” Keys said. “However, after the pandemic, we were starting with a brand new staff who were not necessarily involved in journalism or creative writing.”

She said that last year was spent trying to figure out a standard of how Soundings will proceed in future years and is now hopeful that the staff is able to receive the submission and create the magazine in a timely fashion. She hopes that more students submit to Soundings this year so the magazine will have a larger variety of submissions this year.

“I think it’s a great opportunity [to submit to Soundings],” Keys said. “We have so many amazing STEM and music opportunities in this school, but we lack a lot of opportunities related to writing or art, [Soundings is] a way for people to express their creativity in writing and art, and I hope students will do that with the magazine.”