Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

To the Reader:
As we neared production of this, our 2 nd issue of Aerie International, I
couldn’t help but reflect on our aspirations for this magazine. One was to
establish a legitimate journal for young people, a journal of writing and art
that young people could claim as their own. We wanted it be one of beauty.
We hoped to make connections, not only for our editors and the people we
were fortunate enough to encounter on and off these pages, but also to offer
the means for young people far outside our sphere to meet. Having pen pals
is great, but what if we could give young people the opportunity to share
their art in their own magazine?
It is a usual day for me to enter the classroom and find Katie, our 2009
Editor, sitting cross-legged on a table, reading from a manuscript or waving
one in front of my face (I mean that literally), usually accompanied with the
command: “Lorilee, this is AMAZING. You HAVE to read it.”
She is usually right.
That’s how I first came to hear, “Worker Bee,” a story about what might
be described as a very conventional narrator and his obsession with an
equally unconventional young “antagonist.” Jake Ross manages to take
on environmental issues, high school, middle America, and its fringes.
His characters are whimsical and delicious and irreverent, at once both
fantastical and oddly real.
In her memoir, “Navy Blue,” Emma Pimmental speaks of visiting a
hippotherapy farm in Sudan for children from underfunded hospitals. These
children have been abandoned by war, disease and poverty that is nearly
incomprehensible outside the developing world. Emma walked to Jane-
Ann’s farm twice a week all summer in the Sudanese heat and dust to help.
“I learned more about love and humankind that summer than I ever have
before or since,” Emma writes.
I don’t know that I could have picked two pieces from the magazine less
alike. And yet they are about what the entirety of this journal, all of art,
perhaps, is about—coming to the center of a thing and laying it bare, first
to discover it for oneself, and then, if we are very lucky, to share it. This
magazine is full of those kinds of moments, in image and in word.
Many pieces poke fun at our cultures and who we are. Annie Chang
writes about growing up Asian-American in central Oklahoma, “where just
five minutes from my home are real cattle farms and horse ranches.” She
says she likes to laugh at herself, and in so doing, gives all of us permission
to laugh, not only at her, but at ourselves as well. Her story is part memoir,
part fiction, about shopping trips to Wal-Mart where her mother insists,
over her daughter’s protestations, to buy soymilk for the family “primarily
because Oprah Winfrey tells her to.” Her story is hilarious, a convergence of
cultures and coupons.
Whether visual art, photography or writing, the pieces are about longing
and love, about society, about what we accept and what we do not. In
“Killing Beauty,” photographer Gabriella Otero formally poses two young
girls in party dresses in a field. They are focused like manikins on an
electrical power station in the distance, their backs to the viewer. Austin