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