![Gleam meets every Tuesday after school to provide a place for student writers to share their ideas. "I wanted [to join] a club so that I would be able to know people, and [Gleam] was very welcoming and an enjoyable space," Felix Hart, '27, one of the three presidents of Gleam, said.](https://whhscbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/gleam.jpg)
While hanging out with a friend after school, Banana Gubin, ‘28, a copresident of the Gleam creative writing club, got an unexpected text message.
“I was scrolling on my phone and I saw the text from Mr. Taylor,” Gubin said. “He was like, ‘Hey, [Gleam] won this,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa. I have no idea what this award is, but cool.’”
The 2024 edition of Gleam, the literary magazine of WHHS, had been recognized as distinguished by the National Federation of Teachers in the Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines (REALM) contest. This was after English teacher and Gleam advisor Blake Taylor—unbeknownst to the members—submitted the magazine to the contest last spring.
“I was really proud of the work that we had done, and just on a whim, I paid the $25 entry fee, sent off a PDF and forgot about it,” Taylor said. “And so when I received the news, I was surprised; I’d kind of forgotten that I’d done that.”
Students in Gleam put together the annual magazine each year, which consists of student works including short stories, poetry, photography and art. They have weekly meetings to work on the magazine and improve their writing skills.
Recently, Nevaeh Williams, ‘25, and the other presidents created a new meeting structure to improve engagement. Weekly meetings are completely led by students who submit their lesson plans through a Google Form beforehand.
“We’ve done all kinds of things, like writing workshops where we talk about our favorite theme songs and what types of [writing] devices they use,” Williams said.
Williams joined two years ago and has seen positive change both in Gleam and herself.
“[That] first year I would sit in the corner [and] let our president talk,” Williams said. “[I would] do the activities obviously, but I would only say a word once every two weeks. I was never able to find people with the same common interests as me, and that was scary.”
Over time, she became more and more involved in the Gleam community.
“[I’ve] been able to find people that actually do love writing as much as I do in Gleam and in my English classes,” Williams said. “I’ve [also] grown up a little bit and kind of realized I can say hi to someone and it won’t be the end of the world.”
According to Taylor, last year and this year have been the best years for Gleam, both due to the variety of types of people who attend meetings and the novel meeting structure.
“Our meetings are robust; we have a wide range of students, from seventh graders all the way through SENIORS… and we have a lot of enthusiasm,” Taylor said. “We hear different voices presenting different areas of interest or expertise within creative genres each week.”
Gubin has also seen the change in Gleam over the past year.
“There’s a lot more open discussion rather than kids just sitting in the back quietly on their phones,” Gubin said. “We have people interacting more.”
Each year Gleam holds an event in the spring, Writing on the Wall, where anyone—students, faculty or parents—can come and share spoken word, music or anything else creative.
“[In] last year’s Writing on the Wall we had parents participate,” Williams said. “We’ve never had any parent participation before, so that was really fun, and it was also my first year being able to go to Writing on the Wall.”
Throughout the year, Gleam’s main challenge is collecting student submissions for the magazine, which has become more difficult this year due to the phone policy.
“It’s hard now with Yondr pouches and everything,” Williams said. “In previous years, we just put the posters up that had the QR code; you’d scan it [and] you’d fill it out, but it’s harder to do that now because obviously we don’t have our phones, [so] we can’t scan the QR codes.”
Despite the new challenges this year, Gleam members are motivated to create a better magazine this year after winning the unexpected REALM award.
“I’m proud of what we did, especially since we didn’t know the categories, [and] we didn’t know the scoring rubric; we knew nothing,” Taylor said. “Now that we have been able to see the scoring rubrics, the students are excited about doing even better [this] year.”
