The Gleam Team
Krilaunda Perkins
The Gleam team has a meeting after school in Mr Taylor’s room. They talk about their opinions and personal preferences.
September 28, 2016
Gleam is an afterschool club at Walnut Hills High School that spends time writing, sharing, responding and sometimes doing writing inspired activities. English teacher Blake Taylor, is the club advisor. Gleam meets every Tuesday after school from 2:40 to 3:30 in room 2311. President, Arthur Sprague ’19, and vice president, Lena Alpern ’18 both agree that they want the club to be enjoyable for students and not feel like “just another class.”“Lena and I, at the beginning of the year, passed out little half sheets of paper and said write what you’re here for and what you want this year,” Sprague said. Twice a year the club produces a literary magazine filled with student writing and artwork. These are sold to the student body, parents, teachers, alumni and anyone else who would be interested in buying.
Sprague and Alpern come up with activities for the club members to express themselves. “I want you to close your eyes and buying,”Alpern said as she played a recording of a poem. Some listen to her command and close their eyes, while others sit staring off into the distance as the audio plays. Alpern also shares a poem with the club that was about the oppression and prejudices of Jews. She shares this poem to inspire the club members to write slam poetry about their passions. Sprague talks about one of the warm up activities she gives team Gleam. “It’s a literary term-an exquisite corpse. It’s when somebody writes the first line of poem, folds the paper, and passes it to the next person in the circle and then that person writes another line and folds it so that the next person can only see the last line that was written and so on,” Sprague said. Not everything is about poetry. There are some writers that write fiction stories or fiction. One of these writers is Peter Caley ‘21, who gets his influence from comics. “I’m a fiction writer because I have a lot of imagination. This year I’m going to comicon. I like it,” Caley said. From slam poetry to fiction writing, Gleam has various activities for those creative writing students out there. Sprague and Alpern both want this to be a club where students can express themselves the way that they want. Gleam is a club where students could do just that.
