Jedi by Knight

Once upon a time, back in my school days, I was on the staff of two literary magazines.  I recently came across my copies of Perception (high school) and Confiscated (university) that I kept, so I decided to scan and share some.

Snippets from submissions on the front cover

The final quote from Battle Royale on the back cover

My involvement in these magazines was, at least at first, due to being dragged in the wake of the mad-genius creative tempest of two friends.  

These two seemed to exist in a different reality, just slightly off from my own; it was a world I could see, could put my hand through the barrier, but dared not step into fully lest I start to come apart in the chaos.  They introduced me to Rufus Wainwright and The Chronicles of Amber and Cowboy Bebop, and their idea of a party was eating ramen while watching Battle Royale, preferably followed by a paper simulation of the game using our own high school class as characters.  They broke into abandoned buildings at night just to sit on the roof.

And they wrote.  Even in high school, they wrote beautiful things that still stick with me to this day.

They put weird quotes on the back of every issue.

The three of us were in AP US History together.

These magazines are mainly a product of their creative energies.   They did all the organization, design, and promotion.  We published pretty much everything that was submitted (couldn’t afford to be picky) and our staff hand-stapled each copy of Perception to save printing costs.  

We used a similar concept when we started this magazine at university.

I submitted some of my own work, both poetry and prose, for many of the issues; even back then I wrote under the name “Mei-Mei.”  I’ll be sharing some of that poetry as well in the future.