Spring Lake Park Schools

Spring Lake Park Schools, MN - District 16

DEPARTMENTS

Athletics and Activities

Athletics and Activities

The Mirage

General Information

The Mirage is the literary and arts magazine of Spring Lake Park High school. It is published by students and features student writing and student artwork.

The deadline for submitting photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture, poetry, short stories, or One Act Plays for consideration for the 2008 Mirage was March 20. Thanks to all artists and writers and to staff who reviewed their work. The magazine has been sent to the publisher and will be available for purchase on May 5th.

Sharing Meetings:

If you are an aspiring writer, please join us. Listen or share what you are writing or both. Take advantage of opportunities to improve your skills. Sharing meetings will be held on every other Friday Room 526 from 2:30 - 3:45 pm. Get on the memo list and you will receive meeting minutes and a reminder about the next meeting from your English teacher

Kalsang Bhutia takes a turn as Sharing Meeting participants read Morgan Foizie's latest fan fiction epic aloud.

Editorial Board:

Once art and writing has been submiited, it is our job to decide what will go in the magazine. This process begins each year in late February and often produces some of our most heated but most meaningful discussions. They, of course, are made possible by our previous discussions of our own work and its problems and merits.

(left) Claire Lewandowski shares a poem at the September 24th

sharing session. (above) Chelsea Reinhardz paints a sign for the

hood of Mr. H-M's car for the Homecoming Parade.

Awards

Carie Gagne '06 was honored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) who selected her one of the top analytical and creative wrters in Minnesota. She received this honor in 2004 having submitted a short story and taken a timed essay test the previous year. In the picture below, Gagne poses with her award alongside Mr. Harlan-Marks who nominated her to be part of the competition. Moments before, she received her award from then principal, Glenn Martin.

Visiting Artists:

Buffy Sedlacek

Twin Cities' actress (Grumpy Old Men) and playwrght (Jump at the Sun, Tamarack) Buffy Sedlachek has twice visited our campus during the 2002-3 school year, once to read from a new play about a nuclear meltdown in the Soviet Union and a second time to conduct a workshop on developing charcters and plot. The current Director of the Playwright Center, Buffy was an artist in residence at Park years ago. Her instruction focused on teaching students to write believable monologues, always an important component of her own writing. In the picture above, she meets with members of Mirage and other serious writers to discuss creative process. Students asked excellent questions: "Do your characters ever say or do anything that surprises you?" (All the time.) "Do you start with characters or with plot?" (Neither. I always start with a question.) Buffy was our guest on Friday, Feb. 29th during 6th and 7th periods.

Patrick Jones

Patrick Jones, author of juvenile fiction (Nailed), met with Mirage members and shared insights about choosing titles, developing characters, and fleshing out plots from brief overviews of chapters. Patrick revealed that he sometimes titles chapters with song titles. One book, each chapter was named for an REM song. Amanda Reinhart, our resident freshman novelist, is the student to Patrick's right.

Joyce Sutphen

Joyce is a poet in residence and Gustavus Adophus professor of English. The noted author of several volumes of poetry including Naming the Stars, visited Panther High back in 2004 again this year, April 24th. The Mirage sponsored a reading in the Fine Arts Center open to all interested students.. A workshop for a smaller group (pictured above) took place immediately afterwards on the FAC stage. It took the form of a question and answer session for aspiring writers and covered topics ranging from creative process to getting published. A couple of particularly challenging questions were "Do you find that your needs to create something that is both personal and literary ever conflict?" and "What gives you the right to tell readers 'how it is'?" (This was not a personal attack but a question about creating poetry means something versus simply describing what we all can see.) Joyce was up to the challenge of these and other provocative queries. She expressed amazement that our students are as literate, intelligent, and well-prepared as we know them to be. Yeh. Our thanks to Joyce and to PAC who provided the funds for an honorarium both for Joyce and for Buffy Sedlachek and to our students for both challenging Joyce and making her feel welcome and valued.

Judith Guest

This may stretch the notion of visiting artist just a bit as we did the traveling. Guest (Ordinary People.) was doing a reading in South Minneapolis of her new book about a Michigan sheriff investigating the murders of a local family called The Tarnished Eye.. The story is based on a true unsolved mystery. Guest confessed (much as BUffy Sedlachek did in describing her play Tamrack, also based on a real unsolved murder) that she solved the murder because it made for a more satisfying ending for her readers.

Membership:

Join us if you are intrigued by any of what you have read. We are quite flexible and informal. We don't keep attendance records, so come when you can. In fact, many of our members have confilcts for some meetings and we do our best to accomoate their schedules whenever possible, particularly those who belong to our sibling organization The Sandpiper.

Next meeting: Friday, May 9, 2008

Last Updated: May 8, 2008