Melodrama Innovation Pacemaker 2021

CREATING: MELODRAMA | volume 2 Ladue Horton Watkins High School, 2021

Dear Reader, Hi. Our names are Rhea and Oviya and we are applying for this year’s Innovation Pacemaker. Our literary magazine, Melodrama, has been our passion project for the past two years, and we couldn’t be more proud of everything we have accomplished in such a short period of time. Melodrama was started completely from scratch at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and was completely executed without the help of an adviser. We had to overcome countless challenges, some COVID-19 related and some simply related to the fact that we have never produced a literary magazine before. We had to learn the literary magazine creation process from scratch, often learning as we went and backtracking after making wrong decisions. We had to create a new product that completely differentiated itself from our school’s already well-established newsmagazine and yearbook. We had to recruit staff, hold monthly meetings, do outreach and design the 80 page magazine all via Zoom and other online platforms. But, through all of this hard work, we were able to create and establish a platform for student creative expression that will hopefully live on for years to come. We were able to give students a safe space to show off their talents during a time where creativity was put on the back burner. And, we were able to give readers the opportunity to appreciate the wealth of talent Ladue Horton Watkins High School has to offer.

This is the creation of Melodrama.

Sincerely, Rhea Patney

Oviya Srihari

Read Melodrama here

What Melodrama used to be: Melodrama was founded by two Ladue alumni as an arts and culture magazine. It featured stories of interest to our youth, and those stories were packaged in a variety of ways, with inventive photography and unique design.

Topics covered included the toxicity of cancel culture, European beauty standards, Euphoria-inspired makeup, local band features, bubble tea reviews and more. These stories were all written by the Melodrama staff. The end of the magazine contained a small section for student submitted work, but the majority of the publication was written and designed by its staff. After the two students who founded Melodrama graduated, its future was up in the air.

What Melodrama is now: Melodrama is now a full-fledged literary magazine with the goal of providing a creative outlet for Ladue’s student body to shine. We collect student submissions throughout the year, compile them and organize a magazine that solely features work of our student body. We have a small staff that reviews submissions for acceptance, comes up with the magazine’s theme and style guide and designs the magazine’s pages. Nothing in Melodrama is created by the staff — this is the biggest difference from the arts and culture magazine Melodrama used to be.

Why are we called Melodrama?

Ladue Horton Watkins High School has a Ram as our mascot. Our newsmagazine is called the Panorama, and our yearbook is called The Rambler. When the creaters of Melodrama were brainstorming names, they knew they wanted to include that Ram element in it somewhere. They wanted a name that encapsulated everything the magazine should be: bold, sensational and emotional. Thus, Melodrama was born. The name encapsulated all of those feelings.

Who are we?

We come from a newsmagazine background. Coming into the lit mag world, we knew how to write journalistic stories, design infographics from scratch and conduct interviews. We had no idea how to play the role of the organizer — collect, sort and publish other people’s content instead of creating our own. Our problems went from not knowing how draw illustrations to having to reach out to hundreds of people asking for submission revisions. This lit mag was a whole new experience for us.

Why did we decide to revitalize the lit mag?

Ladue, like most high schools, has a wealth of unique creative talent to offer the world. However, Ladue, unlike most high schools, did not have a permanent platform for students to showcase their art, writing, photography and more. Our goal was to create that place for our student body, and firmly establish it as a publication that will continue on for years to come.

RHEA PATNEY “losing braincells”

Our staff list entries: we always joke that we share one brain cell since we often think the same thing at the same time.

OVIYA SRIHARI “gaining braincells” Rhea (left).

Oviya (right).

Why did we revitalize the lit mag in the fall of 2021?

Ladue was online during the fall semester of 2021, so our education was greatly impacted. A lot of the creative work was cut out of typical class curriculum due to lack of time.

A lot of students that were typically able to express their creativity through elective classes did not have a creative outlet for expression. During a time where creativity was honestly necessary for some people to get through their isolation periods, we wanted to provide an outlet for students to see their work published and appreciated.

How did we get started?

We had a conversation with our adviser, Sarah Kirksey, and she gave us the go-ahead. However, she warned us that we would be on our own for the majority of the process, as she was about to have a baby and would be taking a full 12 weeks of maternity leave. This posed a challenge, as we were hoping we would have at least one permanent resource that knew what they were doing.

Adviser: Sarah Kirksey. She has never advised a lit mag before Melodrama.

How did we get our staff together?

Coming from a newsmagazine background, finding staffers to fill the roles we needed was not difficult. We sent out an interest survey to the newsmagazine and yearbook staff and then created the staff list based on people’s interests. We had the luxury of already knowing our staff extremely well. We chose our design editors off of the past work we had seen them do in the newsmagazine, our art editor was also the art editor of the newsmagazine and our photo editor was also the photo editor of the newsmagazine. Already knowing our staff’s strengths allowed us to create a staff list geared towards efficiency and productivity.

Why did our staff choose to stay?

With most clubs, it is usually inevitable that many people drop out halfway through or before the club even begins.

However, this did not happen for us. Despite our staff being fairly small, our staff retention rate was extremely high. The initial staff had a total of 12 students, and our final staff list published in the magazine had 11 students.

We believe that our staff chose to stay for two reasons: they appreciated the family environment we cultivated and they believed in our mission as a literary magazine. We emphasized that mission every meeting and attempted to make every meeting engaging by asking check-in questions and encouraging conversation.

How did we have meetings?

Much like the majority of life events in 2020, Melodrama was taken over by Zoom. All of our meetings were held virtually, even when Ladue went back to a hybrid school format during second semester. We faced many challenges with the Zoom system. Similar to any Zoom class, it was sometimes difficult to get our staff talking due to the awkardness of the online setting. Additionally, the 40 minute time limit on our meetings became quite frusturating. However, we felt extremely fortunate to have a platform like Zoom where we could share our screens and be together as a group, even if it was in an unconventional way for a student led publication.

What were our next steps?

So now, we had two Editors-in-Chief with pretty much no literary magazine specific experience, a group of eager editors and staffers ready to rise to this new challenge and an adviser out on maternity leave. All of this in mind, we weren’t 100% sure what our next steps should be, so we did the only thing we knew we needed to do. You can’t create a lit mag without student submissions, and we needed to acquire those somehow.

That is what you will read about in the next section.

Submissions: Collection We collected our submissions via a Google Form. Submitters uploaded their work and filled out the title and genre of their piece. Fun fact: when you put Google Forms into shared Google Drives, they stop working.

Fun Fact #2: We almost broke our Google Form six different times. We also created thorough submissions guidelines that explained guidelines by genre, copyright and work ownership guidelines, submissions steps and other important information.

Submissions: Outreach In order to collect the 100 submissions we received, we had to do some major outreach. We did multiple student body email pushes, presented about our magazine in English and Social Studies classes, individually emailed over 100 talented students, had teachers post on their Google Classroom and frequently posted on our Instagram @laduemelodrama. A lot of our submissions also came from word of mouth.

Submissions: Review We held four monthly meetings for submissions review. Prior to each meeting, one of us would pull all the submissions from the Google Form and sort them into folders by genre. We opted to do this ourselves rather than letting our staff do this in an effort to ensure that anonymous submissions remained anonymous.

At submissions meetings, sections editors led their staffers in reviewing each submission one at a time. In the review process, they considered quality, how well the submissions worked together, how many submissions were submitted per person and other general guidelines. After discussion, the staffers decided to accept, reject, accept with revisions or defer the submission to be considered in a future month. Staffers emailed the submitters for revisions, and our most common requested revisions were better photos of art and shortening writing to fit our space constraints.

Submissions were organized in a spreadsheet. All of these steps ensured that Melodrama upheld a standard of quality, school appropriate work while also ensuring that the message we wanted to convey was communicated.

Designing a lit mag: concept For our theme, our design editors and EICs bounced ideas back and forth, coming up with “individuality.” We thought it was important to recognize that what sets us apart is what brings us together in, especially during a time when everyone was feeling isolated.

We spent many marathon Zoom meetings laying out every single piece on a Google Slides presentation and deciding what elements of each submission fit together.

Our design editors created a style guide to standardize fonts, font sizes, colors and design elements throughout the magazine.

How we created the concept: a LOT of screen sharing while scrambling pieces around via a shared slide deck.

Designing a lit mag: creation To produce a new lit mag from scratch, we worked with our design editors to assign our design staffers pages and created an layout, assignment and page status tracking system. We also taught our staff to design in a style that was a complete 180 from what they (and we!) were used to. We took guidance from our own style guide and past NSPA Best-of-Show lit mags. From start-to-finish, creating Melo posed challenges –– for example, learning lit mag layout and design with only online examples to look to, funding and a much larger print job than we were used to...

And we ultimately ended up with a first place Best-of-Show award!

A shot of about one-quarter of our ladder that assigned pages, color coded to indicate spreads, status, designer, genre, etc.

This was one piece of a streamlined submissions review & design system that we created from scratch to produce Melo.

Why individuality?

We at first brainstormed what connects us, thinking of themes like “love,” “connection” or “together.” Quickly, we realized that what made all of these accepted submissions so special were their uniqueness –– be it style, colors, theme or its reflection on the students’ distinct identity –– and we thought back to our mission: highlighting the hidden talents of our student body and empowering everyone to create what makes them proud. So we scrapped the idea and came back to individuality –– but as we worked, we found common threads running among every submission and realized that our theme of individuality had deeper significance: in an uncertain, lonely time, what makes us unique is also what binds us together.

A shot of our inside cover, featuring Bella Elezin’s Colorblind, a black-and-white to full-color portrait piece we felt communicated not just the theme of individuality, but foreshadowed the design element of color gradient we’d worked to incorporate across the entire magazine.

Why individuality? (cont.)

We conveyed our theme with a main style element of adding creators’ signatures to their bylines –– this way, their stamp was (literally) placed on the magazine. Additionally, we kept our color palette neutral and focused on pulling colors, themes and elements from the works themselves to highlight the unique aspects of each work.

The shared, “collective” aspect was brought about through a subtle color gradient. Throughout the magazine, our pieces move from black-and-white to color, with different submissions working together to create an overall theme. We laid out pieces carefully so submissions placed next to one another would flow thematically; this ensured there wouldn’t be jarring tonal shifts while fitting a theme of finding commonalities that tie us together among distinct works and identities.

Our cover (also the cover of this mini-mag!), created by design editor Joanne Sung, is a collage of elements cut-out from art, photo and video submissions in the lit mag itself, an intentional choice to fit our theme of individuality, while also conveying how it bonds us to create a bigger picture.

The title mirrors the magazine’s bylines, where creators signed their names.

Final product & impact We ended up with 200 copies, each with 80 pages of accepted student work. In addition to a an unexpectedly (and very welcome) large volume of work received, the response to Melodrama, Ladue’s longest publication yet and the first of its kind, was overwhelmingly supportive. The publication gained dedicated interest among established artsand-writing classes and clubs, such as AP Studio Art and photography club (whose members are becoming routine submitters) but also gained significant traction among students who don’t necessarily view themselves “the artsy kind.” The student body was well-represented demographically as well. On all fronts, we felt we succeeded at our original goal: providing an artistic outlet accessible to everyone.

A family photo with (part of) our amazing Melo team!

Reflections on the past year The positives: BEST! OF! SHOW!!!!! What an incredible and unexpected reward for everyone’s patience, work and enthusiasm. On that note, our staff’s camraderie and the close-knit, inside-jokefilled enviroment that we managed to facilitate while remote.

The places to improve: printing mistakes and time crunches –– we were unused to creating a publication of this size and without much guidance (we had the “what” with other lit mag examples, but not their “how.”)

What we learned: making a publication for the first time requires the ability to plan, come up with solutions and ideas on-the-fly and most of all, listening –– to each other, staffers and the student body.

Looking ahead

What’s changing and what’s being added this year?

Having our adviser’s close support and guidance in-person is helpful...

melo

Upper right: A cookie cake iced shakily by an EIC-turned-cake-decorator, right before our Best-of-Show celebration (and our second in-person submissions meeting!)

Upper left to bottom right: texts exchanged after hearing the good news (it took a little while to sink in, and once it did... chaos.)

In-person meetings for the first time!

student body’s hands earlier in the school year.

With greater knowledge of the process, we’ve created a movedup timeline to get copies into the

Staff opportunities were expanded

Far more in-person submissions outreach has been planned.

Our art submissions review section discussing a submitted piece (led by art editor Danielle Zhang, center) at our first in-person Melodrama meeting of this year.

to students without publications experience to align with our mission: that creativity should be something for everyone to take pride in and enjoy.

As a result, our staff size doubled, and our retention rate increased to 100% (we got back our lost team member from last year!)

We’ve assigned a dedicated design-only staff that’s working as a team all year.

Crucially, we added a Junior EIC position that phases into an Editor-in-Chief role, and are teaching underclassmen staffers to take on positions and responsibilities current upperclassmen are tasked with. This allows students to learn leadership skills along with ensuring Melo continues into the coming years.

What worked and is staying the same?

Partnering with specific groups,

classes and clubs to promote outreach––this proved highly effective in increasing submission number and diversity.

Having a style guide that standardized design but allowed enough creative freedom to let submissions take “center stage.”

Theme brainstorm sessions––we were proud of how we pulled together a cohesive design and thought process that reflected the student body’s feeling, and we want to continue this spirit of reflection next year.

Learning from and looking at other high school lit mags!

Check-in questions, activities and other staff bonding activities during meetings that fostered a close atmosphere.