In the middle of August, with the Northwest Academy class of 2024 scattered across the living room of a Pacific City beach house, Jordan Marzka posed a question.
“As we start this year, I want you to think of how each of you can be leaders in the [school] community,” said Marzka, the new High School Activities Coordinator. Murmurs spread across the room as my peers brainstormed what they could bring to the table.
I tried to think of everything I’d done in high school — forming the chess club, recruiting members for the chess club, taking the chess club to state championships. Was that all I ever did? No wonder I was a laughingstock of all four grades.
Later, as I sat atop a dune overlooking a dimming sunset, the thought came back to me. It struck me that — silly as it seemed — my stubborn commitment to chess was a testament of how I try to share my passions with others, even if it declared my nerdiness to the world.
That, in a nutshell, was what Marzka was asking us. How we seniors could bring our own small, insignificant joys to campus every day.
And suddenly ideas swarmed my brain. Little things that only I did: singing songs from Lord of the Rings in the Buchan stairwell, playing a veena concert fundraiser in the Blue Box, telling jokes that most people don’t understand until 10 minutes have passed — it was all there. And it was all uniquely me. Slowly but surely, the tote bag of things I had to offer began to swell.
I asked myself how come I had shared all these things, and yet I had never shared the crowning passion of my academic experience. I knew that I loved to write, and I knew I loved writing, but I could not envision a way to share that love with my community. I could not, for example, start a writing club. Nor could I read my writing in stairwells, though the thought was tempting.
What I could do, and did, was to start writing on the Pigeon Press, and when Inge Hoogerhuis said she found my story about the fish hilarious, or when a random person on the Internet commented on my editorial about Muslims in India, I had never felt so fulfilled.
I don’t want my efforts to share my love of writing to seem academic or mundane. I don’t want to be met with skepticism or disinterest. I want least of all for writing, like chess, to be perceived as an intellectual hobby.
As editor-in-chief of the Pigeon Press this year, it’s my responsibility to try to increase readership of the school newspaper. My goal is not, however, to obligate students to validate the work of the journalism class. My dreams of a cult following inspired by my writing will have to wait.
Instead, I want to show my fellow pigeons that words can, in the right place and at the right time, bring a small, insignificant bit of joy to your lives.
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