With each quarter, the Beyond Words members are busy uploading new stories and completely redoing their website. As quarter one of the school year is rapidly coming to an end, students from the club put up a new sign and prepare for update #2 on their online magazine.

Beyond Words is an online literary magazine for students willing to come forward anonymously or with their written work. Students in the past have written fiction, nonfiction, poetry and even art submitted onto the site.

The club prepares a new magazine each quarter, all with new pieces and artwork. Currently the members are weeding through the pieces they’ve already received to go onto the upcoming magazine.

“Each [magazine], there’s someone new, a new voice surfacing,” adviser and English teacher Brian Mahoney said.

Already, the 10 member club has received many submissions for the next magazine, and they are always taking more. The entire club reviews and discusses each submission before the voting process. Some of the pieces are sent back to the writers with feedback to improve their work.

Beyond Words is more than just publishing the stories and poems they receive. Some students give their work just for feedback from the members.

“We want to develop a safe environment for the writers at the high school so that they can express themselves and to experiment with their craft and know that our magazine welcomes that and hopefully will put it out on the magazine,” Monaghan said.

This month Beyond Words did a horror fiction contest for Halloween. Many students participated, and even submitted a story based on YoCrunch.

“We got this great submission, it was a joke submission to the Horror Fiction Contest about YoCrunch. It was real spooky, someone was creeping up on the YoCrunch, and the YoCrunch got eaten. It was a poem, it was funny,” club member Kristen Kim said.

Next contest the members are planning on starting is a ‘family’ theme. Students can submit their work through [email protected] or through the submission form on their website at wabeyondwords.weebly.com.

“It’s a contest to inspire writing, and we’re offering a $50 gift card, probably from Barnes and Noble. It’s anything that’s related to the theme of family, it can be writing or photography, but we’re not judging them against each other. The writing can be anything from poetry, fiction, short stories, even a song about family, literally anything,” editor Rittika Adhikari said.

Other big news from Beyond Words includes their upcoming poetry slam, which is on Thursday, November 10th. It will be held after school, going from 7-9 in the Black Box.

“We have about 10 people who are confirmed for performing, but we are open to anyone who wants to pop up at the last minute, we’re totally cool with that! We’re planning on getting a pretty big crowd there, as many as we can fit in the Black Box, so everyone can come down and have fun with us!” Kim said.

Despite the popular mindset of the club, they aren’t just working on the magazine.

“I think that sometime people get the impression that we’re really serious, but we’re not. I feel like people think that we’re this hard-core publishing firm, but we’re not, we are actually really chill,” Kim said.

The club meets every Thursday, with occasional extra Tuesday meetings. Mahoney encourages students to come even if they’ve never participated.