ANNAPOLIS—When Jakub Piven (A17) and Abby Purnell (A17) became editors of Energeia, they had a vision for the St. John’s College literary art magazine.
“We hope that [Energeia] will become a unified artistic space for people to share their writing and their art and their music and everything,” Purnell said. “There are many ways people create things, and one of the things that makes this a strong community is when we’re sharing those things with each other.”
Piven and Purnell are relying on word-of-mouth as much as official lines of communication to encourage submissions.
“We sent out e-mails and we put up posters, but mostly it’s just going around asking people—people we know are artists and creative,” Piven said.
Purnell said that she is constantly in awe of the creativity exhibited by her peers and sees Energeia as the perfect place for students to showcase their work. Energeia accepts written work from poetry to nonfiction to musical scores and visual work from photographs to scans of original art. In a visual twist, the fall “teaser” issue will also fold out into a poster.
“We hope to see it everywhere with our name on it,” Purnell said. “Then we hope to have a larger bound issue by croquet [the annual croquet match between St. John’s and the US Naval Academy].”
Piven and Purnell also want to support the work happening in the classroom.
“We are an outlet for people creatively, but we will also publish essays that they’ve written over the course of the year,” Piven said.
“Some people write essays here that change their lives, or change their whole way of thinking about things. From talking to people I know, they have put their heart into what they write. And so it’s important to get that out there; they feel they have written something that is essential to who they are.”
Purnell wrote her sophomore essay on the Book of Exodus, and said while writing she saw everything through the lens of her work.
“It was all I could think about, it was all I could talk about. I was like, ‘You know what this is like? The Exodus,’” she said. “It was just so consuming for me. And it was so funny to turn it in and be like, ‘Alright, now I’m done with that; I have math homework for tomorrow.’”
“Energeia sustains our creation in a way that can be looked back on later. There is something nice about having Energeia to look through at leisure and to reflect on more slowly because of the nature of the program is to [move quickly] all the time.”
—Brady Lee (AGI14)