After noticing a lack of publishing platforms aimed at promoting young authors in Indiana, award-winning English teacher Mr. Boruff decided to create his website, Perspicacitymag.com: a new, locally founded literary submission outlet for Indiana students statewide.
“Perspicacity means having insight into things,” Mr. Boruff said. “It’s the idea of diving deep. Look at the world around you and have these realizations.”
Mr. Boruff is editor-in-chief of his website with a few volunteer educators and personally selected professors who aid in selecting the top qualifying student authors for the next published issue. The magazine is currently accepting submissions for the 2024 fall issue until Sept. 29.
“I really didn’t have any special sort of tactics to get them, I just started scouring the internet for the email addresses of English teachers throughout the state,” Mr. Boruff said. “It took forever because there’s no online repository of all the email addresses so I just had to look up a list of high schools in Indiana, go to their websites, find the staff directory and just copy and paste emails.”
After much time recruiting, building and formatting his website, Mr. Boruff’s Perspicacity Magazine is currently releasing two issues per year which will include poetry, fiction and non-fiction submissions solely from Indiana students. He claims his goals creating the website were to “just to celebrate the work that students do.”
“I don’t feel like there are enough opportunities for high school writers,” Mr. Boruff said. “These are the formative years where sometimes if you’re in high school and you’re either told you’re really good at something or not. That’s the fork in the road from whether or not someone continues to write creatively in the future, and if they’re not told that at some point in their formative years, they’ll spend the rest of their life not bothering to write creatively.”
As well as literary submissions, Perspicacity Magazine also hosts a cover art contest, accepting hand-drawn or graphically designed submissions to be included in the next issue.
“I see creative writing as an act of exploration, it’s not about having all the answers or having things figured out,” Mr. Boruff said. “It’s about exploring ideas and who you are and what appeals to you.”
