“Paths of Clover” is Clover Hill High School’s very own student-run, student-created, award-winning literary magazine, and is again forming into the competitive success of years past.

The magazine itself is composed of literary pieces and other artistic creations, all compiled into a single work.

“The magazine usually features poetry, flash fiction, and short stories,” Waidelich said. “Those tend to be the things that students like to write, and we love to see them. We do try to get a good mix of those things, but when we compete, we want more. We want a variety of different types of media. In past years, we’ve got some things like screenplays and we’ve had musical compositions, like actual sheet music in there, which is a lot of fun.”​

Clover Hill’s literary magazine has had recent success in the past few years, winning a multitude of awards from several organizations, such as REALM (Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines) or VHSL (Virginia High School League), under senior editor-in-chief Abby Ellis. The VHSL is a state run organization that participating schools may submit their works to to be judged and ranked throughout the state.

“Two years in a row, we have won trophy class, which is the highest possible award that a lit mag can win with the VHSL. So we’re super awesome, basically. We send our lit mag to a bunch of competitions, and we are very highly regarded by all of them,” Ellis said.

Clover Hill’s literary magazine, commonly referred to as the lit mag, is printed and edited yearly for the school in the Creative Writing class hosted by English teacher Daniel Waidelich.

“While we’re having people write, we’re trying to get the word out to other students around school,” Waidelich said. “We go to English classes, promote [the lit mag] there for submissions. We talk to art teachers and art students to get photos and paintings, and all of that. At the end of November, around the winter, December or January, we’ll start using a program called Adobe Indesign to lay out our magazine. That’ll probably take about two months, and once the layout is all complete, everything is beautiful and pretty, and we have all the art and the writing, we send it to our printer. It’s probably another two or three weeks, and if everything goes well, by the end of March, we’ll have a magazine.”

Along with the VHSL success, according to Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) superintendent John Murray in a message to the school board acknowledging school success, the magazine also won a REALM first class award last year. REALM had 422 recipients from 5 separate countries and 46 states, and only gave the top award to a total of 125 publications.

“The big one that we go for every year is the VHSL championship,” Waidelich said. “So 2022, that was the first lit mag that I was in charge of as an advisor, we won a second-class [ranking] on it. In 2023, we got a first class ranking, and in the last two years, we have got a trophy class, so we’ve been going up in the rankings every year. There’s another one called the Realm Awards for the National Council of Teachers in English, and again, we went from excellent to superior, to first class last year, which is the highest one.” 

The theme for this year’s magazine is “fate,” and as such, all submissions are related to the topic and its various applications.

“The theme is fate, which is interesting. We’ve got a lot of submissions about a bunch of different things,” Ellis said. “We’ve got some that are like the three fates, like Greek mythology, we’ve got some that interpret fate as like your ending fate, like death, we’ve got people contemplating destiny, we’ve got some stuff about religion, everything else.”

The students in the class have a structured system used to decide what makes the final cut for the lit mag.

“We have an editorial review process for all writing or written pieces, and then we have an art review for all of the artistic pieces,” Ellis said. “As it goes through, each piece is reviewed three times, and then if something is said yes to all three times, then it’s definitely in. If someone says no, then it does not get in immediately, and we review it again. If someone says no twice, then it’s out.”

The magazine as a whole is meant to bring together and inspire students.

“[Paths of Clover] is built like a big community for me with all the writing people, and as I look back fondly, I’m like, ‘Oh, all these people that I met that did creative writing, and we’re involved in this magazine together,'” Ellis said. “It’s also really nice to hold something that you worked on in your hands… and then it’s like, whoa, I did that.”

“Paths of Clover” is a highlight for the major players involved.

“It’s the high point of my professional career for me. I like teaching. I love teaching. Like, if I didn’t do the magazine, if I wasn’t the advisor, I would still show up to my job every day, but this is like a dream. I loved making magazines before I was a teacher. I worked in media, and I was in a magazine team, and I loved it then, I loved publications. Working with the students in the magazine, the high-quality work that they do, and getting to help them out is the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done professionally,” Waidelich said.

With that being said, the Creative Writing team’s product will be released in the upcoming months.