During a lunch hour in a Cabot High School classroom, students chanted not for the football or basketball teams, but for much quieter hobbies: poetry and prose.
Tyler, a teenager who can command a crowd, commandeered a tabletop.
"This is a hype room," he explained. "We're going to get hype in it."
(For those unpracticed in young-person-speak, "hype" means "excited.")
Tyler told his audience to shout "Our Voice," the name of the monthly gathering where students share their poetry, skits, music and artwork with their peers.
After the final shout, Tyler gave a charge:
"We will not be silenced. Our voices will carry on for generations. Let's do this."
Then, students shared what they'd created or practiced. A boy played a short riff on an electric violin. A girl read a fictional monologue about a friend's suicide.
"This is terrifying," she said before she began. "I feel like I'm the youngest one here."
In the audience, two seniors, Gracie and Paige Fuhrman, looked on, while Gracie occasionally scribbled notes in a notebook.
The two 17-year-olds, who are cousins, orchestrated the relaunch of Our Voice at Cabot High School. It's one of several literary projects the teens have spearheaded in the past year.
Their largest endeavor is the Arkansas Youth Magazine, a website that accepts poetry, essays, art and opinion pieces only from nonadults.
Gracie said in starting the online literary magazine, she and Paige wanted "to show everyone else what the creative youth of Arkansas are capable of."
"I want students to realize that their art is worth something, and it's meaningful. It deserves to be recognized for what it's worth," she later said.
The girls live near each other, spend most of their time together, and both took artistic direction from their mothers.
Gracie said she's been writing poetry since eighth grade, sometimes to handle grief after several family members died. Her book choices have often reflected her mother, a Stephen King lover.
"I thought I was a big girl, and could read Cujo by age 12," Gracie joked.
Gracie's grandfather was James Canfield, who owned and published the Jacksonville Daily News. A plastic sign emblazoned with the publication's name still sits at her grandmother's house.
"Both my grandmother and my grandfather had this journalistic nature about them," Gracie said. "And I think I just grabbed onto that and held onto it."
Paige's mother was an art teacher for 20 years, though "she let me find it on my own," the 17-year-old said.
Paige wants to study graphic design at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, the school Gracie also wants to attend. Paige created the Arkansas Youth Magazine logo, a landscape of geometric mountains against an ombre sky.
With a love of art in both their backgrounds, they embarked on launching their online magazine.
The cousins built the site, printed fliers and stacked them at central Arkansas coffee shops. They emailed teachers across the state to churn up responses.
One of those teachers, Stacey Buff at Siloam Springs High School, had her entire class submit essays. Gracie and Paige selected two of her students' pieces to eventually be printed online, after a round of edits.
"Some of the kiddos ... never in their lives thought their writing would be worth that," Buff said.
"It really changes their whole perspective on what they're capable of," she said.
Drew Smith, a junior who submitted a fictional narrative, said he was "super ecstatic" when he learned his piece was chosen.
"Mostly because I got to figure out that people enjoy my writing to the point where they want to share it with other people," he said.
Also, he said, "because I can brag to my friends. 'Hey, I didn't see you get published.'"
Arkansas Youth Magazine is only one of two literary magazines the Fuhrman cousins hope to get off the ground this year.
Melinda Asewicz, an English teacher at Cabot High School, is assisting them with the high school's new literary magazine, Liminality.
The name was chosen because its Latin root means "threshold," and high school students are on the threshold of adulthood.
Gracie oversees literature submissions, along with a team of editors, while Paige's domain is artwork.
Asewicz also helped Gracie and Paige Fuhrman relaunch Our Voice after it died out a couple years ago.
Through years of teaching, Asewicz said she's seen a shift in her students. There's more anxiety and more hospitalizations, but there's more of a willingness to talk about their problems, she said.
Asewicz said that through the magazines and Our Voice, she hopes her students "feel like their voices can be heard and they can be valued for that."
During an Our Voice session in Asewicz's classroom, students stayed quiet as their peers scrolled through their iPhones, selecting famous or personal pieces to read.
Gracie, long hair tucked behind both ears, read a short poem she'd written about war.
A teenager named Sam read two poems. One is famous, by William Shakespeare, and the other is less so, an "Ode to Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan in Star Wars."
Nicole, another student, presented a "sweet little poem" she wrote about love.
"Thank you for reminding my heart how to do the whole fast-paced thing," she read.
When she finished, students whooped and hollered.
"Nicole, that was beautiful!" shouted a girl in the audience, enveloping Nicole in a hug before the lunch bell rang and they filed into the hallway.
Metro on 12/25/2017