When Murrah High School English teacher Sarah Ballard was approached by a student about starting a literary magazine, neither of them had any idea what they’d soon be reviving.

Four years ago, a senior at the school asked Ballard why there wasn’t a literary magazine, and she said she didn’t know but thought it was a great idea.

“A teacher who I taught with said she thought Murrah used to have a literary magazine,” Ballard said. “I went home and started Googling to see and what popped up was this amazing information that Murrah not only had a literary magazine, but had one of the best literary magazines that goes all the way back to the 1960s.”

The more Ballard dug, the more she found out about the school, the magazine and her own family’s involvement.

“My own father went to Murrah, and it turns out he had a piece published in The Pleiades in 1963,” she said. “It’s a really cool story.”

The magazine was called The Pleiades and several Pulitzer Prize winning writers had been a part of it, she added.

“We wrote a letter to Murrah alumni telling them we were interested in resurrecting The Pleiades and asked for donations,” she said. “That got circulated amongst Murrah alumni, and we ended up raising enough money to support the magazine for the past three years. It was amazing.”

The students hit the ground running, and the first issue published four years ago, winning second best literary magazine in the state.

“We’re still going strong,” she said. “We’re working on our fourth issue right now.”

Working with the magazine gives students a way to use their voice, Ballard said.

“It’s an amazing way for them to have their voice recognized and to feel authority in their voice, that they have something relevant and interesting and valuable to say either through poetry or short story or nonfiction or art,” she said. “If they have something, they have opinions and a voice, this is a way for them to express that and have it be enjoyed, so they’re sharing that and putting it out into the world, which I think is a very important thing.”

Ballard said there’s been interesting conversation about expressing the voice of Murrah.

“A lot of them are very aware and want our magazine to be considered as good as some of the other schools around us that get a lot of money toward their publication,” she said. “We have a lot of discussions about how we’re going to be true to who we are and we want to be true to our population and our poets and our artists and that can be just as good. Sometimes the voices sound different, but that’s because they are different.”

Ballard and a group of 15 students meet once a week after school to make the publication a reality. Students who work with the publication all do so in their free time — there is not a class for the magazine.

“It’s been really successful,” she said. “The kids love it. They have been so proud of that publication, and they work really hard.”

Ballard said it’s been fun for her, too, to work with the students.

“They’re amazing kids,” she said. “They’re fun to work with. They’re so creative, and people want to be a part of that.”