Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

It occurred to me the other day that I have no idea who you are. I think of you often, constructing drafts of my letters to you in my mind as I drink my coffee and imagine what you would write back. Unlike all other forms of writing I do, I have no idea who my audience will be. You could be a student or a parent or a prospective applicant reading this on the Scroll’s website; I have no idea. I have not assigned you a name or a face in my mind’s eye. I only know one thing about you: whoever you are, I am eternally indebted to you.

I started writing for the Scroll in my freshman year, freshly 14 and shy. I found my voice as an opinion writer as a sophomore. I spent my evenings sprinting back to John-Louis at 9:53 p.m., explaining to my proctors that I knew I was late, and it wouldn’t happen again (it would). I published my favorite OpEds as a junior, alongside my turbulent first letter to you. And now, as I reach the end of my senior year, I write to you my last.

Recently, I looked through a Google Drive folder I had titled “scroll.” It was a collection of every article I had written, collated in the event of future usefulness. I reread every one, and with each successive document, I was thrown to a different part of my life. I was fourteen again, receiving an angry email from my Page Editor demanding I write 200 more words for my News article. I was fifteen again, waking up bleary-eyed to a ringing phone, pretending that I had been awake for a few hours as I went over edits on my second OpEd. I was sixteen again, sitting in the Kendall auditorium and watching All the President’s Men, a Christmas cookie in one hand and a preliminary copy of the Arts page in another. I was still sixteen, writing the first email I would ever send to the Scroll mailing list, quadruple-checking that I hadn’t made any typos.

And it was then that I realized that the Scroll had given me so much more than a love of writing and more than a few amazing friends. I had documented my entire high school experience in the margins of this newspaper. I have had the incredible honor of growing up in these pages, becoming a young woman with confidence and resilience and determination. I can reread this journey, squinting between the lines to see the remnants of a past self I have left on every page. She is there and memorialized in every word I’ve ever typed, full of fear and hope and joy.

Because of your readership, the readership that makes the Scroll a newspaper, not just a journalism club, I have learned how to share my own opinion with the world and talk with people who disagree with me. I’ve been able to interview people I would have never otherwise talked to and learned their stories, entering their lives for a fraction of an hour. I’ve begun to understand that what I say matters, for better or worse, and that any platform, even one as small as a boarding school newspaper, is one that should be handled with respect and responsibility. I’ve had the opportunity to process some difficult emotions about this wonderful, complicated school and then slip them under your door.

So, thank you. Thank you for bearing with me through the unsteady first two years when my articles were marred with typos and logical fallacies. Thank you for taking the time to understand my opinions even if you disagreed with them. Thank you for letting me vent in a socially acceptable fashion, for finding me in the library to tell me you really liked my last piece, or for texting me a day after distribution with a picture of a sentence you hated. Thank you for extending an open invitation to that small, fourteen-year-old girl who was so afraid of this brave new world that has such people in it. Thank you for telling her to write. As always, thank you so much for reading.

Yours faithfully,

Anna Jo Guerrini