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The Student Newspaper of DePaul University

The DePaulia

The Student Newspaper of DePaul University

The DePaulia

The Student Newspaper of DePaul University

The DePaulia

Rookie Magazine celebrates its senior ‘Yearbook’

Rookie+Magazine+celebrates+its+senior+Yearbook

Flower crowns, quirky glasses and Elvis Costello t-shirts. A little girl, about four years old, sporting a leather jacket. Everyone clutching their new “Rookie Yearbook” as if it’s the Bible. This was the scene at the Music Box Theatre Wednesday night for the celebration of the release of the fourth “Rookie Yearbook.”

Rookie is an online publication founded in 2011 by Editor-In-Chief and Chicago-area native, Tavi Gevinson. The publication evolved from Tavi’s personal blog, The Style Rookie, that she started when she was 11 and continued to write on quite frequently until Rookie launched four years later. Rookie’s demographic is teenage girls, but there are people of all ages and genders that find solace in the work published on rookiemag.com, including Judd Apatow, Jessica Hopper, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Miranda July. Rookie covers a wide range of topics from weekly playlists, dating and beauty advice, to extensive pieces on people’s experiences with depression and self-harm, accompanied by lots of different topics in between.

The Rookie Yearbooks are a culmination of the best-of pieces from the site over a year’s time. Each Yearbook also has a section of yearbook exclusives, which have included interviews with Kiernan Shipka, Emma Roberts, and Solange Knowles, as well as other content contributed by Willow Smith, Lorde, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange and Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. The yearbooks follow the same timeline as a set of high school yearbooks, from freshman to senior year, making this last yearbook Rookie’s senior year.

At the Rookie Yearbook Four event, Gevinson was accompanied by Meagan Fredette, 28, Upasna Barath, 18, and rock critic and senior editor of Pitchfork, Jessica Hopper, 38 — three local Chicago contributors who each read one of their pieces previously published on Rookie.

Gevinson began the event by reading from the Editor’s Letter she wrote for the fourth yearbook. The theme of the piece was adulthood, the transition into becoming your own person, and “(coding) your own DNA.” 

“I am also learning that while it does get better, some things get worse,” Gevsinson wrote in her Editor’s Letter.  “Other things just transfer ‘teenage’ (human) feelings over to a scenario that is only more ‘grown-up’ in some artificial sense.”  

Hopper read next from a piece she wrote called “Where The Girls Aren’t,” an excerpt from her relatively new book “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.” Her piece focused in on the marginalization and misogyny towards women in emo and rock n’ roll music.

“Us girls deserve more than one song. We deserve more than one pledge of solidarity.  We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us,” Hopper wrote in her piece, and was met with the loudest reaction from the attendees after she finished this sentence; a feeling of empowerment consumed the room.

Once the readings concluded there was a fifteen-minute Q&A session between the audience and the readers.  Questions ranged from “Tavi where did you get your shirt?” to “how do I find what I love to do?”  Every question was met with thoughtful responses matching one young woman’s comment that “Rookie is one of the only places where young people are taken seriously.”

Rookie’s night at the Music Box Theatre, and Gevsinson’s brief homecoming, was a night of love, empowerment, and feminism, three of the most important aspects of Rookie.  The fourth and final yearbook is full of wonderful pieces of writing, art, and interviews, with something for everyone to enjoy.

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