On the evening of April 16, 2012, Dr. Andrea Frantz’s Writing For Magazines/E-Zines class launched their E-Zine, Piquant, which is dedicated to food. This is the third semester Dr. Frantz has taught the class, and the first time the E-Zine was related to food.

“It started with the whole class sitting in a circle brainstorming ideas such as sports magazines, human interest magazines, profiling Robert Morris athletes, and just throwing different ideas around,” said junior Brooks Bratten. “Then I brought up the idea of food because we all obviously eat food, we’re all involved with food every day of our lives, and I think everybody kind of came together and said ‘yeah that’ll be a good idea’ so we started brainstorming ideas.”

The E-Zine has five different sections with stories ranging from different stories of chefs to gluten free living. Every member of the class enjoys each member’s story, however senior, Maria Mauti believes hers will be able to help people.

“I really enjoyed writing my article, ‘The benefits of gluten free living: Not just a fad’ because it’s an article that I relate to personally in my life because I suffer from celiac disease,” she said. “It’s something I’m passionate about because it’s something I benefit from and I want to help other people with it.”

Bratten feels that the launch event really showed that all their hard work paid off.

“It’s nice to be able to do an event like this and have a few people come out, and have food,” he said. “Just having the multimedia aspect, and having a launch event is a lot more rewarding for the students in general as opposed to just throwing it up on a website for a grade.”

Dr. Frantz is happy with what her students have done, and really enjoyed working with them through it.

“I am very proud of my class tonight,” she exclaimed. “They not only proved themselves fantastic chefs, but also really good magazine journalists, so it’s really exciting to see all of this up and running.”

Piquant can be found at http://piquantmagazine.weebly.com/.