Contentious Times hits the stands

For her upstart magazine, Nina Neff has cross-examined white supremacists, edited an essay on a student suicide at Lakeside High School, tackled the anatomy of faith and interviewed a group of Sudanese refugees.

In her fourth and most recent issue, the 15-year-old home-schooled student announced, “We won’t be content with bubble-gum journalism.”

Neff sells her monthly magazine, Contentious Times, for $3 at Auntie’s Bookstore downtown. (The mother of one of Neff’s writers works there.)

Neff quickly settled on the title for her magazine.

“That was what popped into my head. I’m contentious. These are contentious times. It just seemed to fit,” Neff said.

Neff’s goal with Contentious Times is to reach out to people her age who want to be leaders and make a difference in the world. In her January debut issue, she described the magazine as the new generation’s journal for leadership, debate and solutions.

“You can’t just let things go,” Neff said. “We’ve seen what happens when you let things go.”

Neff tried attending ninth grade at Lewis and Clark High School last fall but found it not to her liking.

Next fall she’ll enroll at Eastern Washington University through the early college program Running Start.

In addition to the two hours daily she spends on her magazine, she finds time for guitar and flute.

Neff’s older cousin, Molly Helmbrecht, said she has watched in amazement for years as Neff jumped in on adult discussions of politics and social issues.

“I always knew Nina was a special person,” Helmbrecht said.

There were times when she watched Neff become frustrated after people her age didn’t share her passion for national issues.

Typical of Neff, as a personal project she recently researched the Geneva Convention and found it hard to obtain an actual copy of the international document.

“It was inappropriately difficult to find,” Neff said. “I believe in primary sources.”

Neff was inspired to turn to activism by the book “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, one of her heroines. Neff reads between 15 and 40 books a month.

To get her magazine started, Neff invested almost 47 hours of baby-sitting money – $187 – to print 100 copies. Enough copies sold to pay for the second issue, and so on. She’s yet to sell an ad.

“I don’t have financial backers,” Neff said. One day she would like to be able to pay her writers.

She generally prints 100 copies of Contentious Times monthly with stories by her and other writers. Their reach extends beyond Spokane; the magazine’s latest issue included letters to the editor from Portland, Seattle and Orlando, Fla., readers.

Neff developed her network of writers through her years in the Spokane Public Schools Odyssey program, a magnet program for gifted fifth- to eighth-grade students. In addition, Neff has gone to Satori, a summer camp at EWU for highly capable students, for three years.

She still keeps in touch with her former Odyssey teacher, Mike Cantlon, who also organizes the Satori camp. Cantlon said Neff’s an amazing philosopher and deep thinker.

“I’ve been teaching gifted kids for 26 years now,” Cantlon said. “She’s one of these extremely special gifted children that sort of shines above the rest.”

What really makes her stand out is a drive that pushes her toward her goals, he said.

“You don’t see that motivation even in a lot of gifted kids,” Cantlon said.

Neff lives in Peaceful Valley with her mother, Joanie Eppinga, herself a National Merit Scholar who studied at Oxford. She’s also a professional editor and writer.

There was a time during breakfast years ago when Neff was about 5 years old, and Eppinga was telling her daughter about the Hindu ideas of energy wheels in our bodies, called chakras. Eppinga said she wondered if she was overloading her daughter with too much information. Not long after that, Eppinga said, her daughter told her, “I like having a mom who knows things.”

As Neff approached her teen years, she noticed her mother wasn’t able to answer her questions about the world anymore. Neff once told her mom, “It’s like your brain has an X-axis but no Y-axis.”

Regularly, they attend community lectures at Gonzaga University, like the recent Noam Chomsky talk. Eppinga also drives Neff to interviews, such as one with a Holocaust survivor and a group interview with Sudanese refugees.

The magazine is running its first humor piece in May, called “Battle with the Editor,” a playful poke at Neff by a writer.

Friends say Neff is intense, opinionated and also generous. Neff said she’s learning to delegate tasks.

Neff recruited a talented eighth-grade designer, Helen Vander Wende, to add life to the covers.

The first issue’s cover by Neff showed a gray and barren landscape of Sudan. The fourth issue showed an alternative-looking woman in funky glasses and striped knit cap under floating images of Buddha, an Israeli flag and a wooden cross.

Vander Wende has no doubt Neff will develop the magazine further.

“She’s good at getting things done,” Vander Wende said. “She has that kind of ambitious attitude, and she has hope for people, which really helps.”