11.30.08
snow and skin
What is it about the basic things of the earth that bring out the joy in us? Consider the two feet of snow that has just fallen outside. Ask anyone, artist or not, and two feet of snow will create all sorts of wonder. Some will play in it. Some will exercise in it. Some will stare at it. But it is creating life experience in some way or another for virtually everyone.
Snow. Raindrops. Warm breezes. High alpine mountains. Oceans. Sunsets. Dew. They are beautiful. They seem to affect us more than just in their outward beauty. Whatever it is, it gets into us. Moves us. Speaks to us. Calls to us. It separates us from the minutia of life, and draws us to a higher place.
I often think it’s one reason why faith in God used to be more prevalent — people who lived in the middle of nowhere, and connected with the land, the weather, the elements — saw themselves in much better perspective than we do now. They were well aware of how small they were, yet also how vastly miraculous. It seems we’ve disconnected from both ideas.
We are so small. One mountain lion and we’re toast. One cold night in the open and it’s over. The elements remind of us that we are but dust. And they develop a sense of awe, a knowledge of our submission to that which is grander, uncontrollable; master over us. We get to share in its awesomeness, partake of its goodness. Connect with it in our place — insignificant, yet elemental. Part of the beautiful miracle of it all.
And we see in the world a reflection of our beautiful and perfect design. We see the birds fly and the fish swim upstream. We see the trees grow and the rivers meet the sea. We see the balance of the delicate web that is life. And we see our own selves. Our skin, perhaps one of the most brilliant substances ever made — soft, regenerative, sturdy. Our hearts pump a vibrant red liquid full of vitality through our motion-filled bodies. Our vocal chords form the sounds of our thoughts from synapses of energy in our brain. We see. We love. We change. Amazing. Miraculous.
It snows. We breathe. Life goes about living. The earth rotates, spinning through the universe at breakneck speed, but we look around as if nothing’s moving. And we create, as if this isn’t a wondrous event. As if everything in the universe has the ability to create. But other than us, only One creates. Everything else exists within that created realm. We are small. And we are miraculous.
Meet Me
I thought it was about time I introduced you to me. You’ve seen some of my photography, read a little of my writing, and some of you know I make my living as a graphic designer. So here’s my artistic journey.
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I’ve always been the verbal, high-strung, sing-songy friend some of you know. It feels like I’ve got a fireworks stand in my head, and I’m always either singing, writing on scraps of paper and sides of cups, or just trying to find an ear to listen and join my little escapade. To say I’m energized by the thought of creating is an understatement.
My first real creative experience was probably writing the song “Take the Money and Run” in the third grade. Lyrics like “I don’t want a fancy divorce/I don’t want a fancy separation/I don’t want any of your money/All I want is for you to be gone, so…” showed I was definitely not writing from experience, had some good ability to empathize, could unbalance a lyric, and maybe skipped childhood altogether. But I felt compelled from that point on to create. Just create.
In the seventh grade, I won a writing contest, and the prize was 6 sessions with a college writing professor. Oh, I thought I had won the world’s most abundant lottery. And I didn’t even mind that all we did was talk about Edgar Allen Poe (although later on I would lament it). My roots in story grew deeper with the intricacies of Poe and Agatha Christie. I loved plot, loved story. My English teacher gave me a journal at the end of the year, with a note that encouraged me to keep writing. Immediately I began an extensive plot development of a castle and many dinner guests and murrrddddeeerrr. I’m still mulling it over at times, actually.
But writing wasn’t the only passion developing. In junior high, I fell in love with the darkroom and photography. My Pentax K1000 is still one of the joys of my life. Understanding focal point, the rule of thirds, flow, story in a photograph, and then in a layout. Whew. Dude. I love that stuff.
I plunged myself into the junior high yearbook, then the high school paper, and then one of the the crowning moments of my life, winning the national competition for yearbook copy and caption writing my senior year. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I could write cutlines like no other. But it was my love for the dominant photo accompanied by just the right caption that did it for me. That same yearbook won first place in the nation.
That was it. My heart was absolutely set on this stuff. I jumped into journalism in college. I designed the school’s magazine, and got a job laying out tehnical papers for the school’s IT department (on Pagemaker Ice Age, with a rock for a mouse). I gravitated towards advertising and graphic design as my emphasis, where I was going to be the next great ad creator of the world. That 1984 Apple ad had me entranced, and that’s what I wanted to do. The way ad copy sizzles, takes you on a 2-minutes journey. The way a dressed-up photo or 30-second spot makes you decide then and there that you are going to be “that kind of a person.” I am still fascinated.
For my internship, I worked with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on their Urbana 90 convention. Any of you who were there might remember the big world map and magenta “Urbana” that was the stage backdrop; or the cyan, magenta and black posters that blanketed the stadium with the words “Jesus Christ, Lord of the Universe, Hope of the World” in 6 or 7 languages. That was my handiwork. And I will never forget walking out into the arena the first night, with 20,000 people looking at that backdrop, those posters. And no one knew it was me. That sense of anonymous accomplishment is very important to me, and I got addicted that night.
After college, I ended up getting a job at a home plan design company. I worked on magazines and catalogs, and learned all there is to know about print production. And I worked with my (still) dear friend, Bruce, on advertising. We wrote such epic ads as “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch (or the 1-story . . .).” We would break into pun contests on the fly, and even now have a long, nonsensical greeting full of story and meaning. Good creative stuff.
After a few years there, I went on to run the art department of a fundraising company, designing 40 brochures a year. And I ran a freelance business on the side, where I liked to do graphic design for causes I care about, like the Crisis Pregnancy Center, and Omaha for Decency — and anti-pornography group. Then, wonder of all wonders, I was plucked from obscurity to move to heaven, and design Citizen. It was a dream come true, and married all of my passions. I felt like I was made for it. And I was able to write and design renewal ads for the magazine for several years.
Now I design much more than I write, so I’ve been working on fiction (back to the old Poe days) and songwriting, to keep my brain from popping open. And I also sell some stock photography on the side. And I blog. Therefore I am.
My advice is just keep doing it, whatever it is. I spit out a lot of stuff that no one ever sees. But it makes me more of who I am, it teaches me something I didn’t know, and it motivates me to continue. Create, and release the outcome. Risk being good or bad, known or unknown. Soon you will see a path forming behind you, and it will be clear what was in you all along.
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Thanks for listening. I hope this makes you want to create in some way. We’ve all got creative corners. Let’s dust them off.
11.18.08
Lou Holtz says the best things
Anyone who loves college football probably knows about Lou Holtz. He’s the former coach of places like Notre Dame and South Carolina, and we watch him on the weekends with Mark May and Reece Davis on ESPN. During the Virginia Tech-Miami game on a recent Thursday night, Coach Holtz told of a pre-game dinner prayer the Notre Dame players would say. It was so great, I thought I would repeat it here. I don’t have an original author, and forgive me if all the words aren’t correct. But this is the gist:
This is the beginning of a new day
God has given me this day to use as I will
I can waste it or use it for good
What I do today is important because
I’m exchanging a day out of my life for it
When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever
Leaving in its place that which I have traded
I want it to be gain, not loss
Good, not evil
Success, not failure
In order that I should not regret the price I paid for it
Because the future is just a whole string of nows
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May we all enjoy the value of today, and choose accordingly. Have a great day.
11.13.08
Meet Karla Dial
Art is a loose term to me. When I asked Karla Dial, one of the news and magazine writers I know, to be a guest on my blog, she said she wasn’t really an artist. But I think she is. And I think anyone who watches today’s news would agree. It’s an art to come to a story, be able to assess its angles, research the facts, and propose an unbiased recounting of why it is important to the readers. Really, not many people do it well anymore. Karla does it very well. Here’s her story, in her own words:
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I got started in my career as a journalist in the most unlikely of places—the library of my junior high school in 1980-something.
I was in ninth grade, about to graduate and move on to senior high school. In order to sign up for classes, the administrators had us all fill out forms indicating our interests to help us find electives. At the top of the form was a blank to fill out titled “Career Objective.”
I paused at that point and really thought about my “career objective” very hard for the first time. Until then, I’d always wanted to be a jockey, like my hero Alec Ramsey in “The Black Stallion” book series by Walter Farley. I loved horses—but my granddaddy’s cattle ranch didn’t really provide the kind of riding, nor his Quarter Horses the kind of racing, I’d read about all those years. And if Alec had taught me anything, it was that the ideal jockey was only five feet tall, if that, and barely over 100 pounds. I was only 14, but I could tell I was going to be just a little too big for the job.
So I thought about what I was good at instead. I took Advanced Placement English, and my teachers had always spoken very highly of my writing. I’d even written a children’s book when I was in sixth grade that one of them submitted for publication. I thought about deadlines for a moment, from long-range book projects to daily newspapers, and figured something in the mid-point, like a monthly magazine, would suit me best. So I wrote “Journalist” in the blank, and that was it. A star was born!
Of course, that’s a total lie—but something really did start to happen from that day forward. I signed up for my high school newspaper, the Purple Press, and was the editor of it by my senior year, then went on to major in journalism at New Mexico State University. It might be a big party school, but it happens to have an excellent journalism program. I got a job as a reporter at the college paper, The Round-Up, and went on my collegiate way.
About two and a half years into that, however, I got very discouraged and had a hard time reconciling my career choice with my Christian faith. I remember walking across campus one day, praying, “God, I don’t want to be a journalist. The field is full of alcoholics, and they’re all so anti-You!” So I switched my major to, of all things, psychology. (Talk about anti-God!) That lasted until I had to take a course called Experimental Methods, which involves a lot of math. Nothing drives me to my knees faster than math, so I figured it was time to get back to what God was really calling me to do, and began concentrating on journalism again. A job covering NMSU football and basketball as a stringer for the Albuquerque Journal—the largest newspaper in the state—literally fell into my lap, and I started covering games on some of the tightest deadlines known to man.
The last summer before my graduation, the name of the game was all about finding a good internship somewhere—but I was 0 for six because all the newspapers in the area were into affirmative action, and I am not Hispanic. (Though a strong case could definitely be made for hiring a white girl under affirmative action in that area of the country.) One day during the spring semester, I got a phone call from my advisor, who happened to be the head of the journalism department.
“Karla, I’m concerned about you because you’re oh-for-six on internship opportunities, and the only reason is that you’re not Hispanic,” he said. “You make better grades and have more experience than all these other kids who are getting hired.”
“Well, I can’t think of anything else to do except just keep trying,” I told him.
“There’s one paper you might be really interested in,” he told me. “The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, hires four college interns every summer, and one of them is always in the sports department.”
“That does sounds interesting,” I said. “I’ll have to check it out.”
“I thought you’d say that,” he said. “And that’s why I took the liberty of writing them a letter and signing your name to it. I just wanted you to know about it in case they call you!”
I was too stunned to even tell him how unethical that was. Not that it would have done any good after the fact, anyway. But about a week later, I did get a call from the Press-Enterprise, telling me they’d hired me for the summer.
That was a major turning point in my life. By the time I went back to school in the fall, I’d decided I would just go ahead and be a sportswriter, and if that was the case, Southern California—home to a plethora of professional teams—was the only place worth doing it. So I blanketed the region with my resume, planned a trip back over my Thanksgiving break, and set up about a half-dozen interviews. I told the editors even if they didn’t have a job opening, I would just like to meet with them and hear whatever advice they could offer me.
So that’s what I did. I rented a white Mustang convertible and met with editors in Santa Barbara, Antelope Valley, Pasadena—anywhere I could get somebody to spend time with me. The very last place I visited was The Desert Sun, the daily newspaper in Palm Springs. And as I drove through the mountains, farther and farther away from my boyfriend in Huntington Beach—the guy who at the time covered the Angels for the Press-Enterprise—I thought it was the last place I wanted to work, too. But since I had the appointment, I figured I might as well keep it.
When I walked up to the sports desk, there was just one guy sitting there—Larry Bohannon, the golf writer.
“You must be here about the prep job,” he said.
“What prep job?” I asked. “I’m just here for a meeting.”
As it turned out, the paper had fired the prep sports guy a week earlier for making up quotes and only pretending to go to games. The sports editor liked my resume because I was somewhat familiar with the area already—having spent the summer just 45 minutes away in Riverside—and asked if I could stay long enough to try out for the job. I said no way! I had papers to write, finals to take, back in New Mexico. So we scheduled a tryout for right after graduation instead. When I came back in December, they showed me around the valley, took me to look at apartments, wined and dined me quite a bit, and had me go out to interview a guy at a church about a car racing team he was organizing. I had to write the story in the office, on deadline—while everyone there was bouncing off the walls and having a Christmas party! They figured if I could write under those circumstances, I could handle anything, so they offered me the job. And to paraphrase an old proverb, a job in the hand is worth two on the beach—so I took it.
So that’s how I got started in journalism. Obviously, it’s not where I ended up—I now run a monthly newspaper on education reform for a libertarian think tank in Chicago while freelancing about bodybuilding for Muscle & Fitness magazine and conservative grassroots activism for Citizen. But isn’t that exactly what I said I wanted to do when I was in ninth grade?
The one thing I would really like to say about the beginning of my career, though, is that when I got that job in Palm Springs, I was a Christian, but I wasn’t letting Jesus control my life. In fact, I’d chucked my Christianity into the corner completely because I was tired of feeling like I had to perform well enough for the Lord to love me. I could never be good enough, no matter how hard I tried! So I had decided that I would rather go to Hell in one piece than live my life in two pieces, if that was what Christianity was.
I thought I got the job because I was just so smart and so talented! But three months into it—with my boyfriend 100 miles away in Huntington Beach and my family 1,000 miles away in New Mexico—I was more alone than I’d ever been, and both my job and my attitude sucked. That’s when I was sent out to write a feature story on Lyndee Hovsepian, a sophomore at one of the high schools I covered who’d just qualified for the Olympic swim trials—and during that interview, she and her mother invited me to go to church with them sometime. I said to myself, you know, I might be the biggest screw-up Christianity has ever seen, but I am not completely stupid—and I can tell when it’s time to take care of business.
So I went to church with them the next week and met the rest of the family. As I was walking up the sidewalk, the dad took one look at me, pointed right at me, and said, “You’re an answer to prayer!”
While I inwardly freaked out, thinking, “Man, this guy has been out to lunch a LOT longer than an hour”—I mean, who had ever said anything like that to me in my entire life?—I politely asked him what he meant. He said the family had known for a long time that Lyndee’s talent was going to attract attention, so they’d been praying for the right journalist to come along to write the story. And that person was me.
Long story short—I rededicated my life to the Lord that day. The Hovsepian family basically adopted me. I broke up with my boyfriend and started really growing in the Lord for the first time—coming to realize that I wasn’t in Palm Springs, in the job that I had, because of my own talent or brains. The Lord had simply been orchestrating my steps all that time. And my performance had nothing to do with His love for me. No, I could never be good enough, love God enough, to be saved—so all I could do was rely on His grace and let Him love me. That totally changed my perspective!
About 18 months later, a new guy was hired as one of the assistant city editors at the paper. He was six months out of rehab for—you guessed it!—alcoholism. He asked me what brought me to Palm Springs, and I told him this story. Not too long afterward, he asked Jesus into his heart—and two days after that, the Lord said to me, “That is your husband!” Sure enough, six months later he asked me to marry him, so I said yes. About 18 months into our marriage, he took a job writing for Citizen magazine at Focus on the Family, so we moved to Colorado Springs. He’s now the vice president for media relations there, and I do all my freelance work from home. God has an amazing sense of humor.
Sherri asked me to tell you what my forte is as a writer. I’ve always been very intrigued by crawling around inside other people’s heads and finding out what makes them tick, and then helping them tell their stories. My favorite thing is to tell stories like this one, though I usually find it easier to do when they are other people’s stories and not my own! (They’re easier to edit that way.) So as it turns out, journalism is not as anti-God as I thought it would be in college. If God can use me, He can use anything!
The best advice I can offer anyone is that whatever you do, do your best. Give your heart to the Lord, and let Him orchestrate your steps—and then stand back and watch as He creates art out of your life.
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I’m sure you can tell from the story many of the other reasons I love Karla – she’s hilarious, smart as a whip, and always has the perfect thing to say in any circumstance. It would really be worth your time to pick up Muscle & Fitness Hers, where Karla writes a monthly column. She is a fitness guru, and competes in fitness competitions, so she knows what she’s talking about. She’ll quickly become one of your favorite reads, I’m sure.
Life anew
It’s my favorite time in the garden. Everything’s dead. The frost has put things to rest. And there, in the dry, monochromatic landscape, hidden to all but the seeing eye, is life.
For those of us who are Christians and who tend gardens, resurrection is perhaps the easiest part of the Savior story to comprehend. Out of death, life. A seed is planted, but in its due time, bursts forth with an entirely new kind of life, a new body.
The seed is dull and small and hard, and sometimes barely visible. It has no signs of life, and oftentimes falls to the cold dirt, or rides the gusty autumn winds, with virtually no fanfare. Only those who really know what’s happening can even pick it out. To most, it is completely unrecognizable, and completely unimportant.
This is the time when all of the energy of the former plant is infused in a power-packed little pellet. Everything the plant has worked for and proven rests in the hands of this tiny bit of resurrection power. All its hopes laid to rest, with only the hope of resurrection.
Then, in the spring, when the harshness of winter has torn against the barrier of the naked seed, when the piles of snow have burdened its being, and when the rains and storms of early spring have pushed it to its limit, that tiny miracle begins to show signs of life. It breaks open, and the most delicate shoot of little green life pushes with great power through the dirt. Uncanny power. Resurrection power. Something so small, so fragile, should never have the strength to do what it does. But so it does. And to those of us watching, it is jaw-dropping.
From death, life. From cold, motionless seed, breathtaking beauty; delicious food; sustenance for a microcosmic civilization; a buffet for birds and bees feeding from the river of life in its pollen, dusting the earth with the powder of potential. Life anew. A life never imagined in the mind of the seed, but gestating there all along.
So I am out in the yard, where every year I harvest a selection of seeds for my seed collection. I leave the rest to find their way to the ground, and I wait for resurrection power — the joy that is to come.
11.06.08
Meet Reg Franklyn
I’ve got another talented friend for you to meet. Reg Francklyn is a photographer that has consistently done great work for us at Citizen. You can throw him into any situation, and you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to get. He has a great eye for the story, captures all the right moments, and is as flexible as all get out (these kinds of jobs can give you whiplash). Here’s his story, in his own words:
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I have always enjoyed taking photos. I started using a darkroom in the 6th grade thanks to a math teacher who set one up at my elementary school. I did not really know anything about what a good photo was, but I loved the look of a print revealing itself in the developer. I took a few more pictures in High School and worked in the darkroom some more. I really did not take what I considered to be a decent photo until I was in college, when I went to the Sand Dunes and to shoot some 2 ¼ black and whites. Kind of hard to take a bad photo there.
While I was at the college I was influenced by Ben Benschneider and Myron Wood. Ben had a long history as a commercial photographer and Myron was well known for his documentary work on Southwest Colorado and New Mexico. Myron made exquisite black and white prints from 35mm copy film and special developer.
I graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Political Science and a minior in photography. After waffling for a few months I decided I really wanted to go to Art School and was accepted at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena , CA (http://www.artcenter.edu/accd/index.jsp)
The program was 8 semesters. After going 4,and needing a break, I decided to work as a photographer’s assistant for a while. I was also out of money. I got to work for some well known LA photographers and saw lot of shooting styles. After a year of doing that, I moved back to Colorado Springs and tried to get some work. I started out doing some freelancing for the now defunct ” Colorado Springs Sun,” a daily paper. I then got a job a KOAA channel 5, working as a part time freelance photographer, and later working full time in the studio, which I did not care for. The pay was lousy, but the access to interesting new stories was great.
I got a big break when I started doing a lot of work for Hewlett-Packard with product photos, environmental user shots, and some travel to HP plants around the US. Many of the photos I took were used as magazine covers for trade magazines. I did in-camera photo composite work using multiple 4″ x 5″ cameras and complicated lighting setups. I went to do a lot of work for different high tech companies form there.
Focus on the Family moved to town around that time, and I helped with a lot of product photos. I shot covers for Focus on the Family magazines and features for many of the other magazines.
Shooting for Citizen magazine has been my favorite assignment, and I even went on a few international trips with writer Steve Adams. Sherri has been a great editor and champion of my work, and I love working with her.
Along the way, I got into aerial photos, construction photos, and Architecture. I still don’t have my license yet, but I do have over 200 hours of flight time at the controls and 400 landings in the Cessna 172 I use.
Of course Digital now rules the roost for photographers. I was a pretty early adapter of Digital, shelling out $6,000 for the Nikon D1 . It was pretty hard to learn to work with the photos because computers were weak and expensive and the internet was not the wonderful place for learning it is now. The learning curve was steep.
Right now I like that the digital SLR can do just about every job, from a 10′x 12′ mural at a tv station to a small illustration. Although I am now pretty good with Photoshop, and even teach it at a community college, I mostly like straight photography. I do like the instant image feedback so I can review pictures with the user when appropriate. I am always looking for that “decisive moment” and the freedom one gets with digital is a big help in capturing it in low light.
I have to say right now I am having a lot of worries about photography as a career. There are many people who want the lifestyle and will do the work. Fees and usage are under pressure as many users expect all rights for the assignment. Photography assignments often can dry up in a recession as well. The key of course is self-promotion, which I am terrible at and need to do a better job with.
So, I am keeping my options open and trying to self assign more work. I am pretty sure that things will improve and get better–there will always be an assignment for photographer with a good eye.
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And Reg is a photographer with a good eye. If you have any photography needs, look him up. You can post to the blog, and I’ll pass on your interest to our friend. Thanks, Reg.
