This is my entry into the New Threats to Freedom Scholarship Contest (yup, it’s that time again… getting ready to start my graduate degree in writing at Chatham University this fall).

Word count: 479

Campus Censorship and Independent Student Journalism

George Lukianoff in his New Threats to Freedom video argues that censorship and the limitation of free speech inhibit college students’ ability to engage in discourse and public debate after graduation.

When someone confronts you about your beliefs, asks you “why” and presents another side, you are forced to think about why you believe what you believe.  This discourse is essential in a democratic society, and without it, we are reduced to, as Mr. Lukianoff puts it, an “armed camp mentality” in which members of each camp fling nothing more than insults at each other.

College is a modern day right of passage for many young adults, and it is essential that these young adults learn how to debate, discuss and share ideas civilly if there’s any hope for the continued prosperity of our country.

These institutions will not change unless they are forced, and the only people who can force that change are the people that make the institution possible: the students.

Enter student journalism.  The media is often called the fourth estate, with the first, second and third being the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the United States federal government.  The fourth estate informs our country’s citizens of what’s going on in the world and what our government is doing.  As a working journalist and former student journalist, I believe that the fourth estate is essential in keeping the government honest.  It’s much harder to keep a secret with a reporter constantly nosing around your office.

Independent student newspapers can and should serve the same function on college campuses.  At the University of Pittsburgh, I worked for The Pitt News as a student journalist.  I was lucky, because The Pitt News is not only daily, but independent.  The school administration has no say over what is printed, no matter how critical of the administration a story might be.

My time at The Pitt News taught me to look at every angle of a story and ask the hard questions.  I no longer accept things at face value.  I do my research, and I know why I believe what I believe.  I learned, not only through The Pitt News but many of my classes at Pitt, how to engage in open discourse, how to share ideas and how to learn from ideas that differ from my own.

The ability to express opinions freely, to criticize a school administration, to debate with my peers: those things have made me a better person, and a better American citizen.

Many school newspapers aren’t independent, but I believe that is the best place to start in the fight to end campus censorship.  If your student newspaper isn’t independent, start a campaign to make it independent, and make sure you involve your local newspaper.  Once you establish the fourth estate on your campus, the administration will have a tough time squelching opinion.

Click for a larger version. Drawing and text (c) Kelly Lynn Thomas

I drew this for a scholarship contest for my MFA.  I’m really pleased with how it came out, so I decided to share it.  I rarely draw, but I think I’m going to have to start doing it more often.  As long as I have source material to reference, my drawings usually turn out okay.  I will never be a famous artist or anything, but I do have a lot of fun drawing, and in high school I did it all the time (mostly I copied CLAMP drawings…).  I think having various creative outlets are a really good thing.  Mine, aside from writing of course, are sewing, calligraphy and drawing.  What are yours?

P.S.: I am soooo not a poet! I like the images in this one, though.

Spring is on the way, and I'm ready for it. Photo courtesy stock.xchng.

Last month Grey Sparrow Journal won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Best New Journal Award!  I’m really glad that one of my short stories contributed to the overall quality of a great new literary magazine.  You can read more about the award on Grey Sparrow‘s website, here, or check out my short story “La Catedral” here.

I’ve also been having a blast writing reviews of young adult novels for The Figment Review.  My reviews are published on the first Thursday of every month, so be sure to check them out, and feel free to make suggestions.  I recommend subscribing to their RSS, because all the reviewers there are pretty awesome and well deserving of recognition.

(In case you missed the boat, Figment is an awesome website for teens and young adults ((and older adults too)) to share their writing with peers and friends.  I beta-tested the site over the summer, and while I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to hang out over there, it’s an awesome site and I highly recommend it.  The community is friendly and open, and there are some great stories.)

What I am most excited about this year, though, is getting my metafictional travel memoir, The Goddess España, out into the world.  I’m working on my final revision, which involves polishing the prose and trimming the text to get rid of some dead weight.  I’ve already written a query letter and have picked out a few choice agents to whom I plan to send said query letter once I’ve completed this final final revision.

I’ve spent two years polishing and refining this book from a more academic-oriented experiment in how to combine fiction and nonfiction to a beautiful travel memoir with wonderful short stories scattered throughout. I say that not to brag, but because I’m confident that this book can and will do what all travel writing should do: open a reader’s eyes to a new place, new people and new experiences.  In short, I believe in my book!

(And okay, I’m also really excited about our upcoming trip to Japan!  My husband D.J. and I will be heading off to “glorious Nihon” (as I like to call it) at the end of March for a visit to our good friend Emily who is in Osaka with the JET program.  I plan on doing a lot of eating, especially of regional favorite okonomiyaki and, of course, SUSHI.  D.J. also plans to drag me to an Osaka Pro Wrestling show, and I’m sure it will be an experience.  If you’ve been to Osaka or Tokyo and have a favorite restaurant or tourist/sight-seeing spot, please leave a comment with your recommendation!

University of Alcala, Spain. In 2010 I finished my travel memoir about Spain. In 2011 I hope to publish it! (Photo by Kelly Thomas, 2011)

Well, 2010 is officially over and that means we’re all looking forward to a whole new year.  2010 was a great year for me: I got married, was published for the first time, gave my first public reading, became an assistant editor of a newspaper (albeit a very small one) and grew a lot as a person.

Resolutions

I hope 2011 will follow in 2010′s footsteps.  I never used to be one for resolutions, but I made two last year and since I kept them achievable, I was able to keep them.  I’m doing the same for this year, although I’m building a bit on last year’s.

Last year I resolved to get published (which I did!) and to read two books I already owned for each new book I bought.  I was 95% successful on the second one, and that’s pretty good (especially if you know how many books I buy in a year).

This year, I have a few more resolutions, but a few of them are basically the same:

1. Get my book published.
2. Read five books I own for every new book I buy.
3. Post once weekly at my blog about storytelling and metafiction, The Narrative in the Blog, as part of WordPress’s 2011 Post A Day challenge.

I am confident I’ll be able to achieve these goals!

Charities

In 2011 I also hope to continue supporting the great literary institutions I supported in 2010, including City of Asylum/Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.  I also supported National Novel Writing Month in 2010 by coordinating the Great NaNoWriMo Book Drive here in Pittsburgh, and had a great time doing it, but in 2010 I’d like to focus on the “home team” so to speak.  NaNoWriMo is an incredible event and I’m so pleased to have seen it grow so much in the four short years I’ve been a participant, but both City of Asylum and my library have big plans for the new year, and I want to help them achieve their goals, because they are my neighbors and a great resource for us Pittsburghers.

To that end, starting January 8, I’ll be participating in the Carnegie Library’s 2011 Winter Read -a-Thon.  I hope you’ll consider sponsoring me!  I plan to read for about 50 hours during the course of the event.  If you sponsor me for just ten cents per hour, it comes out to a $5 donation–and every little bit helps!

Here are my suggested sponsorships:

• $.10 x 50 hrs. = $5
• $.25 x 50 hrs. = $12.50
• $.50 x 50 hrs. = $25
• $1.00 x 50 hrs. = $50
• $2.00 x 50 hrs. = $100

You can also make a one-time gift.  Drop me a line at kelly.lynn.thomas[at]gmail[dot]com if you’d like to sponsor me!  I’ll post more about my Read-a-Thon plans in the near future, as well.

Secret announcements

On January 8 or 9 I have great news to announce, so look out for that.  I wish I could post it now, but I’ve been asked to wait until an official announcement is made.  So until then….

Happy New Year!

Photo (c) City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. Used with permission.

Back in September, I was invited to give a reading as part of City of Asylum Pittsburgh‘s “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t speak my mind” reading during the Mexican War Streets’ house tour.  If you’re not familiar with COA, I highly recommend checking them out, reading their magazine Sampsonia Way, and donating to help support their mission of giving asylum to writers from around the world who face persecution, imprisonment or death for speaking and writing their minds.

While this wasn’t my first reading, it was my first public reading, so I was nervous! I read “Los Caídos,” which is a story about two people dealing with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.  A group of students from Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts middle school read before me.  They were absolutely fabulous, and I wish I would have arrived a little bit earlier to hear more of them read.

While I was reading, I couldn’t read the audience.  I had no idea what anyone was thinking, whether or not they were bored, enthralled, wishing they were anywhere else but too polite to get up and leave, or what.  So I plowed through the story, constantly reminding myself to look up at the audience (which I still should have done more of!) and read at a reasonable pace–not too fast, not too slow.  At the end, which seemed to me to take absolutely forever, I was exhausted, and still had no idea what the audience was thinking, despite some applause.

My husband assured me I performed wonderfully, and said a woman walking by stopped dead in her tracks to listen, but I’m still not entirely sure I believe him. He assures me it’s true, but surely she couldn’t have been that interested in me!  One of the CAPA students complemented my story, so I suppose at least one person (aside from my husband, of course) enjoyed it, and that’s plenty enough for me.  Regardless of audience reaction, it was a wonderful experience (as was COA’s Jazz Poetry concert, which I had the privilege of writing about for my newspaper), and I’m proud to support COA’s mission!

For an excerpt of “Los Caídos” and my article on the Jazz Poetry concert, click the “Portfolio” tab.

Me with my copy of Grey Sparrow Issue 3 - Why yes, I do realize how silly this photo is!

Grey Sparrow Journal published my short story “La Catedral” in the summer 2010 volume of its print literary journal.

This is my first published story, and as such I’m very excited about it!  Grey Sparrow‘s editor has been a great source of encouragement to me, and she decided to not only publish “La Catedral” in the summer print magazine, but to also publish it in the fall online edition.  When that’s release I will be sure to post a link here.

In the meantime, please check out the online summer edition of Grey Sparrow, and consider purchasing a copy of the print summer edition, which you can do here.

“La Catedral” is a short story from my metafictional travel memoir The Goddess España that tells the story of Father Fernando, a priest at the Catedral de Alcalá de Henares.  It is, at its core, a story about storytelling and magic, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

The Goddess España is a labor of love for me.  I’ve been working on it for three years now and hope to send it out to agents and literary presses this fall.  It combines the story of my spiritual and physical journey across Spain with fictional accounts of the places I visit and the people I meet, or wish I could have met.   You can read a few excerpts by clicking on the Portfolio tab at the top of this page.

I am kind of like the Duquesne Incline--moving right along! (Forget about the fact that it only moves back and forth on a fixed track.)

During the very brief time that I was an “Examiner” over at Examiner.com, my “manager” told us that we shouldn’t write a welcome post–just jump right in to it, get it moving.  That seemed so counter-intuitive to me, but I was so excited to have been accepted to an “official” blogging “news” site where I could make a few bucks that I generally followed their guidelines and didn’t write an introductory post.  Of course, their guidelines became more and more constrictive, and I was still only making a penny per page view.  Very quickly I realized I was being used and stopped posting. If they wanted me to play by their rules, they were going to have to pay me, and that wasn’t going to happen.

Later I learned that the man behind Examiner.com was conservative, Christian activist billionaire Philip Anschutz.  Now, as a practicing Pagan, I’ve got nothing against conservatives or Christians, and I probably even lean conservative when it comes to some fiscal and economic issues, but I do have trouble working (albeit very indirectly) for someone who supports suppressing the rights of others, as Anschutz did in 1992 in Colorado by funding anti-homosexual initiatives.  He also supported President Bush, and while I am not one to demonize someone who’s had that job (I know the pressure would kill me after about two days), Mr. Bush was not exactly known for being open-minded when it comes to civil rights for ALL Americans, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.

So perhaps in a small way this is me giving the middle finger to Examiner.com–they use citizen journalists and barely give them a pittance, and won’t even let them write introductory posts! Absurd! Well, take this, Examiner.com! From now on I’m going to write as many introductory posts as I please.

But more than that, this is me taking control of my career as a writer.  Now, I am a real, paid, full-time journalist, and while my newspaper (The Northside Chronicle) is small and only has a staff of three and I am technically an AmeriCorps volunteer, I know that money should always flow TO the writer, and my words are too precious to give away for free–unless I am giving them away for my own purposes, like here, where I hope to create a comfortable space for me and anyone who might drop by.  Ultimately, changing people’s lives with my words is far more important to me than money, but I do need to eat, and if someone else is going to gain from my writing, I should too!

Here, and over at my other blog, The Narrative in the Blog, (in which I explore metafiction in all its varied forms) what I hope to gain from my writing, and what I hope you, the reader, gain from my writing is insight into the human condition, the world around us and ourselves.  I hope my words will touch you in some platonic, non-sexual way, and that you will leave here having learned something and with something to think about it.  In turn, I hope you tell me what you think and feel, so that I have some proof that I’ve made a difference.