At the beginning of the semester, the Folio staff put out a call for students to participate in a multimedia contest called “Franken-Folio” in which students were asked to remix past Folio material with copyright-free material through the Library of Congress to create something new and original from the old.
“This semester we tried something different,” says Folio’s literary editor Jason McFarland. “We thought it would be great to get students involved in potentially collaborative processes but specifically in reinventing work of other students from past folio publications. So we issued a challenge to those who were interested and we called it ‘Franken-Folio’. The idea was to take work that was collected and offered to remix and to use only that material to make something entirely different from it.”
Several multimedia videos were submitted using this ‘Franken-Folio’ challenge, which was the brain-child of Professor Lisa Bickmore. This year was Bickmore’s last year as the faculty advisor. She is putting together a multimedia essay class for fall semester. Brandon Alva will be Folio’s faculty advisor for the upcoming issue next fall.
A reading and publication launch was held for Salt Lake Community College’s literary magazine Folio at Taylorsville Redwood Campus’ Markosian Library on Thursday April 19.
Folio is an English department project which encourages the college’s artists and writers to contribute and showcase their work for publication. Folio is published every semester and is launched by a public reading event and gallery.
This semester’s Folio is entitled Memoria, as many of the submissions by students were memoirs. Elements of Folio contain fiction, non-fiction, poetry, artwork and photography. Folio has been expanding their submissions to include multimedia content and an online extension of the magazine.
“I’m always impressed with the quality of the magazine,” says Nean Michael Hawe, a contributor to Folio who read excerpts from his lyric essay and non-fiction manifesto. “It’s just awesome to have a publication like this. It’s a good encouragement just to know that other people actually enjoy your work and want to do something with it, want to put it out there for people to read. I think it’s also inspiring to come to the reading and see what other people have done.”
‘Memoria’
Folio has been publishing student’s works for over a decade. It originally started as a publication project by two former SLCC English Department faculty members by publishing essays from English 1010 and 2010 classes but now has expanded to encompass art and other forms of literature. Every year there is a new editorial staff and a theme which incorporates the overall submissions of that given year.
“We decided to call this issue Memoria which is the Latin term for memory or to remember,” says Kristy Sabey, Folio’s design editor. “Originally it began as most of our submissions were memoirs.”
Sabey shared how many of the submissions in this issue were personal stories and how it is the collective experiences that have made people who they are and allow them to share these stories. Many of the subjects in the book have to do with personal experiences. One story was shared about life in prison, another dealt with the pain of being different.
A couple of poems were performed by their authors in a slam poetry style that is meant to be spoken with an emphasis on flow and rhythm and how the words work together. Sean Sweeny and Theresa Marie Wells DeOliveira performed their pieces rather than reading them.
Students can pick up their free copy of Folio outside of the Student Writing Center in the Administration Building at the Taylorsville Redwood Campus. Interested students can visit the Folio website to view student submissions and multimedia works online and find out how to be a part of Folio’s next issue publication in the fall.
