St. Michael’s B200 is the Gender Neutral hall. Students who live here identify on every part of the gender and sexuality spectrum from cisgender male and female to transgender to non-binary.

At the time of their interview with Jackalope Magazine, the group of SFUAD film majors had received roughly $700 in crowd funded donations. By the next morning, that number had jumped to $1,390. While that’s still short of the $5,000 goal, the group spearheading a recently launched IndieGogo campaign for their upcoming project, A Film, were more than giddy about the sudden spike in donations. The brainchild of junior film major Alvie Hurt, who serves as writer-director for the project, A Film is a sort of “meta” comedy. The story follows a young writer attempting to write a screenplay for a film. Along the main character’s journey, his hyperactive thought process throws the viewer into a cinephile’s mindset, breaking the fourth wall any chance it can while paying homage to various styles and genres along the way—a fitting story for a group of film majors to undertake. A Film is comprised of all film majors: Hurt, Austin Ross, Nathan Regier and Amy West with the film’s marketing being handled in part by Shantanu Sagara. “It’s literally getting in the head of a writer,” explained Hurt. “—and that’s where it all came [from].” Hurt previously made this project for one of his production classes at the film school, shooting in two days and editing in one. Displeased with its production value and listening to his friend’s excitement for improving the film, Hurt decided to remake the project and raise enough money to meet his visual expectations. “I find it very personal to Alvie’s experience and I think that that’s really cool,” said West, one of the producers of the project. “It’s very relatable, though,” added Regier, the director of photography for A Film, noting that while the story’s main character is a direct reference to Hurt’s experience, viewers can find its appeal in not only the satirical nature of its writing, but the visual parodying of mainstream film styles. “It’s an inside joke that everyone can be apart of,” added West. The way IndieGogo campaigns work is that, contrary to other crowd funding sites like Kickstarter, the money raised equals money earned for the production even if their projected goal is not met. “This is the most money I’ve ever worked with myself,” said Ross, EPK director for A Film, who was not alone with his statement. Hurt, Regier and West all explained the anxiety working with that amount of money, though their nerves seemed undisturbed with camaraderie at a high. A Film isn’t the only crowd-funded project being headed by film majors. ArcadeTV and Waterless Petunias all launched this semester and are currently underway, though the team of A Film doesn’t think competition is the right word to describe the other projects. They expressed their love for all members of the other crews and the excitement for the amount of budding talent within the department. Hurt’s film is set to begin principle photography March 27, following spring break. In addition to A Film, Sagara will be making a film about the making of A Film, to which Hurt added, “Christopher Nolan has nothing on us!”...

Writers paid tribute to James Baldwin at The Lannan Foundation’s The Fire This Time event Feb. 13.

Members of the Jackalope staff share memories of their worst Valentine’s Day experiences.

What are the borders in our lives? The physical, psychological borders that strain our society? That is the central question SFUAD’s playwriting class hopes to answer in its spring production of Borders: Crossing the Line. Dale Dunn and Lynn Goodwin are in their second year of teaching playwriting, a class that started as an independent study. But, the duo felt the craft of playwriting deserved a more permanent home in SFUAD’s curriculum. “It’s a wonderful outreach project for the university,” Dunn said. In the class’ first year, Dunn and Goodwin produced Left to Our Own Devices: Staying Connected in the Digital Age. It was performed off campus at Warehouse 21. “When we performed last year a lot of people came up and said ‘well I’ve never seen anything by the university,’” Dunn began. “A lot of people hesitate to come out to the campus, but having the show in downtown Santa Fe opens up access to a lot of different audience members who were thrilled to see the variety of students that we have here, and hear their different opinions of what’s going on.”   The production was performed in partnership with students from the New Mexico School for the Arts, a performance high school in Santa Fe. They plan to continue the collaboration this year as well. When asked if some of the dark, adult subject matter was too much for high school students, Goodwin was dismissive. “Oh no,” she said. “Sometimes they’re worse than you guys.” Goodwin and Dunn were well aware of the tumultuous times we are living in, which heavily informed their opinion for this year’s subject: borders. Between foreign soil struggles, like ISIS and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as domestic court cases that highlight our current racial tension, the duo felt that a nuanced look at universal division was needed. “[We want] students to see where they are, and feel like they have a voice in the world, that their voice is heard,” said Goodwin A typical class starts with a discussion on a play students read for homework. The plays vary from classics like A Streetcar Named Desire, to untraditional plays like The Laramie Project and Ajax in Iraq. This transitions into a general discussion of craft, often using other plays as examples. Lastly, a significant portion of class time is spent writing and workshopping pieces. One of Dunn and Goodwin’s favorite aspects is the diversity of voices in the classroom, with majors ranging from Creative Writing to Music, Performing Arts to Film. “We’re always surprised by the shape that it takes, because of everyone’s different point of view,” said Goodwin. Santa Fe will have to wait until early May to see just what those different opinions are....

SFUAD Photography Program Director Tony O’Brien, David Scheinbaum and Norman Mauskopf exhibit work at Verve.

Jackalope Magazine recently sat down with senior film student William Khouri whose latest project is ArcadeTV, a comedy series planned for YouTube.

With students from 87 high schools across the country submitting 140 entries to the 2015 Glazner Prize for Creative Writing, competition was fierce. This year’s winners were announced this week, chosen by SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department co-chairs Matt Donovan and Dana Levin. Named for the founder of the Creative Writing Program, Greg Glazner, the Glazner contest was conceived as a way to engage creative writing high school students across the country with SFUAD’s Creative Writing Department.  Winners receive publication of their award-winning writing in Jackalope. Additionally, the first place winner receives an iPad with retina display; second place receives a Kindle Fire; and third place receives a $50 Amazon gift card. And the winners are…   Alexandra Spensley is a junior at Avon Lake High School in Ohio. She was named a finalist in the Sierra Nevada College High School Writing Contest, and her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cadaverine, The Postscript Journal, Canvas Lit, and Crashtest. Her writing has also received recognition from the Live Poets Society of New Jersey and Vincennes University. Read her award-winning piece, “Portrait of a City.”       Joseph Jordan-Johnson is a senior at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois, who says she doesn’t take herself “very seriously—I’m not entirely sure if this is good or bad.  I enjoy long walks on the beach and effective discourse on racial equality in America. I believe the written word is the most raw form of communication, stripping narratives of the language that makes them whole, and creating art within the shells you made. Also, I’m irrationally in love with Beyonce.” Read his award-winning piece. “Hair.”   Emily Zhang is a high school junior from Richard Montgomery High School in Maryland. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of England, the Sierra Nevada Review, and Princeton University. She enjoys watching reality television. Read her award-winning piece, “History of Navigation.”...

“Portrait of a City” by Alexandra Spensley received first place in the 2015 Glazner Prize for Creative Writing contest, sponsored by SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department.   Part I: Streets & Avenues The city receded like tidewater, brackish. I watched it slide. Metal accepted metal in a blur of ticking steel, urban heartbeats. Sidewalks swallowed themselves: unclean tongues roving through a city scorched sideways. Who will shoulder this weight? I am left with empty husks, the shadows of buildings ashen as roman carpets. Alone, I map my way through the rubbish: slabs of stone, loose teeth, a child’s violin splayed open and bleeding, red-eyed mice twisting in its hollow chest. I hung the city like wallpaper, then tore it in two— and it was  not stitched from a paste of broken stars, not submerged in the hot sways of red dresses— no, the city was a cut-glass mobile, enthralling, suspended above a child’s eager hands. Part II: Harvests We knew we were done for when the newspaper said one-fourth of the houses in the eastern district now stood vacant, empty monuments to the past. That same newspaper had voted us best hardware store in the city for three nonconsecutive years—we had their dates on a plaque in the frosted-glass window out front—but who needs a hardware store when there’s no houses left? I started rearranging things. I moved the Phillips screwdrivers to aisle four and put most of the auto parts by the cash register. Nothing worked except positioning the blue paint-thinner jars in front of the window; this spiked sales for a few weeks before my conscience made me move everything back. Soon nearly everyone who came in was trying to tune up their cars for the long drive to a new house, buying gallon jars of oil and gas or trailer hitches for U-Hauls.  When I asked them where they were moving to, they all mumbled something along the lines of “Oh, Barb and I are headed west” or “We’re taking the kids up north for high school”—indiscriminate, vague substitutes for “anywhere but here”. Outside, foreclosure signs sprouted like poppies in a pasture. Outside, the rain started. I thought we could struggle by on what we’d saved up from the good years, but when the generator busted ($5,000) and the roof started leaking ($6,000), I had no choice but to close the place down. I used all of our meager revenue from the past four months printing out huge black-and-red EVERYTHING MUST GO signs, hung them out front next to the posters of angry-eyed kids with ‘missing, desperacido‘typed in block letters on top. There were dozens of those missing posters—I pasted each one I found; I just couldn’t stand those kids’ eyes. My wife suggested that we move out after closing shop, let our house become another shuttered tomb in the sea of a dying city. I told her no, I couldn’t release this land after so many years of holding it— so long that it had bloomed roots around my tired wrists. Still, the sight of the grocery on Sunday pierced me: washed-out high school kids, coughing up cigarettes in the parking lot; shelves heavy with a lack of bread; the thick, tangible seep of money right into the greedy earth. Gone. In the end, we couldn’t sell everything in the shop and drove it to the town dump instead; we needed three full pickup beds to move it all. Paradoxically, the dump seemed to be the liveliest place in the city: laughing, tanned men in cutoff shirts, cheerily tossing mountains of metal screws and power drills into the gaping tongue of a trash compressor. The leather of the pickup’s passenger seat stuck tight to my thighs; soon, summer would be here. In the rearview mirror, I watched the men heave trash bags over their shoulders like insect cocoons full to bursting, like a reaping of...