SFUAD’s new Quidditch club has its first practice session.

The Young Professionals was the second of four senior readings through SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department.

Starting April 24, and every Friday after that, between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., SFUAD students will be able to order lunch from the Street Food Institute food truck. The truck is parked near campus by the Higher Education Center at the intersection of Yucca Street and Siringo Road. The food truck also will also be catering for the fifth annual Outdoor Vision Fest™ (OVF), serving food on May 1, on the SFUAD campus.

“There is an image that we want to put out there ‘cause we think that’s a powerful tool,” said Janel Blanco Jean-Bart, lead vocalist for the Maya Spectra. Maya Spectra describes themselves as independent electronic pop, though members were hesitant to brand themselves as a “pop” band. “Our strong structures tend to reflect pop song structures, but we’re not exactly doing the Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift type thing,” said Donald Peña who, along with his brother Julian, makes up the rest of the Maya Spectra. Beginning more than a year and a half ago as the Janel Blanco Trio, the Maya Spectra has gone from being strictly defined with a jazz label to branching out into creating original scores, and thus, finding its own unique image. Its latest EP, “Music Box,” was released in December and caught the attention of various music publications, including Ear Milk and Entertainment Weekly, to name a few. Perhaps more importantly, they became a household name amongst SFUAD students —Amy West, a junior in the Film School, being one of them. West heard the EP and found inspiration to practice fire dancing to the song “Quicksand.” After posting a short video to her Instagram account, she began pondering the possibilities of incorporating Maya Spectra’s music and her own talents behind the camera. West consulted her peers in the Film School to see who might be interested and piqued the interest of junior Jakob Anderson. After garnering the support of Anderson and his crew and ensuring that she could create the project for class credit (Advanced Cinematography) , West began drafting a script. Unsure of how the band would respond to her pitch, West took the dive and sent a lengthy message to Maya Spectra’s Facebook group. “At the beginning of the semester, I’m like, ‘I’m gonna ask them! I’m gonna ask the band,’” said a giddy West as she sat with the Maya Spectra during band members’ interview with Jackalope Magazine. It soon became apparent to West that the Maya Spectra had reservations about what kind of image the band would be putting out. What initially began as a fire-dancing music video soon became a visual representation of the Maya Spectra’s compositional narrative.  “[The fire-dancing] went completely out the window, but I think what we’re going to end up with will be a much more satisfying piece with a stronger narrative,“ said a hopeful West. “I think it worked out,” added J. Peña, who along with the rest of the band seemed unashamedly confident in West and Anderson’s work—with just cause: their work is incredible. West’s style borders on Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson, with a confident attention to detail, and with grit in only the places where the story calls for it. Both West and Anderson have shown their filmmaking prowess in the past years, Anderson having been DP for various productions including Alice Under Skies and West having completed a variety of short films including Ritual, which won best sophomore film at last year’s Juried show. The video for “Music Box” plans to shoot the weekend of April 17 and will have a rough cut by the end of the semester. Maya Spectra will be playing at this year’s OVF as apart of an interactive live-music installation—the first of its kind at OVF and will also be performing at Quad Stock the same weekend. The band is also a contender for Best of Santa Fe. Click here to...

This week, Jackalope photographers capture the shoes and tattoos of the student body at SFUAD.

Meow Wolf’s newest project, The House of Eternal Return, includes numerous internship opportunities for SFUAD students.

In this interview with David DeVillier, assistant director of campus life, and Terrance Sanders, Student Life operations manager, we hear from two of the friendliest faces on campus.

Alyssa Vogel says String of Pearls is a “woman-empowering show. You will know a woman in the play, whether it’s your mother, your grandmother or someone else.” String of Pearls premieres April 10 and 11 at 7 p.m. and concludes on April 12 at 2 p.m.

Fan fiction is defined as fiction written by fans of TV series, movies or books that includes the characters of the original stories. Widely popular online, fan fiction is an area in which it seems like just about every fan has dabbled at least once or twice. Fan fiction also is a integral part of fandom communities (world wide groups of fans), and has been around since the popularization of it in 1960’s in Star Trek fanzines such as Spockanalia (1967.) Fan fiction certainly has its fans and practitioners in the Creative Writing and Literature Department, as was demonstrated recently when Amaya Garza, sophomore Creative Writing major, lead a Student Writer’s Association workshop on fan fiction. “It’s been my sort of weird dream to teach a fan fiction class,” she says with a laugh. Garza strongly believes that every writer should write or at least take a serious look at fan fiction. “Fan fiction is a useful tool to train a writer in characterization and consistency. I have always been very passionate about characters and…you have to really care about the characters you write about…So when you write fan fiction and you have to take someone else’s character and treat it as your own little thought baby and cradle it and take care of it, it kind of helps you form that bond and you can later transfer that bond to your own characters,” Garza explains. One aspect of writing fan fiction writers struggle with is keeping their versions of the characters in line with the canonical personalities. Garza believes that writing fan fiction and forcing oneself to keep truthful to a character’s essence is good practice for one’s own writing. Creative Writing freshman Chantelle Mitchell agrees with Garza. She believes fan fiction is especially helpful for screenwriting and collaborative work. “…Taking a character that’s not your own and being able to do it justice and stay true to the character while writing is an important skill to have just because in the professional world you won’t always be writing your own characters. If you’re working on a collaborative project or a screenplay or a TV show, somebody else created those characters and you have to be able to write them true to who they are as people. I think fan fiction is a good way to practice that.” Novelist and Creative Writing faculty member James Reich, however, cautions students about writing fan fiction. “If the world you write into isn’t public domain—broadly, pre-1923—you may be wasting your time,” he says. “You could call it a learning environment, but I don’t think it’s a sufficiently challenging one for a serious writer.” Fan fiction fans are aware of its critics. At her seminar, in fact, Garza asked attendees to list the things they didn’t like about fan fiction. What she found was that very few of the characteristics mentioned were exclusive to fan fiction but were rather simply elements of bad writing. “Whenever fan fiction gets a bad reputation it’s because use of cliché, bad diction and bad syntax, poor characterizing…these are all the things that people complain about but when you take a look at it in a list you realize that it’s just the elements of bad writing,” she says. It’s not that fan fiction writers aren’t good at what they do, but rather that a lot of people write fan fiction and a lot of people don’t know how to write well in general. Not everyone has a gift for literature or have the opportunity to study writing at a university. “It’s easier to blame an online community that you don’t know than to say that publishers will publish bad writing.” Reich, however, points out his concerns about the medium itself. “My anxiety about fan fiction… is that, apart from the impossibility of publishing it offline without risking a legal suit, it exists in a vacuum of wish-fulfillment and weak writing that the Internet...