Art Beat: Finding middle ground with creativity

WASILLA — A belated Happy Halloween everyone. My name is Jacob Mann and I cover the art beat for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Stories start in many different ways. This one began with an interview with a seasoned writer living in Spain, and ended with a couple of kids living right here in the Valley.

I’m a firm believer that creative pursuits and the final products contain a certain power. If you ask me, and thankfully lots of other people, creativity has the power to bring people together. I call it the middle, and it’s the ever loving, ever growing ground for human connection, the very foundation of getting along in my book.

I recently interviewed a Palmer raised author who’s currently hanging his hat in Spain. I talked to Joshua Keil about his new book, “In the Land of the Salmon” and naturally, as a fellow scribe, I hit it off with him. We chewed the fat for quite a while and I ended the conversation feeling charged up like a new battery, overflowing with inspiration.

I thought the timing was great since I was thinking of ideas for my next column and I knew that I wanted to talk about the power of storytelling and how it brings people together. His book is a love story set in Alaska. The plot follows a conservative man falling in love with a liberally minded woman, that old nutshell. That of course, is a poignant theme applicable to our current political environment.

“This whole idea of reflecting how polarized our society has become just grew and grew in my head. That’s part of the reason why I set that part of the story in 1969 because that was obviously a very tumultuous time in America that is somewhat analogous to our own time… I feel the answers to some of our most pressing problems more often lie in the middle than people think. That’s the spirit of what I’m trying to capture in these two people,” Keil stated in our interview.

It wasn’t long after my phone interview with Keil that I had the opportunity to sit down at the Wasilla Library and help them judge submissions to their Once Upon a Spooky Night Young Writers Contest.

As a parent, I gotta tell you right now that it sure was tough having to pick one kid’s special little story over the other. But like youth services director Sara Saxton said as I was looking through them, “you gotta do it.” So I did, and despite the anxiety of having to kill my newfound darlings’ darlings, it was a lot of fun. Saxton said that she and her colleagues felt the same.

“Not only was it fun to read them, it was kind of a nice change of pace for our staff. Things have been stressful for so many people lately, so for our staff members to have a little break from what we normally do, and get to read some stories and think about the people that we’re serving kind of in a different way. It’s nice for us to be able to connect with our patrons in that way, and celebrate their creativity,” Saxton said during a follow up interview after the results came in.

I was seriously taken aback by some of these young minds at work. There were some seriously delicious examples of wordplay and plenty of fresh ideas brought to the table. I laughed out loud and audibly said, “wow” to myself quite a bit as I read stories from local students from first grade all the way to senior year in high school.

Some people say Halloween is a special time of year, a time brimming with magical qualities that you can practically cut with a knife, much like these persistent fog spooking up the town. As candy coated and corny as it sounds, I’m one of those people; and so is a local mother I ran into in downtown Palmer during Trick or Treat in the Street.

“Just seeing excitement in their kids’ eyes when they pick out their costumes. They like acting it out and all that. It’s really cute. It makes me think of back when I was a kid, and the magic of Halloween. You could be anybody,” Robins said.

That stuck to me like a glob of glue in some kid’s macaroni art project. It reminded me of how we all loved telling stories and hearing them when we were kids. We all acted out roles we got a kick out of. The kicker is, you get older and you gotta pick a role in life and stick with it. At least that’s what I’m told.

We get older every day whether we like it or not, and that mortal clock keeps on ticking until it’s time to show what we all have under our skins, a skeleton. We all have that one in common, that much I know.

Though we may get old, our ingrained impulse to make sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves will really never die, especially if we stop every once a while and act like a kid painting a picture or listening to his favorite ghost story.

I would like to close this article with one of my two favorite submissions from the writing contest. So, without further ado, here’s some homegrown talent cooked up by your friends and neighbors’ creative children. These were copied and pasted verbatim.

6th Grader, Whimsy “Willa” Rath’s “Child Thief”

On Christmas morning Lily got a doll. It was an expensive china doll, with light brown hair and green eyes, like Lily’s. Unlike Lily, the doll had no freckles, where Lily had lots of freckles. Her mother had made Lily and the doll coordinating dresses. Both dresses were blue, but Lily’s had purple trim and red buttons, and the doll had red trim and purple buttons. Lily loved the doll.

On New Year’s eve, Lily was playing in the woods near her house. It was getting dark, but she

had a lantern, and having her doll with her made her feel braver. She went farther than she normally would. She came across a hole in the side of a hill. She was curious about it. It was dark and she had to duck to fit inside.

Once she was inside, she found it was big enough to stand. As she walked, she held her lantern in front of her. At the end of a long tunnel, she found a door. She knocked on the door, and it swung open. She stepped inside and found a girl about her own age sitting with a black cat on her lap.

The girl said, “we’ve been expecting you.”

Behind Lily, the door swung shut with a thud. Lily hugged her doll tight, and asked the girl how

she’d known she was coming. The girl cackled, and Lily could never remember what happened next.

Bella was exploring the woods near her new house when she found a doll. The doll wore a

tattered blue dress with purple trim and red buttons. The doll had light brown hair, and it’s green eyes were incredibly life-like. They seemed to watch Bella. She wiped its face with her sleeve, and found it covered with brown freckles. She took the doll home and showed her family. Her mom said, “it looks old, like it’s been out there for fifty years.” She helped Bella clean the doll up and do its hair.

It’s eyes seemed to watch them the whole time. Coincidentally, Bella had a doll size pink nightgown with purple flowers that fit the doll, and it even matched on that she had. She loved that she and the beautiful doll now had matching nightgowns, but she wished the doll had dark brown skin and dark hair like her own.

That night at bedtime, Bella’s mom put the doll on the top shelf of the bookcase across from the

end of her bed, and Bella fell asleep gazing at it lovingly. Sometime later she awoke with a start. She thought she heard someone whisper her name, then heard a skittering. In the moonlight she saw that her new doll was sitting on the second shelf from the top. She thought she must have imagined that her mom had put it on the top shelf, and she went back to sleep.

Again she was awakened by a skittering and someone whispering her name in a raspy child’s

voice. “Who’s there?” Bella asked. There was no reply. She saw that the doll had again moved down a shelf. It was now on the third shelf, staring at her. She was starting to freak out a little bit, so she decided to go get her parents. Her parents came in, and the doll was back on the top shelf. Bella believed her parents that she must have imagined the doll moving to a different shelf, and she went back to sleep.

CRASH!

She was awakened by a loud noise and skitter skitter skitter… She sat up and looked around the room. The doll was on her floor, looking up at her with it’s life-like eyes glinting in the moonlight. It’s arms were outstretched, reaching for her. Bella screamed. Her parents came running in. She told her parents what had happened. Of course they didn’t believe her, but they put the doll in her closet anyway, locked the closet door. Her dad tucked the old skeleton key that went to the lock into the pocket of his robe. Bella tossed and turned, but eventually fell back to sleep.

In the morning Bella’s sister came in to wake her up for school. Bella was gone. The family searched the house. Her dad unlocked the closed, to search it just in case, and found that the old doll was also missing. “Local Girl Disappears, Leaves No Trace,” the newspapers read. Neither Bella nor the doll were ever seen again.

Carlos found the doll at an antique shop. He asked his grandma to buy it for him. His grandma

had never seen such an unusual china doll before. It’s china skin was dark, it’s hair almost black. It wore a pink nightgown with purple flowers. Because it was so unusual, Grandma decided to indulge Carlos and bought the doll for him.

Lily couldn’t remember what the witch had said or done, but she knew that the only way her

trapped soul could escape the doll was the trap another child’s soul to take her place. She had sworn she never would, but after fifty years she was happy to finally be at peace.

Bella stared up at Carlos out of her brown glass eyes, and wondered if she’d ever be able to do

the same thing to him that Lily had done to her.

The End

3rd Grader Jesse McClellan’s poem “The Iliamna Lake Monster”

The wind roars,

but it’s not the wind.

The waves of the lake shake,

but it’s not the wave.

The sky blackens,

but it’s not the sky.

For the Iliamna Lake monster is awake, so let the night begin.

First you will hear the cry of the beast and you will hug your

blanket so tightly your fingers will hurt.

Then your little sister (or brother) will say,

“W-wh-what was that?”

“It-it’s alright, now go back to bed,” you will reply.

“Okay um…good night,” your sibling answers.

Then you will feel like you’re being watched from afar.

You want to run away from all of this,but you can’t.

“This isn’t real, this isn’t real,” you tell yourself.

You want to find out what the sound is coming from,

so you put on your favorite bunny slippers and sneak outside.

When you get outside you remember, “Dang it, I forgot my

flashlight!”

Your ears tell you that the sound is coming from the lake.

When you get to the lake you see something.

You can’t see it very well, so you step closer and closer.

Your feet are almost in the water.

Then you can finally see something.

It’s a purple and blue fin, like a fish fin, but bigger.

There it is again, the eerie sound that has been keeping you up,

but it’s louder and it is deafening.

In your mind, you come across and idea.

Then you think, “Nah, that can’t be it.”

But that thought in your mind won’t go away.

The thought that the noise is coming from the creature called the

Iliamna Lake monster.

It roams around Lake Iliamna, in the small town of Ninilchick.

In the wild frontier state called Alaska.

Then you hear the bloodcurdling sound again.

“No this can’t be real!

When I get back to town, I’m going to see a doctor about this

hallucination,” you will say to yourself.

But then you will realize that you are not having a hallucination.

You see the beast’s head that is covered with scales.

You want to scream, but you can’t.

You want to run but you can’t.

You want to tell someone but you can’t.

They’ll think you’re crazy and put you in an asylum!

Just as you are going to run far, far away, the monster of the lake

disappears!

The BEAST will Be Back!

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com