My interpretation of “Arts and Culture”
I first became involved with campus newspaper production about a year ago, and as someone who hates to make decisions, I was stressed. There were so many sections to write for, so many potential article pitches, and so much room for error. Writing is daunting. Writing about things that you’re interested in or passionate about for a section as broad as Arts and Culture makes it much more so. When I first started writing, I would dig through past issues of campus newspapers, hoping for some sort of unlikely but explicit formatting guide that would help me figure out what I should write about instead of what I wanted to write about. Thinking that Arts and Culture was a space for curated reviews filled with abstract fluff terms to make mediocre movies sound better than they are for the sake of being a pretentious film nerd. Seeing that a section I loved did not seem to have space for non-review focused pitches, I felt a bit defeated.
When I first think about an Arts and Culture section, I immediately think of the arts portion of it. The ‘culture’ aspect of Arts and Culture is often no more than diluted, short articles roughly every other issue mentioning something brief about the most recently approaching non-Christian holiday, tokenizing culture instead of appreciating it and providing it with the space it deserves. Moving forward, I want to hear more about your culture on both an individual and community level. I want this platform to be used so that you can talk about your family traditions, recipes that have been passed down for generations, playlists of your favourite Bollywood songs, or even about mythology. The possibilities are endless, as culture envelopes so many expressive forms, philosophies, principles of social organization, and works of literature. Have some thoughts on internet culture and how memes work as a form of social capital? I want to hear them! Got an idea about how language is fluid and evolving, but you cannot seem to quite nail down the exact details? Send me a pitch and I can help you with it!
The ‘arts’ aspect of this section can feel repetitive: interviews with artists or lists of the top 10 restaurants near you that serve whatever food is popular on Instagram this week; all of which is repeated for the next issue with some slight changes so it seems like a new article when it is more or less a carbon copy of the last. While I do want interviews, personal essays, reviews, and your favorite restaurants in the city to be showcased, I’m looking to expand the field of arts. Articles can be fun, but they’re not the only thing that can be published in a newspaper. For example, you can write a playlist. For this playlist, you can just list the songs and artists, or you can add descriptions to the songs. Why did you pick this song, why do you like it, how does it make you feel, what does it do for you?
My all-time favorite part of the newspaper when I was a kid was the comics section, and I want to bring this to The Strand. If you can draw or know someone who can, I want to showcase that work! Love to take pictures and are looking to put them somewhere other than Instagram? Send them my way! Love to write poetry, but always fail to meet the deadline for Victoria College’s literary journal The Goose? We publish more than once a year, and our deadlines are never-ending — you’ll never miss your chance!
Writing can be intimidating and writing something that will be published for anyone to see can be even more stressful. Writing can often be very subjective; your personal feelings, thoughts, perspectives, ideas, and opinions will make their way into your words. Open and personal writing, in terms of both form and content, works to eliminate some of the barriers that can arise, not only when writing for this section, but in developing your own understanding of yourself as a writer. To be authentic within your writing requires you to value your emotions, which then allows an organic conversation to unfold between you and your reader. Arts and Culture make the world go around while making it a little less bleak. How does it affect your world or identity? Uncover the personal or local angle as you write about your favourite scene from that really weird movie that everyone’s talking about.
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