This famous quote, its origins though debated, most likely
surfaced during the Revolutionary War – nearly 230 years later,
it still invokes both passion and yearning. One can’t help but
wonder when all wars will finally come to an end so our children
will finally live in a world where they can live freely to write and
create art – without fear of poverty and conflict. In preparation for
such a time, it is important that the youth of today be encouraged
and mentored. They are our future historians; they will record our
religions, our politics and our social mores through their fiction,
poetry, paintings, photographs and sculptures.
This issue is dedicated to the future of art – the 2010 winners of
the Alaska Regional Scholastic Art and Writing of the national
Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. Students from all over
the state (grades 7-12) submitted their work for several rounds of
judging. The final round was displayed at MTS Gallery, with a live
reading of the writings from the Gold Key winners by actors and
professional speakers for the award ceremony.
The following pages are all of the Gold Key winners, and a handful
of chosen Silver Key winners. You can find the work of all other
Silver Key winners on our website. Of the Gold Key winners,
five were chosen from each contest as the American Voices and
American Vision Nominees – their work has now gone on to a
national level and will compete for $35 million in scholarships.
We wish them all the very best of luck.

During the past several months, numerous designers, photographers and artists have created exclusive works, of which we’re deeply honored to display here on these pages. And fashion, as I’ve come to learn during this process, is not about designer names and high price tags, it’s first and foremost about art, passion, creation and beauty. It was noted by all of this issue’s fashion contributors that not only do Alaskans fail to realize there are fashion artists among them, the artists don’t know it either. With this issue, we hope to help the fans and the artists by bringing visibility to the entire scene. We’ve included an abbreviated set of yellow pages of fashion related folks here in Anchorage. These will be posted on our Web site for perpetuity, and hopefully over time, more fashion related people will come out of the woodwork.

We humans relish beautiful things but, the thing we treasure more than beauty, is love. As the author of “Seven Arrows,” Hyemeyohsts Storm wrote: “No two people on the face of the earth are alike in any one thing except for their loneliness.” And everything we do is about satiating ourselves and alleviating that loneliness. Our hunger and hunt for love is part of that equation. So for this month, the month that we place so much capitalistic emphasis on love, we’ve also included a few truly great poems that pander to our wanton craving.

Also this month, F Magazine would like to welcome on a whole new crew of fantastic volunteers, interns and staff. Read their names on the Contributors page. And if you know some of them, or even if you don’t, seek them out and thank them for their contribution to our community. Anchorage, as I’ve been told many times, needs F Magazine. And F Magazine needs you. So thank you for your continuing support.
Viva Las Artes!

Running an independent magazine is hard work, but thankfully it’s also incredibly rewarding. For 11 consecutive months (and several non-consecutive before that) we have been introducing you to an array of artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and nuggets of brilliant Alaska culture. This has largely been made possible by our advertisers. Take a few minutes while perusing our pages, to pay homage to them; stop by their businesses and let them know you saw their ad in F Magazine.
This past year has seen a lot of changes, not only in the magazine that you’re currently holding, but also in different aspects of our arts culture. Whole Wheat Radio, a wonderful on-line pirate radio station out of Talkeetna closed its doors to the ethers. We were proud to have their story grace our pages, and we are sad to see them go. It also seems the Anchorage municipality is fixing to cut the arts funding in half again. Again. This will mean a whole lot less of a whole lot of great things that most of us take for granted. We’ll have an update on the madness in the next issue.
A big change you can expect to see in the arts community is here at F Magazine. We can’t unveil all the changes just yet, as they’re still in the works, but since our wonderful art director, Gretchen Weiss is moving on to new adventures in life, F Magazine is going to have to make some adjustments. Again, we ask you to bear with us as we go through some of these growing pains. And become a volunteer! The only way we can keep informing our readers about the community they live in is with the incredible work of volunteers. And stay tuned in by subscribing to F! We’ve got a full year of exemplary issues in 2011: the art of fashion in February, street art in May, and all fiction, just fiction in June – which we are now accepting submissions for (see our website for details). Speaking of fiction, this issue’s theme, the last in a series of themes for the fiction and poetry submissions, is “Villains, Scoundrels and Low Down Dirty Bastards”. Enjoy the great work submitted by Alec Fritz, Dawnell Smith and Rebecca Goodrich.

Enjoy the arts!

Even though I’ve lived in Alaska for years, it seems I can still be surprised at how different life is here.
Last month, I was upstairs in the living room when I was hit with the smell of horses, that musky tart smell of livestock and feed. So I wasn’t completely surprised when I went downstairs to find four sheep hanging in the garage, being prepped for butchering.
My landlord and several of his friends had gone out to the valley to purchase live animals to bring home and stock their freezers with. The closest thing to this I’d ever personally experienced before was a Christmas tree farm, where you cut down your own tree and bring it home to dress. The gathering of goat skinners below my living quarters, however, had a much stronger sense of community to it (and smell!). They were preparing their winter meat supply together, assisting one another with space and skills.
The culture of food is rich wherever you go: the Ethiopian tradition of using injera (a spongy type of bread) in lieu of silverware to scoop up the food, and being lucky enough to experience gursha – the process of your friend or lover feeding you; in Turkey, the culture of drinking raki (an anise-based drink) with fabulous appetizers called meze before almost every full meal; the 2,000 years of rice culture in Japan – the sowing, weeding, harvesting, preparation and eating. It’s all culture! And Thanksgiving Day in America is most certainly a food-culture event.
This being the month of harvests and a foodie holiday makes it the best time for F Magazine to deliver to its readers a smorgasbord of food culture stories. We’ve taken a closer look at the some of the often-overlooked aspects of food culture in this part of the state – not the obvious hunting/fishing culture, but the horticulture and permaculture, the raising, purchasing, preparing and consuming of food. Localizing everything, including our appetites, is a concept that is rapidly growing in popularity. Is this burgeoning food culture a bi-product or kindling for community?
We’re not just about food this month. We also have some terrific new talent gracing our pages delivering morsels of other cultures, art and music.
The theme for fiction, poetry, art (and a comic!) this month was “Altered States.” As the theme is open to interpretation, you’ll see that each of the published submissions this month interpreted it quite differently – from Alec Fritz’s comic, implies hallucinogens to Jack Gette’s short story about the heinous reality of landscaping (which ties in nicely with the horticulture/permaculture stories.) The random piece by Jesus Landin-Torrez III, who has consistently submitted and been published in every issue (but one) since our inception, is noticeably … different from those in the past. It is a tad shocking, and some readers might find it a bit offensive. It is not our intention to offend, but more importantly, it is not our desired ethical practice to censor art. As we learned from our first issue, however, there is a fine line between censoring art and detracting readers. We hope with this issue, we’ve done neither.

This month’s theme for poetry, fiction, essay and art is “Learning a Craft.” As with all of our submission themes, this was open to interpretation. As an editor I derived much pleasure from finding the myriad ways both “learning” and “craft” could be interpreted. It is always unfortunate that the economics of space prohibit us from printing all the submissions we deem worthy of publication. We ask you to savor what was chosen, and know there is a great amount of talent to be found among the writers of South Central Alaska.
Starting up a small business is all about learning a craft. It is not learned immediately or in just one instructional lesson. It is something that is wrought, fine-tuned and finagled. There is as much trial and error as there is triumph and glory. But to achieve the latter, there must be passion and perseverance. If you are a subscriber to F Magazine, you will notice that despite recent upheavals we are still here! You will also notice there are some changes to layout and format, and we have new contributing writers (a million thanks to all our wonderful volunteers!). You may also see yet a new price on the cover (if you’re in Anchorage). This is part of our learning curve. It takes a tremendous amount of money to produce a high quality looking magazine, and more money to distribute it and pay our vendors. It has been suggested many times that we lower our standards and use a lighter stock paper.
Perhaps we’re being too headstrong, but we believe the quality is a good part of its appeal. However, we also find that less people feel inclined to pay the new price we’ve had for the past two months – and that defeats our goal of bringing visibility to the arts. Thus, we are compromising the price for those who live in close radius to our central hub (we apologize to those who live in other towns, but we simply couldn’t afford it – please bear with us and continue supporting the arts!)
F Magazine is completely comprised of passionate volunteers. So as to not stretch them thin, we are constantly seeking more volunteers until we can afford otherwise. If you have a little time on your hands and you have a passion for the arts and culture, please contact us to find out how you can be of assistance (Fhideout@gmail.com).
In being true to our mission, F Magazine is now the official regional affiliate (our region being the entire state of Alaska) for the Scholastic Writing Competition of the national Alliance of Young Artists and Writers. (This is in conjunction with MTS Gallery – which is running the competition for artists.) The national organization has been honoring students (grades 7-12) with awards and scholarships for 70 years. This is the first time Alaskan students will have a chance at competing, and we are excited to be giving them this opportunity! Pass the word on to teachers and students all over the state. Registration and more information on the competition can be found at artandwriting.com. We are seeking volunteers to judge the 11 different categories in January and a number of professional/experienced readers/actors to perform the winning work for the premier.
Art is good for the soul – for young and old!

Viva las Artes,
The editor

Viva Las Artes!
the editor

After Anchorage Daily News did an enormous spread on F Magazine, our phones began to ring and our email inbox was constantly full. The Daily Miner and other publications around the state picked up the story, and the next thing we knew we were getting requests to be distributed all over Southcentral Alaska and Fairbanks. This is great! And we thank all the fans of arts and culture for supporting our endeavors with their fan mail and subscriptions. Subscriptions! We’ve got that ability now! (Check out our Website: FHideout.org).
With this newfound popularity came the epiphany that some changes needed to be made: To meet demand we have to publish more. To publish more and to afford to distribute we have to raise our rates. Never before did the capitalistic logic of raising rates to meet demand make so much sense. It simply is not possible to do it all without the funds. And for this we’re sorry. We would very much like to keep the extraordinary low price it’s been for the past year, but alas we cannot. We thank everyone for their patience, understanding and continued readership as we move from $2 to $4. But we promise to make it worth your buck! We are now featuring as many stories as we can about artists and events all over the region.
This issue is heaped full of new talent to the F pages (introduce yourself by reading the Contributors column). We’re proud and pleased to have such extraordinary volunteers (as we’re all volunteers at F) and incredible submissions of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. The theme for this issue’s submissions is “Random Acts.” Many thanks and a big warm welcome to our newly acquired poetry editor, Bruce Farnsworth. His experience and keen mind are greatly appreciated at F Magazine.
Writers continue to submit! Artists have faith that there is in fact an enormous community of like-minds and hungry audiences!

Viva Las Artes!
– the editors

It is with great pride that we bring to you the fifth official issue of F Magazine!
In honor of April being National Poetry Month, we have dedicated this issue to the craft of writing story and emotion with brevity and conviction. As we sorted through the poetry submissions, it was delightful to read the tremendous amount of talent this city has to offer.
The motivation behind F Magazine is to create a forum for the abundant amount of art that is still yet to be realized in this city. We are proud to not only represent artists of all mediums and genres, but also the establishments that support them. We celebrate all things local; our advertising space is reserved for local companies, individuals and organizations, and even our printing is done locally.
At the time of publication, we didn’t have a solid calendar of poetry events going on National Poetry Month, but we encourage you to seek them out. And although this issue is predominantly poetry (of which we’re glad you’ve taken the time to read!), we have thrown in a few other artistic treats for our readers.
Stay tuned for the May issue, which is already slated to have lots of brilliant Anchorage art!

Viva las Artes!
-The editors