By: Brianna Zigler
An Origin Story
Around age seventeen or eighteen I decided that I wanted to study film, because when I was fourteen my best friend showed me a website where I could watch movies for free. With at least a relative interest in movies, I found my curiosity piqued in this opportunity to watch films I’d always wanted to see, but never had the money to buy on DVD or the time to go see in theaters (in spite of how many people might shame me for my lack of moral character in this decision to stream free movies on the internet). But it was this mild form of criminal activity that allowed me to realize just how many movies I wanted to watch and how happy it made me to watch them, how passionate I was about different aspects of film, and how film was, really, the only thing that seemed to make me feel this strongly.
A friend of mine once asked me how it was that I watched so many movies so quickly, and so people I knew began to regard me as the “film expert”, even though I was far from it. I was a kid and I acted like movies were mine, but it felt like I had really found my calling, what I saw myself doing with my life where even if financial stability was uncertain, I knew I’d be happy.
The Struggles of Being an Uncertain 20-something
When I entered my third year of college and transferred from a small, Penn State branch campus close to Philadelphia, to the expansive, overwhelming Penn State University, I was weirdly full of hope, excitement, and optimism. Transferring to the main campus was a necessary step in order to complete my degree as a film major, and I was thrilled to take more specific, rather than generalized, film classes, that perhaps would tickle my tendencies as a cinephile and help me discover just exactly what I wanted to do for my film-making career.
However, quite the opposite occurred. Instead of seeing the path in front of me become more clear, I watched it become shrouded in clouds of doubt. I started feeling like I didn’t actually have enough interest in more of a variety of the aspects of film-making, and the major did not have a large enough focus on the aspect of film-making where most of my interests lay and what I was best at; writing. Though my major offers over twenty classes, only three of them are writing classes, and taking these other classes that focused on aspects of film that I was neither all that good at, nor interested in, simply discouraged me. It had me questioning my role as a film major, and it had me questioning if this was really the career path I saw myself going into. Perhaps I should’ve been an English major, or a creative writing major, or a journalism major. Surely I should’ve simply majored in something that had a solid foundation in the skill that I am best at.
New Discoveries: Ending My College Mid-Life Crisis
Over the summer I did some “soul-searching” in my much-needed time away from Penn State to discover just what it was that I really wanted to do and, if necessary, make the weighty decision to change my major. But after some help in unexpected places (watching a lot of movie reviews on YouTube), I realized that my love of film as a whole trumped my dislike for certain aspects of film; that I really did want to work with movies and with writing simultaneously someday, even if the major I was in at the moment did not seem to cater very well to that specific aspect of film-making that I held interest in. I realized that I truly was passionate about film, that it was my only genuine passion, and that I shouldn’t allow my dislike of, say, editing or directing, to distract me from my desire to have a career in what I love.
That being said, what, then, does my self-discovery of career choices have to do with my English 209 literary magazine practicum class, and what I’ve learned about literary journals thus far?
Pasting Ideas Together
I fully understand the risk I take in setting my sights for a career in film, or even film-critiquing (I’m not really sure where my sights lie most specifically), and I like the idea of having a fall-back plan. Or, not even a fall-back plan, but conceivably something I could do on the side, either during or after my quest to break into the world of film. My main skill is writing, and I’ve teetered on the fence about whether I should go into journalism or something similar, but that’s about it. Then I began my time in my literary magazine practicum class, and my sights began to set somewhere else.
I had been published in a literary journal before, in Penn State Abington’s award-winning Abington Review, but I wasn’t apart of the actual journal creation; I had simply submitted a few of my old pieces of writing that I liked via the journal’s website, and they happened to get published, which was especially thrilling to me since I’d never tried submitting any of my work to get published anywhere before. So, at this time, I didn’t actually fully understand what a literary journal was. At all. I just knew it was some collection of poems and stories that my campus produced and that I had ended up being a part of, but I didn’t know that literary journals were, like……a thing.
Drawing Inspiration
These past few weeks in My English 209 class ended up broadening my horizons in terms of where I want to potentially put my writing skills. I still see myself in a career surrounded by film, but I like the idea of having other interests as well, having other ideas for where I will go in my life, and literary journals really opened up that door for me. Learning and reading about how much care is put into them, how each literary journal is truly unique and satisfies different people’s tastes, like each journal is it’s only little world, and it’s fascinating to me. Multiple times I’ve been sitting on my couch, reading assigned essays and excerpts for class about literary journals, and I’ve found myself considering starting my own. Perhaps, one that includes writing that is thematically centered on movies and TV shows. I love the idea of creating my own little galaxy of writing in the form of a paperback collection of words. It’s poetic, and literary journals have such a rich history, despite being these things that are very subtly, quietly sewn into the fabric of society without a lot of peoples’ knowledge; people, previously, such as myself.
Quotes from our readings that really inspired me to potentially follow the path of literary journal-creation include this one from an essay by Andrei Codrescu; “We have our own sky,” or this quote from Jeffrey Lependorf; “That’s what we look for – writers who make us feel like they’re seeing their world, whatever world that is, with fresh eyes, and who, through their words, allow us to do the same.” This idea that literary journals are each their own, individual sky, of people, ideas, themes, and likenesses, coming together to create something just for them, constantly looking for new writers, new ways of thinking, new ways of putting old words together to create something beautiful. I love the idea that I, too, could bring people together and do something like that.
In Conclusion
To sum this all up, I’m still just as confused and uncertain about my future as any other stressed-out 21-year-old that I know, but literary magazines surprisingly opened up another world of possibilities for me that I didn’t know existed before I took this class, and, suddenly, I ended up feeling a little less lost in the impending vacuum that is growing up.