Smith, L. (March 2, 2016). Finding My Way Home. Garden & Gun, 5(1), p. 88-93
Garden & Gun magazine is a well-known publication in the south for its useful tips on southern music, outdoor life, food, and all around southern culture. I personally enjoy this magazine because I am originally from the south, and also because in every issue, they include a feature piece on an aspiring or famous artist from the region. The February/March issue showcased Lee Smith, an author from Grundy, Virginia who chose to focus on her roots in order to write stories she was most passionate about. The article begins with Smith discussing how she could not wait to leave her backwoods home in Virginia and become a famous writer. It was not until she entered Hollins College and heard an excerpt read by southern author Eudora Welty that she decided to write about what she knew best––home. The article explains how Smith seemed to find herself by channeling people like herself, and trusting her own instincts. Smith has since written thirteen novels and multiple short stories that pay tribute to her hometown in Grundy, and her Appalachian life.
While this article was an account of someone's personal path to success, I was able to gain new knowledge and gather opinions to apply to my own life. Relating back to Baran's chapter 1 and the Media History lecture, I can compare my thought process of writing to how people want to be viewed in the media. When writing a poem or short story or any piece of fiction, I always seem to want my story to be the hero, or the type of writing that everyone wants to read. This idea relates to how people want to be viewed as the hero through media by "being a certain way" to society. This article helped me understand that sometimes writing what you know is the most successful writing a person can do. A piece of advice that I seem to keep referring back to from this article is that more often than not, people are more interested in reading stories about things they are not accustomed to. The unfamiliarity is attractive because it allows people to feel, see, and experience a life outside of the routine they are living everyday. I read this article out of all the others because it was a personal and artistic piece. The other features appeal more to the masses: the best southern recipes by the best chefs in the south, how a family lives their Carolina lifestyle, a football coach taking a team from the bottom to the top, etc. These articles, to me, were typical hero stories that allowed me to predict the content and summarize without even having to read it. "Finding My Way Home" was much more intriguing because I needed to read the entire article to understand what finding her way home meant, and how she got there. I already owned Garden & Gun magazine, so it was convenient for me to examine each article and determine which one held my interest the most in order to write this post.
After reading the article, I was interested to see what kind of advertisements surrounded the piece. The magazine is 155 pages long with at least 47 advertisements, meaning that about 30.3% of the magazine is made up of ads. Since this magazine is considered a more up-scale magazine for the southern region, it is well-structured and the advertisements are (what artists would consider) well designed and expensive. For this reason, I think that there are just enough advertisements for the size of the magazine and the content that is involved. Most of the ads appear to fit the content included in the magazine– most are about vacationing in the south, southern-made liquor, southern cuisine, etc. I am pleasantly surprised that there are no fashion or beauty ads (which typically junk up regular grocery store magazines) to distract from the vibe of the magazine. Surrounding my article are mostly ads for vacationing down south, but one is for a book written by an author from West Virginia. I think this is not only clever advertising, but also clever media design. People that are interested in reading and writing are more than likely going to read "Finding My Way Home." By placing an ad about a book available by another southern author, the advertisers and designers of the magazine have created a call to action, and focused the audiences mindset on buying the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment