A Young Publication Gives Up-and-Comers a Break

Claire Sollars wants to be a professional painter, so when a national magazine published her oil of a woman reading a book on the beach, she was ecstatic.

The 14-year-old was grateful her painting wasn’t competing with articles on Jackson Pollack and other hot modern artists for attention. It was right with poems, paintings and stories by her peers in the Children’s Magazine.

“With the Children’s Magazine you can show your best and not feel you’re the worst because you’re so young and don’t have much experience,” Sollars said. “Compared to their [adult professionals’] art, you feel degraded and don’t feel like you can stand up to it.”

The confidence Sollars got from seeing her work in the Children’s Magazine was exactly what Lynn Grafman and Larry Bloom had in mind when they started the quarterly publication last year.

“What we want to do is enable kids to have a venue of their own, something that allows them to be creative,” said Grafman, vice president of the Scottsdale-based publisher, Timed Resources Inc. Bloom is publisher of the magazine.

“We’re hoping that we have the next Shakespeare and next Picasso--you never know.”

The magazine began as a local publication for the Scottsdale and Paradise Valley area. It then expanded statewide and went national within a year, Grafman said.

“We just decided to put it out there and the response was incredible,” she said. “We got so many submissions.”

For published work, children are paid $10 for poetry, book or movie reviews, cartoons and comedy, photos and creative excuses. Short stories fetch $20 and scary tales $25.

Grafman said Timed Resources hopes to print up to 100,000 copies of the winter ‘97/98 edition, compared with the 20,000 copies printed for the first edition.

Besides creative works by children, each edition features essays by prominent adults who submit a baby picture and write about why they chose their careers and how they succeeded.

Those featured in the fall 1997 edition include Dan Quayle, Phoenix Police Chief Dennis Garrett and Jerry Colangelo, managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks and president of the Phoenix Suns.

“Growing up there were three things most important to me: family, school and sports,” Colangelo writes. “Family was, and always will be the most significant aspect of my life. As far as sports is concerned, I always dreamed of playing professional basketball or baseball.”

Aspiring artist Jay Schelstrate, 15, shares Colangelo’s love of sports and expresses it through his drawings and paintings. His pencil sketch of baseball legend Willie Mays was published in the Children’s Magazine.

“[Art] is what I really love to do in life,” said the ninth-grader from Scottsdale.

Schelstrate and Sollars said the Children’s Magazine also helps them see what their peers are producing.

“It shows me there’s other artists out there who are just as good as I am or better, and it shows me what I have to work for,” Schelstrate said.

For 12-year-old Allona Burk, of Gilbert, seeing her poem about a lost friend in print boosted her confidence and wowed her friends.

“All my friends were like ‘Oh my gosh, how’d you do that?’ ” she said. “I was just amazed because I didn’t think my poetry would be that good.”