Tuesday, November 17
Level 4 Meeting Room, Salt Lake City Main Library
210 East 400 South, Salt Lake.

Mingling at 6:30 pm, lecture starts at 7:00 pm.

You can also connect with this event on Facebook.

So far, it has produced some excellent work, including James Goldberg’s Prodigal Son, which won the AML award for drama this year.

Their most recent effort is Melissa Leilani Larson’s play Little Happy Secrets, which “combines honesty and humor to present a very real and timely story about same-sex attraction from a distinctly LDS perspective.” It has received some glowing reviews.

The New Play Project was generous enough to record an audio version of the play for those who couldn’t make the actual performances, and Melissa has give the Red Brick Store permission to link to it.

So click here to listen to Mormon theatrical history in the making. Little Happy Secrets can also be found as a free podcast on iTunes. But, by all means, donate to the New Play Project so that the plays can keep rolling in.

Little Happy Secrets by Melissa Leilani Larson (c) 2009

Audio play directed by James Goldberg

Do you watch House M.D.? On the third season’s last DVD there’s a short sequence on how some of the show’s cast and crew got a little jazz band together – Hugh Laurie himself at the piano (and yes, he even plays “Minnie the Moocher” for all those Jeeves and Wooster fans out there).

At one point in the sequence, Laurie mentions that, until now, he had been under the impression that producers had the sole responsibility of driving expensive cars around.

I had been under a similar impression about editors. I wasn’t so naïve as to think that they could afford expensive cars, but I was certain that their sole responsibility was to tap writers on the head with their magic wand and turn them into authors. Oh, and they also corrected spelling errors.

As it turns out, editors do actually work; and their work is much different than I had expected.

I need to drop the producer metaphor here and take up a football metaphor.

Lots of people watch football on television or at their local high school. If a young person (let’s call him Bill), who had watched many of these games, decides to play football with some friends, he doubtless has no trouble going through the motions he had seen in previous games: hiking the ball, throwing it, tackling, running.

Perhaps Bill plays football with his friends for years, and eventually feels that he has the talent to play in the professional leagues. He shows up at the door of the local professional team and presents himself as player material.

But he finds that he can’t even get past the secretary. “I’m a perfectly good football player,” Bill tells her, “I always get picked first in games, and they always have me play quarterback.”

The secretary is compassionate and gives him a phone number. “Call this guy,” she says, “He can help.”

The guy turns out to be a bodybuilding coach. He takes one look at Bill and says, “Boy, you gotta bulk up if you want to get into the big leagues.”

It takes years of work, and not just the work of running and lifting weights, it takes precision work. The bodybuilding coach knows how the body works, he knows which muscles need to be strengthened and how. It also hurts. Bill discovers muscles he never knew existed.

“So when I finally have the muscles, then can I play?” he asks his coach

His coach shakes his head, “You have to actually know how to play football,” he replies.

“But I do know how to play football,” Bill says.

The coach writes down a phone number, “Give this guy a call.”

It turns out to be the number of the local high school football coach. Bill has four more years of work ahead of him, learning how the game of football (on the high school level) actually works, with all the rules in place. He starts to see that a huge array of skills and knowledge that he had never even thought of underlie the playing of football. Watching it on television, football had always looked so easy.

Bill graduates from high school, having become an all-state player. He believes he is ready for the big leagues now. But he still has to compete successfully in college – another four years. And then, if he works hard and has a bit of luck, he might find his way onto a professional team, where his learning curve will begin yet again.

During each of these periods in Bill’s training, he had to have a coach. And, as you may know, coaches aren’t there to tell you what a good job you are doing. They aren’t there to tap you with a magic wand and turn you into a football player. They aren’t there to say nice things about you to the reporters. They are there to force you into the painful work of actually becoming a football player. They are there to explode your preconceptions of how easy football is and train you in the skills invisible to the crowd. They are there because they know, in depth, how the game works.

You probably see where I’m going by now. I used to think that learning to write was a solitary pursuit. You read books and sat at your computer typing. Sometimes you would show your work to a friend or relative, and they would say it was great stuff. So you thought maybe, just maybe, you could make it to the big leagues.

However, writing has been around longer than football and it is just as demanding if you want to get into the big leagues. You need someone who knows writing to help you bulk up: learn your way around a good sentence, paragraph, character, chapter and story. You need coaches who are willing to say, “Sorry kid, there’s a lot more to it than that. Get to work.” Then you need coaches to force you into the painful work of learning to actually play the game; and there are a lot of different games in writing, each with its own set of rules and lore.

Editing, frankly, is often about pain – and always about work. A few years ago I signed up for a class with Alane Ferguson, an Edgar-award winning author whose writing I admire. Sadly, she had to cancel. I wrote, asking her why. She said she was in the middle of a “hideous” revision. “I’m not sleeping, just working and slogging and wishing the revision was OVER!”

This from a professional author. I’d bet money that this revision was not self-inflicted; it was doubtless foisted upon her by her editor. But take look at the product. Alane’s work is so finely tuned that it becomes invisible, allowing the reader to fully enter the story. But it did not come without pain.

After reading all this, you’re probably thinking, “I’m not going to send any of my stuff to Sunstone. Stephen sounds mean!” Don’t worry; I’m a very nice magazine editor. I actually do a lot of your revision for you. In other words, the majority of the time I don’t say “Change this and change that,” I actually make the changes (while keeping the “track changes” function turned on, of course, so you can go through to accept and reject the edits). I also try to give commentary on why I make particular revisions so that the author can see my reasoning.

But I’m a great believer in the author’s abilities. A few times, an author has rejected my actual verbiage whole-hog, but has taken the idea behind the words and used it as a launching pad to do some really fantastic stuff.

I love it when that happens. It means I have a real writer on my hands, someone who takes his or her work seriously. I feel like a football coach watching a player I’ve been working with perform a fast break and plow gloriously into the end zone.

In the end, writing and editing are collaborative projects, each flourishing on the commitment, skill, and investment of the other.

Christmas Season, 1989. I was a freshman at the University of Utah, my first year away from home. Like any college student, I was looking for extra holiday cash, and the Help Wanted ad for a shopping mall Santa seemed like just the thing.

Illustration: Jeanette Atwood

Christmas had lost its luster a decade before, the day I had gone searching for my swimming mask and snorkel in our travel trailer. It turned out that my parents had thought the travel trailer was an ideal hiding place for Santa’s loot. It had been until their young son decided that he needed a mask and snorkel in the dead of winter.

I spent several years playing along, afraid to reveal that I knew the big secret, afraid that the loot would vanish.

Life as an 18-year-old Santa wasn’t very glamorous. I would lug a large suitcase to the mall and make my way upstairs, beyond the food court, into an access hallway, and finally to my “dressing room.” A janitor’s closet. Yes, literally. Complete with mops, buckets, vacuums, and the acrid smell of cleaning agents.
In this little room, I would transform into a fat, jolly elf. I’d put on my belly, don my red velvet suit, deftly apply the makeup to add decades to my face, and top it off with the beard, wig, and hat.

I was Santa. On the outside anyway.

On the inside, I was recoiling from the ever-lengthening holiday season, the Christmas music beginning on Halloween, the in-store decorations getting dusty even before Thanksgiving, all presided over by the retail juggernaut. I wanted the magic of Christmas. I looked for it. But it had been elusive, making me weary and jaded.

I’d wait until I heard the sound of Santa #1’s bells coming down the hall. We’d exchange pleasantries, I’d wait a few minutes, and then, trying not to sweat, jog to the door and throw it open, shouting “Ho Ho Ho!”

Trotting is best, the manager had told me. It shakes the bells in a rhythmic fashion, it makes you look jolly, and it allows the youngsters to keep up. So, I trotted down the stairs, trotted into Santa’s village, and trotted to Santa’s throne.

It took a bit of politicking to talk as Santa to children. I saw their hope, their excitement, their wonder—and I wanted to keep that, not destroy it. But at the same time, I couldn’t promise anything, especially when I saw anxious parents watching me, silently calculating the damage in their heads. A simple “Santa will do his very best, and you have a Merry Christmas” was usually best for everyone involved.

After a while, I really got into this Santa thing. Even though I didn’t feel the Christmas magic myself, I seemed to have a knack for spreading it around. So I decided to use my Santa costume and visit friends from my hometown. A few days before Christmas, I started attending their holiday parties as the fat man, spreading that Santa-ness around. I loved it.

One night I was driving along a rural road on my way to another party. I saw a flash in my headlights and hit the brakes. But a sickening thump told me I had been too slow.

I stopped and checked my rear view mirror. A deer’s still bleeding body was crumpled in the middle of the road. I couldn’t just leave it; another car was bound to be along soon. So I turned around and illuminated the scene with my headlights. Then I got out of the car, grateful for the warmth of my Santa suit, and began pulling the deer to the side of the road.

At that very moment, a van passed by. Slowly. Mom and Dad stared at me from the front seats; several children’s faces were plastered to the window. They looked as if they’d just witnessed a murder.

Donner. Dead. The big man trying to hide the evidence.

Great job, Santa.

The little girl on my lap was eight, maybe nine, and dressed in the finest winter apparel. She arrived with a mom to match. They had probably arrived in a gold-trimmed Lexus. I braced myself for a long list of toys and clothes and games.

But she was polite, she was tentative, and when the moment came, this young girl looked directly into my eyes and, with unquestionable and absolute sincerity, said simply, “I want the kids who don’t get Christmas to have a Christmas this year.”

I wasn’t prepared. I was speechless, choked up, stunned. What would you say? She believed in Santa. More than any other kid I had met. I could see it in her eyes. Her hopes and wishes were genuine and heartfelt. Santa could do this; he’d deliver. This was Christmas!

Last year my older kids wanted electric scooters. Being well-trained consumers, my wife and I obliged. I ordered my daughter a really cute, mini-Vespa-looking thing. Pink. UPS delivered it to the front door. Except it arrived during Christmas vacation, and the box had a big picture of the scooter prominently displayed on the outside.

My daughter signed for it.

Fairytale imploded.

I think I handled the whole thing well. Sure, there were trauma and tears, but after a good long talk, Santa had hired a new, world-wise little elf to help out on Christmas Eve.

But it’s one thing to have your hopes dashed by a UPS driver at the door with a scooter. It is quite another to wake up and realize that Santa hadn’t come through, yet again, for all those kids who don’t have a Christmas.

I often think back to that earnest little girl. I wonder about her. She gave a young shopping-mall Santa a gift, but where is she now? Likely a young mother, with her own toddlers in tow, trying to find the spirit of the season she embodied so long ago.

Perhaps it’s best that I don’t know her; perhaps it’s best that she lives on as a memory. But I still look for her, because her memory causes this Santa to be a little more reflective, a little more aware of the people around him. A little more willing to keep being Santa. Even after the costume comes off.

Originally published in the Winter 2008 issue of Sunstone.

As to the ‘Eroica,’ I had meant to tell you how I felt about it, but it opens the flood-gates, and I can’t. The wail of grief, and then the sympathy which should comfort the sufferer. The wonderful funeral dirge, so solemn, so full, so deep, so splendid, and always with courage and comfort. The delightful march home from the grave in the scherzo, the wild Hungarian, almost gypsy in tone,and then the climax of the melody, where the gates of Heaven open, and we see the angels singing and reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail, and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without tears. I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.
–Henry Lee Higginson, from a letter to a friend

Henry Lee Higginson is one of my great heroes. He is most remembered for his founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but he contributed a great many other things to the civic life of Boston, including a large playing field (Soldier’s Field, for all you HBS grads) and a community center (Harvard Union) for college students, and several Civil War memorials.

Early in his life, he would have seemed an unlikely philanthropist–he broke rather severely with his high-society Boston lineage, and went to Europe to study music. The depth of his lifelong feeling for music is evident in the passage above about Beethoven’s Third Symphony. When he decided to pursue music as a course of study, he wrote, in a letter to his parents:

I know not how one finds that he has a talent for any one thing without trying: but everyone has a particular faculty for something, everyone has a decided turn and talent for a particular branch, and it is his duty to try to find this out, and to turn to it. If one may trust what he hears within himself, in his own heart, and be sure that it is right, I should say that my talent was for music, and that, if I studied it properly and persevered, I could bring out something worth having, worthy of a life thus spent, worthy of a man, worthy of my mother and of you….

His study of music, though, was cut short by neuralgia in his arm, and by the treatment for it, which consisted chiefly of bloodletting. He returned to Boston in 1860, and his attempts at finding a job were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. He had a successful career as an officer, but was wounded and felt very deeply the loss of many friends. After the war, he failed at several business ventures before finally resigning himself to joining his father’s company and discovering, somewhat to his horror, that he was very, very good at making money.

In describing the path his love for music had taken, he wrote (late in life):

Sixty years ago I wished to be a musician, and therefore went to Vienna, where I studied two years and a half diligently, learned of music, something about musicians, and one other thing–that I had no talent for music. I heard there and in other European cities the best orchestras, and much wished that our own country should have such fine orchestras.

For many years I had hard work to earn my living and support my wife…. All these years I watched the musical conditions in Boston, hoping to make them better. I believed that an orchestra of excellent musicians under one head and devoted to a single purpose could produce fine results, and wished for the ability to support such an undertaking; for I saw that it was impossible to give music at fair prices and make the Orchestra pay expenses.

He therefore founded the orchestra himself, giving an enormous sum of money himself, and committing to supporting the orchestra on an ongoing basis until it could be established as a cultural institution that commanded support from other benefactors. It is no exaggeration to say that the BSO (and all the other symphony orchestras that followed in the US) exist because of his contribution. His determination to recreate the great orchestral music of Europe in an American setting has blessed the lives of generations of musicians and listeners, and the model for private patronage that he established has allowed American cultural institutions to thrive despite the lack of government patronage on the scale that European institutions enjoy.

At the end of the BSO’s first (wildly successful) season, Higginson was invited to the podium. He said that the concerts had been “a great joy, not only because of the music, but chiefly because of the refreshment and enjoyment of the multitude of people unknown to me, who, leading gray lives, have needed this sunshine.”

(You can read a pretty good brief biography of Higginson here, and I would highly recommend it–he is eloquent on many subjects).

For me, there are a couple of important lessons for would-be artists or lovers of art in Higginson’s story. First, that it’s important to be honest about where one’s talents lie. I feel particularly drawn to Higginson because, like him, I have a great love, but relatively little talent, for music. There’s a strong egalitarian strain in American culture that tries to tell all kids that they can be anything they want to be. The truth is, of course, that we come with varied gifts, and sometimes our desires and our abilities will be mismatched–this is one of the great pains of mortality, but like many of those pains, it is potentially redemptive. It seems to me that Higginson’s honesty about his musical talent and his determination to continue enjoying music are a wonderful counterexample to the image of Salieri from _Amadeus_, the frustrated artist consumed by bitterness at his inadequacy. Higginson shows us a better way.

It seems to me that Higginson’s life also teaches us the power of the amateur, the lover, of the arts. We live in an era when the practice of the humanities tends towards specialization and professionalization–one needs an MFA or a Ph.D. in violin performance, or a post-graduate certificate in sculpture to feel that she is entitled to make art. The long tradition of amateur cultural production in the church–dramas, oratorical contests, dance festivals–has almost completely disappeared. We should not, however, lose sight of the theological imperative (and I really mean that!) to be engaged in whatever creative pursuits we are able to be, at whatever level we can. If our potential is truly as limitless as our doctrine teaches us it is, then we have no time to be discouraged by the imperfection of our mortal abilities–we must get on with the eternal project of creation.

Finally, I love Higginson’s devotion to “the multitude of people unknown to [him],” and his determination to bring sunshine into gray lives. It’s a generous, altruistic motive for making art that we should be careful to keep in mind and heart as we work.

1)  I am not very nice when I’m feeling defensive.  (Sorry, Kathy)

2) The problem of branding in Mormon publications is a very strange beast.

Let’s take Segullah and Exponent II as examples.  I still haven’t seen anything in Segullah that the editors of Exponent wouldn’t have been delighted to have had as a submission.  I have seen enough sass and gentle irreverence in Segullah’s writers to think they would be people I’d like to see at an Exponent retreat, and that they might even have a good time.  It still pains me that they felt excluded/put off/offended/unwelcome/unreached/??? by Exponent II and didn’t join the party.  It hurts me, too, that women I know to be faithful, participating, thoughtful, and committed Latter-day Saints are regarded as unacceptably divergent from some ill-defined “mainstream”–so much so that some of their sisters are unwilling to consider their words or appear in the same pages with them.

There are similar issues in practically every genre of Mo publishing–lots of folks won’t even consider reading Dialogue, but are perfectly happy with JMH (even though JMH prints its fair share of things that ought to be controversial).  People publish things in Irreantum that I think are too dark or difficult for Dialogue, but Irreantum never comes up in anyone’s list of “alternate voices.”  BYU professors can publish things in Element that would never pass orthodoxy muster for BYU Studies, but they feel their status may be jeopardized by publishing them in Dialogue.  And poor Sunstone gets the rap for everything, even though (for instance) Dialogue published most of the articles that got the September Six in trouble.  When I asked on the AML list what makes an Irreantum story different from a Sunstone story different from a Dialogue story, the only answers were about people’s comfort with the relative orthodoxy of the other things that were published in a particular outlet.  That’s understandable, but it says disturbing things about the development of a robust aesthetic sense within Mormon culture.  If we only define “good art” as not containing whatever it is we regard as “bad”, whether that is profanity or sex or heresies that diverge from our own pet heterodoxies, the pursuit of excellence may be subsumed by the pursuit of the unobjectionable.  I can’t think of anything less authentically Mormon than such timidity.

I guess what I’m wondering is whether, now that the late 80s/early 90s are well behind us, we can come up with some more vivid and interesting way to define our publications’ niches besides on some spectrum of orthodoxy that really doesn’t describe much of anything useful anymore (if it ever did).

A quick snippet:

“Editing is hardly ever what the non-inky world thinks it is, which is copyediting, which is merely the very last and easiest piece of editing—rather like a crossword puzzle, something you can do near-naked and beer in hand. Real editing means staying in touch with lots of writers, and poking them on a fairly regular basis about what they are writing and reading and thinking and obsessing about and what they have always wanted to write but haven’t, and also it means sending brief friendly notes to lots of writers you have never worked with yet in hopes that you will, and also it means listening to lots and lots of people about lots and lots of ideas, some or all of which might wend their way into your pages, and it means being hip to the zeitgeist enough to mostly ignore it, and it means reading your brains out, and it means always having your antennae up for what you might excerpt or borrow or steal, and it means tinkering with pieces of writing to make them lean and taut and clear, and always having a small room open in the back of your head where you mix and match pieces to see if they have any zest or magnetism together, and it means developing a third eye for cool paintings and photographs and drawings and sculptures and carvings that might elevate your pages, and writing captions and credits and titles and subheads and contents pages, and negotiating with and calming the publisher, and fawning at the feet of the mailing manager, and wheedling assistants and associates, and paying essayists more than poets on principle, and soliciting letters to the editor, and avoiding conferences and seminars, and sending the printer excellent bottles of wine on every holiday, including Ramadan and Kwanzaa, just in case.”

We at The Red Brick Store would like to point out that we do not do crossword puzzles (or copyediting) with a beer in hand. We much prefer Perrier. Also, we send Martinellis to our printers.