We’re delighted to announce that Segullah’s summer issue will arrive in mailboxes across the country this week. The topic, “Gifts of the Spirit,” was inspired by our ongoing quest to find and develop the spiritual gifts which we’ve been given. In her editorial, Allyson Smith says, “I have met many people who come by patience (or faith, or discernment, or trust) with remarkable ease. To some is given one gift, to some another. going back through the list of spiritual gifts laid out in Moroni 10, I am well aware that I did not come installed with most when I was born. But the lack of them hasn’t let me off any hooks. I may be low on original patience, but that doesn’t mean I’m not under injunction to develop some. And so it goes for us all. We start where we are, with what we have.”

The issue includes personal essays by Heather Oman, Michelle Lehnardt and Tarasine Buck, where the authors find themselves in possession of spiritual gifts they didn’t know they had until they were put to the test. I’m particularly excited about our features: an article by Barbara Bishop, who views dreams as gifts of the spirit, and an interview with Marilyn Brown, who sees her role in developing Mormon writers as her own spiritual calling. The issue features amazing art by Leslie Graff. If you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now, so you can read more great stuff like this poem by Darlene Young, which reminds us how spiritual gifts are sometimes given to the people we’d least expect to receive them, and spiritual experiences often catch us unawares:

“Shepherds”

by Darlene Young

Don’t tell me about rose-cheeked Arcadian youth
gathering daisies on a hillside
piping tunes to their cloud-fluffy sheep
under the stars.

No, these were foul-smelling, lusty
men with dirty necks, greasy hands,
snorting, arguing, joke-telling, nose-picking
men—one wearing stolen
sandals (although I admit he felt
guilty about it)—gambling on who
had the best aim as they chucked rocks
at a nearby lizard.

You talk about salt of the earth—
these men were salty, alright
downright ornery, some of them,
fighting sometimes and yelling
at their wives when they were home,
which wasn’t often.

Yeah, I’ll grant you Dan
was an innocent
and Dave had some noble moments
and none of them was really evil
but they all had dirty fingernails
of one kind or another
when the light came—

yes, it came.
But don’t take away that moment just before—
flies whining over the sheep dung
and Jake and Zeke having a
spitting contest—
that’s the key moment, you see,
in all their grimy glory;
it has to be

because the light came to me too,
Alleluia.

The temperature is supposed to hit 90 this afternoon. In my mind, the first 90-degree day signifies the official beginning of summer, no matter what month it is. For me, an ideal summer is all about a comfortable lounge chair, a good pair of sunglasses, and a stack of books from the library taller than my youngest child.

In order to prepare that stack of books, I scour bestseller lists, look for editors’ picks at Amazon.com, peruse Goodreads and take my blackberry into Barnes and Noble and write down the names of all the titles that look intriguing. I used to subscribe to the New Yorker and get email updates from the New York Times book reviews, but eventually I found both of those overwhelming. I can read half a book in the time it takes me to read one of the New Yorker reviews. But my best source of books worth reading has always been my friends. So there’s where you come in: what’s the best thing you’ve read in the last six months?

Followed, quite possibly, by a smack upside my head.  Or a swift kick in the heinie.  Both of them are warranted.

Last week, at the behest of an old friend for some photos, I went through a box of high school stuff that has been sitting in my parents’ basement since, well, high school.  I was amazed at what I found, at what I had saved, and wondering how I knew I would want these things later.  I found pictures of old friends from elementary school that made me stare, letters to old friends that made me crack up, and love letters from an old boyfriend that made me blush.  And, of course, there were my journals.

I picked up one journal that spanned the summer of 1993 to the summer of 1995.  Two tumultuous years of my young adulthood, fraught with all of the expected angst of a person who is desperately trying to figure life out, to make good decisions, and navigate relationships.  And as I sat up well into the night, reading about these two years and all my forgotten drama, I just wanted to shout, “Enough already!  All this whining is giving me a headache!”

And it was whiny.  Wow was it whiny.  But apparently I knew it as whiny, and I defended it, saying that I only write when I feel whiny, because then the writing helps get the whiny out of my system, and that my life isn’t really as messed up as it seems in my journal, but I just write when I’m stressed and feel out of control, and that tends to happen when I was dating somebody, so really, my old journals sound like I’m schizophrenic and obsessed with boys.

Which, I suppose describes most teenagers.  But, I digress….

Like I said, I stayed up late into the night reading that journal. I was fascinated.  It was amazing the things I had forgotten, things I’m sure at the time I thought I would remember forever.  There were names of people I didn’t remember, couldn’t recall, people who had entered my life, influenced it, and then left.  There were events I recorded that I couldn’t remember participating in, conversations I don’t remember having.  My favorite, though, were my descriptions of relationships, and the transparencies obvious to me now that were much too opaque to me then.

Let’s just say if I had seen the movie, “He’s just not that into you”, that would have explained a lot.

Anyway, I’m wondering if other people keep journals like this, and if they mean something to you after the fact.  After my husband’s grandmother died, I had a chance to peruse some of her journals, and it was, again, fascinating to see glimpses of a woman I hardly knew.  I found myself wishing she had written more, just so I could see her life better.

However, reading it felt a little strange.  Intimate, like I was violating some part of her privacy, even though she was no longer on the earth.  I suppose all journals feel like that.

So tell me, do you keep a journal?  Why, or why not?   I know there is a lot of guilt associated with not keeping a journal–is it because a prophet told us to, and if we don’t do what the prophet tells us to do, we feel guilty?  Is journaling something that is hard for you to do, or something that is easy, natural, and, if you’re like me, necessary for your sanity?  Do you journal regularly, or sporadically, when the urge strikes?

If you do keep a journal, what kinds of things do you write about?  I know one friend who described the weather at the top of every entry in his journal.  I couldn’t ever figure out why he did that, especially since he lived in Boston at the time.  Seems to me there would be only one thing to report:

Weather=cold.

Call me crazy, but I find schizophrenic relationships much more entertaining.

My husband has been spending an awful lot of time lately looking at the newest version of the Kindle at Amazon.com. A few weeks ago, he made me sit through the entire promotional video. There are things I love about the Kindle– I love that it’s so light (when I go on vacation, the books I take along add substantially to the weight of my luggage. I can manage with two pairs of shoes for a week, but not two books), that users can either read or listen to the books they purchase, and that it’s virtually immediate. When I want a book I wouldn’t have to hunt it down in bookstores or wait for a week for it to arrive from an online source. But I know I’d miss the tactile quality of the book and the statement that all of my favorite books make in the bookshelves of my home.

I know that some independent Mormon journals (like Mormon Artist and Exponent II) have gone the way of the Kindle– they’re exclusively online publications. At the other end of the spectrum are the journals that have print-access only (like Irreantum). Still others (Sunstone and Dialogue) offer selected articles online at no charge (Dialogue also has an online subscription, for an additional fee), and others (Segullah) have both a print journal and a complete free online edition.

I’m curious about how each publication ended up with its particular print and online presence, and whether the editorial staff of the journals feel comfortable with the access their readers have or don’t have. I know that I personally like to read the article for the first time in a print journal, but it’s much easier for me to access it again if it’s online, since I tend not to keep back issues. Has online publication of your journal helped or hurt your subscribership?

If you came into my house and started rifling through the closets and drawers, you’d quickly discern our family’s academic allegiance– we’re Cougars through and through. I was an English major in the early and mid-nineties, when there wasn’t much job security for BYU English professors. But I’m not embarrassed to say that I had a great experience at BYU. I left feeling like I had received a great education in my major and in Mormon doctrines and culture.

A year after graduation, I started school again, at a much smaller university in the midwest. I’d been used to classes ranging anywhere from 30 to 900 students, so the seminar classes with four or five shocked me (“are they going to cancel this section?,” I wondered every time I started a new semester). For the first time I understood that while BYU had been a great place for me, it might not be the perfect fit for every student.

****

It was lunchtime, and I was jonesing for a slice of pizza, a diet coke, and something good to read. I started digging through the magazine basket, and when I saw the Ensign, felt a familiar stab of guilt, ripped off the shrinkwrap, and carried it back to the kitchen. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it was the first time I’d seriously delved into anything but the conference issue of the Ensign in a long while. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but the articles felt stale– boring, preachy, or sensationally faith-promoting.

****

This afternoon I came across two interesting tidbits about college options for LDS students. The first, from US News, listed BYU as the second most popular college in the nation, with popularity determined by the number of accepted students who actually enroll as freshmen (77% at BYU, trailing only Harvard, with 79%). The second was the website for Nauvoo University, a Mormon-friendly private educational institution that hopes to enroll its first class this fall, with eventual plans to become an accredited four-year university. More than a decade after a new board of directors reorganized Southern Virginia University as a school catering to LDS students (maybe some of those who decided the BYU environment wasn’t right for them), it appears to be thriving.

Do you see the independent Mormon publications as the SVUs and Nauvoo Universities of the publishing world? In what ways do you see similarities and where do they differ?

Last time I was here, I told you about my father-in-law and his obsession with books.  Now I’ll tell you about my husband, and his obsession with writing.

In some ways, it’s the reason we are together.  We are both always writing.  We got to know each other through letters.  We met in high school, but then parted for separate sides of the country.  This was in an age where email was for computer geeks, and the internet was really  for computer geeks.  So, we wrote.

He tells me I was the only one who faithfully wrote him his entire mission, with the exception of his father.  When we finally decided that we should get married, 3 years or so after he got home, the digital age was in full swing, and it had been years since we had sent each other anything handwritten.  Once, I wrote him a goofy love letter instead of taking notes in class.  When he got it, after not seeing my handwriting for so long, he said, “Wow.  I REALLY know your handwriting.  This is kind of freaky.”

I’ve now been married to this man for 10 years, and I’ve learned more about what makes him tick, and why he does what he does.  And I’ve figured out more about why he writes.

We both keep journals, handwritten ones even, although I know that sort of makes us dinosaurs.  But there is something quite satisfying about writing in a paper journal, and having a  year or so of your life chronicled in one spot.  But I’ll admit that to me, writing is mostly a creative exercise.  Yes, I dump as much garbage as the next person into my journal, entries driven by intense emotions that, put together, make it look like my life is just full of drama (which it’s not.  Seriously, I’m the most boring person I know).  But I also try new things in my journal, short stories, essays, even a few starts to a novel.  Creative stuff.  (Such as it is.)

My husband doesn’t do that.  He writes to  solve intellectual conundrums, to bounce ideas off of others, to approach thing from an different angle.   He writes academic articles that prove a point, or solve a puzzle, or illustrates something nobody has ever thought of before.  He wants to write something that will impact future generations. 

Me?  I just hope that somebody will laugh at my blog.

In this new world where anybody with an internet connection and blogspot address can be a writer, sometimes it makes me wonder why so many people are writing now.  Have there always been this much interest in writing, and it’s just never been this easy?  Or is blogging something that lends itself uniquely to mass interest, as you can put yourself in the spotlight, regardless of your message? (One commentor accused a friend of mine, an avid blogger, of being self-centered on her blog.  Well, duh.)

This blog is aimed at writers, at Mormon writers in particular. So I ask you, why do you write what you do?  Is it creative, is it cathartic, or is it, as Madeleine L’Engel talks about, something that you just can’t NOT do?  She knew that she was a writer because even as she got rejected as writer, she started writing a novel about rejection in her head.  It was something she could never get away from.  Writing.

Using this definition, my husband is a writer.  He will write his thoughts for an essay on the back of the program on Sunday if he doesn’t have any other paper handy, and he constantly carries a notebook full of writing.  Not a journal–a notebook.  They have to be separate, you know. 

Because writing is serious business.  Isn’t it?

Why do you do it?

A few years ago, armed with not much but a couple of babies, a dial-up internet connection and a well-used library card, I stumbled across some writing advice from Ray Bradbury: “You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

I had a mad passion for books and was harboring dreams of becoming a writer, but I feared that I could only carry Bradbury’s advice so far– I knew from experience that the local librarians frowned on such activities as me and the toddlers climbing on books and putting them on our heads. Besides, I was more of a “look-books-up-on-Amazon-and-reserve-them-online” kind of girl. Consequently, it wasn’t surprising that after many failed attempts at starting “serious” essays, I turned once again to the virtual world to get me writing. I started a Mommy Blog.

For a while, I followed Bradbury’s advice in the best way I knew how. Most afternoons I fed the troops lunch, plopped them down in front of Nick Jr, and wrote about the kids, the places I was running and the books I was reading. I hastily read what I’d written for glaring errors, hit publish, and before Blues Clues was done, friends from Tennessee and Utah and Massachusetts would chime in with comments like “That happens at our house too!” and “Soooooo cute!” and “You are SUCH a GREAT writer!” It was immediate gratification of the finest sort. But it also felt like cheating– I could be casual and slangy and funny, but I wanted more. When I started blogging at Feminist Mormon Housewives, I couldn’t write exclusively about the cute things my two-year-old was doing any more, and had to find my way with more challenging subject matter and an audience not made up of friends and relatives, but soon learned the trick to getting lots of comments– a little bit of controversy spices everything up.

When I joined the staff of Segullah last year, I warned them that I was not a writer. I was a blogger. I knew that there was a distinction between the two, but I didn’t realize how different the worlds were until I started sweating over my first “real” essay. One of our editors gave me a general topic and I dug in. I wrote for at least twice as long as I’d ever sweated over a blog post (an hour, maybe two tops) and waited impatiently for her response. Instead of  “This is SO funny!” I got a list of things to work on and change. It was hard work. To put it in a parlance I’m familiar with, it was training for a long-distance race, not going for a quick jog around the block, which is what blogging had prepared me for. A couple of months later, when we finally wrung the whole story out of me, the product felt like as much of an achievement as crossing the finish line at my first marathon.

At Segullah, we’ve been busy reading the entries for the Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest. One of the unexpected things from an editor’s perspective is that it’s pretty easy to figure out which essays began life as blog posts. There’s an informality of language and subject matter, an emphasis on hooking an audience early and keeping their interest by making them laugh, that links these blog-posts-turned-essays together. These essays are fun, which makes them stand out– personal essays can be so serious.

Similarly, sometimes serious writers need to lighten up when they blog. This week, previewing pieces for friends that were to be posted around the Bloggernacle, I realized that the advice I give as a Features Editor or a member of the editorial board for a journal is quite different from advice I give as a blogger. Good blog abides by many of the same principles I taught as a middle school journalism teacher. Essentials include a snappy title, a good hook, an engaging topic and a context for discussion, all wrapped up concisely enough that the audience doesn’t pop open the Google Reader, look in horror at the length of the post, and skip directly to the next item on the list.

The transition from full-time Mommy blogger to part-time “serious” writer felt like a welcome challenge. I don’t update my personal blog as often as I used to, and I miss the comments, but often the posts that I pour the most of my soul into (yeah, I’m being dramatic– I’m a blogger) come up with the fewest comments anyway. Come to think of it, Ray Bradbury sounds pretty dramatic in the aforementioned quote with all of his sniffing and lurking. Born in another era, he may have made a darn fine blogger.

By Angela W. Schultz

I’m not the easiest person to live with. I have lots of good intentions, which I often push too far. Some people might call me downright peculiar—even for a Mormon.

I abhor waste. In the summer I collect all the unwanted produce from everyone I know. Yes, including the zucchinis. I grate them and freeze them and cook with them all year.

In the name of frugality, I went several winters in Salt Lake City without heat.

And preparedness? Sometimes even I wonder if I am pushing the food storage thing too far. A few months ago my four-year-old was watching me nurse our newborn when she asked, “Is the baby drinking powdered milk?”

Thankfully, I have a husband who understands. Don supports my zucchini habit. He doesn’t complain about eating beans night after night. And when it comes to thrift, sometimes he even one-ups me.

Don has a history of bringing home strange things from work. One time he called me from the college and said, “Ang? I found some meat. I’m bringing it home.”

“You found it?”

“In the freezer. Here in the biology department.”

Even I have limits. Really, is there any compelling reason to eat a mysterious piece of flesh found in the life-science department freezer?

Then there was the lovely flower arrangement and scented candle that he brought me on February 15th. The day after Valentine’s Day. I was confused at first. I mean, I remembered the childhood stories Don told me about Santa coming late to his house because payday wasn’t until the thirtieth. But he didn’t get paid on the fifteenth, so what gives?

Re-gifting. The flowers were leftovers from a student who owns a flower shop. The candle was passed on by that lab tech who always wants Don to massage her shoulders. I’m not sure if her idea was to annoy me or to enhance our marriage.

Interestingly enough, it did a little of each. Yes, I appreciate new, on-time gifts once in a while. But knowing that I may be the only woman on the block getting day-old gifts also makes me feel special. It reminds me of all the eccentricities I love about Don. And all of the ones he loves in me. You might say that for us, being cheap is a mark of affection.

When we married fourteen years ago, I thought Don loved me. But when I see him working twelve-hour days to single-handedly roof our house, I start to understand how much. Sure, he could always call a contractor (and phone the florist while he’s at it), but I think his style shows a lot of creativity—and commitment.

His creative approach has taken several turns. A few days ago I noticed a strange imperfection on one of my teeth. “Do you think this is a cavity?” I asked Don.

“No,” he said knowingly. “That’s definitely a chip in the enamel. You don’t need a dentist for that. I can fix it for you. All it takes is a little epoxy.”

Did I mention that this is the man who, when I was preparing to give birth to our first child, offered to build me an electric breast pump from our old aquarium equipment?

I turned him down then too.

(from the Fall 2006 issue of Segullah)

I’m the kind of girl who has to psych herself up for a day or two before calling our teenage babysitter. I’m not good at small talk, particularly when I don’t know the person I’m talking to very well. When I became Segullah’s Features Editor this summer, I worried about whether or not I’d be up to the task of giving support and feedback to our writers, but I stewed and sweated over my responsibility to conduct an interview for our “Faces of Latter-day Saint Women” feature. I hadn’t done interviewing since my high school journalism days, when my “interviews” were usually notes passed in physics class.

The night before my first Segullah interview, I had one of those restless nights that hearkened back to my college finals days. I dreamed about getting lost on the way to the interview, about getting yelled at, and about showing up without any pants on. When I left the next day, I had a sheet of neatly-typed questions, straightforward directions, a very cool mini tape recorder, and a great wingman (our Assistant Editor, Emily Milner, who came along for moral support). And while we were with the interviewee, things seemed to go well. She was easy to talk to and interested in answering our questions, and we got lots of good material to write about.

Well, we thought we got lots of good material to write about. My new fancy tape recorder? It captured only about 1/3 of our conversation from that afternoon (the tape snapped and it looked like it was still recording). Emily and I managed to piece together a feature that focused on that material we did get, and I think we pulled it off (we’ll see when it runs in our upcoming issue), but I put the article to bed feeling like it could have been better than it was.

Subsequent interviews have gotten easier. Over the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure interviewing Marilyn Brown through an ongoing series of emails, and find myself still shooting her off little notes when I come across something I think she might find interesting, but I have a hard time feeling confident as an interviewer. I listen to Terry Gross and Krista Tippett on my iPod while I run, and over the last six months, my focus has shifted from listening to the interviews so I could learn and be entertained to listening to the interviews so I can focus on what kinds of questions Gross and Tippett ask and how they engage their interview subjects.

For the experienced interviewers out there– what are your tricks of the trade? How do you prepare? How do you break the ice with the people you interview? And, most important of all, how do you decide who to interview?

And for you interview readers–what do you like to hear about in an interview? What are some of the favorite interviews you’ve read, and what made them good?