We’ve just released our first contest issue. This issue features the winners of our 2009 Mormon Artist Young Writers Contest, including Davey Morrison Dillard, Eliza Campbell, Sarah E. Page, and Tyler Chadwick, along with a set of stories by James Goldberg.

I should add that MagCloud is offering a 25% discount on hard copies of all magazines (including Mormon Artist) from now through January 1st. Get yours at the MagCloud website.

This issue features interviews with Jack Weyland, Jessica Day George, Emily King, Liz Davis Maxfield, Jeff Parkin, and Jared Cardon, along with an excerpt from a novel by Jack Weyland, an article on Eric Jensen, and artwork by Monica Olson, Brandon Grimshaw, Rosa Datoc Dall, and Corey Strange.

This issue features interviews with Patrick Madden, Rick Walton, Cambria Evans Christensen, Perla Antoniak, Debra Fotheringham, and Danor Gerald, along with an article by Menachem Wecker and an essay by Patrick Madden.

New magazine profiles artistically minded Latter-day Saints

by Cody Clark

Originally published in the Daily Herald on March 27, 2009. Reprinted with permission.

What do Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer, James Christensen, Michael McLean, The 5 Browns, Rick Schroeder, John Telford, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Gladys Knight, Dave Wolverton, Janice Kapp Perry, Brian Crane, Jessica Day George, George Dyer, Tracy Hickman, Christian Vuissa, Anne Perry, Howard Tayler, Jack Weyland, Jennette McCurdy and Brandon Sanderson — to name just a few — have in common?

Each of them (including all five of the Browns) is someone who you might someday read about in the pages of the new(-ish) and rapidly blossoming bimonthly magazine Mormon Artist. Two of them, in fact, have already been there: Vuissa, a filmmaker and founder of the LDS Film Festival, and Telford, a noted landscape photographer who teaches at Brigham Young University, are in Issue 3 (January 2009).

Mormon Artist, which is available free-of-charge online at www.mormonartist.net and for $11.25 an issue via print-on-demand periodicals publisher MagCloud, was launched late last summer by BYU graduate Ben Crowder. Every other month, the glossy publishes interviews with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who are engaged in some field of artistic endeavor.

The magazine took shape literally overnight in June 2008 after Crowder, who’s 25 and a Web designer for BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, read about MagCloud, a Web-based enterprise backed by Hewlett-Packard. “I was making breakfast the next day and thinking to myself, ‘What kind of magazine would I like to read?’ ” Crowder said.

It came to him almost immediately. Being, as he put it, both “very Mormon” and “very into the arts,” Crowder quickly envisioned a magazine that would provide a forum for church members to talk about their artistic pursuits in their own words.

“I started writing down names right away,” he said. “Later that day, I started e-mailing people.”

The pace didn’t slow down from there. Crowder’s first interview was with Provo resident and painter J. Kirk Richards. The portrait lens he’d ordered for his digital camera arrived by mail the same day that the interview was scheduled to take place. “I got the lens out of the box and left for Kirk’s house,” Crowder said.

From one-man-band to volunteer symphony

For the first two issues of Mormon Artist, Crowder, who is single, but would like to change that, did almost everything on his own. He picked all of the subjects, arranged and conducted all of the interviews, transcribed them, and handled all of the design, layout and editing himself. A couple of friends pitched in to help with proofreading.

“It wasn’t really sustainable,” Crowder said, which is why, after Issue 2 (November 2008), he decided to ask for help. He sent out a general call for volunteers and quickly found out that he wasn’t alone in his interests. “Within five hours,” he said, “30 people had responded.”

One of the people who rallied to the cause is local playwright Mahonri Stewart, a freelance writer and married father of one who lives in Orem. Stewart interviewed stage director Christopher Clark, who teaches theater at Utah Valley University, for Issue 3.

The idea of a Mormon arts magazine, Stewart said, was instantly appealing to him. One thing he hopes that Mormon Artist can provide to its readership is a sense of possibility. The average Latter-day Saint, he said, may not realize the breadth and variety of fellow church members who, in some way or other, are making a living from their art.

More to the point, Stewart said, he hopes Mormon Artist can demonstrate that Mormon art is flourishing “whether you make your living off it or not.”

Nobody is making his or her living from the publication of Mormon Artist, or at least not at the moment. Visitorship to the Web site is a relative trickle — about 7,500 unique visitors had passed through as of February — and the print-on-demand edition is, for the time being, more of a gimmick than a moneymaker. “With the first issue, we only sold about 11 copies,” Crowder said.

Now that Crowder doesn’t have to do everything himself, however, there’s time for Mormon Artist to gradually build a following. With a pool of nearly 70 volunteers to draw from, the demands on Crowder’s time are very much within reason, down from between 50 and 80 hours every two months, to 10 or 15 hours.

Focused on people

Eventually, there may be art, poetry, photography, short fiction, essays and more in Mormon Artist. A short play titled “And,” by local playwright J. Scott Bronson, appeared in Issue 2.

Crowder’s hope, however, is that the magazine’s core content will consist more of interviews with artists themselves than samples of their work. “For me, that’s the most interesting part,” he said. “Without the people, there’s no art.”

Crowder intends to include superstar Mormon artists — Card, Meyer, Knight, David Archuleta, Donny and Marie — but he also hopes that the magazine can introduce people to lesser-known figures.

“Basically, I want the people who everyone knows, the people who no one knows and everyone in between,” he said.

And while there aren’t a lot of requirements to be profiled in the magazine — most of them are included in its name — there’s one that’s especially important. “The only real criteria is that [interviewees] be active, practicing Mormons,” Crowder said. “The point is to build a community of people where faith and art can interact without betraying either.”

Clark said that he thinks Mormon Artist can fill a void, in that sense. Church members and others, he said, tend to be aware of the religious affiliation of Latter-day Saints who are successful in sports or business, but LDS artists are often more obscure.

“There’s always that sense that if you go into the arts you’re going to lose your testimony or leave the church,” Clark said. With Mormon Artist, he said, there’s an opportunity to say, “Look, you can be a strong member of the church and you can also do some really great work in the arts.”

Whether or not a given LDS artist’s output is demonstrably focused on religious themes doesn’t matter to Crowder. “Because ours is a religion, when we’re living it, that extends into every area of our lives,” he said, “even art that isn’t overtly Mormon still has Mormonism in it.”

One thing that won’t stand in the way of future issues is finding people to interview. Once he started investigating, Crowder said, he realized that “there are tons and tons of people working in LDS art. It’s amazing.

“We will never run out of material.”

This issue features interviews with Janette Rallison, Howard Tayler, Amy Van Wagenen, Shaun Barrowes, Rob Gardner, and Mahonri Stewart, along with an essay by Mahonri Stewart and an excerpt from Janette Rallison’s novel Just One Wish.

As mentioned in this issue’s editor’s note, we’re going to start posting more content to this blog in the near future. Stay tuned. :)

Also, three interviews about the magazine have been published since our last issue:

Daily Herald (March 27)
Iconia (February 11)
A Motley Vision (January 24)

First place ($100): Davey Morrison’s play “Adam and Eve”
Second place ($60): Eliza Campbell’s personal essay “Faith”
Third place ($40): Sarah Page’s poem “Coring the Apple”
Honorable mention: Tyler Chadwick’s poem “For the Man in the Red Jacket”
Honorable mention: Davey Morrison’s poem “Blind Man”

These will be published in May in a special issue including interviews with the writers and essays about their pieces.

Also, we’ll be announcing the details of our next Mormon Artist contest soon. (If you want to make sure you hear about it, subscribe to our blog, follow us on Twitter, or join our Facebook group.) And don’t worry, the next contest will be open to everyone, regardless of age.

Categories: Short stories, personal essays, critical essays, short plays, and poetry.

Who’s eligible: Anyone thirty or under.

What we’re looking for: Work that reflects the purposes of the magazine, which include building the kingdom through the arts and encouraging artistic excellence in all disciplines.

Prizes: $100 for first place, $60 for second, and $40 for third.

Submissions deadline: February 28, 2009 (by the end of the day your time, wherever you are).

How to submit: Please e-mail submissions to literature@mormonartist.net and make sure you include the words “Young Writer” in the subject line of the e-mail. You may submit no more than three written works, but they can be in any category.

If you have any questions, feel free to email us. :)

Here are our updated staff needs, now that we’ve had the chance to work a few things out (see the old staff needs post for more details):

1. Transcribers. We have a lot of people doing this but can always use more. One interview generally takes two to five hours to transcribe, and you’d be transcribing roughly one interview every three months.

2. Proofreaders. Before we send out the magazine, you proof it for errors. It’s a fairly small time commitment, depending on how fast you can proofread.

3. Scouts. The more we have of these, the better. Basically, you just let us know if there’s anything we ought to be covering.

4. Photographers. You need to have a DSLR and a lens with a low f-stop (f/1.8 or f/1.4), and you probably need to be in Utah.

5. Interviewers. We need more people to be able to do interviews. You can live anywhere, since many of our interviews are over email or the phone. If you plan to do phone interviews, you need to have a microphone. If you want to do in-person interviews, you need a digital recorder (or need to be able to borrow one).

6. Writers. We’re not quite to the point where we’re running feature articles, but we will before long.

7. Editors. We also need more editors. You need to have editing experience and be a little OCD. :)

8. Section editors. We still need section editors for Visual & Applies Arts (painting, photography, sculpture, book arts, glass-blowing, etc.) and Music & Dance. You need to have editing experience (since you’ll be reviewing the editors’ work) and some level of organization skills (since you’ll be selecting content for your section). And you need to be reliable.

If you’re interested, email us at editor at mormonartist dot net. Thanks!