You know, I still can’t believe it—just seven months ago I was in my kitchen scrambling some eggs for breakfast when Mormon Artist was born. The day before, I’d stumbled across MagCloud (a print-on-demand magazine publisher) and thought it was an interesting idea, filing it away in my mind for future reference. As I pushed my eggs around on the skillet, the idea of publishing a magazine resurfaced and grabbed hold of me. I decided to give it a shot. A few possible topics shuffled through my head but none sounded compelling enough.

Then I stopped and asked myself what kind of magazine I wanted to read. Almost instantly I thought of the arts, and then the name Mormon Artist popped into my head and I knew right away that I had a winner. The floodgates opened right then and it’s a wonder I didn’t burn those eggs, there were so many ideas pouring down as I scratched them onto an index card in a frenzy.

I knew I had to start right away—patience has never been one of my stronger virtues—so I registered the domain for the website and started planning out a list of people I wanted to interview. Things miraculously came together, even more easily than I expected. (My guess is that this is because I didn’t have enough sense to know what I was getting myself into.) But here we are on our third issue, with two more already lined up and no end in sight. It really is a miracle.

Even more of a miracle is the outpouring of interest in helping out. Already we’ve had over fifty people volunteer, and in this issue, all of the interviews, transcribing, and photography, along with almost all of the editing, have been done by volunteers. (I did the first two issues almost entirely by myself. Let’s just say that when publication time came around, I didn’t get much sleep.) Having people help out has made a difference. Which isn’t to say it’s been an entirely smooth ride—sickness and technology failure made brief cameos here and there—but overall it has gone spectacularly well. And now that we have enough people onboard, we can start running more interviews in each issue, and, with luck, switch our publication frequency to monthly instead of bimonthly.

We still need more volunteers. If you’d like to help out, take a look at the staff needs post on our blog and shoot us an email or a message on Facebook or Twitter.

While we’re more than happy to have people help out wherever they can, we’re particularly looking for section editors for Visual & Applied Arts and Music & Dance (we want people with editing experience and a passion for the subject) and for more interviewers.

If you want to help out but don’t have time, tell your friends about the magazine. If you’re on Facebook, join the group (“Mormon Artist”) and invite people you think would be interested. The more people reading the magazine, the better.

Up till now the conversation on the magazine has been primarily one-sided. We’re hoping to change that, and to create more of a dialogue we’ve added support for comments to the website. Feel free to post your thoughts if you’d like. We’ve also removed the advertisement sidebar and replaced it with a listing of upcoming events and other announcements, which will hopefully be more useful. (If you have something you feel should be added there, send us an email.)

Again, if you know of any international Latter-day Saint artists, let us know. We’ve got Jonna in this issue and in the next issue we’ll be featuring a brother who wrote one of the hymns in the Italian hymnbook, and we want this to be just the beginning. There are many, many members of the Church in the far reaches of the world who make art and yet hardly any of us know about it. Let’s change that.

Thanks to everyone involved, especially the artists and the volunteers. There would be no magazine if it weren’t for them. ❧