I’m not doing such a good job at updating this frequently, am I. Lately I’ve been in more of a design mood than a writing mood, with the current project on the burner being our ward directory. I used the old look for a solid year, and while there’s no real reason I had to change it, I did want to freshen things up a bit. This new design (no screenshots yet, I’m afraid) uses a circle motif and feels a bit lighter — which is good, since it’s for spring/summer. I’m hoping to have the whole thing done within a week.

Great post on Segullah by Chris Bigelow entitled Mormon Literature: Carving Out a Middle Niche?

Piddling around with Mormon niche markets is okay, as far as it goes (which isn’t far). But for me, the real holy grail of Mormon literature would be for a Mormon author to break through nationally with authentic Mormon content. We need a Mormon Saul Bellow, John Updike, etc. If and when that ever happens, I think that’s what will crack open the Mormon culture for some real literary treatment. I haven’t seen anyone come anywhere near to pulling this off yet, though.

Good post. And in the comments, Angela Hallstrom (who wrote Bound on Earth) said this, which really resonated with me:

I think we just need to write things true, you know? Without an agenda. Without a, “I’m so spiritual, look at me,” OR a, “I’m so edgy and provocative, look at me” undertone ruining the honesty that makes good writing work.

Exactly! Honesty, not self-conscious pretention — in either direction. That’s one of the things I love about New Play Project. I don’t know how it happens so consistently, but the plays we produce really don’t have agendas. They’re not preachy or saccharine, yet they deal with hard issues without going “edgy” and chasing the Spirit away. They’re not afraid to question things, but it’s all within a context of faithfulness, all on a solid gospel foundation. They’re honest. They’re true. They’re awesome. :)

And the more we see of that in all the artistic disciplines, the better. I feel like we’re teetering on the cusp of a full-blown Mormon renaissance. Yes, we’ll always have sappy stuff, and we’ll always have edgy stuff, but now we’re finally starting to see the well-rounded and healthy works in the middle — the middle niche Chris talks about in his post. Ah, it’s a great time to be involved in Mormon arts. :)

Great post by Robert Starling (via Gideon Burton) on Mormon Renaissance yesterday, called High Expectations for Mormon Filmmakers. This part was particularly inspiring:

In a “behind the scenes” portion Dr. Woodbury was recorded saying something that has guided my creative life. He had gathered his cast and crew who were bone-tired from endless rehearsals and he was exhorting them to dig down into whatever reserves they had and give their very best. He said, “My brothers and sisters, we are in the very last of the Last Days. The time is too short to waste our talents in producing “small” plays and giving “small” efforts (and producing “small” movies?). Everything we do must be something that has eternal significance if it is to have any real value.”

And the Capra story has just crawled into a secure place in my heart. Sure, I don’t think that creating fluff is necessarily a sin (though at the same time I can see how it might be), but “the talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your own. God gave you those talents; they are His gifts to you, to use for His purpose.” Beautiful.

Earlier today Katherine posted “Toward a Mormon Renaissance” over at Mormon Renaissance (how fitting :)). It’s an essay by James Goldberg, one he read at the beginning of New Play Project’s “Thorns and Thistles” set of plays (which happened to be when my first play was performed, incidentally) (and I’m not just blogging about it because he mentions me in the essay, either :P). The essay — and the idea behind it — gives me goosebumps:

What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s time for us to help change the world again. Look, I know it sounds arrogant to say that. I’m 24 years old, and the only times I can focus on theatre full-time are when I’ve saved up enough money to quit my day job for a few months. I mean, I don’t even have insurance — who am I to change the world? Who’s Katherine Gee or Ben Crowder? Who are any of the actors you’re going to see tonight? You know, most of them aren’t even trained actors. They’re just nice people who wanted to help us put on these plays.

Who are we? Well, we’re Latter-day Saints. We’re people who have wrestled with some of life’s big and little issues and have been lucky enough to have help. We’re people who think and act a little differently than most of the country does. We’re people who know a little about God and a little about life. And we’re people who believe that’s enough to say something big.

Are we going to make a difference? I hope so. And I take hope in history.

Beautiful. And let me just say again that I love New Play Project. It has the right feel to it (”right” being my own very subjective perspective, of course :)), and it’s just a really wonderful, beautiful, awesome thing. And it is changing the world. It’s not often that I find causes I really feel I can commit to and throw my lot in with full heart and soul, but New Play Project is one. I’m in it for the long haul. (Hopefully I’ll keep getting better as a playwright so that my plays keep getting accepted. ;) I’ve already got ideas for a couple more plays I’ll be submitting to the remaining festivals this year, actually, and tonight I started outlining one of them.)

I’ll wait a few more days before I give another update on rehearsals for Safe and Sound and Prodigal Son, by the way. (And purely for the historical record, with respect to that quote from James’ essay, Katherine Gee acted in my first play, and she and I are now directing Prodigal Son. Which James wrote. :) There’s connections all over the place, folks.)

Anyway, New Play Project has definitely found a warm spot in my heart, and I really feel that it’s a movement that is going to make a difference and change the world. And it’s unmistakably part of the Mormon renaissance.

[Cross-posted from Top of the Mountains.]

Yet another Snowstorm post. :) (But it’s the last one.) We had the encore performance of “Eccentricities” tonight, and it went quite well, even though the place wasn’t completely sold out. At the end they tallied all the audience votes for the four performances, and to my surprise, Snowstorm took third place! (That’s a good surprise, not a bad one. :P) They presented me with a check for $15 which I’m going to frame as my first real writing prize.

It’s not about the money. It’s not even about winning, really. It’s about the joy of theatre, of words and acting and stories, of humanity. Even though I didn’t really participate in the production — I wrote the script, submitted it, and then sat back and let them do their thing — even though I was a clockmaker playwright, I still felt a wonderful sense of community with all the other playwrights and actors and directors and everyone else who helped out. I love theatre.

Which doesn’t mean it’s been a bed of roses. (And by the way, I’m not sure a bed of roses is all that great. I mean, the petals would get squished all over as soon as you got in, and the smell would be a bit overpowering, and doesn’t the pigment in flowers rub off on you, too? ;)) Saturday, for example, I kept seeing all the faults in my script (lines I wish I’d written differently), and I have to admit that it got me down. I almost vowed to stop writing plays entirely — with fiction and poetry, you don’t have to see it acted out in front of everyone, it stays safely on the page. Less embarrassing if it goes wrong. But then by Sunday I was itching at the bit again to finish this new play and submit it. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, really — nothing like dating, but still a lot of ups and downs.

We have a talkback session after each performance, and usually all of the questions have been directed at other plays, because all but mine had a deeper meaning and thus provided more fodder for discussion. Tonight, though, something bizarrely switched, and almost all of the questions were about Snowstorm. Unexpected but fun. I’m realizing that even though I usually don’t like being up in front of large groups of people, I can do this. I even like it. Phew. :)

So anyway, the submission deadline for the next festival is tomorrow at midnight. (If you’d like to submit something — and you really ought to — you can check out the website.) I’ve got one play which is mostly done (and the title keeps changing so I’ll leave it anonymous :P), and then Saturday around noon I was walking down the hill south of campus and came up with another idea which I’m also going to try to write by tomorrow night. Lots of writing, but it’s worth it. Oh, it’s worth it. :)

Back in May, I decided to start digitizing the Welsh Book of Mormon (Llyfr Mormon), dubbing the endeavor Project Cymru. It was going along pretty well for a while, but then I got bogged down over the summer and kind of forgot about the project. I did (and still do :)) have two volunteers helping me, so we made some headway, but overall the project’s been hibernating pretty tightly.

Not for much longer, though. I’m working on getting a spit-and-barbed-wire version of Unbindery up soon so we can do the OCR clean-up easily, and even get more people to help out. Once that happens, it won’t take long to finish the text. And then I’ll be typesetting it into three different versions: one similar to the original Welsh text, one versified (ala the Doubleday edition of the English Book of Mormon), and a parallel English-Welsh text.

Here’s a page from the versified 1 Nephi:

And here’s a page from the parallel edition:

This’ll be Unbindery’s maiden voyage. Humble beginnings, but she’ll go far. :)

In my attempt (successful, so far) to avoid finishing Shadowpaint, I worked a little on The Girl in the Mirror (a Gothic narrative poem), and I realized something that I’d sort of noticed before but hadn’t paid much attention to: without external constraints, I naturally gravitate toward fantasy and the supernatural in my writing.

Why do I feel almost guilty about this?

Two reasons, I think. First, I’m a Mormon, and we believe in truth. Truth meaning what really is. And fantasy is, by definition almost, what is not. :) This argument doesn’t hold up very well, though, because Mormonism started in our day and age when a boy saw an angel. And as far as the world’s concerned, that’s fantasy. Our temples have an aura of mystery about them (to the outsider) that easily lends itself to imaginative speculations of the fantastical sort. And does writing stories about stuff that never happened — and never could happen — somehow distract us from the goal of becoming like God and getting back to heaven? The tiny little Puritan in me says yes, but to be honest, fairy tales and other fantasy stories actually bolster my belief in God — who is unseen. I don’t see any irony here. Even though I still feel that nagging sense of self-conscious guilt.

The second reason is our modern worship of science and the scientific method. What’s real is what matters, they say. And fantasy isn’t real. Again, tales of fancy stretch my imagination, fueling my creative drive, and that has real-world benefits all over the place (even financially).

The point is, I love fantasy — stories where things happen, in ways they don’t usually happen in our experience — and it’s time to stop being self-conscious about it. Because I sure as heck am not going to stop writing it. :) (Which isn’t to say that I don’t write realistic works — all of my plays so far have been solidly planted in reality, for example. But it’s ten times easier for me to get excited about a work that toes the line between reality and faërie.)