We’re finally waking up the Mormon Artist blog. We’ve primarily been using it to announce new issues of the magazine, and we’ll continue to do that, but there’s a lot more we’ll be posting about — what’s coming up in future issues, interesting things happening in the Mormon arts world, arts-related competitions you can enter, Mormon artists on Twitter, you name it. (There’s lots of LDS arts news that we can’t publish in the magazine because of time issues or space issues, whereas a blog is perfect because it’s instant and there’s no limit.)

Know somebody we should interview? Let us know, either by emailing us (editor at mormonartist dot net) or by leaving a comment here. Thanks! :)

If you haven’t already heard about it, the Church has a new radio website — radio.lds.org — and one of their programs is a podcast on creativity called Everything Creative, with ten episodes already available. Here’s their description:

Inspired by a talk given by President Uchtdorf called “Happiness, Your Heritage” (General Relief Society Meeting, Fall 2008) Everything Creative explores creativity through interviews with artists and creative people of all types. Each episode is unique as the interviewee from a previous episode becomes the interviewer of another creative artist. The program is hosted by Utah musician Nancy Hanson.

Here’s a press release from MormonMedia.com, which is now posting artist interviews to its blog:

Announcement: MormonMedia.com is opening the door to Mormon artists, authors, performers, etc. to talk about their work. Under the site’s “Media Buzz” section, MormonMedia.com posts articles about movies, books, music and other related topics, about the details behind the work and about the artist. If you would like to submit news about yourself and/or your work, please email Brittany@mormonmedia.com. Please note that by submitting any news to MormonMedia.com, you give the site permission to post the information. MormonMedia.com reserves the right to choose what news it posts, and the right to edit it. The information may also appear in MormonMedia.com’s newsletter, which you can also subscribe to at www.mormonmedia.com.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of our first Mormon Artist contest (literature from writers thirty or under):

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.

We’re pleased to announce our first Mormon Artist contest, with the winning entries being published in a special issue of creative written work by young writers.

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. :)

Mahonri Stewart just interviewed me about the magazine on A Motley Vision. If you’re interested in how the magazine got started or want to know a little more about our vision for the future, check it out.

I’m pleased to announce that Issue 3 of the magazine is now available: http://mormonartist.net/

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!

New post about Mormon Artist on The Red Brick Store.

So, doing the magazine primarily by myself is proving to be unscalable, and since I do like to sleep (occasionally ;)), I’m trying to get more people on board. Here are the different things I need help with in putting the magazine together — if something appeals to you and you feel you have enough time to volunteer for it, send me a Facebook message or an email (editor at mormonartist dot net). It would also help if you let me know about how much time you think you can commit. For the illustrators, photographers, designers, writers, editors, and interviewers, please send a few samples of your work as well (to the email address).

Also, if you know of anyone who’d be interested, please let them know.

1. Transcriptionistas. Since we try to quote our interviewees as accurately as possible, we record interviews (whether they’re in real life or on the phone), and that means we need people to listen to the MP3s and type up the interviews. The work is fairly tedious and not exactly glamorous or exciting, but it needs to be done. This is the biggest bottleneck for us right now. The time commitment varies on how fast you transcribe; interviews are generally about an hour long, so transcribing one interview would probably take from two to five hours.

2. Proofreaders. We’re not big fans of typos or other errors, so we need people to comb through the magazine in a nitpicky fashion looking for things gone awry. (Or anything that ought to be clarified.) The time commitment on this depends on how fast you can proof, but it’s less work than transcribing.

3. Scouts. We want to know what’s going on in the world of Mormon arts, but we (meaning me) only have so much we can do by ourselves. We need people to scour the web looking for people we can interview, feature article ideas, and existing content we might want to reprint (photographs, essays, whatever).

4. Illustrators/photographers/designers. We’d like to have illustrators and photographers we can call upon to supplement the magazine where necessary. I’m not sure yet exactly how much we’ll need — it’s in flux — but it’d be great if we at least knew that we could get illustrations and photographs if we needed them (for the design, I’m thinking). You would of course retain the copyright to your work and be able to use it elsewhere; all we want is the right to put it in the magazine.

5. Interviewers. Interviews will only be done on assignment for now (i.e., we won’t accept unsolicited interviews), but we’d like to expand our base of interviewers (which currently consists of me, myself, and I :)) so there will be more variety and different perspectives. (We’ll have some rules and guidelines for conducting interviews — for example, non-email interviews (real-life/phone) must be recorded. And interviews need to touch on the intersection of faith and art in some way, since that’s what this magazine is all about.) It would be best if interviewers can transcribe their own pieces, since they’re going to be the ones most able to capture the gist of what was actually said. Location is really only a factor for in-person interviews; you can do phone interviews over Skype (you do have to buy Skype credit, though), and email is of course free. (We generally have the interviewee choose which is most convenient for them.)

6. Writers. As we start expanding our content base beyond interviews, we’d like to have staff on hand who can write up events or do other feature articles. (Granted, we *will* be accepting external submissions as well, but we want to be able to assign things as well.)

7. Editors. This could technically be part of transcribing, but I’m going to try splitting it out and we’ll see what happens. Basically, once the transcriptionistas transcribe a raw interview, the editor needs to go in and turn the spoken English into written English. You need to be a good writer for this. And as we expand beyond just interviews, the editors will also review submissions and their submitters to edit them into shape for publication.

8. Section editors. This is the biggest commitment. As you may have noticed, the magazine is now split into sections:

• Literature & Words (writing, storytelling)
• Visual & Applied Arts (painting, photography, sculpture, book arts, glass-blowing, etc.)
• Music & Dance
• Film & Theatre (including animation)

The names of the sections may change but that’s the basic idea. Section editors will be responsible for the content in their area. They’ll choose people to interview, get them interviewed (whether themselves or by interviewers), make sure the interviews get transcribed and edited, gather artwork/photographs to accompany the interviews, review submissions, find other types of content and get it ready for publication, and so on. Because this is such an important and responsible position, I’m going to have to be very selective. I need people who are extremely reliable and committed, who can follow up with other people to make things happen, who are passionate about the arts in general and their specific area in particular. If you’re interested in becoming a section editor, write me a short (one page or so) letter to convince me why I should pick you. (I should also say that if there are enough people who want to help out, I may assign assistants to the section editors to help lighten the load.)

This is getting long. :) Anyway, I’d love to have as many people help out as possible, while still maintaining (and hopefully exceeding :)) the level of quality we’re at. I realize that not everyone has oodles of time to volunteer for something like this, but with the various positions (and there may be more types in the future), I’m hoping there’s something for everyone, even those who only have an hour or two a month. And location really doesn’t matter, thanks to the Internet. (You do need an Internet connection, but if you didn’t have one, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. :))

Finally, expect some growing pains as part of this staff expansion. With luck it’ll be a relatively smooth transition, but hang in there through the ditches and speed bumps, because we’ll make it. :)