Honors 300R Ethnography: The Denizens of Leading Edge

by Daniel Friend

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Acknowledgements Special thanks to Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Dave Doering, Linda Adams, and Peter and Karen Ahlstrom for taking enough time out of their day for me to buy them lunch; to Chen‘s Noodle House and La Hacienda restaurant for being good enough to tempt them with; to Emily Sanderson, for babysitting the Ahlstrom girls; to Emily Adams and Nyssa Silvester for running things at the magazine while I was off interviewing people; to Joe Vasicek, Neal Silvester, Daniel Teichreib, Erika Bishop, Sarah Seeley, Caitlin Walls, Benjamin Keeley, Alan Manning, and Amber Thomas for taking the time to contribute; to Camilla Parshall, Evan Witt, Benjamin Blackhurst, Arielle Myers, and even Genevieve Busch for using facebook (albeit under duress for one of them); to Melva Giffords, Jonathan Langford, and Douglas Summers-Stay, for emailing someone they had never met; to Incubus, for providing great formatting music in If Not Now, When?; and especially to Deirdre Paulsen, who encourages all good things. This project needed all of you to make it what it is.

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Table of Contents

Part I: The Ethnography

Abstract Introduction Literature Review Methodology The Site The Culture Conclusion Alphabetical Index of Informants Works Cited

Part II: The Collection

The History of Leading Edge p.14 The Divine Influence in Leading Edge Founding History by Dave Doering and Linda Adams Leading Edge Yields Latter-day Saints by Melva Giffords The Leading Edge—Thoughts and Memories by Jonathan Langford

Success Stories of Leading Edge p.42 The Class that Made It Big by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Peter Ahlstrom, and Karen Ahlstrom Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time Introduction by Douglas Summers-Stay

Engagement Stories from Leading Edge p.74 How the Ahlstroms Got Engaged by Karen Ahlstrom Today Is Unexpected Proposal Day by Nyssa Silvester

The Culture of Leading Edge p.79 Changes through the Years by Joseph Vasicek Shirts, Sniffs, and Smirks by Daniel Teichrieb Tales from the Slushmeister by Neal Silvester Not the Typical Person by Caitlin Walls

The Lingo of Leading Edge p.98 Adjusting to Leading Edge Lingo by Daniel Friend

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How I Found Leading Edge by Sarah Seeley

Workplace Preparation at Leading Edge p.103 Valuable Experience by Benjamin Keeley Diving into the Slush Pile by Emily Adams

3 Questions about Leading Edge p.106 Getting Published at Leading Edge by Evan Witt Learning to Love Giving Feedback by Benjamin Blackhurst Genevieve’s Rant by Genevieve Busch The Greatest People by Camilla Parshall Amber’s Three Answers by Amber Thomas Three Answers from Arielle by Arielle Myers

Current Events at Leading Edge p.116 Hands off the Slush Pile by Alan Manning

Appendices p.123

Appendix A: Staff Letters from the Beginning of the Funding Crisis

Appendix B: Letter from Chris Baxter on Proper Cover Letters

Appendix C: My Funding Crisis Letter to the Dean

Appendix D: Dan Wells’ Leading Edge Card Game

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Abstract This corpus of interviews with current and former staff members of Leading Edge documents the ways that this journal‘s unique work environment has prepared students for the editing workplace, enriched their time as BYU students, and fostered the development of a unique BYU subculture. These benefits of the Leading Edge project are convincing evidence that Leading Edge deserves continued funding from the College of Humanities and the Department of Linguistics and English Language.

Introduction Leading Edge is Brigham Young University‘s journal of speculative fiction (mainly science fiction and fantasy). Under the distant supervision of a faculty advisor, the publication is entirely student-run, and is set up just like a professional publishing house. This organization allows editing students to gain applicable experience while still at college. Leading Edge enjoys semi-professional status through paying its contributors (authors, poets, and artists), and is by far the most widely-read of BYU‘s student journals. It is also a social gathering-place for the many students who volunteer to run the magazine. Despite all these feats, however, the administration of the College of Humanities has decided to obliterate the journal‘s funding. After struggling to uncover the reasons for this unexpected and uncommunicated severance, I realized that part of the problem comes down to a deep-rooted issue that plagues nearly all BYU departments: administration has almost no connection with the student body it governs. This is mainly by design, but here is not the place to belabor the particulars of BYU‘s administrative policy. The point here is that had the persons who made this decision known anything about the students it would affect, and how negatively it would impact them, the decision made would have been different. Perhaps if these same persons can come to understand and appreciate the flourishing subculture of Leading Edge, as well as comprehend the beneficial effects it has had and continues to have in their educational experiences and in their lives, the decision do defund Leading Edge might still be reversed. As I begin this project, I must admit unabashedly that not only am I an insider of this subculture, I‘m in charge of it. I came to BYU specifically because of the editing program and the chance it offered me to work on Leading Edge, and have been volunteering for the magazine since I arrived. After only a few months of consistent attendance, I was made Fiction Director. When an Editor position opened up, I was handpicked by Amanda Brown, the outgoing Editor, to replace her. Now, as Senior Editor, I effectively call the shots of the day-to-day running of the magazine. Although this could potentially cause my informants to feel that they are being pressured by the boss into contributing something to this project, I‘ve tried to avoid that as much as possible. Luckily, Leading Edge is home to an atmosphere of camaraderie and friendship, and I felt that my friends took the time to help me because they are my friends, not because I‘m in charge. Although nobody ever declined to participate, there would not have been negative repercussions had they chosen to do so. My position as Senior Editor also means that I‘ve been around Leading Edge for longer than any of the senior staff (and the slush room staff, too, except for Joe).

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An outsider attempting to tackle this project probably would have gone about it a different way, or at least asked different questions. It‘s possible that an outsider to this culture would have been better able to note some of the quirks of the staff that differ from social norms than I have been able to. However, as an insider, I know exactly which questions to ask the current staff, and I know which things will be of importance to all generations of Leading Edge that I might interview. These items, if not brought up, will likely never make it in to a cultural description of Leading Edge. The advantage this insider knowledge gives me over an outsider in defining this subculture cannot be overestimated.

Literature Review There are not very many outside sources on Leading Edge, and those few that do exist are written from a literary history perspective, not an ethnographical one. Hence, this study is the first one to exist that examines Leading Edge as continuing culture, not as a magazine. There is, however, some literature worth noting. In December 2010, Joe Vasicek published an article in Mormon Artist entitled ―The Class That Wouldn‘t Die.‖ This solid piece of journalism chronicled the beginnings of the sci-fi/fantasy community at BYU, and the beginnings of its organizations: Quark, the club; Life, the Universe, and Everything, the symposium; and Leading Edge, the student journal. He interviews and publishes the recollections of several prominent members of Leading Edge staff, some of whom I would also like to interview. Apart from this article, I could find no other documents relating to Leading Edge other than the issues of the journal itself until Linda Adams referenced a history by Barbara Hume in a the prologue to a science fiction anthology edited by M. Shayne Bell. Although Linda considers it inferior to Joe‘s work, I have included it here as a reference. It has the double-edged sword of being written by someone who participated in the events, and so is about as reliable as Ms. Hume‘s memory. Despite whatever flaws it may have, it‘s a perspective of Leading Edge history that‘s worth recording.

Methodology I‘ve always been a strong believer in the principle that if you want to know something, you ask the person who has firsthand knowledge about it. You don‘t ask their peripheral contacts, and you certainly don‘t ask their enemies. The way to get information is to go to the source of that information. In this case, that means talking to people. I prepared myself for my interviews by coming up with three questions that I feel best show why the subculture of Leading Edge is worth preserving:

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU? 2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world? 3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

The first question is designed to show how volunteering at Leading Edge is intellectually enlarging and character building, how it forms friendships, and helps students academically. The second question focuses on the skill set developed at Leading Edge, on that leads to lifelong learning and service. In fact, any conscientious observer reading the

6 responses to this question that are given later on will realize that Leading Edge fulfills the goal of the College‘s ―Humanities +‖ program, ―developing a skill-set that will be identifiable and attractive to employers,‖ and did so decades before this program was introduced. The third question has the most to do with the actual culture of Leading Edge, for it‘s in responses to this question that we see the little traditions and other human moments that made Leading Edge a subgroup. To get these questions to people, I used several strategies. Firstly, I asked the staff at Leading Edge to take a minute to write up an answer to one or more of these questions and email it to me. (For proof that they were not pressured to do so, check the dates of each of their items.) Secondly, I sent out a mass facebook message to everyone I know who is or was involved with Leading Edge. Several of them responded back to me with answers that reflected their unique experiences at Leading Edge. Finally, I conducted interviews with people who I thought would be able to provide the best insights about the Leading Edge experience. These interviews were recorded on my laptop and later transcribed into the text included in this ethnography. As noted on each item, filler words (such as certain instances of ―well,‖ ―you know,‖ and ―I mean,‖ as well as other reduplicated words) and sounds (such as ―uh‖ and ―um‖) were not transcribed. I also tried to be faithful to corrections that each interviewee made as he or she spoke. In certain cases, where the recording was garbled, or a meaning that was clear in the audio file is unclear when reduced to text, I have made clarifications in brackets. Brackets are also used to indicate laughter and other cues that are not apparent in the recordings. One of the biggest lessons I learned from this project is, ―If you want someone to do something for you in the business world, take that person to lunch.‖ Two of the most important interviews in this ethnography came about as a result of a lunch date: the interview with Dave Doering and Linda Adams, and the group interview of Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Peter Ahlstrom, and Karen Ahlstrom. In fact, they took even a little bit more than that, from standing in a book signing line until past 2 am to facebook and email coordination. I was also lucky enough to be able to network into more respondents: Deirdre Paulsen, my instructor, got me in touch with Dave Doering and Linda Adams. Linda, in turn, got me contact information for Melva Giffords and Jonathan Langford. I tracked down Brandon Sanderson on my own, but it was his idea to bring Dan Wells to the interview. And it was Peter Ahlstrom who coordinated and arranged everything so that I could interview four members of ―The Class that Made It Big‖ all at once. It turns out that alumni of Leading Edge help each other out no matter which generation we‘re in. That‘s a characteristic of a subgroup in and of itself. This research gave me the opportunity to interact with at least three generations of Leading Edge alumni. ―The Class that Wouldn‘t Die,‖ represented by Dave Doering, Melva Giffords, and Jonathan Langford, is the founding generation of Leading Edge, the one that started our traditions and gave us our character. ―The Class that Made It Big,‖ as represented here by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Peter and Karen Ahlstrom, inherited fully-formed magazine and culture system, which they then of course adapted to their needs. Their ―class‖ is so named because Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells are now professional fantasy and horror novelists (respectively) who are wildly successful and well-known across the nation. Peter works as Brandon‘s personal assistant, and many other members of that generation of Leading Edge have successful careers in the publishing industry. Finally, many of these items come from members of the current

7 staff, or ones that have left over the last two years. You could call this the ―Current Generation,‖ or, in light of our funding crisis, ―The Class that Wouldn‘t Go Quietly,‖ or my personal favorite, ―The Class that Will Survive,‖ but since we don‘t have ten or more years of hindsight letting us categorize our accomplishments yet, I think we‘ll have to wait to name ourselves until later. The point here is that Leading Edge has over thirty years of history and stories, and so while this sole ethnography cannot hope to encompass all of that, it can present a representative sample of Leading Edge culture and how it has changed over the years. Each item, whether emailed, facebooked, or transcribed, was then put into the same format:

Title Name Genre Age, Gender Date Collected Leading Edge Position Place Collected Relationship to Collector

Item data is grouped together on the left side of the header, while relevant informant data is grouped together on the right. Beneath this header, relevant Personal Data (information about the informant), Social Data (information about the setting), and Cultural Data (an explanation of cultural references used in the item) are listed under separate headings. The text of the item follows. It should also be noted that certain data that is usually collected in ethnographic studies was not collected for this project, such as birthplace and home region, which are not important to this study. Furthermore, the occupations of Leading Edge alumni, if important, are noted in the text of the interviews. The current staff are all full-time or part-time students. The avocation of interest for all of the interviewees is, of course, Leading Edge itself. Also, since all the interviewees are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, religion is not included as a field on the forms.

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The Site Like many ethnographic field studies, the items in this collection were mostly collected on the site of the subgroup‘s meetings: in this case, the fourth floor of the Jesse Knight Building on BYU campus. Leading Edge meets there from 7:30 to 9 pm every Tuesday and Thursday, as well as Saturdays from 10:30 to noon. The fourth floor of the JKB is home to the Humanities Publication Center and its attendant computer lab. For details, please see the diagram and explanations below. Keep in mind that the titles of the rooms on this diagram will correspond to the many of the entries under ―Place Collected‖ on the item form.

JKB Floor Plan, Fourth Floor

Atrium Tables

Slush Room Editing Room Ancillary Room

Atrium Tables—These tables in the foyer outside the HumPub lab are the historical sites of developmental and substantive edits. Slush Room—This is where submissions to the magazine are read, and their fates decided. It is also the main social nexus of Leading Edge. Editing Room—This is where the staff with formal titles do all their work. The Macs are used for email correspondence with contributors and production work in InDesign. Ancillary Room— These recently-available rooms are now used for business strategy meetings and developmental edits.

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The Culture Like any distinct subgroup, Leading Edge has its own insider phrases and unique workplace jargon that distinguish it from other groups. Many of these terms are borrowed from the larger world of publishing. Slush, for instance, refers to ―the unsolicited submissions that most new volunteers end up reading,‖ according to my own item. I go on, ―There was even a pile of it (‗the slushpile‘) in its own dedicated room (‗the slushroom‘). People like me who were reading it were officially ‗slush readers,‘ but more commonly ‗slushies‘ or ‗slush puppies.‘‖ Arielle Myers says, ―I . . . was able to participate on both a developmental edit and a copyedit.‖ These terms, along with ―devedit‖ and ―subedit,‖ are mentioned among those that could be confusing to newcomers. The ―founding myth‖ of Leading Edge—the story without which the magazine would not exist—is that of Dave Doering and the Orson Scott Card lecture. As reported by Joe Vasicek and Barbara Hume in their articles, as well as by Dave himself in this ethnography, the story goes that Orson Scott Card, arguably the most famous Mormon author of science fiction in history, was scheduled to teach a class on writing science fiction and fantasy at BYU. Instead, he gave one lecture that galvanized ―The Class that Wouldn‘t Die‖ into forming a writing group, a science fiction club, Leading Edge, and eventually an entire science fiction symposium, ―Life, the Universe, and Everything.‖ The writing class itself was taught by Marian ―Doc‖ Smith, and according to Brandon Sanderson, it‘s the trifecta of the class, the symposium, and Leading Edge that have put BYU on the map of speculative fiction. In fact, the reputation gained by BYU through these three traditions has led to a prestige unmatched in the science fiction and fantasy world (see ―The Class that Made It Big‖ for more details). There are still other legends that make up Leading Edge culture. Fortunately, they‘re all true. Dave Wolverton, Dan Wells, and Brandon Sanderson really all did work on this magazine, gaining vital experience that helped launch their very visible public careers. They really did publish first with Leading Edge. The cover art for Issue #41 really did win a Chesley Award. There‘s even the cautionary tale of Leading Edge accidentally publishing a plagiarized story back in Peter Ahlstrom‘s day, from which generations of staff members have learned. Leading Edge also has a very structured hierarchy, modeled after that of a publishing house. The Senior Editor has the final say in all decisions, but shares the directorial and editorial workload with two or more other Editors. Beneath them are Fiction Directors, Production Directors, Art Directors, a Circulation Director, a Poetry Director, a Marketing Director, a Webmaster, each of whom usually trains an assistant. Other positions are created as needed. Each position has specialized tasks; Art Directors search for affordable, yet quality artists to illustrate each issue; Production Directors use Adobe InDesign to actually put the issue together; the Webmaster updates the website, etc. When a director either moves on to a new position in the organization or graduates, the assistant he or she has trained usually becomes the next Director. Inside jokes germinate, bloom, and are forgotten with almost every generation of Leading Edge. When the staff stopped using the old typesetting machine, calling it ―Darth Vader‖ (See Melva Giffords and Linda Adams) fell into disuse and was forgotten. Blaming everything on Alan (see ―The Class that Made It Big‖) stopped once everyone who knew Alan had moved on from the magazine. I suspect that the big deal made about

10 the Daniels wearing the same color of shirt will disappear once Daniel and I graduate. And that‘s ok. The culture of Leading Edge is not defined by the jokes themselves, but by the fact that the same kinds of jokes are present in every generation: those about quirks of the staff members (see Daniel Teichrieb‘s story about Matt smelling dictionaries), and those relating to the science fiction and fantasy staples that we all know and love, like Star Wars, and now, Inception. Some traditions survive for several generations, only to be felled by a certain member of the staff. Peter Ahlstrom is responsible for changing the title of the magazine from ―The Leading Edge‖ to ―Leading Edge.‖ The Quantum Duck so beloved of The Class that Made It Big, and which they had inherited from prior generations, was stopped because at some point, none of the editors liked it anymore (It may have been Chris and Kristy). I would be more willing to bring it back now with a new illustration, but so few of the remaining staff members remember it anymore, I think it will just fade into history. At least he‘s preserved in the issues that were printed, and now, in this Ethnography. Some traditions of Leading Edge stem from the larger BYU culture we are all a part of. One stereotypical example is that of marriage proposals. My friends Nyssa and Neal met at Leading Edge, and Neal popped the question in the slush room (see both Neal and Nyssa‘s items for both sides of that story). Peter and Karen Ahlstrom (see both of Karen‘s items) also came together because of Leading Edge. Even Daniel Teichreib‘s sister found her eternal companion through this organization (see Daniel‘s item for the whole story). If that‘s not ―assist[ing] individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life,‖ (see BYU‘s mission statement), then I don‘t know what is. Karen placed all the credit for her marriage on the ―safe place‖ that Leading Edge provided. Says Karen, ―Without the Leading Edge, Peter and I wouldn't be married with two kids now. Initially, it provided us with a place to meet, and a way to foster our relationship. Later, the ongoing community spirit of the organization kept Peter in touch with people who could tell me where he was and give me the confidence to try again. For two people severely lacking in social skills, that's pretty darn amazing.‖ Social interaction is one of the other hallmarks of Leading Edge culture. Like the other traditions, the details vary over time and with the generations, but the idea of gathering is constant. For The Class that Made It Big, the social interactions were games and role-playing, even down to a card game made by Dan Wells about Leading Edge itself. The game is now an artifact in his home, but he let me borrow it after our interview. I showed it to some of the current staff, and most of the cards on it are still funny. The same kinds of weird things still happen in publishing, and they still happen at Leading Edge! When I first joined the staff, there were frequent Rifftrax parties and Malt Shoppe runs of the kind Camilla mentions in her piece. Later on, these have given way to Joe‘s YouTube parties and movie nights at the Silvester residence. Although the details have changed, the safe social atmosphere is still there. What really drives the magazine‘s culture, of course, is the magazine itself, or, rather, the united act of creating something of value to us all. As Dan Wells recalls, the production of each issue is really left up to the staff: ―There was nobody watching over us, breathing down our necks to make sure that we got an issue out. If we wanted to do it, we had to do it ourselves. If we wanted to do it on time, we‘re the ones that decided what ‗on time‘ was.‖ This is still the case. Whatever else happens, we actually have to come

11 together and make an entire magazine. It has a powerful unifying effect on the staff to hold an issue in our hands and say, ―We created that. This issue would not exist without me.‖ As Caitlin Walls points out, ―It‘s really telling of an experience that I can not necessarily like the genre or whatever, but I can have the time of my life creating it.‖

Conclusion I could go on for a long time about the culture of the slush room and everything else attendant to Leading Edge, but the points are really best discussed by the respondents in the articles they‘ve provided. My hope is that through reading their words, any person at all, even someone who would never be interested in coming to a meeting, can have a taste of the culture of Leading Edge. And, of course, if you do want to come to a meeting, you now know not only where and when they are, but also a lot more about what to expect than I did when I first showed up. What I also hope is apparent from recording these stories is that a vibrant subculture is alive and well at Leading Edge. It fills an important social niche for people who would otherwise be left out. Moreover, it provides a skill set to those who volunteer that will serve them in the workforce for years to come. The most poignant moment of this project for me was looking at Dan Wells, Peter Ahlstrom, Karen Ahlstrom, and Brandon Sanderson, and seeing parts of myself reflected back at me. They are where my fellow editors and I—Neal, Nyssa, Emily, Joe, Chris and the others—will all be ten years from now. Even though the personality traits are found in different people, those traits are all still here. I see echoes of myself in Dan Wells and Peter Ahlstrom, and of Nyssa in Karen Ahlstrom and Brandon Sanderson. There will be another generation after us who will be the same, and who will need this experience as much as we did. This culture is alive. It is helping those involved with it build character, learn marketable job skills, and be prepared to go out and represent BYU and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as visibly and honorably as the classes before it have done. It would be a shame and crime for financial indifference or ethnographic intolerance to try to destroy it. Unfortunately, this is exactly the situation that Leading Edge now faces. When the decision was made to cut Leading Edge off from all funding, neither the students (whose studies and careers may in a very real way depend on Leading Edge) nor even their faculty advisor were told of the decision—let alone consulted about it. Nor, as far as I can find out, were any of the faculty who are directly involved in the Editing Program consulted, either. I am quite convinced that if any of the administrators involved in the decision-making process had been aware of how valuable this experience is to editing students—not just socially but educationally as well—the decision to cut our funding would never have been made. It is for this reason that I invite the educators to become more educated, first by reading the entirety of this ethnography, and then by coming to a meeting of Leading Edge to see for themselves if this report is not true. But even if they don‘t come, we will still be having meetings, and Issue #62 will be published in April for our readers‘ enjoyment. We will continue to bring prestige to this university, even if they don‘t want us to. ―We are going to survive; we are going to live no matter what, and our generation has decreed that, and so it‘ll be done.‖ This class won‘t die, either.

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Alphabetical Index of Informants/Genre of Items  Adams, Emily (Current Editor): Workplace Preparation  Adams, Linda (Former Faculty Advisor): Leading Edge History  Ahlstrom, Karen Stay (First Webmaster): LE Success Stories  Ahlstrom, Peter (Former Editor): LE Success Stories  Blackhurst, Benjamin (Former Slush Reader): 3 Questions  Busch, Genevieve (Former Art Director): 3 Questions  Doering, Dave (Former Managing Editor): Leading Edge History  Friend, Daniel (Current Senior Editor): LE Lingo  Giffords, Melva (Former Staff): Leading Edge History  Keeley, Benjamin (Current Staff): Workplace Preparation  Langford, Jonathan (Former Staff): Leading Edge History  Manning, Alan (Current Faculty Advisor): Current LE Events  Myers, Arielle (Former Staff): 3 Questions  Parshall, Camilla (Former Senior Editor): 3 Questions  Sanderson, Brandon (Former Editor): LE Success Stories  Seeley, Sarah (Current Slush Reader): LE Lingo  Silvester, Neal (Current Staff): LE Culture  Silvester, Nyssa (Current Editor): Proposal Story  Summers-Stay, Douglas (Former Staff): LE Success Stories  Teichrieb, Daniel (Current Fiction Director): LE Culture  Thomas, Amber (Current Circulation Director): 3 Questions  Vasicek, Joe (Current Slush Reader): LE History/Culture  Walls, Caitlin (Current Fiction Director): LE Culture  Wells, Dan (Former Editor): LE Success Stories  Witt, Evan (Former Slush Reader): 3 Questions

Works Cited Vasicek, Joe. "The Class That Wouldn't Die." Mormon Artist 13: 24 pars. Web. 19 Oct. 2011. . Hume, Barbara R. "Strange Bedfellows: A History of Science Fiction in the Corridor." In Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor, Shayne Bell, xii– xxii. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993. ―Humanities +,‖ BYU College of Humanities Website, http://humanities.byu.edu/humanities_plus/, accessed December 15, 2011.

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The History of Leading Edge

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The Divine Influence in Leading Edge Dave Doering & Linda Adams Founding History Leading Edge History 50s/70s; M/F 1 November 2011 Founding Head Editor/Faculty Advisor La Hacienda Restaurant, Draper, UT Strangers

Personal Data: I had not met Dave or Linda before today. They had been referred to me by Deirdre Paulsen, my ethnography instructor. As you will see in the item, Dave basically founded Leading Edge with “The Class That Wouldn’t Die,” and Linda Adams was the first de facto faculty advisor. Dave is a rather loud, outspoken man, whereas Linda is much more quiet and reserved. Dave and the “Class that Wouldn’t Die” also started BYU’s annual science fiction and fantasy symposium, Life the Universe and Everything (LTUE).

Social Data: The first three minutes of this item were collected in the parking lot outside the restaurant while Dave and I were waiting for Linda. The Wingers that we were supposed to meet at had gone out of business, so we chose La Hacienda instead. Once Linda arrived, we went inside the restaurant, picked what looked like the quietest table, and conversed while we ate. The restaurant was moderately busy, with plenty of other patrons and staff all doing their things. I had my laptop out on the table next to me, where a fourth person might sit. It was facing Linda and Dave. Star Trek is one of the classic franchises in science fiction (If you don’t know what it is, GO FIND OUT). Kinko’s is a shop where you can pay to make photocopies.

Cultural Data: “Fanfiction” is fiction written by fans of a particular franchise (say, Harry Potter or Star Wars) that use the characters and universe of that franchise. They are of varying quality and are very rarely taken as serious literature. They are usually “published” online or in “fanzines” specifically dedicated to this genre. Ben Bova is an extremely famous and successful science fiction author (over 120 books and counting). A SASE is a Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope, provided by authors who want their manuscripts returned. “White Space” is the printer’s term for any space in a publication that isn’t taken up by either text or images; it serves to please the eye. Ray Bradbury is another legendary author of science fiction. The Varsity Theater is a room in the Wilkinson Student Center where special guests occasionally lecture.

Item: Collected with the microphones on my laptop, then transcribed with placeholder words and sounds omitted.

Dave: This is David Doering, coming to you live from the parking lot of the former Wingers restaurant in Draper, Utah, in the midst of our first winter snowstorm, to bring you the chronicle of Leading Edge. Well, okay, we called it “The Leading Edge,” now, “Leading Edge.”

Me: Yeah, we dropped the article.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. Well, don’t drop too many articles. Which is fine. So, what would you like me to talk about first?

Me: Well, let’s just talk a little bit about how Leading Edge started, and what your part in that was.

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Dave: Well, when I got to BYU, and found that we needed firstly a serious science fiction club, so a young lady by the name of Carolyn Niceda—Carolyn Larson now—had started the embryo of Quark. But she was getting married, and said, “Well, I’m not gonna run the club anymore, so I guess we’ll close up shop.” And I said, “No, I think I’ll continue to run the club.” And I figured, worst case, I’d run a study hall; I could sit in the classroom and just do my homework, and if anybody decided to come, hey, great. Who knew that years later, Quark would turn into like the largest club on campus that isn’t one of the fraternities? And, you know, had incredible success. But at that time it was just a matter of finding other fans to be together, and serious about science fiction and fantasy. There was another club on campus called “The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” and they were the fan club, and they were—you know, it was an enjoyable romp; I went to their meetings. But the important thing was that they had done a little fanzine of their own, just collecting stories of fanfiction. And it occurred to me that, wouldn’t it be nice if we had one of our own magazines. But at that time there wasn’t any real nucleus around to build this, to make something happen. That occurred when we had the “Class that Wouldn’t Die,” the now-famous “Class that Wouldn’t Die.” The right combination of ingredients worked. You see, Daniel, I’ve long thought about it. The original instructor for the class was to be Orson Scott Card. My thought is that if Scott had actually been able to teach that class, much of this wouldn’t have happened. Because we probably would’ve got more professional writers coming out of there, thanks to Scott’s help—We are now interrupted by a truck [laughter]—We now continue with our regular program. The fact of it is, though, I’ve taken Scott’s classes now in writing since then, and he is a demanding professor. And I think it would’ve intimidated some of us so much that we would’ve never continued with the process. In doing science fiction. Because we would’ve seen, “here’s the lofty goal,” and, “here’s where we are.” And we are so far from there . . .

[Car drives up]

I think this may be the vehicle.

Me: Oh, yay, Linda’s here!

Dave: Horray! Linda! Linda Adams is here!

[Recording stops, we greet Linda, and move into the restaurant.]

Dave: So when I talked to the chair of the English Department, he was quite supportive of the idea of students doing stuff on their own. And, now, it certainly helped having the record here of talking about LUTE. But I’m excited that, in fact, as I mentioned, the film side wants to do the same thing that we’ve done with the symposium, developing a symposium on film and how to develop good-quality content.

Linda: Is that gonna start [indistinct]

Dave: No, it’s Dennis Packer.

Linda: That’s who I mean. *conversation turns to LTUE for a noisy minute+

Dave: Great guy.

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Linda: Oh, I love him.

Dave: Yeah. OK, let’s go back. So when we finished the “Class that Wouldn’t Die,”

Linda: Have you told him about that?

Me: I have actually read that article.

Dave: The article, the one in Mormon Artist,

Me: Yeah.

Dave: Because the one in Wash by a Wave of Wind was somewhat incomplete, and not quite accurate in some points, and to my regret, I didn’t start writing some of this, because I thought, 1, “How important is it?” And 2, “I’ll remember all of this long after it.” So now when I pull out my fanzines of that era, I’m sitting and saying, “Wait, what?” Like, when we took Ben Bova and his wife to lunch, and things that went on there, I thought, “OK, this is what I remember from that lunch,” but what I wrote about at the time was quite different!

Me: Is that part of something that had to do with Leading Edge?

Dave: Only in a general sense. It was the same core group that did both Life, the Universe and Everything and Leading Edge. Now, with getting the symposium started with just a call to Marion Smith, Doc Smith, because the school said, “Look, we have Ben Bova here for the whole day.” When Doc called up and said, “OK, what can we do with Ben Bova?” I thought, “Well, OK, we can do a luncheon, a question and answer, and then take him over to Betty Pope’s for a reception.”

Linda: And Betty Pope’s a name you’re gonna hear a lot.

Dave: Yeah. ‘Cause it really helped having the librarian who actually made a PC-4 section [in the library] science fiction and fantasy only.

Me: So tell me more about her, then.

Dave: We could spend hours talking about Betty.

Me: Tell me what I need to know about her to understand how she fits into the Leading Edge history.

Dave: Well, it’s that most libraries, using the Library of Congress System, do not segregate genre fiction from general fiction.

Me: Right.

Dave: It was Betty Pope’s initiative that created a specific sub-category of PC-4 to do science fiction and fantasy, so that you could browse and find similar content. Otherwise, you’re just

17 looking under authors’ names, and you might never find something. So, the fact that she was also a solid Star Trek fan didn’t hurt. But it was encouraging for us as freshmen and sophomores to see people in the administration who were fostering science fiction and fantasy. So we were encouraged, then, to start looking at ways to do stuff.

Me: I wish that attitude had been maintained a little more. It’s not as prevalent like that today.

Linda: It was maintained for years, but the last while has been hard.

Dave: It fluctuates, you know? Part of how we survived the early years was Doc Smith was very good at how to deal with administration. And he served as a fulcrum that kept things from getting out of hand. And essentially trusted us, though, to do the right thing. Doc was welcome at any meeting; Doc could’ve come in at any time to talk about stuff; but he mostly kept the hands off, you know, except when we went in and asked him, you know, “What should we do in this regard?” Now, the initial idea for The Leading Edge, as I said, came from attending meetings for the fan club, and they had their own little publication. Plus, BYU was doing “Century 2,” which was a student journal of writing.

Linda: The literary journal that is now Inscape.

Dave: Yeah, Inscape, yeah. It was Inscape by then, but I think of—

Linda: No, I don’t think it was Inscape quite by then, ‘cause I had a couple of years before we turned it into Inscape.

Dave: OK.

Linda: What year was the year that was the science fiction class?

Dave: Well, the one with Doc Smith was 1981. It was the fall of 1981. And, so, as I said, that was supposed to be taught be Scott Card, but it wasn’t, and so Doc was just the right balance of encouragement but kind of “hands-off” stuff that left you wanting more. And so that’s why Shane Bell and I, afterwards, when he said, “Let’s do a writing group,” I said, “Yes.” ‘Cause I wanted to do more science fiction writing. But as we were developing our writing skills, we began to receive rejection letters from New York with almost—well, universally without any comment other than, you know, “We’re not accepting your work.” So, we thought, “Well, why don’t we try doing our own?” We thought, “OK.” At the time, the BYU Student Association had a grant program for student projects.

Linda: They still do.

Dave: Yeah. OK. So we encouraged Mike Reed to submit a proposal to do a science fiction magazine. Then we won a grant of two hundred dollars to make this publication happen. So, to get entries, we ran a contest and we got a bunch of contest winners, and we bundled those together for Issue 1.

Linda: Have you seen all the issues?

18

Me: I have seen many of the issues, but I have not actually been able to find an Issue 1. I found an Issue 2, an Issue 6 and 7, but Issue 1 has been hard to get a hold of.

Linda: I can find some of mine that you can borrow.

Dave: There was a reprint in the library, about a year ago, I looked up, it was a reprinted Issue 1.

Me: I think that Special Collections has a copy, and that Periodicals has every issue of Leading Edge.

Dave: Yeah. So, it was just a Xerox. We went down to Kinko’s

Linda: Was that the one that has the Mona Lisa on it?

Dave: No, that was Issue 2. That was printed up at the BYU Press. This one was done at Kinko’s. And Shane went in and talked to Linda Grummit at the BYU Bookstore, and she said she would take 60 copies.

Me: Wow.

Dave: We printed a hundred, but 40 went to the contributors and staff. So, they said, yes. I mean, I think we charged something like two dollars a copy. And the bookstore actually gave us a check, and we said, well, I suppose we should give the money back to BYU/SA. We went in, and they said, “No! No! We don’t want the money back! ‘Cause then they’ll reduce our appropriation for next year! Don’t give us money!” So we said, “Wow.”

[Waitress takes our orders]

Linda: Because I came in ’79 to teach at BYU, and I got Segfried to in ’80, and then we think probably, I’d have to look for sure, but it’d probably be about ’82 to mid-80s that I did Inscape.

Me: So what was your involvement, Linda, with Leading Edge having its start?

Linda: Well, the first issue I didn’t have anything to do with. *to Dave+ When did you start using the typesetter?

Dave: I think that’s going to be like Issue 4 or 5.

Linda: We’ll have to look up the date.

Dave: I know Issue 2 was typewritten, and so was Issue 3.

Linda: Yes.

Dave: Because, by then we were starting to figure out how to do this on the typewriter pretty good. We did it. Someone was a student employee in an office in the Kimball Tower, and—

19

Linda: And I’ll need to check some dates for you because I’m not quite sure when I got my setup.

Me: And they actually typed it up on a typewriter?

Dave: Yeah. Yup, we used electric typewriters and we hadn’t realized that when you shrink it, you really need to use legal paper in order to fit an 8 and a half by 11 page. So I could’ve got more text in had we realized that. And it was actually when I recruited Steve Keel to be Art Director with Issue 3 that—he was the one who encouraged us to get typesetting done. And I thought, “Oh, that’s going to cost a lot of money.” And so, we started looking around for resources, and that’s where Shane was, I believe taking a class in editing—

Linda: Yeah, he was, and then he was one of my interns.

Dave: So, that’s where we started doing the typesetter.

Linda: We had a big, old compugraphic typesetter that the kids named “Darth Vader.”

Dave: Darth Vader! Yeah! That had eight [and a]half-inch floppies.

Linda: It sure did.

Dave: It was quite a monster.

Linda: And I heard a number of projects going, and it was interesting that the kids on the literary magazine and the kids on The Leading Edge, and it was mostly the kids on the literary magazine, felt they had, that the typesetter was theirs. So they relegated the kids from The Leading Edge to typesetting at night [chuckling]. They took the daytime hours, and Leading Edge took the nighttime hours, although I think The Leading Edge enjoyed being there at night.

Dave: Well, yeah, it was many a fun night spent in the basement of the Smith Family Living Center, you know, reading to the screen because typesetting in those days was not done with wiziwig.

Linda: We had no input.

Dave: Basically, it was the same as doing XML coding today. You enter the code to start, and then when it finishes, for bold, and such, then you had to be extremely careful because, unlike XML, which you can view on screen, the only way to know that you got the copy right is to output it to photographic paper, which was far more expensive than just photocopies.

Linda: So by the time you output, you had to really have it. Whole thing.

Dave: Yeah, every paragraph, you had to have the opening and the closing, or the whole thing ended up as one paragraph. Yeah, it was laborious. ‘Cause here we are, kids in school, and we’re excited to get our magazine out because, you know, the bookstore’ll want every copy, and they actually sold out.

20

Me: Wow.

Dave: We just went, “Wow! The world’s our oyster!”

Linda: What they had to do, was somebody input it—typeset it—then somebody else read out loud from the copy while somebody else watched on the screen to make sure that what was supposed to be input was input. And so, those were interesting sections, ‘cause we got all our little abbreviation codes. My favorite one was when they were doing an article on the Browning gunsmith shop, and we were doing “Bang” for an exclamation point. So then we’d say, “Cap gun Bang!” Get the giggles.

Dave: Try reading XML code out sometime and you’ll get a point of what it was, but the result, of course, was obviously a far more professional-looking magazine.

Linda: It was a beautiful typesetter as far as that goes, and as he said, it went to a film that then a negative was made of them, and it printed from the negatives.

Me: So which issues were done that way?

Dave: Well, it was probably about three or four issues that we did using the Compugraphics when the Publications Center acquired some Macs.

Linda: Probably more than that.

Dave: It may well have been.

Linda: I’ll look up dates for you.

Me: That’d be great, thank you.

Dave: ‘Cause I retired, semi-retired after like Issue 5 or 6. I wanted to start a fantasy art magazine, and get on with some other things. Besides, I thought it was time to let other people take a stab at what was going on, ‘cause it was my concern that if the magazine became Dave Doering’s magazine, it wouldn’t go anywhere. And then I wanted to see it succeed. So some of those things after Issue 5 had become kind of—I’m not sure exactly what year, but—

Linda: ‘Cause we were on Darth Vader for a long time.

Dave: Yeah. And we had moved into the basement of the Jesse Knight Building, and it was at that point that we migrated over to the Macs. Somebody was really good at formatting using the Mac Word or whatever it was at the time, and you could output it on the laser printer, so we were one of the first publications to done from the Mac.

Me: Tell me a bit about how the organization of the staff was in those very beginning years. You mentioned needing an Art Director. Is that the first time you had an Art Director, or what other kinds of positions were going on at that time?

21

Dave: We followed a lot from looking at what Linda was doing with her magazines, and say, “OK, here’s what the structure should be.” But it was fairly clear from Issue 1 that we needed to have a Managing Editor who would deal with the day-to-day production, and an Executive Editor who would handle more of the interfacing with the administration, and out promoting the magazine. Then a group to handle the reading, and very early on we made the decision to workshop manuscripts. ‘Cause we wanted to show some initial value coming [from] submitting to Leading Edge, [rather] than just getting the form rejection, because we had been the victims so often of form rejections, we said, “We want to do it the opposite.” And the Art Director position (because other magazines had art directors), and we needed someone who knew other artists. Because as writers, we’re in the English Department; we don’t know artists. So, I had to ask Steve Keel, you exactly. But before that we just kind of asked people, you know, “Could you do some drawings?” Fill in the magazine.

Linda: On the early ones, there’s probably a different artist for every article.

Dave: Yeah.

Me: That’s still the case now; we have different artists for just about every story. Every now and again we’ll have an artist that we had in a previous issue come back. You were saying before, Dave, that you wanted to not just do form rejection letters. So, that sounds like it evolved into the comment sheets we do today. How did that process [happen]?

Dave: Well, the comment sheets just began when, as we recruited new people to come on board, how do you pass along the skills and the requirements to do the job? And it just became simpler to create forms to show, “Here’s how things are done.” So it wasn’t like there was a big epiphany, it just formed over time, just saying, “OK, here’s what has to happen to get through the slush pile.”

Me: So in the beginning were you sending out personalized rejection letters, or how did that process work?

Dave: Technically, the manuscript was returned in a SASE, usually with a letter from the Managing Editor, or the Fiction Editor, as to, we appreciated this, here’s some of the reasons why it doesn’t work for us at this time. And then something encouraging to submit again, and see if we can’t buy something from you in the future. Well, I shouldn’t say “buy.” It was many years before we actually could go and pay for submissions.

Linda: One of the things that was different about The Leading Edge from any other student journal, and I started out with Inscape, and by the time I left, I started about thirty student journals in all kinds of departments and subject areas. And the thing that was different about The Leading Edge is they accepted submissions from all over the world. Inscape is an in-house publication, and we accept student work, we put it out for the student body, and we sell some in the bookstore. And we exchange with other literary magazines from all over, but Leading Edge, from the very beginning, wanted to be able to be a magazine that wasn’t just a college magazine.

Me: So how did that get put into place, then, of getting and accepting and considering submissions from places outside of BYU?

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Dave: Well, fortunately, the science fiction community has always been aggressive in communicating. And there were places online—I shouldn’t say “online” at the time—but there were different publications that came out, which say, “Here, you can submit to these people.” And, obviously word of mouth was a primary resource for getting submissions. But I remember plenty of times saying, “Look, you know, we’re missing a manuscript or two. We don’t have enough for the issue,” and just asking authors, like Dave Farland, you know, “Well, you have something you can give to me?”

Me: Dave Farland actually just published with us in our 30th Anniversary Issue as well. How did he get involved with Leading Edge? He’s kind of a famous name in fantasy.

Dave: Well, of course, at the time, he was one of us. Just a guy in the group who aspired to be an author and I think he was taking one of the editing classes, but I can’t be sure.

Linda: Yeah, he took my editing class and we were also on Inscape as well as on The Leading Edge.

Dave: That’s right. He did publish a number of pieces, I think, in Inscape.

Linda: ‘Cause he’s able to write mainstream and science fiction and fantasy.

Me: Very versatile.

Dave: No, no, Dave obviously demonstrated his strength. It’s much like looking at Brandon Sanderson. I like to think that he would’ve been a great writer without The Leading Edge and the symposium, but I’d like to think that he was wooed to this side because of his exposure to the fan group and to the work doing on The Leading Edge.

Linda: I think so. I think that’s true.

Me: I’ll ask him next semester when I take his class.

Dave: Well, he’s been always a hundred and ten percent behind like The Leading Edge and the symposium.

Linda: Absolutely. And encouraging others. Brandon, Daniel Wells, particularly good about coming back, helping other people in the way that they were helped.

Dave: Right.

Linda: Another person, very early on, that was a really big help was Jim Christensen. And he used to let The Leading Edge use any of the artwork that they wanted of his without charging us. So we had a lot of cover work from him, and sometimes inside.

Dave: Jim became a good friend for his support. It was a struggle, of course, because you asked in your email, there was no funding from the department or the college for many years. We were usually a grant from BYU/SA or some other charitable individual would help the magazine

23 get through getting published and printed. I mean, I know one year Doc and several of the professors just chipped in to pay the printing bill. We went to BYU Press to have it done one year, but they cost a lot more. And that’s when we first found John at MC Printing. For, you know, twenty years, published every issue of Leading Edge at MC Printing.

Linda: He’s the one who complained most about BYU Press! I really like him, but he’s got a bit of a grouch to him.

Dave: Yeah, he is a bit of a grouch. But that’s fine because he does a good job. And because he was very encouraging,

Linda: Oh, and he’d stay late at night; he’d get things out on time.

Dave: He tolerated Shane Bell coming in with last-second changes: “Is that plate on the press yet? I’ve got this one section that I need to fix!” ‘Cause Shane would always find another way of expressing things.

Me: Tell me a little bit more about just the work atmosphere , kind of the culture that just developed those first few years as the group worked together.

Dave: Well, we saw ourselves as trying to pioneer something that had never been done before. And there was a great camaraderie in working for a magazine *for+ which we weren’t getting credit at the time. No credit for doing any editing or publishing.

Linda: I had to work hard to get that. And what they got from the university a lot was using the typesetter, because they didn’t ever pay for any materials or anything. I just took them under my wing as part of my editing kids, and the typesetter was there to teach the editing program.

Dave: Yes. There is no question that we had a great friend in Linda here that took us to that next level. You know, I do need to mention that Jonathan Langford’s name hasn’t come up, but again, Jonathan was a true professional when it came to editing. And so, he was greatly involved with The Leading Edge in moving to the next level.

Linda: Right, and perfecting us, too.

Dave: And it was under his tutelage that some of these processes that we talked about earlier got instituted. He’d say, “OK, we gotta have a structure.”

Me: Was he a professor or was he part of the staff?

Dave: He was part of the staff. He was just one of us.

Linda: Jonathan started at BYU at sixteen. Has his son Nathan come back onto the staff? He just got back from his mission.

Me: Nathan Langford. I have not met Nathan.

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Dave: I think he’s coming to school in January.

Linda: OK. So he just got back, so he hasn’t come back to BYU yet.

Me: We’ll be happy to see him.

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Linda: And you could interview Jonathan. He’d love to talk to you.

Dave: Jonathan’ll talk your ear off.

Me: If you could get me contact information for him, I’d love to interview him as well.

Linda: Sure. I’ll email you that.

Dave: He can keep going and going. But the funny thing is, is that Jonathan, I never knew until years later, is colorblind. So, for him, the “Red Issue” that we did, and “Green Issue,” was the “Black Issue” to Jonathan. He never knew that it was red and green because he was red and green colorblind.

Linda: For green, he sees orange. So, he’s quite hyper; in fact, that’s one of the reasons, because when he goes out, the trees are orange, and the lawn is orange, and it’s just not very soothing.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I never knew that! It just was really weird when I referred to the “Red Issue” of Leading Edge and he didn’t know what issue I was talking about. And by the way, that Issue 1 came out in two colors, not for any supernatural reason, but simply because Kinko’s ran out of green cardstock! They said, “Well, we got some red,” So I said, “OK, we’ll give the staff the red issues and we’ll put on sale the green ones.”

Linda: Back to one thing that Dave said that kind of tickled me, Dave said, when he started talking about “getting more on a page.” That became a real problem. It took me a long time to teach The Leading Edge that there’s such a thing as white space. They wanted to fill clear to the margins, clear to the outer edge, top and bottom. They were gonna pay to have it printed, they wanted it filled. It took me a long time to say, “No, you gotta have some margins here.”

Dave: You know, we grew up very much conservative, ‘cause we had no money. And we’re trying to put this magazine out for under 500 dollars, and so every way we could shave costs, we did. So I regret that the back of Issue 3 doesn’t look as good as it could be, because I wouldn’t pay to have the back cover typeset. And now I look back, like, “Pay the twenty bucks, Dave!” But at the time, 20 dollars was HUGE! We were all students. I mean, who had extra money at the time? So, I can’t say enough for the many years that the department and college were extremely supportive.

Linda: They were.

25

Dave: And I appreciate that. I think that I spent a couple semesters at the U, and if you think things are challenging at BYU, try going to the U, where they’re trying to be hoity-toity and couldn’t stoop to have anything like science fiction show up in one of their classes. Because I kinda hoped, you know, while I was taking these other courses up there, that we could get something rolling at the U. But no such luck. So obviously in this tough economic time, Daniel, obviously the college and department have to use their limited funds in the best way they know how. So, I’m not surprised that they would look at their balance sheet and say, “Well, which projects do we want to put our money in to?” But The Leading Edge has survived without grants from the department before, and I think even more so now because we can distribute electronically. It 1982, we didn’t have that option. It was only a print magazine, or there’s no magazine. And so you had to put out some money to print copies. And it all came down to a numbers game, that it’s just as cheap to print a thousand as it was to print 500. But you still needed the money to pay for the 500.

Linda: Now, when you do letterpress printing, the cost per item goes down with the more that you print, and at some point, you’re just paying such a little bit to get more copies, so we always ran a lot of copies that way. I don’t remember what year we started applying for the Humanities Council money, but we got funding once a year from that for Leading Edge. And if you want names of very helpful people, one would be Ben Gedsel, who was a dean who was very, very, very helpful. He always said to me, “The fact that the kids can look on up a magazine or journal, that they can have that experience of acquisition, the experience of evaluating things, editing, of typesetting, of producing,” he said, “I don’t really care what subject matter it’s in, I see that as something to do with writing and with humanities.” And so he funded our biology journals, our health journals, our journals from all over campus because he felt the process was part of his college. And he was a brother-in-law? For Pat Smith?

Dave: Could’ve been. That was well after our time.

Linda: Yeah. And he really always defended, whenever anybody tried to cut any of the magazines or The Leading Edge, or the science fiction symposium. He was right in there, defending it as the dean. And the other person who was very, very helpful was Ron Woods. And Ron would call me up and say, “There’s a little bit of money left over in such-and-such account that’s not gonna get used this year I’ll move over to your account.”

Dave: That was NICE.

Linda: So, I’d get money to start feeding in to various journals. He was wonderful. Still is.

Dave: We have friends, in the department and in the college, that are strong friends. It’s just the ebb and flow, over years, that you see how friends now come in, OK, now you can do this; now we’ve got a little more of a challenging environment. But the spirit, I think, in talking at last year’s symposium to Leading Edge people, is the same. It’s the same with Quark. It’s that sense of adventure. I mean, we thought nothing of spending all night at the typesetter to try to get the issue out.

Linda: In fact, you weren’t really a member of the staff until you’d done an all-nighter.

26

Dave: Yeah! Shane had never been up all night ‘till we had a—he had never been up all night. That kind of dedication and passion about the subject. Because we thought we had a unique voice, which I always thought was important, that we had something to say in a way that the New York magazines couldn’t. And I think we’re now seeing that blossom. You know, why do we have a Brandon Sanderson, a Brandon Mull? You know, and Stephanie Meyer, whatever, some people have an opinion.

Linda: It’s ok.

Dave: She sells and is hugely influential. But the point is, our storytelling now is appealing to the mainstream audience, and I think that we offered a venue, and continue to offer a venue, to make that happen. And I kinda hoped when I started Leading Edge, was that this would be a model, as it happened with Linda, for other groups that said, “Hey, why don’t we do our own magazine? Why don’t we run an event?” ‘Cause I thought, “Yeah. That’s what should be happening!” I mean, I know that there was other fields of interest out there besides science fiction and fantasy, and they just needed to dive in. You know, if you come in with a preconceived notion that “I’m not gonna do anything until my professor pitches the idea and runs with it,” you know, that’s not gonna happen. I’ve found that almost universally at the time that the professors, by and large, were very supportive of students doing something.

Linda: Steve Walker always defended. *Dave and Linda debate whether he’s retiring this year or not.] But one thing Dave said that I’d like to emphasize also: We’ve had our ups and downs as far as support, and withdrawing support, and so forth, but if you weighed the hard times against the times that the college and the department and so forth has been supporting—lots, lots more of that. Of them giving their support.

Dave: Yes. I would say from benign to aggressive support was the vast majority of years. So, I just think that so long as the magazine is adaptable to the audience, and is answering their needs, it will serve an incredible purpose. I mean, I got my first job as a writer because of working on The Leading Edge, because I had written science articles, I had edited text, so I could show, “Look, it’s not just that I went to school, I’ve got some samples.” And to actually see people like Dave Farland—Dave Wolverton, I guess, we’d better say—to see him go from where, “Gosh, it’d be nice to get published” to “WOW,” you know?

Linda: The Writers of the Future Contest, they had quarterly winners, and so each quarter they’d have a different winner, but one year, Dave Wolverton won one quarter, Shane Bell won another quarter, and then Dave won as the whole year’s winner. That’s two of those nationally coming out of our BYU classes.

Dave: Really, it was the Writers of the Future that demonstrated something was happening here, and now it’s fascinating, as I was in a meeting with a church PR guy, dealing with a movie production thing, and then he turned to me and says, “Now Dave, what do you make of Stephanie Meyer?” And I thought, “Here it is that the church PR head is asking me what I think of, what?” But the fact that he even just asked. You gotta remember in 1981, wow, Mormon literature was a tiny field.

Linda: Oh, we’d spend half our time having panels on, “Is there a Mormon Literature field?”

27

Dave: Yeah! I mean, the fact is that the number of Mormon novels that were overtly Mormon was very limited. I mean, Doug Thayer had written some things, and Don Marshall had written a dozen, yeah, maybe two dozen, but that was it. Now, you know, we have whole shelves in the bookstores about LDS fiction. That wasn’t the case in ’81. Let alone worrying about science fiction. Now, of course, that we have a General Authority who wrote science fiction just helps, you know? Albeit that was very novice work that he did. And I’ll think of it one day. I’ll come clean.

Linda: But if you look at who’s producing science fiction, so many of them are Mormons. And coming out of this Leading Edge/science fiction symposium.

Dave: Yeah, and I remember, as the article said, I remember sitting in the Varsity Theatre during Scott Card’s speech that first time on evil in fiction, and him giving me the impression that BYU’s not a real school in terms of this kind of stuff. And I thought, “Huh! What does he know? Yeah. I’m gonna show him that yes, we can do it!” Now, years later, when we hung out together, I asked Scott about that time, and he’s, “No, that’s not what I said! I said this!” I said, “No, that’s not how I took it, but I’m glad that I took it the wrong way.”

Linda: Took it as a challenge.

Dave: Took it as a challenge. Because there were science fiction classes being offered by the department. There was a pool where we could pull. I thought that’s an important footnote to add here.

Linda: Studying it and writing it.

Dave: So it made it easier to go to Doc Smith’s writing science fiction class and say, “Hey, would you submit to The Leading Edge?” So we had, you know, 15 stories to start with. And then recruited staff to come on board.

Linda: Because science fiction writers are so supportive of one another, I’m on the board for Writers of ¿Worlds? now, and we run a big conference and we get some really, really good writers. But we have to pay for them. But the science fiction really good writers would come for their airplane ticket and we’d set ‘em up in a hotel or somebody’s house. Betty Pope had a lot of them, Sue Ring had them stay. They didn’t even get any kind of honorarium and we worked the heck out of them. And we had really, really neat people, like Ray Bradbury and Robin McKinley, just really, really, big-name people, and often we’d work with the university; they’d come as the forum speaker.

Dave: Ray, yeah, he was a forum speaker.

Linda: And then they’d come over and do the symposium for us.

Dave: Comes out here on a day like today, wearing SHORTS! This is a guy who’s not acquainted with how different it is in Utah from Southern California!

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Linda: I have to tell you the thing I learned from Ray Bradbury, though, that was so fun. He was speaking in the Varsity and somebody asked him, as we tend to do, “What do you know about Mormons?” And he said, “Well, let me tell ya. Reed Nibley and I grew up just a couple of houses—just really close to each other. And best friends. So if you want to have a really good roadshow, you oughta go back to the ones where Reed Nibley wrote all the music and I wrote the script.”

Dave: It’s true. And that’s how the rumor started that Ray was LDS. Just because he did come to the wardhouse, and did participate in these roadshows. And I’m sad that roadshows aren’t done now, you know? It’s almost like I have this allergic reaction when I see the word, “platform” on doors in the stake center. Because it’s not a platform, it’s a STAGE!!

Me: We did roadshows when I was in Priests’.

Dave: Brigham Young was an actor, you know? [talk of finishing up the conversation and filling out consent forms+ There’s a lot of great people that are still around, that are happy to talk about things, and maybe we can get you in touch with Jonathan. The important thing to me is that there is a way. There is a way to make things happen. Just as we were talking earlier about the symposium, yes, has a challenging year; we have some entrenched opposition that have a lot of authority, but I figure there is a higher power at work at BYU, and if we are diligent and prayerful, I think we’re doing something that matters. It cannot be that these people who are doing the writing today are doing it and having such an impact without some kind of divine purpose in it. And they’re having an influence on a group of people who would never normally sit down and talk religion.

Linda: For a long time, mainstream writing has gone into areas that, well, that aren’t the way we think and do, and science fiction has been the most religious, and the most conservative, of writing for a long time. And moral. Very moral.

Dave: It’s very true. And I think, possibly because of the way science fiction is abstracted from reality, people are more willing to hear moral tales that way, than they are if this were contemporary fiction.

Linda: People often ask me why there’s so many LDS people *who+ end up writing science fiction that sells, and I say, “Because we believe that most of it’s true!”

Dave: I’m quoted as saying that, “Mormonism is a science fiction religion.” And by that, I don’t mean that it’s invented, it’s that it is one that believes in man’s ultimate goodness and ability to create. And I see that as a strength in fantasy and science fiction, is that we can overcome.

Me: Thank you guys so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Dave: Thank you.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Leading Edge Yields Latter-day Melva Giffords Saints Leading Edge History F 6 December 2011 Founding Staff Member Yahoo! Inbox Stranger

Personal Data: Linda Adams forwarded me Melva’s email address, and Melva was kind enough to

Social Data: There was definitely a computer and a keyboard involved. Other data unavailable.

Cultural Data: Most of the players in this history also appear in Dave Doering’s interview. The Science fiction and fantasy World Con is a yearly convention of science fiction and fantasy aficionados.

Item: This item was emailed to me by Melva and reformatted and lightly edited by me, with Melva’s permission.

In the Beginning

In about 1979, a bunch of science fiction fans signed up for an English class that Orson Scott Card was supposed to teach. Instead, we got a wonderful teacher named Marian K. Smith. We called him our Doc Smith. He had an extensive knowledge of the genre and a supportive attitude towards aspiring writers. This great professor taught us a lot of great stuff, of what makes a great story, and it was the greatest class in which to do homework, writing new stories.

Friendships were established and we continued our association after the end of the term. We started meeting in a writing group called Xenobia. We liked having a time to review each others' stories and would meet every Friday night. As a group, we desired to become professional writers, and so several thought that to accomplish this they needed to know what it was like to produce a magazine and to create a symposium where we would have professional editors and authors come to BYU. As I understand it, Dave Doering discussed a magazine idea with Shayne Bell. Marian K. Smith became the adviser for both new creations.

Some of the Xenobia members started the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium and many of the same started The Leading Edge magazine. New people who had not attended Smith’s class also joined the ranks, such as members of a science fiction club called Quark. For Issue one, we made a call for entries and got a great response.

The key people I remember being involved in the beginning were Shayne Bell, Dave Doering, and Mike and Rayda Reed. There were others, but those are the first names that come to mind. I was a member of the staff. It was arranged for us to use a computer in the English department after other school magazines were done for the night. We worked on an old black computer we

30 nicknamed Darth (after the villain of Star Wars movies). Many thanks to Linda Adams for letting us have access to the hardware and location, and for being a key mentor.

Shayne Bell, being the student who had a car, would pick up fellow staffers late at night or very early in the morning, and we would take turns on the computer for a couple of hours. At various hours of the morning he would return us home. Some of us would work in shifts, while certain people would work all the shifts.

One hundred copies were printed of Issue one. There was a wonderful centerfold illustration by Dave Bastian. They are quite a collector’s item now. The staff never realized that the dream of magazine production would continue throughout the decades. Here are some of the positions for Issue one: Executive Editor: Dave Doering, Managing Editor: Michael W. Reed, Assistant Editor: Rayda Reed.

I remember the growing of friendships and the sense of community that existed in being a part of the staff for The Leading Edge or the symposium. These friendships exist still. Many of the people on the various staffs have now moved on to professional careers.

The Early Years

In the early years I remember about ten people sitting around tables and reading submissions. Since many of the staff members were writers, it was decided early on to submit under pseudonyms. There was one time that Nancy Hayes had submitted a manuscript and Shayne Bell started discussing the story with the rest of the group. I knew she was the author but Shayne didn’t. It was funny to see how interested Nancy was about what Shayne had to say. We also had access to a very talented artist named Steve Keele who did several covers for us. The look of the magazine improved through each successive issue.

Around Issue three or four we featured a very controversial illustration for one of the stories that created quite a storm amongst the staff. This event was one example where

I saw Shayne’s specific effort to maintain a publication of high character. As we grew as a magazine, we gained access to the computers in the evenings and no longer had to work such strange hours.

As each issue progressed, there was a switch-around of positions and those who were staff sometimes got a turn in leadership roles. I became an editor/submissions coordinator around Issue six (I think). When we began to get more exposure, we started to get really huge amounts

31 of submissions, and we would spend Tuesday night, Thursday night, and Saturday morning working on the magazine. If the other BYU magazines moved from one building to another on campus we moved along with them. With our increased submissions to the magazine we also increased our collection of talented artists and fun articles. Sometimes we could interview people who came to the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium.

Throughout the years, various staff members of the symposium and The Leading Edge have felt that BYU wasn’t very excited about having science fiction and fantasy on campus. Some in the English department may not have considered science fiction and fantasy as literature and thought it should probably be ignored and removed completely from university support. I am not sure if those individuals have learned since then that many past staffers of said publication have become professional writers and editors once they left BYU.

I went to the Science Fiction and Fantasy World Con this year (2011). There were a number of Latter-day Saints who were up for prestigious awards. A number of awards have been given to other members of the church in past years in all the areas of science, art, innovation, and in the different genres of literature and the arts; it’s wonderful to see that Latter-day Saints can be listed as some of the most accomplished individuals in all these fields. I will be forever grateful to BYU for providing an environment where I could aspire for success in a chosen career with the Gospel fueling my aspirations.

The magazine provides an excellent opportunity to read the slush pile and to evaluate why a story did or did not work. I remember sometimes there being over 17 folders filled with submissions, and we had to begin restricting readers to 2-3 per story unless it had been accepted. An accepted story went through an extensive review. New people came and others left. The great thing was that through each succession of staff members, aspiring writers, artists, and editors were able to learn their craft by hands-on experience. They showed as much passion and dedication as those before them had.

As the years progressed, there were some minor frustrations. I remember a series of poems being written, quite witty, from some anonymous staffers, popping up mysteriously at the some of the meetings. I guess it was a way for certain people to vent a little. It was with this magazine that I became the art director for a few issues. Fortunately, I had some friends who were professional artists and I believe their submissions were a great complement to the look of the magazine.

As the magazine gained exposure more people started submitting. Artists sent in portfolios in the hopes of having their work featured within each publication’s pages. The various staff members that worked on putting together each issue had a primary concern to provide the best product possible. High quality reflects well on the learned skills of the staff and on the education gained from the university. Students are able to feature hands-on experience to potential employers. Some of my friends were hired because of their involvement in activities such as TLE.

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A couple of past TLE staff members are currently bestseller authors and several are professional editors.

Years ago at the magazine, I remember a married couple approaching me and asking what I felt about the two them being the two chief editors of the magazine. At the time I didn’t see a problem with it. Later, there were some integrity concerns. Some of the staff felt there was too much dominion over everything by this married team. Due to the conflict I finally terminated my involvement with the magazine.

The magazine and symposium helped me improve as an individual. Being from a small town and small high school, I hadn’t had much opportunity to be in many leadership positions. The symposium and magazine gave me the chance to move outside my shell and try things I wouldn’t have dared to do. I will be forever grateful to BYU for hosting such an environment of creativity and an opportunity for young Latter-day Saints to unfurl their creative sails. It is one thing to get class instruction and quite another to have some hands-on experience. Why not combine the two?

My Observations

There were a number of wonderful things that were accomplished by this publication. A bunch of wannabe writers started learning the process of magazine production. With reading all the submissions that started coming in for the different issues we had the great opportunity to begin to analyze why certain stories would work and why others didn't. We learned different techniques for quality control, such as reading to screen, the need for clarity, and checking and rechecking. We learned about design, illustration, and how to effectively work with people. We learned how to establish a good reputation for our publication and thus brought positive attention to the university.

Many of us were very inexperienced. As we began to learn the craft and prove ourselves, we began to gain further responsibilities and learn new skill sets. This makes a great contribution to one's self-esteem. We worked as fellow Latter-day Saints in presenting a good quality product to the best of our abilities. When you sit at the chair of the slush pile and you begin to read a story and analyze its effectiveness, you naturally evaluate your own writing.

BYU as a university is becoming known for many great accomplishments. Why not also to be a key contributor to successful authors and editors? This is but one way we combine our love of the Gospel with our love of literature and art. Then, certainly, we can accomplish new things by way of our education and future careers.

As Shayne Bell has continued his writing career he has published over a hundred stories to magazines. During that time he was in communication with various editors from New York. A

33 question was raised: what is it about Utah writers that lets them present so many upbeat stories that are accepted in magazines, especially when compared to other submissions that usually have a more negative ending? I say that authors from Utah may have been presenting their view of life as nurtured by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and a result, their work stood out from their competitors’.

There is another exciting thing: science fiction and fantasy literature is sold at a higher quantity in Utah than many other states of the nation. Why is that? It’s because Latter-day Saints don't see science fiction and fantasy as a threat to the Gospel. The concepts of worlds without end, of eternal progression, and of the coming of age of a character are all complemented by the principals of the Gospel. The great thing is that the University has nurtured a positive environment for youthful Latter-day Saints to spread their wings in creativity and gain skill sets for their careers. I specifically chose BYU for my education because it hosted events on specific literature and provided a safe environment as I branched out into the world.

The magazine gives us as fellow Saints a shared passion to learn writing and editing. We live the Gospel, and that perspective often tints our writing with characters with morals and drive. There is cause and consequence by a given decision, which is another principal of the Gospel.

Many of us authors tell a simple science fiction or fantasy story and don't realize that some element of the gospel is taught in the message of that story. The irony is that when we feature our fiction outside the Church, that story may be a non-member’s first introduction to a concept of the gospel. It might be cloaked in fantasy or science fiction, but if it can get the reader to think, it can be a stepping stone to expand the mind to other spiritual thoughts.

Several years ago, Mr. Bell was an editor to an anthology called Washed by a Wave of Wind. It featured an article by Barbara Hume that had an extensive exposition about the early days of the Life the Universe and Everything symposium and The Leading Edge. I would invite people to find that anthology and read the article. There have also been various articles in magazines and local newspapers throughout the years, but I don’t have the publications or dates. I recommend everyone to reference: http://lds.org/ensign/1977/07/the-gospel-vision-of-the-arts?lang=eng. Please also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_Edge

Happy writing all.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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The Leading Edge— Jonathan Langford Thoughts and Memories Leading Edge History 49, M 7 December 2011 Founding Staff Member Yahoo! Inbox Stranger

Personal Data: Jonathan Langford was first mentioned to me in my interview with Dave Doering and Linda Adams. Although I still have not met Jonathan, Linda sent us an email that put us in contact.

Social Data: I imagine a mysterious, dark castle with haze and lightning—the lair of a master freelance writer. But of course I have no idea what Jonathan’s personal space looks like.

Cultural Data: BYU Studies is one of the many magazines produced on BYU campus; however, while students do contribute to the editorial process, it is not a student-run journal. The “Cougareat” is BYU’s food court.

Item: Linda Adams put me in contact with Jonathan, and though I was not able to interview him personally, he was kind enough to send me the following article (the only changes made are to the fonts):

The Leading Edge—Thoughts and Memories Jonathan Langford, December 2011

Summary of My Involvement I first entered BYU as a rather undisciplined 16-year-old during the summer of 1978. At that time, I was a political science major, anticipating a possible career in politics. During the winter of 1980, however (my last semester at BYU prior to my mission to Italy), I became involved in a science fiction club at BYU, where a few of us would sit around and talk about books (a personal long-time interest and vice). It was fun.

The next time I was on the BYU campus was April 1981, on my way into the Missionary Training Center. Wandering through the BYU Bookstore prior to reporting, I noticed a strange-looking stapled magazine with a lurid green-and-black cover: The Leading Edge volume 2, complete with the infamous Mona Laser illustration by Dave Bastian. I flipped it open, looked at the staff list, and saw Dave Doering, who had been president of Quark while I was there. Interesting. Too bad, I thought, that it would certainly be defunct by the time I returned from my mission.

Fast-forward two years to summer of 1983 and my post-mission return to BYU. One of the many insights on my mission had been the realization that while in Italy, I’d had no problem setting aside my interest in politics—but that everything I saw made me think of art, literature, and culture in general. And so I decided I should follow my love, and go into literature.

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Walking through the BYU Bookstore that summer, I was astonished to see a copy of The Leading Edge #5—and more astonished to see that Dave Doering was still listed as the executive editor. Clearly, the magazine had done well for itself. It was now perfect-bound with a glossy cover, higher-quality cover artwork, better interior typesetting, and what looked like more high-quality stories. I resolved to get involved that fall.

And I did. I’m listed on TLE #6 as the executive secretary. Frankly, I don’t recall exactly what I did on that issue—except that I spent many hours in the basement of the Smith Family Living Center, where the BYU Studies office and typesetting machine were located. We’d received permission to use the space and machine after hours, I think through Cara Bullinger and Shayne Bell, who were both (I believe) interns with Linda Adams at BYU Studies.

That issue was the first one to be machine-typeset (though still with some pasteup work, which continued for several more issues). It represented another step up in quality of both content and appearance. One of my fond memories from my years of working on the magazine was staying up all night with Shayne, Nancy Hayes, and Lareena Smith in the typesetting office on one of the last nights of production for that issue, with us taking turns on the typesetting machine—and writing a round-robin short story that wound up being published in Issue #7, the main virtue of which was that it was quite short!

Issue #7 marked a significant transition in the history of the magazine. Up to then, TLE had been under the close direction and control of its initial founders, including Dave Doering, Shayne Bell, and others. By this time, however, Shayne was in graduate school, others had moved away, and the first generation were anxious to pass the torch on to others. For better or worse, I turned out to be a key person in that transition: known and trusted by TLE’s founding generation (I’d been inducted into Xenobia, their writing group, the previous fall, and made a pretty good impression), but also able and willing to go out and recruit new people.

Issue #7 was challenging in another way. Shayne’s insistence on making Issue #6 as good as it could be led to a beautiful result, but also delayed publication until March, as I recall, instead of December. (TLE at that time came out twice a year.) By dint of some very hard work, we got Issue #7 out by May—only a month behind!

By fall 1984 and Issue #8, Dave Doering and Melva Gifford were the only old-timers still around in a leadership capacity (and I’m not sure Melva had been very involved in TLE before Issue #6). Doering was listed as the executive editor, with me as managing editor, but effectively I was doing all the work. We’d instituted a more democratic approach to deciding exactly what went into the magazine—something that had been a sore point with some of the staff members—and I suffered the indignity of having one of my choices outvoted.

With Issue #9, I took over as executive editor, where I served for three issues—a year and a half. I’m still quite proud of Issue #9, a special Tolkien issue that included (in addition to a mediocre story by me) one of the best stories in the history of the magazine, in my view the best of Shayne Bell’s work to appear in our pages: “Out of Azram,” a hauntingly beautiful and deeply powerful fantasy tale. I should add that I think Shayne had a story in each of the first 13 issues of TLE: a consistent rock of quality around which each issue could be constructed.

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Issue #9 was also deeply exhausting for me. Due in part to poor staff communication and what I saw as a lack of follow-up by various assistant editors, I wound up putting in a lot of my own time to get the magazine out. I also was heavily involved in BYU’s sf&f symposium that year, and wound up getting poor grades in my English major classes as a result. By the end of the semester—and the issue—I was wondering whether there was sufficient interest to keep the magazine alive. Over the following summer, I resolved that the fall would see me put all my best efforts into recruitment. I would put out one more issue—#10, to bring it to a nice round number—and if I couldn’t find sufficient staff to keep it going without cutting significantly into my other time commitments, that would be it.

Issue #10 was a breakthrough issue in many ways. New volunteers came out of the woodwork, and we had the biggest staff I can remember up to that time. We started paying 1/4 cent a word: not much, but a significant symbolic step. (I know that didn’t continue, but can’t remember when it stopped.) We also published two stories that issue that wound up being quarterly contest winners in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest: “Jacob’s Ladder,” by Shayne Bell, and “The Sky Is an Open Highway,” by Dave Wolverton (which was also that year’s grand prize winner). The issue featured an interview with Anne McCaffrey and another with fantasy artist Real Musgrave—together with a retrospective guest editorial from Marion K. “Doc” Smith, our advisor, which remains an important historical perspective on TLE and what it meant to those of us who worked on it during the first 5 years or so of its existence.

I continued as executive editor through Issue #11 (which, by the way, was actually the Winter 1986 issue, though the inside cover says Winter 1985), then stepped down, as I was about to enter the MA program in English at BYU. The legacy of which I’m proudest is the fact that by that time, there was a healthy staff of people newer with whom I felt entirely comfortable leaving the magazine. We had made it past that critical transition from first-generation leadership (the originators of the vision) to second-generation leadership (their heirs)—and then through the still more fraught transition to third-generation leadership (they who knew not the Founding Parents). That’s the time when, I’ve observed, most successful student-originated projects typically wheel away into weirdness, and thence shortly oblivion (if indeed they last that long). I continued on the staff of the magazine through the next couple of issues in supporting positions. By December of 1987, however, I had gotten a job, gotten married, and was realizing I needed to buckle down and finish my MA program, so I had to regretfully bow out of things.

What TLE Meant to Me My work on The Leading Edge was without question the most influential—and positive— experience of my college career. As I mentioned above, as a result of insights about my own character and interests while on my mission, I’d decided that I was going to major in literature— English. A big part of the reason for that was my interest in writing. It was my TLE experience that gave me an outlet to start doing something with that interest.

After I started working on TLE, I completed what was essentially the informal equivalent (at that time) of what would later become BYU’s editing emphasis, serving as an editorial intern with BYU Studies and the Humanities Publications Center, taking the editing course taught by Linda Adams (and subsequent independent study credits for my volunteer work on TLE) and a magazine writing course from Communications, along with more standard English major’s courses. While working on my master’s degree, I got a job with an educational software

37 company writing and editing teacher’s manuals, training materials, and online educational activities. After completing my master’s degree, I began a doctoral program at the University of California at Riverside, with a focus in medieval literature, where I did well and completed my coursework and exams. Over time, however, I came to realize I was better suited to expository writing and editing than to teaching and research, and so I returned to work in the educational publishing industry. For the past 15 years, I’ve worked as a freelance writer and editor.

All of this I owe in large part to my experience on The Leading Edge. Not only did my TLE experience start me down this path; it also provided some of the most effective and intensive training I ever received in the art of close examination and careful improvement of a work of written text. During my time on the magazine, the practice was to make sure that each submission was reviewed by 2-3 readers, each of which would do his or her best to explain what worked and what didn’t in the story. Then each accepted submission was edited by another team of 2-3 people, who would meet with the author and discuss suggested changes. At all the steps in this process, multiple ideas were brought forward and vigorously discussed. In the years since then, I’ve worked with several gifted editors, but none of them has taught me as much as I learned from that experience.

I also learned many other things as well about the soup-to-nuts practical process of publishing— an important area where academic programs often fail to adequately prepare future writers and editors for their experiences in the real world—not to mention time and team management skills. Science fiction and fantasy geeks, need I say, often grow up lacking in key social skills, and that was certainly true of me. To the extent that I’ve learned to manage large-scale projects, including writing and editorial projects, much of that is due to experience on The Leading Edge. And I’m by no means unique in my experience. I could easily name a dozen people from my time on the staff who wound up working in areas where their TLE experience provided relevant training: Shayne Bell, Dave Doering, Nancy Hayes, Ginny Baker, Barbara Hume, Terry Jeffress, Ed Liebing, Debbi Wager, Scott Parkin, Russ Asplund, Cara Bullinger, Dave Wolverton. (Hey! An even dozen! And I’m sure I’m missing some...)

It’s also my opinion that hands-on experience with the editing and publication process provides valuable insights into literature itself. There’s a lot that I think students can gain from working on a magazine, including a deeper understanding of issues of style, the give-and-take process of literary production, writing as a multistage process (including revision in response to reader feedback), the social context for writing, writer intentionality, the value of originality, literary influence, and elements that distinguish high-quality writing from mediocre writing. Such insights are valuable not only to practicing writers and would-be writers, but at least as much so to teachers, critics, and literary scholars—as I learned in my own academic career.

Finally, there’s the sheer benefit of working on a team with dedicated people to accomplish something worthwhile that stretches your mind and talents while developing lasting bonds of friendship: something everyone should have a chance to experience while in college. I’m proud of the magazines we produced. I still keep in touch with many friends I made. I can only hope future students have similar opportunities.

Stories, Funny and Otherwise From the beginning, The Leading Edge had lowest priority when it came to use of equipment. That meant a lot of late nights and weekends. Staff meetings were Saturday morning, with

38 additional meetings stretching throughout the afternoon and as needed on an ad-hoc basis at other times as well.

Sometime after I started working on the magazine, we moved to the new Humanities Publications Centers in the basement of the Jesse Knight Humanities building (JKHB). There we had a filing cabinet and a few shelves of our own. Saturdays, we were typically the only ones there. Sometimes other occupants of the suite of offices were irritated by our presence and the noise we made, but we tried to keep it down.

After I became executive editor—and while I was serving as an editorial intern for BYU Studies— I had a key to the office, and would often spend late nights there. Sometimes I would lie down and sleep in the conference room where we had staff meetings. On at least one occasion, I startled the janitors as they came in about 4:00 in the morning, which resulted in them calling Linda Adams to make sure it was okay that I was there. I think they may have called campus security as well. I got the feeling that I wasn’t really supposed to be there, but they didn’t give me any hassle after that.

For a while, my BYU ward met in the same wing of the JHHB where the Humanities Publications Center was. Sometimes I would slip into the office for a few minutes during a gap between meetings. Since that was also where most of my English classes were held, I spent time in the building each day of the week—more time than in my own apartment, by far.

One time I remember that we were talking about science fiction stories set in bars and featuring poker. Being good Mormon kids, none of us really understood poker. We decided that we needed to remedy that—purely for purposes of scientific inquiry and literary appreciation, of course. So someone looked up which hands beat other hands in a dictionary and wrote the information on the chalkboard. We passed out thumb tacks and paper clips from the desks—for betting purposes—and played several rounds. Then we emptied our stakes back into the desk drawers.

(I’d write about the infamous Deadly Doily incident, but I think that’s been written up somewhere else. Besides, it wasn’t really a TLE story, but rather a BYU Studies story.)

We did our best to make the magazine self-supporting through sales and (occasionally) ads. Our achievement, however, always fell short of our intentions. Early in my time on the TLE staff, I remember working on a banner for a new issue advertising “Science Fiction and Fantasy from BYU” to hang in the Cougareat. Unfortunately, I’m partly colorblind, so when I came back after a break, I continued the lettering in a different color than I had started, changing blue for purple (or vice versa). Later, I found out that some people had thought it was deliberate.

We worked hard to get TLE into local bookstores and libraries. A few times we got copies into the Salt Lake library system, partly as I recall through a family contact of a staff member. One of the reasons I liked having such a large staff was because I figured each staff members was worth probably 3 copies’ worth of sales or gifts to friends and family members. We tried to get up to 200 subscriptions so we could qualify for bulk mailing, but I think the highest we ever got was about 100. Marketing was a constant losing battle: none of us wanted to do it, or knew how. Sometimes we’d get a student who was studying marketing and wanted to do something with the magazine, but their ideas always seemed to be out of touch with the real world—such as

39 putting ads in The Daily Universe, something that was horridly cost inefficient, particularly when you could blanket the campus with flyers for only a fraction of the cost. It always seemed to work better when we got actual sf&f fans to do some marketing, but it was never the part that interested us.

We did come up with some clever flyers from time to time. The best I can remember was the first of the “Where Are They Now?” series. Talented artist Eddy Mueller drew a large, slavering Tyrannosaurus Rex. Next to it, we put something like: “They roamed the earth for __ million years. They could kill *something or other+ with a single bite of their immense jaws. They didn’t read The Leading Edge. Where are they now?”

There were, of course, conflicts. I mentioned the story where I was overruled in Issue #8. Later, Dave Wolverton had written a fantasy story about a town infested with unicorns, with a bounty on them because they’re spearing the sheep. The POV character, a 14-year-old boy, is recruited to help a couple of unicorn hunters as they stake out his maiden aunt’s house. But the unicorns never come. The story included the boy’s reflections on his sister, who used to attract unicorns (causing grim-faced looks from his father due to the dead sheep), until she suddently didn’t anymore. At one point in the story he accidentally swears by an evil god, and believes he is damned for it. Then he starts thinking about all the things he can get away with doing since he’s damned anyway. Pretty tame stuff—as he realizes when the unicorn hunters, frustrated, start cursing at the unicorns’ non-appearance, and his naughty thoughts are pale beside their casual speech. It was a clever story, and I liked it, but some members of the TLE staff were offended. We wound up taking the story to Doc Smith, who read it and said that while it was well-written, he didn’t think it was a really top-quality story—and that if we were going to offend readers, it ought to be for a top-quality story. So we didn’t publish it.

Not long before I left the staff, I was involved with another controversy, this one involving Shayne Bell. He had written a particularly long story, “And the Stars Are Old,” which we published in two parts in Issues #12 and #13, and which represented the first part of the novel that was eventually published as Nicoji. As it got time to publish the second installment, Shayne wanted us to continue and serialize the whole novel—which he hadn’t finished yet. I was among those who voted not to do so—not because I thought anything he wrote would be less than publishable quality (though I did worry about agreeing to publish anything sight unseen, in terms of the precedent it might establish), but mostly because I couldn’t imagine Shayne (who was constantly revising his stories) continuing without at some point deciding that he needed to change something that had already been written—at which point he and we would both have a problem. So we didn’t publish it, and Shayne’s attitude toward the TLE staff became somewhat cool. He thought we didn’t trust him as a writer, but really that wasn’t it at all.

Random Observations One of the extraordinary things about TLE was the broad-based volunteer staff support we were able to recruit to keep the magazine going—often from people who weren’t majoring in English or any literarily related field, and sometimes from people who weren’t students at all. Some may see that as a drawback. I see it as a strength—not just from an organizational perspective, but from the perspective of the magazine as a valuable learning laboratory.

The business of literature and the humanities isn’t merely literature, but the entire range of human experience, including science, mythology, culture, technology, the “big cosmological”

40 ideas, and much more. Science fiction and fantasy, I would argue, are important because they represent a space where many of those often segregated ways of conceiving the universe come into fruitful contact. On The Leading Edge, we lived in that zone of contact, both as regards the content of the magazine (where, for example, stories dealt with the society-changing potential of computers and an astronomer could examine the scientific and textual evidences about the red star Frodo saw from Rivendell) and with respect to our own staff community. Literature majors have much to learn from collaboration with those in other fields, as those of us who go on to work as writers and editors learn in our professional lives. The magazine was unquestionably better for that variety of perspectives.

We sometimes envied the staff of Inscape (BYU’s “real” literary magazine) for their huge budget (as it appeared to us) and their paid editorial positions. However, I suspect that having a few paid staff members would have introduced poison into the peculiar community we had developed. I do know that their staff was much smaller than ours, and didn’t seem to have nearly as much fun.

I also realized early on that Inscape was a magazine where each issue represented one specific editor’s editorial vision. TLE, by contrast, was always the product of a community. As executive editor, I could overrule pretty much anyone about pretty much anything—but I couldn’t do it very often unless I wanted to end up doing all the work myself. Compensation for volunteers consists largely in a sense of ownership: knowing their opinion counts and that their efforts make a difference. I’ve since learned that this is true of passionate people in almost any community, including paid work environments: a lesson many executives in companies where I’ve worked don’t seem to have grasped. Truly, man does not live by bread alone, but by feeling needed and wanted. My experience on The Leading Edge taught me that.

In all the time I know at BYU, all of TLE’s faculty advisors guided with a very light hand—which was appropriate, I suppose, for an enterprise that had been started by students and continued purely by ground-up effort. Certainly it never occurred to us that he should be the one to choose who filled the editorial positions. Whole semesters might pass without Doc Smith showing up to any meetings, though he liked to be kept informed about what was going on by the managing editors and executive editors. Mostly, he was available for consultation as we felt we needed his help—and to act as our “front” man in drafting requests for funding from the English Department, College of Humanities, BYU Student Association, et al. I learned the art of the deft written memo from him. One noteworthy example requested from the chair of the English Department some funds for the magazine—and ended with the hint that a positive response could delay his request for an updated computer for another year. It was a masterpiece of carrot-and-stick, done so humorously no one could take offense. We got the money.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

41

Success Stories of Leading Edge

42

The Class that Made It Big Brandon Sanderson Leading Edge Success Stories 35, M 8 December 2011 Former Editor Chen’s Noodle Shop, Orem, UT Future Professor

Dan Wells Peter Ahlstrom Karen Ahlstrom 34, M 35, M 34, F Former Editor Former Editor First LE Webmaster Stranger Stranger Stranger

Personal Data: Brandon Sanderson is the bestselling author of the Mistborn series, and is finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time epic. He also teaches Engl 318R (How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy) at BYU every winter semester. Dan Wells is the bestselling author of the I Am Not a Serial Killer trilogy. Peter Ahlstrom is Brandon’s personal assistant, and Karen is Peter’s wife. All four of them worked on Leading Edge at the same time. Special thanks to Emily Sanderson, Brandon’s wife, who watched the Ahlstrom daughters so that both Karen and Peter could attend this interview.

Social Data: The trick to getting people to do things for you in the real world is to take them out to lunch. We met together at Chen’s Noodle House, a Chinese restaurant in Orem, UT (the place was Dan Wells’ idea). There is an authentic Chinese theme in the restaurant, right down to statues, chopsticks, and Chinese ambiance music. There were other customers in the restaurant at the time (though not too many), as well as wait staff &c.

Cultural Data: “TLE” is this generation’s acronym for The Leading Edge, as it was called at that time. Quark Xpress is an older design layout program that has since been replaced in the university curriculum by Adobe InDesign. Penguin is a large, well-known publishing house. Starcraft is a popular science-fiction-themed real-time strategy game that you can play online against your friends. Connecting several computers together to play such a game via a Local Area Network is called a LAN party. Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of autism that only affects an individual’s social interaction skills. For more details, consult a medical dictionary. Insight is the student journal of BYU’s Honors Program; Inscape is the literary journal of BYU’s English Department. Cheers is a sitcom (I’ve never seen it). The Violent Femmes are an American alternative rock band; “Blister in the Sun” is one of their songs. An “info dump” is a term used to describe the practice of certain novice authors telling you, either directly or indirectly, the history, culture, technology, or magic system in great detail all at once. They are usually very boring and a horrible way to begin a story. Editors hate them. Sherlock Holmes is the most famous 19th-century British detective in literature. The Nebula awards are annual awards given to science fiction stories. The Chesley Award is given annualy to the best cover illustrations in science fiction at the World Convention of Science Fiction (WorldCon). Temples are the most sacred structures in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the temple in Nauvoo, IL, has special historical significance for the church. Rebuilding the historic structure was a big deal at the time (1999–2002). Warhammer is a strategy game played with little miniature models (called minis) that have to be constructed and painted by hand. As such, each player can build an army with a unique color scheme if he chooses. It is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. Locus is a sci-fi/fantasy magazine that reviews the science fiction and fantasy published each year; getting exposure in it does a lot for one’s publicity. Star Wars: Episode I is subtitled The Phantom Menace. The first release of the Star Wars prequels was a big day in nerddom,

43 resulting in long lines of dressed-up fans waiting for the midnight showing of the picture. Christopher Paolini is the author of the Eragon series, and first became published when he was still a teenager. A “pub” is a British term for a bar, where alcoholic beverages are served. Of course, Mormons don’t drink alcohol. Diablo II was a much-anticipated PC video game in which the protagonist tries to kill the devil. Wizards of the Coast is a Seattle-based company that makes board games and card games. You can see the influence of their Magic: The Gathering in Dan Wells’s Leading Edge card game. A “forum” is a name for an online message board of a website. Moshe is Brandon’s editor at Tor, the biggest speculative fiction publisher in America. Orson Scott Card is the quintessential Mormon author of science fiction and fantasy; Tracy Hickman also publishes in these genres, though is not quite as well-known. Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling, is possibly the best-known and best-selling fantasy series of the early 21st Century. Jimmer Fredette was the star of BYU’s 2010 to 2011 basketball season; he has since gone on to play in the NBA. Mistborn was Brandon Sanderson’s first really successful fantasy novel. Michael Chriton wrote Jurassic Park, and many other thrillers with a science fiction flavor.

Item: The interview was recorded on my laptop (I spent a lot of my time turning the machine towards the person who was speaking) and later transcribed, omitting filler words and sounds.

Peter: So I did go one day in 1994.

Brandon: That’s what I was referencing.

Peter: I think it was February of 94. I took a “college day.” At my high school we could take college days. We could take three days off of school and go visit a college if you were a junior or senior. I was a junior, and those were actually the only three days I missed the entire year. The only year I ever had perfect attendance. *laughter from all+ And since it was college days it didn’t count as being absent. But they were doing LTUE; I mean my sister was out here, and she was at TLE, so I was like, “Oh, I want to see this place.”

Brandon: How was it different then?

Peter: Leading Edge, as far as the meeting that I went to, was the same. I’m not sure about how much they were talking around the table, but they were sitting around the table reading slush.

Dan: You didn’t have the “too many loud people” problem? How many staff members did we lose to

Brandon: Me, Alan, and Eric

Dan: And Eric [¿Yuers?].

Peter: Well, the thing is, Karen can probably –you were there for the issue that took a whole year, right?

Karen: I guess. I wasn’t as much on the staffing side. I was the fiction director, so paying attention to who’s reading slush and what needs to get read, and what needs to get sent back, and stuff like that.

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Peter: But wasn’t it when Vanessa was in charge that she was strictly enforcing the rule of “no talking around the table,” and that people just stopped coming because it wasn’t fun enough.

Karen: I don’t remember that. There are large gaps in my memory. I was clinically depressed at the time, and times when I’m depressed, half of my life is gone from memory. It just doesn’t exist anymore. I went once before I started really going. Doug, my brother, went on his mission the year that I came to BYU, and he told me that I should go to The Leading Edge and that I should say that Doug sent me. So I went, and everybody said, “Hi,” and “OK, you’ve got a cool brother. OK.” And I was like, “OK. See ya! He says ‘hi’!” And so I didn’t really go back until he came back from his mission and I started going with him.

Dan: I got there after my mission, which would’ve been beginning of the school year of ’98. Like August of ’98. I was dating a girl before my mission whose parents were both English teachers at BYU, so we were long broken up, but I was still good friends with her mom, so I came back, and she’s like, “You should totally go do this thing!” And so my roommate and I, Ben, went like the first or second week of the semester and we were there forever. And I think all three of them [Brandon, Peter, and Karen] were already there when I got there.

Brandon: I can’t remember how I found out about it. I just came in one day and Vanessa was editor, so you *Peter+ would’ve already been there, probably. But I was immediately, for whatever reason, made a production lackey. I guess they had a hole. And so, in the old Leading Edge, production was in the basement. I don’t know how it is in this new fancy place you guys have, but production was in the basement; everyone sat around a table upstairs. It was an old house.

Dan: I miss that house. That house was sad.

Brandon: Yeah. So I got moved downstairs to be production, and learned Quark Xpress and things like that from Jeremy Caballero. And didn’t get to know a lot of people upstairs because I was down there.

Dan: I actually didn’t know you very well until we were in the writing class together, and didn’t even know that you were a writer until you showed up at the writing class, and I’m like, “What’s the production guy doing in the writing class? I thought he was a production guy.”

Brandon: Yep. So. Our generation was—on the ride over here, we were talking about how it seems like there are “generations” of science fiction/fantasy enclaves at BYU, and that there’s some glump in between them. But you’ve interviewed the Class that Wouldn’t Die.

Me: Yes.

Brandon: And we have a pretty distinct enclave. And I think it was mostly solidified by a lot of us going to Dave’s class the year he taught How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy to us.

Me: Dave who?

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Brandon: Dave Farland. And Wolverton. He was the second year that the class was offered. So he was the year after the Class that Wouldn’t Die, but he’s kind of in that generation, we decided. And so taking that class together, Ben, Peter, Dan and I starting a writing group together, and kind of moving at that point I moved upstairs, so I started doing more editorial . . . Good old Doug. I love Doug. He kind of vanished his last semester at Leading Edge.

[Waiter takes our orders.]

Dan: Our class, our generation, needs a cool name.

Brandon: Yeah, we do.

Dan: ‘Cause “The Class that Wouldn’t Die,”

Brandon: That’s a cool name.

Dan: if they didn’t have a cool name, no one would remember them.

Brandon: Yes, we totally need one.

Dan: No offense, Class that Wouldn’t Die. I actually know several of them and they’re very cool.

Peter: Are we like “The Class that Made It Big?”

Me: You are like the most successful ones! Well, when you think of Leading Edge alumni, the ones that are successful, the ones that are nationally-known are the three of you. Which is why this is a really cool interview.

Brandon: Well, Dave is very well-known nationally.

Me: Yes, and in company of Dave Farland.

Brandon: Ann Sowards. The editors don’t get a big lot of attention—

Dan: Nobody remembers them.

Brandon: —but Ann Sowards, as Peter was pointing out on the ride over here, was a generation before us, and she’s an editor at Ace, which is a division of Penguin, and we did end up with Stacy, who’s an editor in New York as well.

Me: She’s doing “Tau,” right?

Several: “Tu.”

Brandon: And so we can claim her.

Dan: Yeah. I came late enough that I actually missed Vanessa entirely. I didn’t even meet Vanessa until years later.

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Brandon: Loreli was the editor at the time. See, I was only there for the last month or so of Vanessa.

Brandon: So culture of Leading Edge. During our era, which basically starts, I would say, during Vanessa’s editorial shift, then goes through Doug’s, and then the three of us, and then Ben. And that’s kind of the “Class that Made It Big,” if you would call it that.

Dan: I love it!

Karen: While we were there, Leading Edge and Quark were essentially the same entity.

Dan: Yes. And I kind of wonder if that’s part of the reason why our generation became so well- defined, because we were there during the time when there was not a separate science fiction club. If you were interested in science fiction enough to join a club, you joined Leading Edge. And so it had a different, I think, blend of social stuff than maybe some of the other staffs have dealt with.

Peter: Ven was the Queen of Quark—Ven Itah—and then when she moved to Oregon, the separate group collapsed.

Brandon: We did a lot of extra-curricular activities. I mean, we often role-played together.

Dan: We actually at one point did final work putting together an issue in a language lab ‘cause it had enough computers that we could work while also playing giant Starcraft LAN parties. So we were there like all night long, finishing a magazine and playing Starcraft.

Peter: The CLIP lab’s where I worked, the Computer Language Instruction and Programming Lab.

Brandon: I was working that whole night.

Dan: I know, you were. You were in the other room working.

Brandon: I didn’t know you guys were playing Starcraft.

Dan: Well, we were playin’ Starcraft!

Brandon: It was like 3 am and I’m looking over last proofs and things.

Me: That’s awesome.

Peter: Yeah, we were having weird banding issues with the art. I think that the color space was wrong in a lot of the art. Which nowadays, I know a lot more about, but back then, I really didn’t know anything. Because I wasn’t doing the production stuff.

Me: So what are some skills and different things that you’ve learned from Leading Edge and working there?

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Brandon: Interacting with other people who are interested in what I’m interested in.

Dan: Yeah.

Me: How so?

Dan: Well, the core element of that interaction, plus then the skills of that interaction. Like he said, that’s kind of how we got to know each other, that’s how we ended up starting a writing group. The writing group has a lot to do with how we eventually got published. Getting tapped into that community helped us into the careers that we have today.

Brandon: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Mm-hmm.

Karen: And just having a safe place to practice social interaction. I believe that I have borderline Asperger’s Syndrome, and just knowing how to talk to people, and how to react when people talk to me, was really not something I learned in high school. And Leading Edge was a safe place. I could go and I could have a complete breakdown on the table, and everyone would pat me on the back and say “It’s all right.” And then we could talk about something totally different and have stuff to talk about, you know?

Brandon: A part of why it was so important, though, I think is that it wasn’t just a club.

Dan: Yes.

Brandon: The fact that we shared a common goal, and that there was work skills that we were trying to learn, and all of this industry stuff, it meant that we had a reason to go other than hanging out with our friends, and mixing those two together was a recipe for great success. So, making us feel motivated to get things done, but also having a good time. You know, I would not have gone to a science fiction club. I would not have been interested. But a place that I went to read stories, learn how to be an editor, learn good storytelling techniques. And also being able to chat about those things with friends is great.

Peter: My whole career has basically been because of The Leading Edge. Back in junior high and high school, I wrote a lot, and I’m like, “I’m going to be writer when I grow up.” But once I got to The Leading Edge, I really, really fell in love with editing. I went to one semester first at BYU before I went on my mission, and I don’t remember what I was doing then as far as The Leading Edge, but yeah, that’s not relevant. *laughter from all] After I got back from my mission, I majored in linguistics, and at the beginning of my last semester, or when I had one semester left, I realized, I really don’t want to work in linguistics. But everything that I did at The Leading Edge was stuff that I’d been doing for three years and I still really liked it. And so at that point, my goal was to do publishing. But I took the class, I took Linda’s class. Her editing and publication class. And I had all that experience at The Leading Edge, so even though I was a semester away from graduating in something that I didn’t want to do anything with, I didn’t have to panic because I already was doing the English minor with an editing emphasis. I mean, now they have an actual editing minor, but they didn’t at the time.

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Dan: I think it’s important to point out that all of these benefits we’re talking about from working on a publication we couldn’t have gotten at any of the other publications they had at BYU at the time. I worked on a couple of the others, Insight and Inscape, and they were very different. As Brandon said, part of what made TLE valuable was the structure that it provided. It was not just a club of interested people showing up. But part of what made that work is the lack of structure, you know? There was just enough hole, just enough of a vacuum, that we had to fill it ourselves with the social stuff, but also with our own sense of responsibility. There was nobody watching over us, breathing down our necks to make sure that we got an issue out. If we wanted to do it, we had to do it ourselves. If we wanted to do it on time, we’re the ones that decided what “on time” was. I don’t know if that’s still how it is—

Me: More or less, yeah.

Dan: —but I think that’s really important because more than anything, that, once I got out into real jobs and I worked as a corporate writer in various creative departments for about eight to nine years, those are the skills I look back on. You can learn editing and so on in a class, but learning how to set your own pace and get work done because you’re the only one who can do it, I learned that from The Leading Edge. And so, this sounds so counter-intuitive, but I think that lack of structure is part of what made it such a good experience.

Brandon: Yeah, it wasn’t a, “You’re taking this class for a semester, have this product done by the end of the semester,” it was, “We are getting together and making a magazine, and we have subscribers, and we need to be responsible to them.” It’s not for a grade, it’s for our own integrity.

Dan: Yeah. And whatever the big research magazine is that the Honors Department does, it’s either Insight or Inscape, one of the two, I did that for a semester, and it really just felt like a class, you know? Someone else was making all the decisions, and we got one paper that’d already been chosen, and all we had to do was edit it and make it good. And I learned a lot from that, but at Leading Edge we learned so much more, like “When do we want this issue to be out? If we want it to be out in March, what does that mean? When do we have to have everything else? How are we going to fill it? What are we going to fill it with? Oh no, there’s an empty page here. What are we going to put on it?” All those kind of elements that you don’t get, you don’t realize how important that is until it’s the day before your deadline and you have an empty page and you don’t know what to put on it.

Brandon: Right. Not having a professor whose job it was to say, “Oh no, I will have to do this if the kids don’t do it,” and then doing it for them, or even in good nature, feeling that the magazine was their responsibility. Not having that meant it was our responsibility, and, you know, I would hold up the magazines we made against the other magazines at BYU any day in terms of quality and production.

Dan: Absolutely.

Brandon: And beyond that, I would make a hefty bet if you were to go to either of the other ones, Insight or Inscape, during the same era, say, 1980 to 2000, and say, “How many professional editors came out of this? And how many professional writers that make their full-

49 time living writing would you find?” and then compare it against us, and we will blow them out of the water.

Dan: Mm-hmm. Well, and when we talk about the lack of structure and the lack of that faculty supervisor making sure it all happens, I don’t want to make that sound like we’re down on our supervisor. Linda, at the time, was great. And she was always there. Anytime we had a question, she would answer it, she would help, if we couldn’t do something, she would show us how to do it, but she was never the driving force. The driving force had to come from us.

Me: You mentioned the slush room a little bit and how sometimes it was really talkative and sometimes, apparently there was a rule you guys mentioned that you couldn’t talk there? It seems like the slush room kind of has a pendulum swing going on over the generations with that.

Brandon: How is it right now for you guys?

Me: Oh, it’s a talkative place. Right now it’s the fun slush room. And I hope it stays that way for a while, because that’s what I like.

Brandon: We actually solved that problem by making a “quiet room” and a “talking room.” And those who wanted to go chat, went and chatted. We had the balcony, so during the summers we would just go out on the balcony, and if you wanted to go just read, you did that. It worked wonderfully. Solved that problem. And Alan and Eric were not allowed on the balcony. [laughter from all]

Dan: Well, and the weird side effect of that is, because we were in a little house, basically, you opened the door, and you walked down a couple weird landings, and then there was this table that’s too big for the room, and people had to crawl over it to get to the other side, and so there’d be seven or eight people kind of crammed around and draped over couches reading slush pile stories, most of which were awful, and so they were bored, and it became a very talkative environment, and I remember, so it was very threatening, I think, in a lot of ways, for newbies to show up, and I remember one in particular: This guy came in, and he opened the door and he just kind of saw everybody, and it’s like on Cheers, everybody’s like, “Norm! Hey new guy! How are you?” And then somebody said, “I say” (‘Cause they’d been singing Violent Femmes all night), so they said, “I say that we welcome the new guy by singing our favorite Violent Femmes songs.” And they start singing “Blister in the Sun,” and the guy turned around and walked out. [all laugh] And that was like the shortest staff member tenure we ever had.

Karen: But another side ffect of having talking around the slush pile was you’d finish a story and be like, “Oh, man, this was terrible!” and someone would ask, “Why?” And that kind of helped. You know, you had to write a response on every sheet that you finished, but that sort of talking helped you figure out, “What am I gonna write on this sheet? What is it that bugs me so much about this story?” or “Why don’t I care at all?”

Dan: And that also helped you weed out what was purely an emotional response. If you finished a story and said, “I just hated this story!” “Why?” “Because I’m having a bad day.”

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And then you would just put it back and you wouldn’t ding the guy’s story just because you were pissed off that day.

Karen: And so I’d, in my time, I’ve done a lot of reading other people’s stuff and commenting on it. I’m in the writing group even though I’m not actively writing.

Others: Except you just sold a story!

Karen: I did just sell a story.

Me: Where to?

Karen: Machine of Death. So it’ll be in their volume 2. Who knows when it’s coming out. Being able to read something and tell somebody why it’s not working or what you’re really liking or even what it is you’re feeling when you’re reading is a learned skill as much as any of the others, and I’ve found it valuable in my social interactions with writers.

Dan: Well, and as a writer as well, I became A) much better at pitching stories to editors once I had read two years of slush because I knew from experience why I hated something and what bugged me about a submission, and what would bug me before I even read it. And so I learned how to not do that kind of stuff, or I learned how to do it well so that it wouldn’t bug people. And you just learned a ton about writing from looking at other people’s writing and then being forced to say why it was good or bad.

Peter: One of my favorite things that I did over there was when we published the story “Lever Handles.” It starts off as a terrible, terrible story. A huge info dump, very boring, for nine pages, and then the story starts. And so the other editors, it seemed to me, were very lukewarm on it, but I really liked the last part of the story, and so we just decided to go ahead and cut the first nine pages. Leave like the first paragraph and a half, cut out nine pages, and then have the rest. And since we were doing something that drastic to it—at the time we did all of our acceptances just by mail, we would print out an acceptance letter and a contract and just mail it to them.

Dan: This was in the olden days.

Peter: And they would send it back, but since we were gonna do something so drastic, we decided that I should call him on the phone, and say, you know, “We want to publish your story, but—”

Dan: “—only half of it.”

Peter: “—we want to take an axe to it.” And he was fine with that. I mean, once we explained the reasoning and stuff. And I think the story that we published turned out to be a good one. And learning to recognize that in writing, because that sort of thing is something that is a mistake that writers will often make. They have the back story for the character; they need to know for themselves, but they need to know when the story to tell actually begins. And it’s often a good idea to write out that back story, but then . . .

Karen: It’s often a good idea to then throw it away.

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Peter: Throw it away?! Well, save it, save it in a different folder, but, you know, don’t put it on a . . .

Me: I’m working on a story that’s exactly like that right now. Same thing. Not that many pages, but almost exactly the same thing. Peter, when we were corresponding by email earlier, we mentioned there was kind of a crisis about a story that had ended up being plagiarized. [laughter from all] Could you tell us that?

Dan: I was actually just going to bring that up, because I thought that was one of the best learning experiences.

Brandon: Do we have to bring that one up?

Me: I think it needs to be recorded.

Peter: It was actually a very interesting learning experience.

Dan: First of all, it demonstrates the fact that we were playing without a net, you know? That the possibility of failure was completely real. We were not shielded from the real world in the way we had always been in high school and college classes. We were out actually dealing with real people who would try to rip us off, and rip other people off. And then when problems happened, we had to solve them. It didn’t just, you know, the semester’s over and like, “Oh, well, glad I didn’t have to deal with that.” No! We still had to deal with that. So we learned a lot of how to be careful, how to fix problems. Anyway, Peter was more involved. He can tell you more about the anecdote itself.

Peter: So we got the story. It was a long one. It was a novella. It was at least 17,000 words. Maybe it was 15. It was called “The Singular Habits of Wasps,” and it was by this guy whose cover letter said that he was in prison.

Dan: We actually got a lot of submissions from people in prison. I don’t know if you still do.

Me: Not as much.

Brandon: I didn’t think we got a lot.

Dan: Really? Maybe I’m just remembering the poetry guy. Because I loved him.

Brandon: It would happen every couple of months or so, we’d get one from someone who was in prison. They’re in prison, what else are they going to do? They’re going to sit and do something like write.

Peter: And so we read it, and it was a good story, it was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche where Jack the Ripper was actually Sherlock Holmes chasing down an alien that was implanting eggs into bodies of these women. And that’s why it was called “The Singular Habits of Wasps,” because

52 wasps will do the same kind of things with caterpillars and what not. So it was kind of a wasp- like alien that was disguised as a human, and Sherlock Holmes was chasing this guy down.

Brandon: Peter says it was a pretty good story. It was a fantastic story. It was the best story I have ever read at Leading Edge.

Dan: Which maybe should’ve been a clue. *all laugh+

Peter: So we wanted to publish it, but the guy wrote back and said, “You know, actually, I can’t, because I’m a convicted felon, I’m not allowed to earn money while I’m in prison, and so I’ll just give you the story for free.” And we felt really bad about that, but, like, it’s an awesome story, so we’re gonna publish it. And we did. And after the issue came out, somebody read it and recognized it.

Dan: It was Marny Parkin.

Peter: OK, it was Marny.

Dan: Marny Parkin. Marny or Scott. One of the two. Scott’s the one who called me on the phone.

Peter: Pretty sure it was Marny.

Me: So what did—

Brandon: It was either Scott or Marny. Honestly, I can’t remember who it was that called me, and just said, “Hey, got bad news for you: one of the stories in Leading Edge that just came out has been plagraized.” They were former editors. “This is a fairly well-known story. It’s hard to know all stories, but it was a Nebula nominee.”

Peter: By Jeff Landis. It was nominated. It may have even won.

Dan: I don’t think it won.

Brandon: No, as I remember. Anyway, so Marny said, “I’m going to contact him. Just so you know.” Which is a very them sort of thing. Honestly, after the call I had the thought, “You’re not going to give us the chance as the official to contact him? You don’t trust us?” It’s like she kind of said it as a you know, “So you can’t sweep this under the rug, I’m going to call him.”

Me: Who is Marny at this point, in regards to Leading Edge?

Brandon: I had met her once or twice.

Dan: Past editor.

Peter: Yeah, Scott and Marny were with Leading Edge for, like, a decade. And then, I think Scott Parkin is listed as, who is it that’s listed as “Old Coot” a couple times in the old—

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Dan: I think that’s Scott.

Brandon: Anyway, they were monarchs of Leading Edge for a number of years. Great people. Real good force in fandom. But by the time we took over, the generation right before us, I think, had felt their fingers, but our generation didn’t really. Like, I only vaguely knew who they were. They had let go by then. Peter knew who they were.

Peter: Just vaguely. But anyway, I did talk to Jeff Landis on the phone, and explained. I mean, he knew about it already by then, but we worked out that we would count it, basically, as a reprint of, and [buy] reprint rights, on the story, but we would pay him our maximum. We had a maximum that we would pay per story. I think it was, like, a hundred dollars.

Brandon: Yeah, somethin’ like that.

Peter: And then we would put a sticker in all the copies of the book, covering up the other guy’s name and putting a copyright at the bottom of the first page of the story in all the issues, and also changing the table of contents.

Brandon: We had to print off a lot of stickers and we stuck ‘em in there. We had to do something for all the issues that had gone out, too. I can’t remember what it was. A letter, I believe.

Dan: Well, I think TLE is on demand now, isn’t it? Print-on-demand, or you print a really small run?

Me: Kind of. What’s happening with it now is that last year, the department and the college decided to just pull all of our funding, and decided not even to bother to tell us about it. For a while, there was some real miscommunication going on; we thought we were going to get a thousand dollars a year, and I restructured the magazine to that it can run on a thousand dollars a year, and that’s only for paying contributors. Five hundred bucks an issue. And as far as print costs, the $6.95 issue price right now covers about five bucks for printing and about two bucks for shipping, so every time someone buys an issue online, and the subscription rates have been adjusted as well, it actually pays for all of that. We just need money for author costs right now. That’s where the magazine is currently.

Brandon: OK. Did the department ever give you money for the magazine to pay author costs?

Me: They gave us enough to cover [Issue] 61, which is where you guys were published, and that’s why you’re going to be getting for that one. For the next issues, though, we’re kind of on our own, and so what we’re trying to do is sell lots of back issues if we can, we got from legal that we can sell PDFs of issues, so we’re doing that. Also, we’re selling now our developmental edits. It’s become a service that, based on word count, authors can send in a story and three of four editors will take a good, good look at it and give it three or four pages of copious notes about what to do to make it better. And that’s actually brought in about 300 bucks so far this semester, so we should hopefully be able to get the 500 we need for an issue by the end of the year, and do it that way. That’s where we stand now, but of course—

Dan: See? And you would never have learned those skills on any other magazine at BYU.

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Me: Never. Never ever ever. I’m going to write my own little part about that, because that’s something that my generation has to deal with, is the funding crisis.

Dan: They need to get over themselves, funding these other boring magazines that nobody reads.

Me: Exactly. *laughter in the background+ And we don’t know why. But we are going to survive; we are going to live no matter what, and our generation has decreed that, and so it’ll be done.

Dan: Yay.

Peter: The other thing that I really liked doing was the anniversary issue.

Others: Mm-hmm!

Peter: Pretty much my idea, right? Wasn’t it?

Brandon: I think so. You came in and said, “Hey guys, guess what?”

Peter: We’re gonna have the twentieth anniversary; we should do something really cool and awesome. So, I mean, it’s the biggest issue ever. Still. There hasn’t been one longer than that. I mean, we got James Christensen to do the cover.

Dan: Which he won a Chesley for.

Peter: I think Jeff lined that up. And we took the people that had been involved with the magazine in some way in the past and went to them and said, “Can we have a reprint story?” basically. So there was Michael Carr, gave us a new story, but he was the least-big of the published authors that we had. He only had one published in Fantasy and Science Fiction before that.

Brandon: You guys did something similar for the 30th Anniversary edition, didn’t you?

Me: Yeah, we came and talked to you guys! [chuckling all around] Came and published things by you! And so that actually has been the tradition. There was a twenty-fifth anniversary issue, and now this.

Peter: Well, there was something they did from the tenth, I think for the tenth anniversary issue they published some of the best stories in the previous ten years, but they had been in The Leading Edge already. Like, they had something by Dave, and something by Shayne, and I’m not sure what else, so in our age, we had something by Dave, and something by Shayne.

Brandon: And some stuff by new authors, too.

Me: Which we also had in our anniversary issue just now.

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Dan: The cover, the James Christensen cover, I think it might’ve been Jeff who set up the interview. And I remember Brandon and I and a friend of mine who was an artist (because we thought maybe he would need to speak secret artist language with him), we all went to his house, and up into his studio, and did an interview, recorded it, took notes, and then asked him if we could reprint one of his old things as the cover, and he’s like, “Sure! What do you want?” He brought out this big folder and I remember we were just like giddy little children flipping through this thing, “Oh, that one would be awesome! Can we have that one?” “Sure.” “Well, can we have that one?” “Sure.” It was awesome.

Brandon: That was great. I mean, he also showed us the paintings for the Nauvoo temple, the mural, that he was doing—

Dan: —which were up on his wall at the time—

Brandon: —and he was doing something else. Wasn’t he painting minis?

Dan: Yeah, he was painting a Warhammer army.

Brandon: Yeah. Painting a Warhammer army.

Dan: That’s kind of how it was with Wolverton’s story, too. He sent us five or six pieces of short fiction, and we just kind of read through them, and had to narrow it down to which one we liked the best. And I remember calling him, and saying, “Dave, these are great! I mean, I love your books, but your short fiction is so much better!” Which was a horrible way to say it. [laughter from Brandon] And Brandon in the background literally hit me in the head. And I then tried to salvage that by saying, “You’re just a gifted short story writer!” Blah blah blah. But it was fun.

Peter: Oh, and with that plagiarism thing, after it made Locus’s website, made their news, and after that people started going through and finding at least five other things that the guy had plagiarized.

Dan: Not with us.

Peter: Not with us, but, like, a magazine called “Celldor,” had published a few.

Dan: Had he plagiarized anything with Hadrosaur Tales? [laughter from Peter]

Peter: I don’t—you can tell that story. I don’t think so, but it was interesting that the guy didn’t change the names of the stories, but he would go through and change some words.

Dan: In our case, with “Singular Habits of Wasps,” he invented the word, “lobstrosity,” which was my favorite part of the whole story. So, I gotta give him props for that. He was very good at plagiarizing stuff!

Brandon: He was very dumb at it. Change the title at least.

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Peter: Yeah.

Dan: OK, so Hadrosaur Tales. This is kind of fun. We were always polite. You would always try to be polite when you’re rejecting a story. But it’s very easy for people to take it personally, and especially when you’re sending them two or three pages of, “These are all the many, many reasons I hated your story!” It’s very easy to take it personally, and so we started to get lots of emails from people saying, “Oh, yeah? Well, this story you guys hated just got accepted. So eat that.” And over time we realized that almost all of them were for some magazine called Hadrosaur Tales, and if any time we just hated something and rejected it, Hadrosaur Tales’d pick it up a month or two later, to the point that, and I can’t remember which issue it’s in, but if you go back, one of the editorials is—I can’t remember who, I want to say it was Brandon, but it might have been somebody else on staff—

Peter: Was it the “How Not to Get Published in The Leading Edge?”

Dan: No, it was—maybe it was.

Brandon: I wrote that one.

Dan: But it was a special thank you to Hadrosaur Tales for swimming in our sloppy seconds or something like that. [laughter from all]

Peter: I don’t know if you wanna . . .

Brandon: I only remember one editorial I wrote, which was “Kill the Elves.” I can’t remember what else I came up with.

Dan: “Kill the Elves.”

Brandon: “Kill the Elves.”

Peter: But yeah, Hadrosaur Tales, I think they may have paid in contributor copies.

Dan: Yeah.

Peter: So we considered them beneath us.

Dan: It’s rare that there’s a smaller-press magazine than we were, but Hadrosaur Tales was.

Karen: One of the things I’m most proud of of my time there, other than getting the slush pile down to manageable proportions, was getting the website up and running. I was really into web design while I was in school, and actually got a couple of jobs outside of school using those skills. And this was at the very start of the internet in ’97, ’98, and so I got us a website from the . . . I was working in computer support, so I knew who to ask, and put up our submission guidelines and email address and stuff like that that hadn’t really been even out there. And I think we put, like, the first couple paragraphs of each story up for each of the issues.

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Dan: I don’t know how consistently we did it, but yeah. And like she said, this is 1997. That was back when you would say, “I want to build a website for this magazine,” and the university would say, “Why? What possible use is a website?” *all laugh+ It’s hard to imagine that that used to be the case, and yet they . . . I don’t know, I don’t want to harp on this point, but Karen saw a need and went out and filled it. And that’s awesome. That’s the kind of skills that you learn.

Peter: I didn’t realize that you made the website.

Karen: I’m pretty sure I did.

Peter: ‘Cause I did the redesign. [all laugh]

Dan: So he cursed your name. Without knowing it was yours. And, now, because we’ve got both Peter and Karen here, we’ve gotta tell this. Do you still do the future date in every issue, or is that just a weird thing that we used to do?

Brandon: We inherited that from other generations. They killed of a few of those long-standing traditions.

Me: Some of those traditions, we don’t even know about them now.

Dan: So the future date is, every issue would include a future date, which just some random date that was pulled out of the air. Sometimes it would be a specific thing. I’m pretty sure one of the dates is like the day that Kahn started the Eugenics Wars in Star Trek continuity.

Brandon: So the whole thing I remember is, “This issue is brought to you by The Future Date,” like, “This episode is brought to you by the Letter A,” except it’s a science fiction magazine, so it’s brought to you by a date that hasn’t happened yet.

Dan: And we would provide no context.

Karen: It’s one sentence at the bottom of a page.

Dan: Yeah, it’s like the last page. It was a filler.

Karen: “This is brought to you by December 15th, 2014.” And that’s all.

Dan: And you have no idea why, and we never bothered explaining why, and some of them we just chose at random—there is no reason why. But one of ‘em was the marriage date that you guys had set up, or something?

Peter: Yeah, it was.

Karen: I don’t really remember.

Dan: I don’t remember what date it was exactly, but they were engaged.

Karen: I vaguely remember it doing the dates of the re-release of the Star Wars thing.

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Brandon: Yes, we did that.

Karen: And after I broke off our engagement, Peter was going to propose again at the Star Wars release. Sitting in line for that.

Peter: Well . . .

Karen: Or maybe it was The Phantom Menace opening or something.

Peter: Probably. It may have been that opening.

Me: I think we should back up and give me the whole history of this, a little bit more than what I got in the email. That way we can have both sides of the story going on.

Dan: Well, Peter and Karen were engaged, and then broke it off and then got re-engaged at least once and are now married! And have two beautiful girls.

Karen: We started dating having met at The Leading Edge.

Peter: We were talking around the table, and somehow the subject of Gordon Corman books was brought up, and both Karen and I both really like Gordon Corman books, so we were like, “Oh! That’s someone who has good taste.”

Dan: No one else at the table knew who Gordon Corman was.

Brandon: I still don’t know who Gordon Corman is.

Dan: I still don’t either. That’s why Karen married Peter.

Karen: He wrote his first novel when he was like 12 or 14, a lot like Christopher Paolini.

Peter: The Canadian Paolini, but not related to fantasy at all.

Karen: And he was doing the circuit of young author events in Ohio, in the time we were in elementary school and junior high, and so that’s probably how we

Peter: Well, I’m not sure how we found out about him at all, I mean my youngest sister eventually met him at the young authors’ state championships in Columbus or Dennison University. But I had just read his books, and I just really liked his books. They did, in like seventh grade or eighth grade, one of the English classes was doing Son of Interflux, as one of their books they read and discuss. But I had started reading before that.

Dan: The salient part of the story is that that’s how they got hooked up. So anyway, one of the future dates was going to be their wedding or something, and then after it was printed, they broke up, and we were all sad that the future date didn’t work anymore.

Brandon: The other thing we did was the Quantum Duck.

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Dan: Which I don’t think you still have.

Me: The Quantum Duck has been debated, whether the Quantum Duck should be resurrected. It kind of goes back and forth among the staff. Some people love him and some people hate him.

Karen: You can get a new illustration.

Brandon: Yes. He’s been illustrated a number of times.

Karen: If the illustration is the problem, get a new illustration.

Peter: I mean, the one that we used the most often was not even the first one we got illustrated. I mean, if you go back in the very early issues, there are lots of different versions of the Quantum Duck.

Dan: We just liked the kind of grizzled space bounty-hunter version of the Quantum Duck.

Peter: Though the cigar in his mouth did get removed from the original.

Dan: AWW!

Me: It’s BYU.

Dan: I know, but still. So who created the Quantum Duck? As I understand the story, the Quantum Duck came about because someone, when they were naming the science fiction club, Quark, someone asked what “quark” meant, some, you know, administrator who didn’t know science said, “What is ‘quark’?” and snarky science fiction dude said, “Well, that’s the sound a Quantum Duck makes.” So that’s where I believe the duck came from, but that might be fully legend. I have no idea. And I don’t know who any of those people were.

Peter: “Quark” is definitely the sound of the Quantum Duck, but I don’t know how it was invented.

Brandon: There was a whole fiasco while we were there of trying to get The Leading Edge sold on Amazon.

Me: We’re still trying to do that.

Brandon: Yeah, and Amazon saying, “We don’t sell periodicals.” So we like changed it to an anthology for one issue, rather than a periodical, and tried to get a ISBN.

Peter: Well, we were gonna do that for one of the issues. We were gonna have it be an anthology so it’d have an ISSN and an ISBN. And we had actually lined up an ISBN, but then we realized we would have to re-word all the contracts, because the contracts didn’t allow for that. And so we killed that idea.

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Brandon: But for a while it was just going to be Leading Edge instead of The Leading Edge, or something like that.

Peter: Well, I think that has actually stuck.

Dan: It’s Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy. The “the” is gone. And the reason that has changed is because Peter is a stubborn, obstinate grammarian. And it always bothered him, like horribly, that “The Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy” was not a real sentence.

Peter: But it used to be, “The Leading Edge Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy”; I just thought it was too long.

Dan: Maybe it was.

Brandon: I remember you slipping that in during the whole anthology thing, too. ‘Cause you’re right, Peter had been harping on that, and he comes in and says, “And, as an anthology, it really should be named this, because the “the” is more of a magazine thing.” *Dan laughs+ And we finally relented, and that’s the “the” died from Leading Edge.

Peter: But we still called it “TLE.” We always called it “TLE.”

Dan: Do you still say “TLE”?

Me: Nope. It’s just “Leading Edge” now. If it has to be abbreviated in text, it’s sometimes “LE.”

Peter: It’s the same, I mean, number of syllables, “Leading Edge,” “TLE.”

Brandon: So Peter killed the “the.” He is “the” slayer.

Peter: I am the “the” slayer.

Dan: Brandon killed elves, Peter killed “the.”

Karen: Speaking of nicknames, Doug and I, I don’t know if anybody else ever did, referred to the Humanities Publication Center, which was that Crandall house, as “the pub.” And we would joke that we were going down to the pub for an evening and thought that the pub needed more of a name, and maybe a sign, so we envisioned that it was “Hugh Manatee Pub.”

Peter: Was there a manatee on the sign?

Dan: Yes, a Manatee named “Hugh.” The Quantum Duck’s best friend.

Karen: Like, wooden sign with a Manatee routered out and then painted.

Brandon: Oh, boy. I wish someone had made that and hung it out there.

Dan: That would be awesome.

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Karen: We really thought about it for a while.

Dan: You should hang that by your back door. For you office.

Me: We can still do that.

Peter: Do you still put the barcode on the back?

Me: I don’t think so.

Peter: Oh. I did the ISSN barcode.

Dan: You know, Brandon, you could do a routered wooden pub sign, Humanities Pub, for the Explorers Club.

Brandon: That’s true.

Dan: That would be awesome.

Brandon: Yes. We should. We need to do that.

Dan: OK, I’m trying to think of other weird things that we did. One thing that started from—it’s not a tradition of TLE so much as just a thing that happened—is one of the issues we were working on, we had a friend named Ethan Scarsdale, and we were handing out all these titles, and he didn’t have a title, and he said, “Well, can I be the Entertainment Director?” And we said, “There is no Entertainment Director. That doesn’t mean anything.” And he’s like, “Well, can I be it anyway?” We said, “Sure.”

Me: We have one of those.

Dan: So then he hopped on the internet and emailed Blizzard and said, “Hi. I’m the Entertainment Director for a university science fiction magazine with a national subscription and readership. I was wondering if you could send me a review copy of Diablo II.” And they’re like, “Sure!” And then it showed up in the mail, and we’re all like, “What?! You can get free stuff?!”

Me: That’s a good idea!

Dan: And so we made it; we called it “The Official Time-Waster’s Guide,” or “The Semi-annual Time Waster’s Guide” because there was one game review per issue, and we did it for three or maybe four issues, and then we all graduated, and whoever was left there—or no, it wasn’t that they weren’t carrying it on, it’s just that it got too big. I mean, you’ve got ten geeky weirdos saying, “We can get free stuff by promising reviews for it.” It blew up really fast. And so we ended up forming a website that didn’t really die until a month or so ago when we realized our code was so old and porous that any 9-year-old in Brazil could hack it.

Brandon: So we ran this website, which started basically to get free stuff. And we would write reviews, and Dan was the king of getting free stuff for a while.

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Dan: Well I still do. I still do game reviews on my site; there’s still three or four companies that I’m just on their list. Wizards of the Coast sends me every board game they make.

Brandon: And see, here’s the thing: you are now famous. See, now it’s a good idea for them.

Dan: Now it’s valuable.

Brandon: Back then it was, you know.

Karen: But Peter spent a lot of time on the Time Waster’s Guide forums during the years when he didn’t live in Utah.

Brandon: That’s how we kept in touch.

Karen: That’s how he kept in touch with his friends from The Leading Edge. I didn’t keep in touch with people from The Leading Edge, Pretty much because when I broke off the engagement I had to stop going because it was so painful for Peter every time I’d show up, and so anyway, because he kept in touch, then when he was looking for a job, trying to move back to Utah, he put on the forum, “I’m trying to move back to Utah. Looking for a job. Can everybody start giving me contacts and networking and stuff?” And it was in meetings that he set up to do that that Brandon started thinking, “Hmm. Maybe I should hire Peter.”

Brandon: Mm-hmm.

Dan: I was thinking about this on the way over here today, there is a surprisingly huge chunk of my social circle is still the same people that I hung out with every day in college at Leading Edge. You know?

Peter: That’s the only social circle I have.

Dan: Our writing group is almost all Leading Edge. The people I play games with . . .

Brandon: Yeah. That’s basically my social structure. I mean, part of that is, for me at least, these are the people who knew me before I quote-unquote “got famous,” and it’s hard to hang out with other people now because they view me very differently than these guys, who view me as, you know, that joker. But beyond that, studies have been done, like, once you make those friends, a lot of people just stay with those friends, and this is where we made our friends. It wasn’t high school for me, it was college.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: It’s because of Leading Edge. I hadn’t been a guy who made a lot of friends in high school; it was when I came and met this crowd that eventually took off, so it’s been pretty awesome. And, I mean, if you think about it, the three of us, Peter, Dan, and I, all have jobs because of each other. Dan is the one who found the editor at Wolf Fantasy and introduced me to him, and I sold a book to him because of Dan. Years later, I pitched one of Dan’s books back to that editor, and the editor bought Dan’s book. And then, me being successful enough meant

63 that I could hire Peter, and so we have jobs because of each other and because of The Leading Edge. I would not have found that editor without Dan.

Peter: And also, they used me as their conversation-starter at the conventions.

Dan: Uh-huh.

Peter: They would figure, “OK, these editors have been talking to wannabe writers for a long time. Let’s have them talk to a wannabe editor instead, and there will be less pressure.”

Brandon: It worked wonderfully.

Dan: It was a great ice-breaker. Once I couldn’t do that with Peter anymore, I started using a friend of mine who was a bookstore manager. Just introducing him to everyone, and I made some great contacts that way.

Me: I’m totally gonna have to do that.

Dan: Yep.

Brandon: Yep, Leading Edge got us all gainfully employed.

Dan: Gainfully unemployed.

Brandon: Yeah, gainfully unemployed.

Me: Which is better.

Peter: Well, I’m employed, so . . .

Dan: That’s true. You have an office to go to. I can work in my pajamas if I want.

Brandon (to Peter): You can work in your pajamas if you want to.

Dan: Yeah, that’s true.

Me: That’s on record now, Brandon.

Brandon: Oh, I know.

Peter: I do take my shoes off.

Dan: That’s the hedonistic lifestyle that Peter lives.

Peter: Of course, I would do that a lot at Tokyo Pop, too. [all chuckle]

Brandon: The thing about your job is you were kind of half doing it before I hired you anyway, and so really you were gainfully unemployed first doing half of what you do now.

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Peter: Well, that’s how I’ve gotten both of my jobs, is volunteering doing stuff for a while, and then

Brandon: And then people saying, “Wow. This guy is really. . .”

Dan: “We should start payin’ this guy for that.”

Peter: I mean, before I worked at Tokyo Pop I did a lot of manga stuff totally for free for like two years, and then finally got a job doing it.

Dan: And it was Brandon, Peter, and I that started going to conventions together.

Brandon: Ben was there, but he doesn’t count.

Dan: Yeah, Ben.

Peter: I still have the old emails where I convinced Brandon we gotta go to World Fantasy.

Me: Maybe I should include those in this project. [all laugh]

Dan: Well, and again, you know, Leading Edge, yes, is what brought us together, but I think it’s also kind of what taught us how to talk to editors. The fact that we had to talk to editors. I mean, once we’d kind of been on the inside of this industry, however small-scale, we realized how important it was to get to know people in person. And we got much better at talking to adults and professionals because of all the stuff we had to do for the magazine.

Karen: And we had had a slush pile. We’d had a slush pile that went six to eight months. I got it down to like a year and a half, and, you know, if you’re sending something to somebody to sit in a pile that they might not get to even thinking about looking at it for a year and a half, if you can get it put on the table the first day, which we did for people we knew, or people who had somebody they knew tell us to do it, you know, some sort of “in,” then you could either get published sooner or get rejected sooner and can move on to something else.

Me: Is that the way the real world works in your experience?

Brandon: Oh yeah. That’s the way everything works.

Dan: Absolutely. David Hartwell, big editor at Tor, put it this way. He said, “If you are submitting a story without a name, it’s not going from someone who knows someone, it’s just random ‘Dear Publishing House,’ it will get read by a high school intern. If you put a name on it, it will get read by an editor. And it’ll probably get read pretty quickly.”

Brandon: Unless that editor’s Moshe. *all laugh+

Dan: Yes.

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Brandon: Then it takes like two years, even if it’s, you know, me sending him KayLynn’s book, and saying, “You’ll love this.” *Dan laughs+

Me: A couple of questions, maybe a little bit off of Leading Edge, but I was talking with Dave Doering a little bit about how many Mormon authors there are in science fiction and fantasy nowadays. What do you guys think about that?

Brandon: I partially blame this whole thing. *all laugh+ No, I mean the Class that Wouldn’t Die, the science fiction/fantasy culture at BYU, I don’t think it can be discounted as having a hand in this. I mean, yes, LDS people do like to read, and they do seem to like science fiction and fantasy, but having that culture, the number of people that came out of this new group, and having a big LDS science fiction writer in Orson Scott Card, that when we say, “Wow. He can do it,” him and Tracy Hickman, I think is influential as well.

Peter: And Diane Thornley moved into my ward when she was stationed at Patterson Air Force Base, and while I was there, her first book came out with a local small press and then Orson Scott Card wrote a review of it in Fantasy and Science Fiction, where he lavished praise on it, and then David Hartwell picked it up at Tor, so the rest of her trilogy came out then. But I went to her writing group and she told me a lot of those things that I learned about talking to editors and going to conventions and obviously helped my parents to know, “Hey. Writing is actually something you can actually make a living doing this.” You know?

Dan: “My son is not throwing his life away in trying to be an artist.” The Mormonism, and Mormons in general, and Utah very specifically, are very monocultural. You know, if one thing gets big, then it will get really big. And so both sides of that coin are working in favor of this right now. It’s first of all, if something happens, we all dive into it, and we love to do it. And so it’s really snowballed. There’s so many writing conferences and science fiction/fantasy conventions around here, and I think that’s because it just feeds itself. There’s also the fact that growing up in a very conservative religious environment, there’s not a lot of opportunity to hang out with all the geeks. Which is why we all found Leading Edge and valued it so much. But we still had those monocultural tendencies, and so we kind of applied it to our geekiness.

Brandon: I do think science fiction and fantasy also at a low point of things were a safe counterculture for a lot of us.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: At least that’s how I viewed it. Looking at myself, I wasn’t in Utah but I wanted to do something different from my parents; I wanted to be my own person, but I didn’t want to get it through all the nasty things that kids do, and instead I got into role-playing and fantasy novels, which my parents didn’t get at all, but it was a safe counterculture. And you mix that with the whole grand tradition of Christianity in fantasy with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and you mix it with, you know, it didn’t take off, I think, in a lot of religious cultures because I don’t think LDS thought is as threatened by the idea of other worlds and things as some religious cultures are.

Karen: We also are better at noticing the difference between literal and symbolic, and, you know, OK, this is way out there; this is totally not real, but it can have symbolic value. And, OK, you can read this, and you don’t have to believe it to believe it.

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Brandon: Yeah. You can read Harry Potter and not feel that when they’re talking about burning the witches in the Old Testament or whatever, stoning witches, that you are supporting witchcraft.

Peter: Well, there are even some fundamentalists who are against the Narnia books, you know?

Brandon: Yep. C. S. Lewis is not well-regarded in a lot of American Christian culture. I didn’t realize this, but you go to the Baptists or things like this, they do not like him. They do not think highly of him.

Peter: But he gets quoted by general authorities all the time.

Dan: I think one of the biggest things is, you know, what are Mormons good at more than anything else? Mormons are good at talking about Mormons. And so, there’s probably just as many Presbyterian authors as there are Mormon authors; there’s probably just as many Catholic authors, probably more, but Mormons are really visible and newsworthy in a lot of cases, and we just like, we enjoy that spotlight. It’s the whole kind of inferiority complex that we have sometimes, you know, like, “There’s actually a published Mormon author? I didn’t think Mormons could do that!” We have this weird sense about ourselves. And so when it gets big we love to share it with everybody. We love to let everyone know, “Guess how many Mormon authors there are? And by the way, I’m Mormon. Do you want to talk to my two friends?”

Me: That’s awesome.

Dan: And so I honestly don’t think that Mormons are overrepresented. I just think that we are over-promoted.

Brandon: I’ve wondered that one myself. I don’t know how true it is. It does seem, but . . .

Dan: Utah is a surprisingly high concentration of authors.

Brandon: Well, and sales. If you look at the sales demographics, I mean, if what you were saying is true, I think it would be other regions, and if you look at it—I get the bookstand numbers every week, and Utah is disproportionately large sales for its population in science fiction and fantasy across the board.

Karen: And even if there are just as many Catholics or Presbyterians, it cannot be denied that there is a growing science fiction community among Mormons.

Dan: Absolutely. And people are finally starting to notice. We’re starting to get a lot more authors coming through for signings. Partly, I think, because people like Brandon are so visible that the publishers are noticing, and so people that would never bother stopping off in Salt Lake City when they’re on a national book tour, and they do now because people are realizing that there’s this big, growing community here.

Me: One last question before we all go: what do you guys see as or hope for the future of Leading Edge to be?

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Brandon: Don’t let it die.

Dan: Don’t kill it.

Brandon: Yeah.

Karen: Keep having a safe place for people to meet, have an excuse to keep going back to, and learning, and that is a safe place for relationships to form, whether it’s romantic relationships or networking/business/friendship relationships, keep having that safe place.

Peter: Yeah. Don’t let it die.

Dan: Well, and keep it student-run. I think the two worst things that could happen to TLE are A) it gets killed, or B) it goes corporate, so to speak.

Peter: And the people that I know from Leading Edge are pretty much still active in the church, you know? And a lot of people outside—it’s very popular among writers in science fiction and fantasy to not think very much about religion. And being in a group like that, where, like The Leading Edge, where you’re among people that liked what you liked but also have the same beliefs that you have can really help a lot.

Karen: Yeah, that you can have an intellectual conversation with other thinking people without having to defend the fact that you’re looking at it from a religious perspective helps.

Me: Anything else you guys would like to say for the record here?

Brandon: I think that whole plagiarism thing is Alan’s fault. *all laugh+

Me: Alan who?

Brandon: That’s a joke. His name is just Alan.

Me: OK.

Dan: He’d like to say, “You haven’t been the hottest girl at TLE in a long time.” *Brandon laughs, then Dan]

Brandon: We have a friend who’s very political. We started up a quote board of best quotes at Leading Edge, and abandoned it after we realized he had three quarters of them.

Dan: They were all him. And he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

Brandon: No.

Dan: He was the kind of person who could legitimately say, “Oh, you haven’t been the cutest girl at TLE in a long time” without realizing that that was an insult.

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Brandon: Yeah, he was trying to make it as a compliment, because it’s implying that they were the cutest girl at Leading Edge at one point, so that’s a good thing, right?

Peter: About the Mormons liking science fiction thing, I don’t really know . . . I don’t really have evidence on my side, but my dad liked science fiction, but he grew up on a farm, not Mormon, and he was born in the forties so he had a lot of the old pulps.

Brandon: Here’s the thing. What might be telling is that I think Utah sells more books demographically across the board. I think LDS people read because of the focus on education. And so it may not be a focus on science fiction/fantasy so much as it is a focus on reading, whereupon you end up with a disproportionately large number of science fiction readers because you have a disproportionately large number of readers there.

Peter: Maybe. I mean, my experience is not Utah-based until I got to college, and like other kids in my ward really didn’t read books. Any kind of books, you know?

Brandon: Right. You’ve got to remember, though, that the population that would read in general, and so if you have one extra person reading science fiction/fantasy, in that hundred, you’ve doubled the numbers.

Dan: I think that Utah sells more books than average because nothing is open after 6 o’clock here. [all laugh]

Peter: OK, I came to BYU largely because I knew that it had The Leading Edge, and science fiction sort of stuff.

Me: So did I.

Peter: And I knew that because my sister who went before me got involved with it. And, I mean, all the kids in my family were good readers, and we were big Star Trek fans.

Dan: And on that note, can we gripe about this for a minute? This is the first year that LTUE is not going to be fully at BYU. I mean, it’s always been a BYU symposium, and the current administration is so unfavorable towards it that I believe there’s gonna be one or two events on campus and I believe that everything else is gonna be at UVU this year.

Brandon: They are going to UVU.

Dan: Yeah, that’s been confirmed now.

Peter: Have they picked a weekend? ‘Cause I looked on their website and they still haven’t updated it.

Dan: Yes, I have the actual dates for it. Dave Doering emailed me Tuesday. It’s February 9–12.

Brandon: Am I in town?

Peter: Yeah.

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Brandon: I am? Oh, good. When am I in Taiwan?

Peter: January 30th through February 6th.

Dan: Oh, great. So you’re just in time.

Brandon: I’m just in time.

Me: I’ll probably see you guys there.

Dan: Awesome. So please, dear BYU administrators reading this, science fiction is not evil. Get over it.

Me: Thank you for saying that . . .

Brandon: I still hold up the idea of this publication creating so many professionals, compared to, you know, I dare you. Go look and see what Inscape’s provided. How many professionals came out of that? I mean, if you really want to educate people, it’s our community, the science fiction community, and it’s three events: The class, The Leading Edge, and the symposium together have created people who are very high-profile LDS people who still have good values. It’s stunning to me that sports stars, an LDS sports star, gets lauded so much because of all the “good they’re doing” for the Church by BYU, by the administration, everyone you know, “Look what Jimmer will achieve. Let’s ignore Orson Scott Card,” who is doing the same thing for a different community, but one you just don’t get, and so is therefore not as valuable to the administration and to the school at all. And this is, you know, our group. I don’t watch sports. I don’t care who Jimmer is. I’ve never cared who Jimmer is. Steve Young seems like a nice guy, but I don’t care about Steve Young. Orson Scott Card and Tracy Hickman, these are role models. And you’re gonna kill that by what you’re doing.

Dan: I wonder, part of it, you’re talking about sports. Back when I was in high school, doing things like college days, like Peter was talking about, there was a BYU recruiter, who took a bunch of us out to dinner, and said, “Now you can ask me any questions you want about BYU and how it’s run and what happens,” and I think we asked a couple dumb little things, and he’s like, “Really? Ask the hard questions. Ask why the football guys get huge scholarships.” And we said, “OK, why do the football guys get huge scholarships?” He said, “It’s because they pay for themselves. They bring so much notoriety and money to the university that they make themselves too valuable to possibly be ignored.”

Me: And I think the administration doesn’t get that. I was on an airplane going from Salt Lake to El Paso, and I was just talking to some random girl, not a member of the Church, and I was actually reading Mistborn, and I told her, “Oh, I’m planning on studying editing, and I want to do sci-fi and I’m at BYU,” and she said, “Oh, Brigham Young is the right place for that.” No connection to the church, no connection to BYU, but she knew that. [Dan laughs] Because of these kinds of things.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

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Brandon: Oh, you shouldn’t say that, because the administration will hate that. They don’t want people to think BYU is the place for science fiction and fantasy.

Dan: Well, I hesitate to say it’s the whole administration. I kind of suspect it’s one or two key people.

Brandon: Yeah, we shouldn’t talk about the administration as a group. I think most of them are just oblivious, and there are a couple of key people are like, “No, we don’t want it.” There’s some sort of literary eliteism going on where it’s like, “We don’t want to be known as the genre fiction school,” and are worried about this.

Dan: Well, and what I keep thinking, thinking about the football player principle and things like that, the Inscape magazine, or whatever the big research one is, Insight or Inscape, I wish they had more distinctive names. The University actually mails that out. It’s like a prestige thing. Even though it may not be producing editors or writers, it is bringing the University some respect among other universities. I think the way to maybe help change the University’s attitude a little bit about TLE and the symposium is to go out of our way to give the University that notoriety. You know, bring it that kind of respect as publicly as possible, so that they end up just having to embrace it, instead of stifling it. And that would probably piss a couple guys off, and I don’t like those guys anyway.

Brandon: Whatever happened to, you know, small and simple things, and the lowly of the Earth? I mean it seems like it’s all about the prestige and not about the fact that you’ve got this community of people, and let’s face it, a lot of the science fiction/fantasy people are not terribly eloquent. They are not politicians, they are not the beautiful people that the literary magazines want to feel that they are. I’m not talking about beautiful physically, you know what I mean?

Karen: Well, at the symposium, I was looking around the room one day, and thinking, “Why does science fiction attract . . .”

Dan: “All these weridos.”

Karen: “Fans that you can look at ‘em and say, ‘Hmm! Look at all these science fiction fans!’” And I think we decided that it was probably because it doesn’t exclude them.

Brandon: Yeah.

Dan: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: Sports fans will laugh those guys out of town, and we’ll say, “Nah. You can come. Everybody’s welcome.”

Dan: Oh, but we’re just as bad.

Brandon: We can be.

Dan: We are just as bad. We make fun of Jocks, we make fun of literary elitists.”

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Brandon: We make fun of literary elitists because of what they’ve done to us, mostly.

Dan: Yeah, I know.

Brandon: Most I know of our generation don’t make fun of jocks. High school, maybe, but most people I know, once you get to your twenties and things, jocks and nerds blend, because we kind of do the same things.

Dan: Yeah. You just geek about different subcultures.

Brandon: And it blends together. I do think there is a lot of resentment of, because of what’s happened here, I mean, because of things being killed and whatnot. But we certainly can be self- hating a lot, which bothers me.

Dan: I remember, you know, I’ve been going back and forth with Dave Doering almost the entire year about what was going to happen to the symposium, and at one point he said, “Richard Paul Evans. The Christmas Box guy. He’s written a science fiction now, and so we could get him.” And my first response was to laugh and say, “You realize how he’s going to get pilloried if he tries to show up at this convention because he’s not our people?” And I thought, what a stupid, jackass thought is that for me to have. You know, if he wants to be part of this culture, we should be embracing him instead of just making fun of him because he’s The Christmas Box guy. And as much as we complain about that attitude, we still kind of have it. We need to be better than that.

Brandon: Good point. The way we treat Christopher Paolini, for instance. Even Michael Chrition.

Dan: I remember at one of the early World Fantasies that we went to, you mentioned Michael Chriton as a science fiction author, and half the room would go, “Oh! Michael Chriton, that jerk!”

Brandon: Something they did to Harry Potter initially.

Dan: Yeah. Harry Potter initially, you could not bring him up. That’s what we do to Stephanie Meyer.

Me: Oh yeah.

Dan: Don’t mention her at a science fiction convention, ‘cause everyone will laugh at you. And we need to be more inclusive if we want to be included.

Brandon: I need to get back to work.

Me: Thanks, everybody, for coming. This has been awesome.

Brandon: We ought to go to Leading Edge one of these weeks, just to see what is happening.

Me: Show up anytime.

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Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time Introduction: Douglas Summers-Stay A Tale from Leading Edge Leading Edge Success Stories M 27 October 2011 Former Staff Member Gmail Inbox Stranger

Personal Data: Douglas Summers-Stay was an editor at Leading Edge at the same time as Brandon Sanderson and the Ahlstroms.

Social Data: Unavailable

Cultural Data: Brandon Sanderson is now a bestselling author, and is currently finishing The Wheel of Time series begun by Robert Jordan (Mr. Jordan is deceased, and his wife asked Brandon to use his notes and finish the series).

Item: I posted a call for Leading Edge stories on our facebook page, and a few days later, Douglas emailed the following blurb to the Editor’s Gmail inbox:

When I was an editor at TLE in about 1999, I mentioned that I had bought the first six books of The Wheel of Time series in hardback from the Science Fiction Book Club, but wanted to sell them. One of the other editors was interested, so I sold him the whole set for $20 or $30. That was Brandon Sanderson. He sure got good use out of them!

Douglas Summers-Stay

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Engagement Stories from Leading Edge

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How the Ahlstroms Got Engaged Karen Stay Ahlstrom Leading Edge Engagement Stories 34, F 2 November 2011 Former Staff Member Gmail Inbox Stranger

Personal Data: Karen is not only Leading Edge alumna, but is married to Peter Ahlstrom, another Leading Edge alum who works as Brandon Sanderson’s personal assistant.

Social Data: Leading Edge operates a Gmail account; this story was sent to [email protected].

Cultural Data: This explains the larger context necessary to understand the items given in the social data. For example, the item that you are turning in is a joke you heard at a Relief Society Enrichment meeting. Social Data would include how many women in the group, the activity going on at the time, why someone told the joke, and other pertinent information. Cultural Data would explain what a homemaking group is, if the activity was traditional in nature, why only women are there, etc. Please include all of the information that you can think of that will make the item more understandable and more relevant. Having too much material is better than too little.

Item: Douglas Summers-Stay, another Leading Edge alum, forwarded an email I sent him to his Leading Edge contacts; Karen replied back to the Editor inbox with the following story, to which I have done some minor mechanical editing:

My husband, Peter Ahlstrom, and I met at The Leading Edge. There are many stories of our courtship, engagement, breaking off the engagement and the aftermath of all that drama, but the story I want to tell is what happened several years later (forgive me if I've already told this story).

I was living in California, thinking about "what-ifs" and wondered if I'd be happier if I had married Peter after all. My mom wouldn't indulge me in speculating, but she did ask, "Do you know where he is now?" That sent me off to do some Internet stalking, and snooping. I got several leads, but none of them could be confirmed as current. Then I emailed the staff at The Leading Edge to see if anybody there still kept in touch with him. I got a reply from somebody (I can't remember who) who told me that they didn't have an address, but that they had seen him at a convention just the month before, and they knew he was living in California and he was a "confirmed bachelor" (evidently he'd been ranting about the whole dating scene and decided he was DONE with it).

That email gave me the confidence to actually go through with meeting Peter again My first thought on reading the email was, "Well I can change that." I hadn't known before that email whether he was married or in a relationship, and I didn't want to bother him if that was the case. It also told me that the California address I had for him was the most likely to be current.

I used the Meetinghouse Locator on LDS.org to figure out which Singles Ward he'd be in, and went to church there the next morning. At the end of Sacrament Meeting, I stopped him and said Hi. He was understandably shocked and asked, "What are you doing here?" I explained that I was living in California, and was single, and since our relationship ended on bad terms, I

75 wanted a better ending if not a new beginning. "Oh I'm all for new beginnings!" was his immediate response. Six months later we were married in the Salt Lake Temple and the rest is history.

Without the Leading Edge, Peter and I wouldn't be married with two kids now. Initially, it provided us with a place to meet, and a way to foster our relationship. Later, the ongoing community spirit of the organization kept Peter in touch with people who could tell me where he was and give me the confidence to try again.

For two people severely lacking in social skills, that's pretty darn amazing. I definitely think the club is worth continuing for all those reasons.

Karen Stay Ahlstrom

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Today is Unexpected Proposal Day Nyssa Silvester Leading Edge Engagement Stories 20, F 12 September 2011 Current Editor Silvester Residence Friend

Personal Data: Nyssa is a very helpful person and a very good friend. She was happy to help me out with this project.

Social Data: The Silvesters live in a duplex in southwest Provo. Nyssa was at home doing her homework when she wrote this, no one else around except the cat and perhaps Neal.

Cultural Data: Leading Edge is BYU’s student-run journal of science fiction and fantasy. The magazine takes unsolicited submission from all over the world, which are called “slush,” and are read by “slush readers” in the “slush room.” Most of the slush is of low quality. Traditionally, the senior member of the slush room writes “Today is _____ Day” on the whiteboard of the slush room, filling in the blank with an appropriate yet cryptic title for an otherwise ordinary day, which then becomes a topic of conversation. At the time of this story, Neal Silvester had just become the person authorized to declare the day. Moroni and Joseph Smith are religious figures in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Institute is a term applied to the formal religious education setting for young adults in the church. (The one that meets two floors below Leading Edge on Tuesdays traditionally serves dinner afterwards.)

Item: I called Nyssa up and asked her to email me an account of their proposal story, which, as a good friend, she did. I have copied and pasted the text here without any alterations.

OK, so here's the opening premise:

Neal and I had been dating for about . . . seven-ish weeks when this happened. We had talked about it before, but hadn't really told anyone else about it. I didn't know when Neal was planning to propose.

We have the "Today is _____ Day" on the whiteboard. Neal came in early and made sure it said "Today is Multiple Day(s)*," and the asterisk directed you to the corner of the whiteboard, which read "Will be explained later."

About halfway through Leading Edge, he stands up and starts into his explanation of the days. First he changes the day announcement to "Today is Harvest Day," and he explained that the Day of the Harvest was when Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith on the fall equinox, a symbol of the beginning of harvest, when what was sown could now be reaped. That has personal significance to us, but the layman's message is that we were going to be reaping the rewards of trial and faith in finding each other.

Then he erased that message and wrote "Today is the Twist That No One Saw Coming Day," important because no one at Leading Edge even knew we were dating. Lots of speculation around the room about what that could mean, all far off the mark.

And then Neal erased that message and wrote "Today is Nyssa, Will You Marry Me? Day" and came over to my slush reader chair, got down on one knee and presented me with the ring.

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Everyone was surprised (collective "Awwww!" from all the girls in the slush room), and then you heard all the ruckus and came into the room and sort of disbelieved the words on the board at first.

And then we left to go eat some Institute dinner and talk about plans and . . . whatnot. ;)

So, that's a pretty complete retelling of the story.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honrs 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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The Culture of Leading Edge

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Changes through the Years Joseph Vasicek Leading Edge History and Culture 27, M 18 October 2011 Perpetual Slush Reader Ancillary Room, JKB Acquaintance

Personal Data: Joe has been coming to Leading Edge for longer than I have. He graduated in political science, emphasizing in Near-Eastern Studies, but now wants to be a full-time sci- fi/fantasy author. He is very knowledgeable about many topics and likes to engage in intellectual conversations in the slush room. He was also very active in Quark, BYU’s science fiction club. Joe is also the author of “The Class that Wouldn’t Die,” referenced in the bibliography of this work. He has conducted research and interviews with several of the same founding members of Leading Edge who have also contributed to this ethnography.

Social Data: We recorded this interview in a small room on the fourth floor of the JKB. The computer was on a table, and we sat in two of the available red chairs. No other persons were present.

Cultural Data: Quark is BYU’s sci-fi/fantasy student club. It has a shared history with Leading Edge, but the organizations have almost nothing to do with each other currently, though a few staffers are members of both. Quark habitually runs a writing group for aspiring sci-fi/fantasy authors. The Wheel of Time is an epic fantasy series by Robert Jordan that is very much a classic of modern fantasy. YouTube is an online video-sharing website to which college students often resort for short, funny videos as an entertaining distraction. A Netbook is a type of Apple laptop computer. Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) is BYU’s annual science fiction and fantasy symposium. BYU/SA is BYU’s Student Service organization, and an umbrella group for many BYU clubs. Caitlin Walls is our current Fiction Director. She and I had a brief, 3-week relationship in February 2011.

Item: I recorded this on my laptop and transcribed it here, sans “ums” and other filler words.

Me: Joe, tell me about Leading Edge. How did you get into it?

Joe: How did I get into Leading Edge? First time I came to Leading Edge was after I joined Quark. My freshman year I was here at BYU. I think I saw like a banner for Quark at the Wilk at some point, but I didn’t actually do anything about it then. But then, the next year, like—I went home for a semester, so the next fall, about the middle of the fall semester, so this would’ve been fall of 2006, I started going to the Quark writing group. A lot of fun. I ended up actually leading the writing group the next year. I think my first semester of writing group leader was in 2007. And, I remember over the summer, a friend of mine from Quark, who was Josh Leavitt, actually, he was one of the editorial staff here at Leading Edge, and he on the Quark message board forums, he posted that Leading Edge was having a thing where they were . . . what was it? . . . they were giving out a bunch of their magazines because they were moving from the, I believe it was the Knight building, like way down south of campus, out near the old buildings; it got bulldozed over, it’s like just below the where the engineers are, it’s like the opposite corner from the JKB. It was kind of this weird split-level building there, like the JKB, and they were meeting in one of those rooms, and they were moving out of that one and here to the JKB. I think. I’m not sure. But they had, like, too much stock. They had too much inventory there, like too many back issues, so I actually had been elected to be leader of the Quark Writing Group,

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Fall of 2007, and the elections had happened at the end of Winter Semester, so Winter 2007, or Spring of 2007, I knew that I was going to take on this post, but nothing really happens over Spring/Summer; so I didn’t have a writing group for me to lead or anything, but I figured it would be good to have a whole bunch of old back issues of Leading Edge to give away.

So I went there, with Josh, to pick up like a bunch of boxes of things. I also picked up a whole bunch of—I picked up one issue of all the issues they had that they were getting rid of; I picked up one issue of each one for the Quark vault, and then one for myself, so I actually have a pretty decent collection. It’s not complete. The oldest issue I have I think is 19 or it’s like issue number 7. Then I got issue 13 or issue 16, and then like 20 through 40-something. I’ve got pretty much all of those, and then after that it gets a little spotty, but then, of course, when I started attending regularly and started getting contributor copies, but I lost my contributor copy for the one with the red cover and the Chinese thing on it. I need to get one of those. But I found out what Leading Edge was, and I thought, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started going.

Back then, actually, Leading Edge was very quiet. I remember getting through like three stories because we’d all sit down—there’d be like six or seven of us—and Josh was on the editorial staff, and there was this girl in the editorial staff who recommended this one book that had some interesting stories; she was a little more talkative, but everyone else was just quiet. But I liked the stories, actually. I read a couple of good ones that never got published, but I just found it really interesting. And I really liked it because it gave me these things to see what bad stories were, and see what the difference was between them and try and analyze them to see what it was that actually makes them good and makes them bad. I was kind of developing myself as a writer, and it was right around that point that I actually figured out that I wanted to be a writer. For the first part, until about mid 2008, I figured I that I would get a career, get into something else, and then while I was doing that, I could write on the side. And then after 2008 I really decided that I wanted to [be a writer]. Leading Edge was one of those things that helped me to solidify my writing style, so I just enjoyed it. I kept coming back. I actually kept coming to Leading Edge through like about the middle of the Fall Semester of 2007, and then I just got really busy doing stuff for a while. Then I started coming back, I think it was Summer of 2009 that I started coming back, partially because there was a girl that I liked who was coming. The thing was, I knew that Leading Edge was awesome, so I was like, “OK, I’ll go.” And by then it was very, very talkative and so my personality kind of fit in really well there.

Me: What changed?

Joe: What changed? I have no idea. I was gone for, like, a year or two years, so there was a . . . I don’t know, normal “students come and go,” leadership changes, and everything else just changes, so I don’t know what changed. When I started coming back again, kind of the dominant, like Alpha-wolf figure was Chuck, and she was like, you know, always making a lot of noise and talking. She was really fun, though. It was a lot of fun with her around. So she added a lot of personality to the place, and it kind of also, by her being really talkative, kind of encouraged the rest of the people to also be really talkative. That was when Peter started coming again, right after the Iraq involvement, and that was when Neal started coming. The three of us just formed a trifecta and we just kind of kept things going after Chuck graduated into the editing room, and Chris was there. Chris was a lot of fun. And we just like initiating all the new, really shy, quiet editing-types, you know, editing minors, these shy, quiet girls that just don’t much like to step on anybody’s toes, and they’re kind of perfectionists, and everything has

81 to be exactly perfect, you know, “Oh my gosh, she spelled this wrong! It’s ‘gray’ with an ‘a,’ not with an ‘e’,” or whatever. So we liked, you know, ribbing them. It was fun.

Me: So what’s the slushroom like nowadays?

Joe: Oh, it’s a lot of fun. We always goof off. It fluctuates. I think there are some people who are regulars. Peter’s gone, of course; he was one of the regulars. Neal’s moved out of the slushpile room into the editing room. I still keep coming. I usually only come Tuesdays now, though. I usually have other stuff to do or something else going on Thursdays. Saturdays I just generally don’t ever come. I still like to come, though. But over the Spring and Summer, it gets really sparse, which is understandable, ‘cause everyone’s gone. There’s like really maybe two or three people in the slushpile room, or I remember this last spring/summer we all moved into the main room and just kind of hang out there, and then now, recently, there’s usually a big surge the beginning of every semester, and then it trickles out towards the end of it. But this year, we’ve gotten a whole bunch of people, like maybe 20 people in the slushroom, and some of them are people who’ve been there before, and keep coming back. So there are some people who come there who never say a single word, who just sit with their stories and read, and kind of laugh and look at all the rest of us, but there are other ones that—I don’t know. We have a lot of fun.

Me: How would you describe Leading Edge’s “culture”?

Joe: Leading Edge culture? Like what aspect?

Me: What kind of things or traditions or inside jokes, what kinds of things go on at Leading Edge that makes it Leading Edge, as opposed to anything else?

Joe: Well, there’s kind of a mix between people who are at Leading Edge because they like editing, and people who are at Leading Edge because they like science fiction. There’s been a couple people in the past—in fact, I don’t know if they’re still here or not or if they’ve graduated—but there’s some people on the editorial staff who the only reason they’re on the editorial staff is because they want to have that on their resume. And so, I’ve kind of disagreed with a couple of the decisions on some of the stories. Not the decisions, but just the way that they approached the stories. But we ended up buying them and publishing them. But there are some people who are here just because—they don’t care about science fiction and fantasy. And those people, I don’t know, they don’t tend to stick around, or if they do, they end up at least developing some kind of an enjoyment of science fiction and fantasy. And then there are just people who come because they love science fiction, and they end up like right now, they’re having a long, drawn-out conversation about Wheel of Time, which they’ve had at least two or three times already. And they’re just discussing various points. The people who come who like to geek out to that.

Me: What are the kinds of topics that aren’t “recycled,” but come up over and over again in the slushroom?

Joe: Come up over and over again? You know, that’s just the thing, is that there’s no—I mean, there’s a couple perennials, but, like, there’s always something new going on. So I mean, basically people just—it’s a place for people, while they’re reading the stories, you know,

82 sometimes a story can be really boring or really not very good. Sometimes they’re really good, but sometimes they can be like, you know when you’re in the middle of one, and of course you’re supposed to read the whole story through, so just to get a break, or you know, to get a breather, people will just start joking around with each other. And it’s funny because it’s always something different. I mean, there’s always something off-the-wall that somebody says, and then everyone says, “Oh. Well, that’s kind of interesting.” There’s always the “Battle of the Sexes.” There’s always conversations about “women are like this,” or “men are like this,” or, “the person in this story is totally a *_____+”; “this is not the way a real man would act/this is not the way a real woman would act” and then have these long, interesting conversations about things like that. Other stuff. A particular franchise or something like that.

Me: Now, I remember some times when we’d geeked out about particular YouTube videos, and it seems like you were the main instigator of the YouTube parties, so tell me about those.

Joe: Oh, yes! We used to have these YouTube parties. We’ve had ‘em less because I haven’t been bringing my computer as often. But I had a little Netbook, and because the slushpile room has such a great hookup for audio/visual, I figured out how to hook it up, so after everyone was gone, I used to just kind of linger around and just watch YouTube videos just on the big screen, and sometimes, you know, it kept getting earlier and earlier, and finally it became this perennial thing where would just have a YouTube party, and everybody’d be like, “Oh, look up this video and watch this,” and so, we’d linger a little bit after the hours. So that’s been fun. I haven’t been bringing my computer as much. My Netbook’s kind of getting fried, too—it’s starting to go, so I haven’t been bringing it as often. But those are fun. Those are fun memories.

I think people who I know who have gotten married from Leading Edge. I know way back in the day there was Peter Ahlstrom. I think he met his wife at Leading Edge. And I know . . . I don’t think Dan Wells did. I know from people I’ve talked to he had some fun stories about Leading Edge, too.

Me: Were you actually here while any of those semi-famous alumni were working here, too?

Joe: No, not really. The only person I knew was Josh Leavitt, and he’s my editor now. I’ve been hiring him as a freelance editor, as I’ve been e-publishing my books. So that’s cool. When I was here there wasn’t a whole lot of famous famous people, but I did interview a lot of other people who were now moved on to big things, and I interviewed them for an article I was writing about the people who actually founded this.

Oh, wait, marriages. There’s Neal and Nyssa. There’s . . . that’s the only one I think I know of that—I mean, Peter married someone outside. There’s been people, like, off-and-on dating each other from Leading Edge. I think you and Caitlin were dating at one point.

Me: That’s right.

Joe: You know, I know a lot more people who’ve gotten married from Quark. I know like 5 or 6 couples who’ve gotten married from Quark. Quark tends to meet for a lot of other things, though. Quark is only really loosely affiliated with Leading Edge now. In fact, not really as much. Leading Edge has kind of been co-opted, or got adopted by, the editing minor, and it seems that it’s become a little bit more autonomous. This from my position as a slushpile reader, and as

83 alumni that keeps hanging around. There’s not as much involvement with Quark as there used to be. ‘Cause I think that Josh was the big connection, because he used to be active in Quark, too. But Leading Edge has since gone and become its own independent thing. I think there was a time, I know, that Quark became just almost like a front to get funding for Life, the Universe, and Everything, which is why the English Department hates Quark and why the English Department was always really lame about bringing up advisors and stuff, which was a whole other issue, and why they ended up going to BYU/SA, which ended up working out (and recently, I’m not sure if it’s working out that well, but). But the advisors, basically, us and Quark, we built the club from the ground up, when I started [doing] Quark in 2007, we were just kind of an *indistinct+, and we thought, “Hey, there’s an infrastructure here, and a club that was once active and has kind of become dormant and died down and stuff, but let’s resurrect it and bring something back.” And our purpose as an organization is, I mean, this coming through Quarkies, is, like, we’ll throw together, like, we just did a Full Metal Alchemist marathon, and it was pretty good. I stayed until about the twenty-third episode, and then I decided to go home. But I they’re gonna hold the second one later on, probably in November, to finish off the series. It’s been pretty good. But they bring in like big numbers, like a lot of members, and socially they have like a hundred, a hundred and fifty people.

But it’s kind of broken off because I think back when, my understanding is that when Dan Wells was the editor, one of the head editors, and Brandon Sanderson was in the editorial staff, Quark had kinda died down, and so they created the “Time Waster’s Guide,” the forums, and kind of just a forum for themselves, but also a forum to keep the Leading Edge—Leading Edge kind of became the social aspect of the geeks at BYU kind of thing, and so they print “Time Waster’s Guide” as kind of a forum for them to interact, and then I’m not sure, but I think that kind of forum format was adopted by the next people who eventually ran Quark and created the Quark message boards. And then the “Time Waster’s Guide” kind of went on to become a fan site for Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and all those guys, and then they started attracting people who didn’t even have anything to do with BYU, and just kind of became its own thing. And I think they recently ended up retiring it, because they all have their own fan sites now. But the Quark message board forums have been going on for a long time. But that’s kind of broken off and become completely independent of Leading Edge.

Me: Do you have any Leading Edge memories, or good times that really stand out to you?

Joe: There was one story, one line from a story that was so good I tweeted about it. It was about a hippopotamus, and like, ‘as a hippopotamus is wont to do while riding a unicycle down a cobblestone street.’ Or some kind of line like that, and of course there’s like really awkward lines you just have to read out loud, like, when characters want to use parts of the female anatomy, and they resort to the thesaurus definitions, like the term “mammaries,” and it is so ridiculous that, you know, you just have to say, “Hey, check this out. This is hilarious.” There’s just been like hilarious lines that we talk out loud. Other than that, Peter, he was cool, happy to be around. He let me read his science fiction book that he just came out with, “One Confirmed Kill.” That was pretty good. I think that’s pretty good. I think he’s gonna go places with that. But he had some interesting stories, and, that’s it, I guess. I mean, nothing specific comes to mind.

Me: Well, thanks so much.

Joe: Yeah, no problem. Good luck with your project.

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Shirts, Sniffs, and Smirks: Tales Daniel Teichrieb from the Glorified Mailboy Leading Edge Culture 24, M 18 October 2011 Current Fiction Director Ancillary Room, JKB Friend

Personal Data: Daniel and I started as slush readers at about the same time. He is a psychology major and served his mission in Japan.

Social Data: The two of us were alone with my computer in an upper room of the JKB.

Cultural Data: Chris Baxter and Nick Rose are former staff members that worked at Leading Edge, as senior editor and fiction director, respectively. Blizzard is a company that makes role- playing computer games that fantasy nerds habitually like to play. The other Daniel mentioned in the shirt story is the collector. WoW is short for the massive multiplayer online RPG “World of Warcraft” (which is made by Blizzard, I believe).

Item: (Interview was recorded on my laptop and then transcribed, with placeholder words edited out.)

Daniel: After my mission I came back to Leading Edge because my sister told me I should come. She’d been a Leading Edge person as well, and she told me to come, so I showed up there and there was another guy who had the same name as me, which was not terribly uncommon. Daniel is a very common name in my age. I noticed, I think it was winter semester that he was always coming in these button-down shirts, and one of them was blue-colored that I had the exact same shirt of, and so I started seeing when he’d wear it and when he wouldn’t. So then, one Thursday when I came in (I knew he’d be there), I’m like, “I’m pretty sure he’s gonna wear his blue shirt today.” I like to wear my blue shirt because it makes me look awesome, so I came in wearing my blue shirt and so we had the exact same color shirt on. So then I made a point of pointing that out. So then I would then try to copy him with his colors, because he has two, three colors that he’d wear, and so for that semester and a little bit longer than that, we would start to wear the same-colored shirt, and after a while, I just stopped worrying about it. I would just get up in the morning and go, “I’m thinking about a red shirt today.” And I would go to Leading Edge, and he was wearing a red shirt that day! ‘Cause we just got on the same track. And so, it became this, “The world is right if the Daniels are wearing the same-colored shirt.” Unfortunately, after summer break, he got more shirts, and then it was harder to figure out what shirt he’s going to wear when, and so we’ve never really been on track since then, but every once in a while the world is back to right when we wear the same-colored shirt.

Me: How did the slushroom react to this shirt trend?

Daniel: Oh, my gosh! The slush room loved it. I mean, it was everyone, “Are you guys wearing the same shirt? Are you guys wearing the same shirt?” And every once in a while I’d just pick some shirt that I knew he didn’t have, just to throw them off. But, when we stopped wearing the same shirt, I mean, even now, like two years later, they still talk about the Daniels wear the same shirt. We haven’t done it for, like . . . I think we did it maybe once in the last couple months or so. It’s October right now. But it’s still a really big thing, and it’s just funny how I kind

85 of instigated that thing, and then just kind of let it build upon itself, and it became a big thing for a couple years now.

Me: I’m not sure if that’s psychology or psychics, but it’s pretty awesome either way. Let’s see, you had a story about Matt and the dictionary?

Daniel: OK, so Matt is a math major, and he would come to Leading Edge because he liked reading the stories. But he also had this weird fascination with—well, he always had his own dictionary that he carried around, and he really liked to smell his dictionary. Whenever he pulled it out, he would sniff it, and so this got a big running joke about sniffing dictionaries. And in the slush room there’s another dictionary that’s been there for a long time, but doesn’t have the book smell that he was looking for. So he’s always locate his book, and he’d put it in his face, and he’d sniff it, and he’s like *sniffing sound+—I don’t think it was that, but he’d sniff it really loudly, and we’d be like, “He’s sniffing his books again!” And so it was just kind of a running joke with that for a while in the slush room.

Me: So whatever happened to that?

Daniel: Matt went on his mission, and so he hasn’t been back, but every once in a while we still mention sniffing dictionaries. And I look forward to when he comes back next year, Fall of 2012 he should be back from his mission, and we can see if he still sniffs dictionaries or if he kicked the “substance abuse” on his mission.

Me: *laughter+ Oh, that’s awesome. What other fun slush room stories do you have? I mean, what’s the slush room like?

Daniel: The slush room is just a bunch of friends who hang out for a couple hours. I’m a crummy person, so I don’t have a lot of friends, in reality, people to hang out with, but going to the slush room was just . . . reading stories that sometimes were really, really not worth reading, and sometimes were really good, but the ones that weren’t worth reading usually had some funny comments that you could kinda put up to people, and then you took like basic sentences that just didn’t make any sense and built entire jokes off of them. I love how they evolved. I still remember one line was, “Bang, bang, and an ocean of blood.” And just how hilarious that was. It’s like going through this poetic sentence describing how somebody died, and then, “Bang, bang, ocean of blood,” you’re like, “Whoa!” There’s other ones that use misplaced modifiers: instead of “cream-colored eyes,” “her eyes were like cream.” And you’re just like, “Eeeeewwww! Cream eyes!! Eeeeewwww!” And other things like that. I mean, Leading Edge is more about the social aspect , and about getting to know other people, and getting to know who they are, and just understanding what other people think than it is really about the reading. I mean, we do that; that’s what we do for the service project, or whatever, but it’s a lot of socialism. Not socialism, it’s a lot of socializing. [laughter]English is not my strongest degree. English and I have autistic things at times, so I don’t always get the right word I’m looking for.

Me: But yet you’re working for a student journal. How does that happen?

Daniel: I am the glorified mailboy!

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Me: So, what do you do, now that you’re not in the slushroom as much anymore?

Daniel: I am the Fiction Director, which means that I handle all the incoming and outgoing mail, so when mail comes in, I bring it in, figure out who it goes to. Most of them are stories that I then put in the process through our spreadsheets so that we know about ‘em. And then we put ‘em in the folders so that when we go through the slush pile, all the other stuff is done, so we put ‘em down there to read. I also handle all the outgoing mail, which is basically anything that has to do with the stories that we’ve read and rejected, or sometimes we’ve passed. No, we don’t do it with pass-ups, actually. That means rejection letters, so I get to do all the, “I’m sorry, your story’s not good enough for us,” put politely. I just sign the letter to it. The person before me used to make songs about it the entire time. It’s a little bit of a harsh job, because you got to break people’s hopes, but it also gives you a lot of pleasure in doing so. *laughter+

Me: Nick certainly got a lot of pleasure in crushing hopes and dreams!

Daniel: Nick was fun. Other than that, I handle emails about people questioning whether or not we got their mail, or if we still have it, where it is, or if they have questions about, you know, which ones will be submitted and stuff like that. And that’s just a lot of checking the database to see if we have it, or ‘please check the page where we say what the criteria is for sending stories.’ Other than that, I also take care of the slush room for anything that they need, like comment sheets and stuff like that, but that’s about it. So I’m basically the glorified mailboy.

Me: So tell me about Nick. What was so entertaining about him?

Daniel: Nick has a very dry sense of humor. He’ll tell a joke with a straight face, and then at the end of the joke, he’ll smirk just slightly so that you know that he knows that he’s saying something funny, but he doesn’t respond any other way, and so you’re sitting there, just rolling on the floor laughing, and he’s smirking slightly. He’s a very quiet person, too, so he sits there and just makes stories about the person and their story, about how he was rejecting it, and you know, you could tell that he was having a lot of fun doing it, even though he didn’t sound like he was!

Me: Any other notable characters from your time at Leading Edge that deserve to be recorded for posterity?

Daniel: Chris’s hat.

Me: (laughing) Tell me about Chris’s hat.

Daniel: Chris had a totally awesome hat. Like, it just said, “I’m sophisticated,” and, like, “a writer.” I mean, intellectually sophisticated. And that was cool. And he always wore the hat. He also had his own chair, like he’d always have his chair. But, yeah, I remember the hat.

Me: Anything else worth mentioning?

Daniel: My sister got married at Leading Edge.

Me: Whoa! Tell that story. I don’t think that’s been told before.

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Daniel: So my sister’s seven years older than me, and this is back when Leading Edge used to meet like back in a little house over on the street next to the Marriot Center. And they’d meet there and they’d do all this stuff, and so she met her future husband there, and they would just do Leading Edge stuff, but her husband, he had his eye on another girl for quite a number of years; they dated for a little bit and then that girl just disappeared to California and didn’t respond to him for like two or three months, and he’s getting close to the time he’s gonna graduate, and he’s like, “Well, I need to get married; I’m about to graduate from college, so I should probably let this one go and start dating again.” My sister goes, “Well, if the position is open, I’d like to apply.” *laughter+ And so they dated for a couple months, and they were really good friends, and they knew each other pretty well, so I think after just seeing if they could handle it, he then proposed and got married, and now they have three kids, and he works at Blizzard, and they play WoW together and raise three kids. It’s a lot of fun.

Me: Wow. That is awesome. Think I’ll have to get their contact information so I can get the story from them, too! That sounds like fun. Anything else you’d like to say?

Daniel: That’s it.

Me: Thanks so much.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Tales from the Slushmeister: Neal Silvester’s Neal Silvester Stories of Leading Edge Leading Edge Culture 24, M 13 October 2011 Current “Slushmeister” Atrium Tables, JKB Friend

Personal Data: Neal is not a BYU student, but came to Leading Edge and there met his wife, Nyssa (who is a BYU student and now one of LE’s editors). Neal attends even more religiously than Nyssa does, and is now the prime concocter of outside activities for the staff, which frequently take place at the Silvester household. Since Neal is not a BYU student, we can’t give him an actual staff position, but we called him “Slushmeister” and let him take care of the slush readers for a while, until he made them self-sufficient. Nowadays Neal hangs around the editing room while we work and talks about the weak points of Brandon Sanderson’s prose.

Social Data: The item was recorded on the bench and table set up in the upstairs landing of the JKB on BYU campus. There may have been another person on the other side of the room doing homework, but it’s usually fairly quiet up there. We will oftentimes have substantive or developmental editing meetings on the same benches.

Cultural Data: Michelle Simmons came to Leading Edge and read slush for a semester. She’s now in both my ELang 468 and ELang 495R classes. In Mormon mission lingo, an “investigator” is anyone who is listening to the missionaries’ lessons about the church (the missionaries’ goal is to get them baptized, which is how an individual becomes a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). “Batman” in this context mostly refers to Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece, The Dark Knight, in which the villain The Joker plays a disturbing, pivotal role. Arrested Development is a cult TV comedy show that is really better seen than described (Hulu it). If you don’t know what Star Wars is, you’re reading the wrong ethnography. Inception is another Christopher Nolan film that is often discussed at Leading Edge. In the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an angel named Moroni visited church founder Joseph Smith once a year for several years to prepare Joseph to translate The Book of Mormon. The church today is funded through the “tithing” (or 10% of annual income) that members donate each year. “Dev edit” is short for “Developmental Edit,” a service Leading Edge is now offering in an effort to raise funds after the administration cut our funding.

Item: The item was recorded on my laptop, then transcribed later with placeholder words and sounds edited out.

Neal: Let’s talk about Leading Edge.

Me: So, tell me about how you got involved. . .

Neal: Interesting story that has a lot to do with Nyssa. (Pause) Michelle Simmons, do you know who she is?

Me: Actually, she’s in one of my classes.

Neal: OK. No longer “Simmons.” “Stoll.” She’s at the center of this. Well, she’s the beginning.

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In August, about a week before she went to BYU, I met Michelle. She became the first girl I ever kissed. And she was going to Leading Edge. So I found out about it from her. That’s where I first heard about it. And because she was in Utah and I was here [not in Utah], she ended up destroying me for about four months. It was awful. I had to watch as the only girl that ever liked me fell out of like with me, and into a relationship with another guy. Not that this directly has anything to do with Leading Edge, but when I came to Provo in May of 2009, a guy living next to me in my old apartment of Southridge heard that I was writing a book, a fantasy story, and mentioned that, “Oh! Leading Edge is this place that . . .” and because I’d already heard about it from Michelle, so I thought, “Oh, OK, I’ll check it out.” And so I come here, and he stopped coming. He went once or twice after that. It’s like the old missionary story, you know, where the investigator brings her friend along and she ends up not joining, but the friend does. (That’s exactly what happened to Nyssa back when she got baptized a few years ago.) So he never went, but I stayed.

Me: How’d you feel when you came to Leading Edge?

Neal: You know, I don’t remember if it was immediate or not, but at Leading Edge I discovered my “people.” My clan. This is where I belong. Because not only are they fantasy and sci-fi nerds, with video games and certain movies and so forth, but they’re also writing nerds.

Me: What kinds of movies and video games and stuff?

Neal: Oh, let’s see. Batman, Arrested Development, and Star Wars, I guess. That one wasn’t as much. But there were the three usuals that came to Leading Edge over the summer. That was me, Joe Vasicek, and Peter Johnston. We were the usuals; we were the trifecta. And pretty much, conversations with Peter and Joe, they were the reason I came back, and we were the usuals. Peter was alpha male of the slushroom.

Me: How’d he show that?

Neal: He was leader of the conversations, and he was the oldest. And he had a beard. He didn’t always have a beard, but he seemed to be the one that had been around there the longest. Joe knew all the science. He was kind of the history and science, and that aspect of it, and Peter was the pop culture, and I . . . we had a great time talking. And when other people were there, essentially we’d be talking the whole time, trying to impress everybody else. As I mentioned to Joe one time, and I brought it up, and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.” Just trying to impress—it doesn’t matter if they were male or female. I don’t remember who was there, but it was us mainly, and Benjamin I guess. And one of the girls that came over from Manning’s class was a girl whose name, I learned, was Nyssa. And let’s see, on her birthday, the first time I remember talking to her—although I know we talked before, casually and briefly in the slushroom—like I said, it was her birthday, and she brought cupcakes, for her birthday, she said, but I found out later it was for me.

Me: Aw. Is food a usual thing in the slushroom?

Neal: I don’t think so. ‘Cause we’re a bunch of poor college students. Male, for the most part. And that’s how that started. And I asked her—our first date was going to see Inception, which is key to Leading Edge culture that I’m aware of.

90

[Nyssa interrupts the interview and recording momentarily stops, then resumes.]

Neal: So the red velvet cupcakes, yeah. And the first thing I said was, “You’re Nyssa, right?” And then so Inception was our first date. It was the third time both of us had seen it.

Me: (laughing) That explains so much!

Neal: Yeah. And actually, a couple of weeks later we went a fourth time. Nyssa’s love for Inception has waned as time went on; she doesn’t think that all of it works together, but it does. But we won’t talk about that any more. No more disagreements. But that was one of the things that united us in the slush room as well, was Inception. Christopher Nolan in general. The Dark Knight is huge. Although, Joe hadn’t recently seen it and the rest of us who had seen it were also kind of obsessed with The Joker, but . . . And so that summer I really found where I belonged. That was just the perfect place for me. And it was a place where you could go to make fun of bad writing, and it was wonderful, and it was entertaining and hilarious, and it made me feel a lot better about my own writing. And there were relationships in that room that in the end birthed a story that I wrote and I submitted, “Duckman,” and it’s getting published here. You’ll find the names of those people and Benjamin in that story. One of the biggest memories I have of that summer is a short story called “Planet of the Babes.” It really felt like a short story written by a kid that was still going through puberty, but it was quite entertaining in its juvenile-ness. So, three astronauts or something find a new planet, and they land, and they’re about to go and disboard, and they stop to think about what if they find aliens here? And then they say, “OK, we need to discover this planet here.” But they met these beautiful women who just wanted to . . . be very affectionate, to euphemize it a little bit, and they were about to go and be “with” the beautiful women/aliens, but one of the astronauts held back, saying, “Wait, guys. What if they’re hideous monsters in disguise, and once they get us vulnerable, they’ll kill us and eat us.” They’re like, “Aw, no, that’s not gonna happen. We gotta get going.” “Yeah, you’re right.” And so they go, and they go on, you know, petting, and kissing, and caressing, and it’s handled in this immature fashion. And in the end, the beautiful women turn into alien space monsters, and they kill them and eat them, and that is the end of the story. That probably doesn’t sound real funny summarized like that, but I do really wish we had the copy of that story still. ‘Cause it was a benchmark in Leading Edge culture from last year.

Me: What are some other “benchmarks of Leading Edge culture”?

Neal: The day I proposed to Nyssa. We kept it a total secret from everybody. On my doing. She was kind of hurt at first, but I didn’t intend it to be hurtful, I just thought it would be really fun to keep it a secret from everybody. And it was successfully kept. And then on September 21st, of 2010 . . . shall I just rehearse this story?

Me: Sure. I can use it from your perspective for sure.

Neal: Excellent. I started the day; I got there early, and I wrote— Oh. Of course, a staple of Leading Edge was the white board in the slush room, we’d write what day it is: “Today is Blank *_____+ Day.”

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Me: How did that tradition get started?

Neal: I really don’t know. Peter was doing it. Peter’s been at Leading Edge for a long time; he was Poetry Director in 2005; he was in the military and did that stuff, and then he came back, and eventually he got married, which he was a secret kept from all of us, too, but anyway, he would always write the day. Well, when he was there. I got there first and wrote on the board, “Today is,” and I put the word, “Multiple Day,” and “s” in parentheses, on the board, “Today is Multiple Day(s).” And people asked about it at first, but I said, “Oh, it will all be explained later.”

Me: Are the days usually explained?

Neal: Yeah. Usually Peter would explain it or at least say something about it or else it was not a big deal.

Me: What kind of days are normal?

Neal: Oh, goodness. I don’t remember. I think I put “Today is Inception Eve” when I did that. Peter would do about his own sporting events, he’d do, like, about his water polo team. Various things in pop culture and mixed martial arts. Just various things that say a lot about him. He’s a lot more sporty than I am. And I was nervous the whole time. About this whole thing. I knew Nyssa was going to say “yes,” but . . . it was “Multiple Days.” And halfway through, I knew Nyssa was super nervous. She got all quiet. She was terrified for some reason. So I went up to the board and I erased “Multiple,” and I put “Today is Harvest Day.” It was fall equinox, which is symbolic of the harvest. There’s actually church history of Moroni visiting Joseph Smith on the equinox, as a symbol of, you know, ‘the harvest has begun.’ And that was something that’s very personal to me. Some of the scriptures that turned out to be very, very meaningful to me, and later to Nyssa. And then I explained that, and I erased it again, and I put, “Today is The Twist that No One Say Coming Day.” And then I erased it again, and put, “Today is Nyssa, Will You Marry Me? Day.” And at that moment, I think everyone was trying to figure out, “What? Is this real? What’s going on?” And they were all silent. So then I didn’t skip a beat, I just walked right over to Nyssa, I took the box out of my pocket, got on one knee, proposed, and all at once there’s a chorus of “Awww!” from like the dozen girls that were there. There were always a lot of girls, who are the usual editing minors that didn’t really say much and didn’t speak up much. There’s mostly me and Peter and Joe joking around and trying to impress them. Not in terms of, you know, romantic contests, but just to “Arg.” And so that was fun. And Joe was there and he was impressed and that was nice, since it’s always a rare thing when Joe is impressed by something. So that was appreciated.

Me: So what does Joe do when he’s impressed?

Neal: He was like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t . . . wow, that was good. So, you guys want to go off and go make out somewhere if that’s what you guys do.” And we did leave the room. I don’t think we went and made out, but the ring was on her finger, and that was official, and that was a famous day in Leading Edge history, and we have subsequently become Leading Edge “society,” as it is here, and that was very happy. I still have the picture I took of the board when it said, “Today is Nyssa, Will you Marry Me? Day” and we can look at it right now!

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[break in recording]

Me: You told me to remind you about Keith, since he is a staple of Leading Edge culture.

Neal: Keith has been going on since before I got there. I don’t know how long he’s been sending. Do you know?

Me: Since before I got here, too.

Neal: Really? That is impressive. Keith is a consistent poetry contributor. We never publish his work, but because of his consistency we love him. He’s great, and he provides great—you know when you read a poem, you know that it’s a Keith poem. He just—by the very nature. He asks lots of rhetorical questions. He never really rhymes. He has very silly ideas, but it’s charming in its “quality.” And, Keith, we always encourage him to keep contributing, and he does. And it’s great fun. And one of my favorite things is to take a Keith poem to the slush room and read it out loud to everybody, and that’s part of Leading Edge culture, too, reading out loud the ridiculous things being sent to us. It’s really fun.

Me: What are some ridiculous things you’ve read out loud?

Neal: Oh, I don’t remember. “Planet of the Babes” we read out loud. The whole thing. That was fun. There’s been a lot. I don’t remember specifics.

Me: So, you mentioned “going in to the slush room.” What’s the culture as far as the two different rooms at Leading Edge?

Neal: Oh, editing room is much more quiet, but it’s a lot more personal. You know everybody there, pretty much, and you all work together as a team. And you get a great feeling of “being superior” to the slush room readers? Not in terms of quality of humanity, people, you just get to be in charge. I mean, I’ve never really been in charge of anything before, so it’s nice to have that feeling. But the editing room is . . . it’s where the high work is done. The slush room is a great place to have fun and a good experience in the beginning, but I think that editing room is the real deal. And where you actually do learn how a publishing house works. Which is going to be very useful information to me as a writer in the future.

Me: What kinds of things did you learn at Leading Edge that will help you in the future as a writer?

Neal: What readers look for. Sometimes, we’ll all reject things, or say “yes” or “no” to a writer; sometimes it goes all the way up and one person in the editing room doesn’t like it, and it doesn’t get through. Just one thing. And so you have to be careful, and you have to write the right things, and expect rejection sometimes. Although I must say I’m at 100% with my submitted work. I don’t know about specifics, but it’s just really good to know how it works, how the system, how the people whose names you don’t know, how they work. ‘Cause editors have a kind of thankless job, they make it pretty, and they make it happenable, but they never get their names on the cover; they never get the glory. Which I think is ok. And I think that they’re ok with it. But at the same time, they’re the ones that get to crush the writer’s hopes. And

93 sometimes that’s necessary, as Peter is fond of saying. We don’t want them to write any more, ‘cause then it’ll never work, so we just crush it so they can move on to something else. Slush room is just a great place to just hang out and laugh and converse and read and feel better about your own writing. The editing room is the real deal.

Me: What are some traditions or anything you notice as far as people moving from one to the other?

Neal: Joe likes to stay in the slush room, where he continues to do what we were doing last summer: Impress people. Or try to. Joe’s a good guy. And he knows a lot. We haven’t always gotten along that well, but I respect Joe. He knows a lot. And he’s always preferred to stay in the slush room and read submissions, but I kind of followed my friends. People who I knew. Peter moved away recently. And when Peter moved is when I moved into the editing room, which is where my wife is now. It’s not all professional in the slush room, obviously. My better friends are in the editing room, and that’s the reason why I’m in there, but I enjoyed the slush room atmosphere a lot, and I’ve taken the unofficial name of “Slushmeister.” I’m the ambassador from the editing room to the slush room and vice versa, and I handle all the slush room questions. Actually, I guess Joe really does, but let’s see.

Me: We’ve recently been going through a financial crisis. What do you think of the staff’s reaction to that situation that’s going on; how have you perceived all of these changes that are happening, and how the staff has reacted to it?

Neal: Well, Nyssa was very right when she pointed out that this is the point in Leading Edge, ‘cause we’ve always had funding—have we always had funding, or is it just in the last little time we’ve had funding?

Me: *We’ve had funding+ in recent memory.

Neal: But, just like in a real publishing house, you’re not always gonna have success. You’re not always gonna have someone funding your organization. Mom and Dad won’t always be there to hold your hand, and sometimes bad things happen and you’re gonna have to find something to do about it, just like in the real world. And so we’ve had to figure it out for ourselves, actually. Manning’s obviously been helpful, but it’s been really fascinating to see just a bunch of students, in their spare time, managing and reviving a magazine like that and keeping it alive, even through strange, kind of offensive actions on the funders’ part. I’m not sure exactly who’s made this happen; I don’t know anyone who personally say they were involved. But it’s really been a proving time, and I think they’re passing. It’s been really heartening to see us—and I haven’t done much personally, but—to see the editing room, all the professional, (or semi- professionals) really pick up the slack and not just sit and whine, but actually do something about it. It’s been a good thing to watch and it’s really inspiring. And obviously it means a lot to me that we publish, or get a physical copy out, and not just resort to being a PDF-file distributor in that, you know, I’ve got a story that’s slated for publication and it just wouldn’t mean the same if it was just published as a PDF file rather than as a real, bound book. And so I’m doing what I can to help out with that, too. I think Manning had the idea for the dev edits, but seeing my peers in the editing room handle this and go at it professionally has been really a neat experience, and I’ve been inspired from it. I mean, Leading Edge has had some bad moments in the past, but this is another one of those big, bad moments that come up that I feel like it’s been

94 a privilege to be a part of surviving this lack of funding crisis, which is going to be part of Leading Edge history. It’s really a part of it, and I’ve offered to help out, and I love this place, and Leading Edge is the organization I most identify with besides the church, obviously. It’s even more than just my ward, it’s who I am and I love this place. I love the people, I love the atmosphere, I love the focus, I love what we’re doing. Publishing stories and making bad writers good and good writers better, it’s just great. And to have fun and laugh and be with people who are like you and even people you’re not going to find anywhere else. A group of creative writers, it’s kind of like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein and the other professors at Oxford back in the forties and fifties, just getting together and talking about story ideas and writing and all of that stuff and this is kind of like that for me.

Me: Thanks, that’s cool. Another tradition I’d like to ask you about is Tuesday nights is institute, and it seems like you have a particular habit that you do every Tuesday.

Neal: Yes!

Me: Tell me about that.

Neal: Well, Leading Edge takes place on the fourth floor of the JKB. Down on the ground floor, which is the second floor for some reason, an institute class gets out at around 8 or 8:15. Leading Edge goes from 7:30 to 9, and we get out at 8, 8:15 or 8:30 sometimes and some of us from Leading Edge—I don’t know how it got started, I don’t know who noticed it for the first time, but it’s been something we’ve been doing—so we just go down and eat some of the food that the institute provides. I hope we don’t get in trouble for *saying+ this. But you know what, no one’s trying to get us in trouble. We pay our tithing, ok? And that’s what’s funding their food. Anyway, yeah, we sneak down there, and they’re always happy to give us food. And if there’s no line left and there’s still food left, they don’t want it. They give it to us. “Take it! Take it! Take all of it! We have to get rid of it somehow.” And so sometimes we take it upstairs and share with people, and it’s every Tuesday night, and it’s free dinner. It’s great.

Me: You know, I think Nick might’ve been the first person to find that out.

Neal: Yeah.

Me: That was just kind of the opportunistic thing he’d do.

Neal: Aw. I miss Nick. “What was the pirate movie rated? . . . PG-13!!” *laughter+

Me: Nick’s one of those people like you who’s moved on to other things now, but Leading Edge always attracts really good personalities, and some of them have moved on. Besides the ones we’ve talked about, who are some other people you can think of that have kind of moved on since you’ve been here?

Neal: Well, first, obviously, Chris Baxter. A lot of the editing room from last semester went away. I didn’t know them that well. It was around that time that I started coming, so I didn’t know the higher-ups then, but Chris is gone. Kristy’s gone. Genevieve, she moved. Of course, the biggest loss for me, out of the slush room, is Peter. We’ll never get over the loss of Peter. Peter

95 was essential to that atmosphere. He was great. I try to carry on. I feel like I’ve taken the place of alpha male in the slush room. But Peter, it was actually quite funny when we learned he was moving back to New York, we asked, “Oh, why, what’s going on?” He said, “Oh, I’m getting married.” And apparently he had had this girl from kind of a long-distance thing for a couple years, and nobody ever knew! I always was feeling sorry for him, ‘cause he’s an older guy, and he’s a nerd, and it’s just like, “Aw, I hope he finds someone.” He’d already found one. It just took a while to get married, and now he’s married and gone forever. Although a month or two ago he did send a few of us his latest writing project about his experiences in Iraq in the marines. It is blistering and hilarious and a lot of it is just him saying how stupid the people he met there were, but it’s always fresh and it’s always hilarious. And he has a very unique perspective on the military. So he’s still writing, which is a good thing. Glad Peter’s still writing. Hope he finds something to be with that in the future. He deserves it. Haven’t heard back from him since. He’s been the biggest loss, in my opinion. And shortly, we’re gonna lose most of the people in the editing room. Right?

Me: In April.

Neal: By the end of Winter Semester. And that’ll be a weird thing for Nyssa and me.

Me: Yeah, she’ll be in charge.

Neal: She will be in charge. She is taking over head editor.

Me: Me and Emily are the only ones who’ve been here longer, and we’re gonna graduate, so . . .

Neal: So that’ll be really weird for me to be married to power. *laughter+ But you know, we’re practicing now, and I could be co-head-editor-something. I don’t edit. I could be the staff writer! The writing consultant; it’s the fiction consultant! Oh, and I should mention that the trifecta of Joe and Peter and I are published in Leading Edge at one point or another, which is good. But yeah, we’ll be dealing with the next generation of Leading Edge. And we’ll be kind of in charge of that, but we’re starting to find names, to see people who are coming regularly in the slush room these days, and see if they’re committed to it and if they’re worthy of entering the editing room as semi-professionals. It’ll be fun. I hope it works out to keep it going, but it’ll be scary, too. In fact, we’re *losing+ all our co-workers, who know what they’re doing, and a lot of our best friends here, who we’d rather hang out with than with anyone else. The three hours we spend at Leading Edge are maybe not technically the happiest, but most looked-forward-to of the week, I think, for Nyssa and I. Yeah, I’m happy being with my wife, but I have a lot more time with my wife than I do at Leading Edge, so Leading Edge becomes very valuable to us. And so it’ll be a weird experience a year from now, when I’ll work with a totally different staff in the editing room, but hopefully we’ll make some new friends in there.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Not the Typical Person Caitlin Walls Leading Edge Culture 22, F 13 December 2011 Current Fiction and Poetry Director Editing Room, JKB Friend

Personal Data: Caitlin and I dated for three weeks in February 2011. We had what might be the most painless break up known to humankind, and are still very good friends.

Social Data: Caitlin usually sits at the computer exactly opposite of mine. We’d be looking at each other if there weren’t two big screens in the way.

Cultural Data: Adobe InDesign is the software we use for layout and design of the magazine.

Item: As my last ethnography informant, I asked Caitlin to write up a little paragraph about her experience at Leading Edge. She emailed it to me that night.

I’m not the typical person who comes to Leading Edge. I am not a big fan of science fiction or fantasy. I’ll be honest, it’s not my favorite genre of all time. I started going around Fall ’10 for journal experience because I was just starting the editing minor and I had heard that joining an on-campus journal was great experience. I had originally done Inscape that prior winter semester, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. I didn’t get to do the kind of things that I wanted to do in a journal. I got put in groups and it just wasn’t a great fit for me. Plus in the winter semester, I couldn’t move up onto staff or anything like that. With Leading Edge, I could. That was a big drawing factor for me was that I could get experience with every single component that goes into producing a quality magazine. I got editing experience, developed my reading skills, InDesign skills and production skills. Within a few months, I had moved from the slush room to poetry director and fiction director. Most important for me was that I felt a part of a group. While I may not have much in common in ways of literature, I still consider them my best friends. It’s really telling of an experience that I can not necessarily like the genre or whatever, but I can have the time of my life creating it.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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The Lingo of Leading Edge

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Adjusting to Leading Edge Lingo Daniel Friend Leading Edge Lingo 24, M 22 September 2011 Current Senior Editor Honors Student Lounge, MSRB I AM the Collector

Social Data: This is one particular prompt where my own experiences will probably provide the best information. I am typing this in the Honors Student Lounge in the basement of the Maser Building as though it were a story. Since I know what I’m doing here, the social and cultural factors should be explained in the text itself as I’ll explain it as though it were to someone who’s never heard these words.

Cultural Data: Leading Edge is BYU’s sci-fi/fantasy student journal. It grew from a class of science fiction aficionados 30 years ago to a publication read on three continents.

Item: I wrote this originally for a class assignment before I knew I would be doing this ethnography, but it works in the holistic context, too.

When I first came to Leading Edge, the first uncommon or unusual word I encountered was “slush.” I was pretty sure the editor or staff member showing me around wasn’t referring to the regular stuff out on the sidewalk during wintertime, because I was supposed to read it (and no, it wasn’t some sort of horoscope or divination type thing). It turned out that the “slush” referred to the unsolicited submissions that most new volunteers end up reading. There was even a pile of it (“the slushpile”) in its own dedicated room (“the slushroom”). People like me who were reading it were officially “slush readers,” but more commonly “slushies” or “slush puppies.” This wasn’t a derisive term, but it was used to lightly poke fun at us. While in the slush room, I was exposed to all kinds of different words. Most of the terms coming from literary analysis a la English class were already familiar to me, and a “comment sheet” was obvious enough, as were the terms “pass,” “rewrite,” and “reject,” which are what happens to slush once it’s been read. And the science fiction and fantasy references to my favorite shows and books made me feel right at home in the slushroom. I was surprised to discover, however, that there were several different kinds of edits. Actually, I suppose “edit” itself as a noun is a term of Leading Edge (or at least our editorial staff) all on its own. It took me a while to comprehend the difference between a “subedit” and a “devedit,” though I had at least a fuzzy idea of what a “copyedit” might entail. When Tiffany Demmings first called me out for a subedit (at least, I think it was that—yeah, it was for “Redemption Songs,” it was that), I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was kind of disappointed when she didn’t seem to care to know about the commas I had found. I quickly learned that a subedit wasn’t the place for comma correcting—that’s what a copyedit’s for. “Sub” in “subedit” means “substantive.” It’s the edit where we take care of the substance of the story that’s wrong or needs fixing: plot holes, character inconsistencies, clunky dialog, unnecessary paragraphs, etc. Copy edits focus on a line-by-line review of the story and don’t necessarily need to be done in a group like subedits are wont to. Subedits usually consist of the editor in charge of the story taking three or four slush readers who have previously read and marked up a printed-out copy of the story off to another room or hallway and going over the parts of the story that people thought were confusing or clunky. Then the editor makes the notes on their copy of the story and emails the author the suggested changes (which we really hope they do). Devedits are similar to subedits except they’re more broad, and the story’s usually in worse shape. Subedits are stories we’ve already contracted to publish; if the story’s author sucks it up, there’s usually very little we can

99 do. Devedits, on the other hand, are not necessarily going to be published, though we hope that the author can pull it off without “band-aid” (superficial) changes. Sometimes they are, but there’s no commitment from us, and they’ll usually go through a subedit again anyway once they are contracted. All of this stuff about the inner workings of the publication process at Leading Edge of course I learned after moving into the “big room” (4037 JKB, the one with the computers, also known as the HumPub Lab), but I began the process about learning about the individual edits by actually doing them as slush reader, and I learned from doing that that I really love substantive editing. It’s what I want to be doing for work one day. Now I get to run the edits, and the stories are the ones I got to pick as Senior Editor. But I’ll never forget how nervous I was to run my first one, or how new and excited I felt to participate as a slush reader (even though they didn’t use my awesome sentence rewrite in Redemption Songs. They should have).

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honrs 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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How I Found Leading Edge Sarah Seeley Leading Edge Lingo 22, F 20 September 2011 Current Slush Reader Atrium Tables, JKB Acquaintance

Personal Data: Since collecting our stories could help Leading Edge out of its currently unappreciated situation, I asked for volunteers from the slushroom to tell me their stories. No one else was involved in the conversation when it was recorded. (Note: Since the Collector is the Senior Editor of Leading Edge, elements of a boss/employee power relationship may exist, though I tried to avoid them in this situation.)

Social Data: The 4th floor of the Jesse Knight Building on BYU campus is mostly deserted at night; one other denizen does homework on a laptop across the room, oblivious to the conversation being recorded.

Cultural Data: The location for the interview is a table frequented during different Leading Edge functions that require a different room.

Item: Recorded on my laptop, then transcribed with “ums” and “uhs” edited out. This items was originally part of an assignment to find out about “shop talk,” but was later included in the complete ethnography.

Me: So, Sarah, tell me about how you got into Leading Edge, and kind of how it felt to start out for the first time and get used to, just, terms and all the different things that were going on.

Sarah: Well, it’s actually kind of a funny story. I started writing a science fiction novel, and I was directed to a professor, I was kind of bouncing around between different professors, trying to actually find a critique group for my writing, and he directed me to Leading Edge, and Leading Edge didn’t turn out to be a critique group, it turned out to be a place where I could learn to edit other peoples’ writing. And I’ve actually found it very helpful, very encouraging as sometimes to read other peoples’ writing and to kind of learn how to improve my own and also to see that my own writing really isn’t so awful as I think it is. (laughing)

Me: That’s good! Did it take any getting used to with the terms, and the words that we use at Leading Edge?

Sarah: Well, I suppose with just my experience with writing in general, It’s taken me a little bit to get used to, like, creative writing terms, and . . .

Me: Like what?

Sarah: Well, like trying to understand the basic components of storywriting like different genres, what they mean, how to structure the things . . .

Me: Any specific examples?

Sarah: Specific examples . . . I’m trying to think . . . related to Leading Edge club . . . let’s see . . . well, I know that I was kind of shy the first couple times that I came because I didn’t know what I

101 was doing, and so I came to just listen to what other people were talking about, and I think just getting used to, kind of, the way science fiction is structured in particular was something that I was trying to figure out, and I think that . . . yeah.

Me: So you weren’t thrown off by things like “slush” and “slushroom”?

Sarah: Not too much, actually. Yeah, I guess just in terms of logistics . . . “slushroom,” like, I don’t know, over the summer it was all kind of in one place, but with the term “slush” or “slushroom,” I came to figure, you know, I’m going to go through stuff that perhaps isn’t as well- written first, to kind of get used to editing, and so, it seemed pretty straight forward, but it was kind of, you know, feeling it out a little bit.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honrs 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Workplace Preparation at Leading Edge

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Valuable Experience Benjamin Keeley Workplace Preparation 22, M 16 November 2011 Current Slush Reader Editing Room, JKB Acquaintance

Personal Data: Benjamin is one of our most faithfully attending slush readers.

Social Data: It was a normal staff meeting of Leading Edge in 4037 JKB, also known as the editing room.

Cultural Data: Leading Edge has an all-volunteer staff.

Item: I asked for Leading Edge stories at a staff meeting, and let Benjamin get on the computers to type one up (he had just finished his slush story and didn’t have time to finish another one before the meeting ended).

I believe that volunteering at The Leading Edge has been one of the driving motivations for me to seek out better ways to critique stories. Like many that come to The Leading Edge, I began as an inexperienced story reader. I knew which stories I liked, but I had never thought about what made them enjoyable. Yet, part of every volunteer’s work at Leading Edge is to provide feedback to the authors of the submissions they review. At first, I put what I felt but it was difficult to back it up with reasoning. This problem led me to seek out more about plot, characters, and other story mechanics. I searched for ways to learn more about these things, through books, articles, and other sources. This search also helped me to do better in my own writing as I came to know more about what makes stories work. Each additional piece of information I learned helped me to become better at looking at the stories and seeing what made them work or not work. Another excellent source of learning how to analyze stories was the conversation I had with the staff and volunteers at The Leading Edge. Those more experienced in writing and critiquing are able to share what they know with those who have less experience. The environment at The Leading Edge allows everyone to learn more and to teach to others what they know. The experience gained from reading so many stories also helped me get a better feel for comparing them, for knowing when a story is good, great, mediocre, or bad. I feel such experience will be valuable as I continue to build my career in editing.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Diving into the Slush Pile Emily Adams Workplace Preparation 24, F 6 October 2011 Current Editor Editing Room, JKB Friend

Personal Data: Emily and I have worked together on Leading Edge for a long time. I suggested her for the open editor position that she currently fills. Emily is very dedicated to the publication and does all she can to see that things get done. She has lots of other responsibilities, but she never wastes time at meetings; she is always engrossed in work relevant to the magazine.

Social Data: A Tuesday night staff meeting of Leading Edge in the Humanities Publication Center. Staff members are scattered around the computers, performing their individual duties, or goofing off, or both. One or two non-staffers are in the room, engrossed in their own projects, not interacting with the magazine staff.

Cultural Data: “Slush” is editorial jargon for “submissions.” Manuscripts are read by “slush readers” in the “slush room.” Many BYU students find out about Leading Edge through their editing professors.

Item: As Senior Editor, I briefly explained the ethnography I’m doing and asked the staff to answer one of three questions. Emily chose to address how Leading Edge has prepared her for the workforce. She typed up and printed out this item that very same night and handed it to me.

I remember coming to my first day of Leading Edge. As I entered the slush room, I assumed I would read vast quantities of good, if not always great fiction. I told my friend, Daniel, as much. He assured me that most of it was actually really bad. He was right.

My creative writing classes had spoiled me. I had no idea just what a slush pile would be like. I was shocked. If I had never come to Leading Edge, I would have entered the publishing world convinced that the majority would be written by at least “par” writers. Instead, I learned that I would be facing actual, and accurately described “slush.”

Now, that isn’t to say that it gave me a pessimistic view of writers or publishing in general; I simply grew to appreciate it more when I got to read a good story. I learned to identify a good story more quickly, and a ad story almost instantaneously.

I feel ready to enter the real world, and dive headlong into the slush!

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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3 Questions about Leading Edge

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Getting Published at Leading Edge Evan Witt 3 Questions 26, M 14 October 2011 Former Slush Reader/Contributor Facebook Acquaintance

Personal Data: Evan is a Computer Science major at BYU who also writes science fiction. He came to Leading Edge to become acquainted with the slush pile and improve his own writing. He eventually submitted his short story “What We Did to Judo,” which was published in Issue 59. I was the editor in charge of that story, and working together personally with Evan was one of the most positive experiences I had as a Leading Edge editor.

Social Data: Facebook is mostly blue and white.

Cultural Data: Leading Edge, like most publishers, sends out official acceptance letters to authors whose work we’ve decided to publish. These letters are accompanied by a contract for the contributor to sign.

Item: Evan was another facebook friend to respond to my three questions via facebook’s message system.

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Leading edge was the source of some of my favorite memories at BYU. When I think back on happy times as a student, I see myself sitting at the long slush pile table on a Thursday night, critiquing incoming manuscripts and gleefully analyzing science fiction with my fellow reviewers.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

I would've gone to Leading Edge slush pile readings strictly for the entertainment, but it also had the added bonus of significantly improving my writing. Reading through dozens of stories honed my writing skills and gave me the skillset I needed to critique my own work. However, undoubtedly the most important way that Leading Edge helped me was when I (finally!) had the chance to publish one of my stories in the magazine. The process of re- editing and rewriting for inclusion in publication taught me more about the publishing industry than any written or verbal explanation could convey.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

My most memorable experience at leading edge was definitely the day I received the letter accepting my story for publication. This isn't simply because I was excited at the prospect of publishing: it was a confirmation to me that it really was possible to improve my writing and overcome previously unattainable obstacles. This was my very first acceptance letter, and I still keep it today in a folder next to all the countless rejections I've received, as a reminder and an inspiration to me.

Follow-up Questions: I'm curious: how did getting that acceptance letter compare to seeing your story in print in the issue? How did you feel about the art?

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I think getting the acceptance letter was more of an emotional high for me, but actually seeing my story in print gave me more satisfaction. I was a little split on the artwork with my story, as I enjoyed the general aesthetic of the pictures, but felt that they contradicted some of the basic descriptions in my text. Altogether, that Leading Edge copy is a real treasure to me, and I still keep it around to show all my friends.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Learning to Love Giving Feedback Benjamin Blackhurst 3 Questions 28, M 14 October 2011 Former Slush Reader Facebook Acquaintance

Personal Data: Benjamin is in Korea on a study abroad program right now.

Social Data: This is what a video camera would record about the situation. Focus on the physical happenings. If submitting an item from the past, describe the setting in the past.

Cultural Data: This explains the larger context necessary to understand the items given in the social data. For example, the item that you are turning in is a joke you heard at a Relief Society Enrichment meeting. Social Data would include how many women in the group, the activity going on at the time, why someone told the joke, and other pertinent information. Cultural Data would explain what a homemaking group is, if the activity was traditional in nature, why only women are there, etc. Please include all of the information that you can think of that will make the item more understandable and more relevant. Having too much material is better than too little.

Item: Received via facebook in response to my query.

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Leading Edge provided me with a sense of community that I would not have otherwise had. I transferred in as a junior--and live off campus--so many of the social connections other students might take for granted, I lacked--and longed for. I know that if I go to Leading Edge, I will have a good time. We'll laugh about one of the many inside jokes (which newcomers quickly internalize), but we'll also critique something each and every one of us loves: science-fiction and fantasy. In addition to this sense of community, Leading Edge has helped me become a better reader by forcing me to justify my decision to pass/demand revisions of/reject a given story. Rather than simply saying, "Oh, [Story x]? I don't like that one, so let's reject it," I must delve into the story to try to understand what exactly isn't working, and then articulate that fact (or facts) to the author. For instance, I might love the arc of a story, but find the end a little flat. After wondering about it, and rereading the story, I might say, "Oh yeah, I remember how you characterize the main character as fueled by his desire to prove himself militarily and to therein distinguish himself from his family; and, I also caught his romantic feelings for his lieutenant, and the tension between wanting to be a brilliant military leader coming from a long line of brilliant military leaders whilst harboring romantic feelings for your lieutenant is palpable, but you haven't quite tied it all together in the end. You resolved the action of the plot, but not the tension. Give the reader his emotional response to the lieutenant saving his life, a cue that he's internalized something more than the relief that he's not dead, that he acknowledges this event as affecting his military status and his feelings for her." I would not have taken the time before Leading Edge to do something like that.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

Most obviously, it has given me experience doing the same sort of work I would do in the

109 publishing world--from the slush pile to the budgeting and the timetable of a magazine. But I think most importantly to me is that it has made me far more confident in my abilities. When I began reading slush about a year and a half ago, I struggled to write the requisite 4 lines of commentary. I quite simply didn't think I was competent enough to provide feedback to an author, despite having grown up loving Sci-Fi and Fantasy works. Now, however, I routinely write 3/4 of a page for each story, and I think that all of it is helpful, and occasionally some of it is exactly what the story needs to go from interesting to "I'd pay money for that." Without Leading Edge, I certainly wouldn't be at that stage.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

I have countless memorable experiences at Leading Edge, most of them involving elaborate conceits or unexpected quips and ending in laughter with people who I consider some of my best friends. However, that moment when I realized that I trusted myself to be writing commentary meant to improve an author's writing, that moment was inspiring. I looked down at my comment sheet and realized that I'd written more than a page--and that none of my comments were so bland as "Nice opening!" as they once had been--and then I picked up the next story, a 69-page doozy, and realized that I couldn't wait to provide my feedback.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Genevieve’s Rant Genevieve Busch 3 Questions 22, F 10 November 2011 Former Art Director Facebook Friend

Personal Data: Genevieve is a good friend of mine from both editing classes and Leading Edge. We even went on a couple of dates one winter. She has a very acidic sense of humor that comes out in both her prose and her conversation. I had to bug her a little bit to get this piece, but I think it was worth it. She’s currently graduated from BYU and at home in Maryland, preparing to serve an LDS mission to the Ukraine. And she means every word of that comment about my ego.

Social Data: Genevieve wrote this from Maryland; I received it in Provo, UT.

Cultural Data: This explains the larger context necessary to understand the items given in the social data. For example, the item that you are turning in is a joke you heard at a Relief Society Enrichment meeting. Social Data would include how many women in the group, the activity going on at the time, why someone told the joke, and other pertinent information. Cultural Data would explain what a homemaking group is, if the activity was traditional in nature, why only women are there, etc. Please include all of the information that you can think of that will make the item more understandable and more relevant. Having too much material is better than too little.

Item: I sent her a pair of messages on facebook. The first was a general mass message that she didn’t respond to; the second was a personalized request that yielded results. I have copied and pasted it below:

ALRIGHT! I'll tell you some stories!

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Leading Edge began as a peripheral extracurricular activity in the midst of many other activities vying for my attention (i.e. Laugh Out Loud, The Experimental Theatre Club, Y-Publish, Swing Kids, etc.--yeah, I was that kid). It ended as the only club I had any time or inclination toward. Not only did Leading Edge provide me with awesome practical editing, design, and publishing experience, it also gave me a desperately needed outlet for the intense geekular forces churning inside my being. Where else on campus can you walk into a room of fellow nerdophiles willing to discuss Star Wars, Arrested Development, the Book of Mormon, and Michael Bay's epic directing fails? The answer: nowhere. The Leading Edge slush room is that proverbial place of nerd lore.

Joking aside, Leading Edge really did provide a solid base for making friends with like interests while giving anyone with aspirations of working in any facet of the publishing industry opportunities to gain and practice their editing skills. I had hands-on experiences at Leading Edge that I never had in a classroom—all while discussing the finer points of why "Iron Man" was such an appallingly unapologetic waste of film, time, and brain space.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

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I have three copies of Leading Edge sitting on my bookshelf, ready to show to potential employers once I return from my mission. Issue #56 includes a book review I wrote on an R.A. Salvatore book. Issue #60 was my first foray into the world of commission and design as the assistant art director. Issue #61, our 30th Anniversary issue, was more or less the Hope Diamond in my Leading Edge tiara because I was the art director for that particularly stunning installment.

Unless I'm woefully mistaken (which I very well may be), it would appear to me that such notches on my editor's belt would be exactly the kinds of experiences any student hoping to begin a career in the publishing world would want to have.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

Any experience including taking another chunk out of the ego of Daniel Craig Friend.

Only joking...but not really.

I most enjoyed simply spending time with my fellow sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts. While editing really is a passion of mine, I'm about as social as they come, and nothing made me happier than chatting about any of the aforementioned topics. I can think of many an evening when I was supposed to be reading prospective stories for the upcoming issue while actually spending hours discussing vampire unicorns, the prevalence of Russian submarines in science fiction, and the apathy the general public feels toward the Legend of Zelda. Productive and enriching, I know.

The moral of the story: my time with Leading Edge was worthwhile to infinity and beyond. Buzz Lightyear and Darth Vader both agree.

(Feel free to edit as you will, but that's all I'm giving you, buster! Enjoy )

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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The Greatest People Camilla Parshall 3 Questions 24, F 7 October 2011 Former Senior Editor Facebook Friend

Personal Data: Camilla was the Senior Editor of Leading Edge when I first volunteered as a slush puppy.

Social Data: Facebook message pages are blue and white, with ads on the right sidebar.

Cultural Data: Facebook is a social media site, and a wonderful way to contact friends who no longer live in the same state.

Item: I sent out a mass facebook message to all the former staff I have as friends asking the three questions that appear below. Camilla sent this response back via facebook.

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Leading Edge was the best experience I had at BYU. In my classes I worked hard and grew to know my classmates a little bit, but it was nothing compared to going to Leading Edge three times a week and spending an hour and a half with the greatest people. Leading Edge was where I met my true friends and I looked forward to each new semester in order to see them again.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

Despite having taken editing classes at BYU, my real experience in publishing came from Leading Edge. The journal provided me with real-life experience where my classes could only present theory. I now know the official process, from start to finish, for publishing a journal or for publishing one's own work. Leading Edge also helped me decide which field of publishing I wanted to enter in my career.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

Honestly, my favorite experiences at Leading Edge happened afterwards. When the meetings were over, I invited everyone over to my house for a movie and ice cream, or I would go get milkshakes with them. Sometimes on Saturdays we would end the meeting and walk over to the Cougareat to grab lunch. Spending time with my fellow editors outside of the journal was my favorite part of being in a journal. Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Amber’s Three Answers Amber Thomas 3 Questions 20, F 6 December 2011 Current Circulation Director Editing Room, JKB Friend

Personal Data: Amber was our Circulation Director, and then went on a study abroad trip to India. She trained Nyssa to be her replacement before she left. By the time Amber came back, Nyssa had moved up to being an editor, so Amber got to slide right back into her old job!

Social Data: Amber gave this to me at Leading Edge, when I was almost done with the project, but I was glad to have it!

Cultural Data: The proposal story mentioned here is well-documented in this ethnography.

Item: Amber sent this to me on facebook.

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Leading Edge is a fun place that I can go to get release from school stress and make progress at the same time. I make progress in becoming a better editor, and then in helping others to get experience in publishing stories. So, basically it is a win-win-win situation.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

I have yet to graduate and work anywhere professionally, but I have learned a few things that I know will help me in the future. I have learned that I would like to edit fiction and/or science fiction. I have learned what sorts of things to look for, and what sorts of things do not make good writing.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

My most memorable experience at Leading Edge would be when Neal proposed to Nyssa during one of our meetings. I did not even know they were dating. It was quite the surprise and it made my day.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Three Answers from Arielle Arielle Myers 3 Questions 20, F Date Collected Former Slush Reader Place Collected Friend

Personal Data: Arielle is a friend of mine from the time we both worked in the slush room. She has since become a Communications Disorders Major and moved on to other things, but we are still friends. We even went on a couple of dates back in the day.

Social Data: Facebook is blue and white. Mostly.

Cultural Data: Both developmental edits and copyedits are part of the editing process at Leading Edge.

Item: Arielle responded to my facebook message with the following:

1) How has Leading Edge enriched your time at BYU?

Volunteering at the Leading Edge gave me an amazing opportunity not only to be exposed to aspects of the publishing world that I never knew about but also to interact with other editors— people who think the way I do and who have similar interests.

2) How has Leading Edge prepared you for work in the publishing world?

I knew very little about the publishing world before volunteering at the Leading Edge. There, I was able to participate not only in the content selection process but also in the editing process. I learned about the different steps of editing a piece must go through and was able to participate on both a developmental edit and a copyedit. I understand the publishing process a lot more because of my time at the Leading Edge.

3) What is your most memorable experience at Leading Edge?

I don't have any specific memories about the Leading Edge that stand out more than others. What I remember most was just the general atmosphere: working with good friends doing something that I love.

I hope those answers work for you. Good luck!

-Arielle

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Current Events at Leading Edge

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Hands off the Slush Pile Alan Manning Current Events of Leading Edge 51, M 3 November 2011 Current Faculty Advisor Ancillary Room, JKB Professor

Personal Data: Dr. Manning has been the faculty advisor for Leading Edge for many years, and employs a “hands-off” approach to the journal: as long as the students aren’t having problems, he basically allows us to run the magazine. He is an avid trekkie, boasting several Star Trek models in his office. His office also serves as a repository for many, many back issues of the magazine. Dr. Manning is pioneering a new approach for parsing English sentences, and has recently started teaching the fiction section of the substantive editing class, where he is employing similar techniques to teach the structure of stories. Dr. Manning comes complete with a quirky sense of humor that is not always understood by his students. He’s described by many (including me) as an “odd duck,” but that really makes him perfect for advising a student journal of fantasy and science fiction. It was also his idea to offer developmental edits as a paid service.

Social Data: This interview was conducted during a Leading Edge meeting, right after Dr. Manning explained the details of conducting a developmental edit to the senior staff. We used an ancillary room for the session, and no one else was present at the time.

Cultural Data: The Humanities Publication Center is the official name given to the editing room and the slush room; many other journals under the College of Humanities are produced in these facilities along with Leading Edge. For an explanation of Life, the Universe, and Everything, see the introduction to Dave Doering’s interview. Analog and The Magazine of Science Fiction are two of the most popular sci-fi magazines out on newsstands today. Doris Dant is the editing faculty member over internships.

Item: This item was recorded on my laptop and later transcribed, with filler words edited out.

Me: I’m here with Alan Manning, talking about Leading Edge. Alan, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you’re involved with the magazine.

Alan: I’m a professor in the department of Linguistics and English Language. A few years ago, we adopted the editing program from the English Department, and Leading Edge was not initially a part of that adoption, but the English Department very notably and quickly decided that they had no further desire to keep maintaining Leading Edge as one of their projects, and so they offered it to us, and we snapped it up because it is very well organized and anybody who wants to work in fiction editing, we can use to kind of train the students for that.

Me: What kinds of specifics are involved with that training?

Alan: Well, I mean, the heart and soul of a fiction editing operation is the slush read. Meaning that people have to learn to pore over fiction which by and large isn’t very well written and, you know, find the gems amidst a lot of kind of wayward novels, and every fiction editing house requires that experience, and that’s the main thing that anyone who comes to work on Leading Edge gets that they couldn’t get anywhere else. If this were merely a publication that published stories from BYU students, we’d be a journal having to shape up everything we got from scratch,

117 rather than sifting through what people’ve written for good stories mixed in with all of the boring, and so that operation that Leading Edge established over a long period of years, to build a national reputation. And so in order to get that kind of training for our editing students, we need this kind of an organization with its history and its operating system and so forth.

Me: Could you expand a little bit on that, on kind of the history and the operating system and what it is that makes Leading Edge unique at BYU and maybe in other places as well?

Alan: Well, I don’t know of any other universities that’s supporting essentially a professional or semi-professional fiction magazine. There are several that have kind of an in-house ‘what students have written’ and are putting it out there, and there are lots of kinds of “fanzines,” you’d call them, online, that publish stories, but none of them are really sifting through mountains of submissions in the way that fully professional magazines like, say, Analog, or The Magazine of Science Fiction. That’s what they do. They have editors poring through mountains of submissions to find the good ones, and that’s exactly what we do at Leading Edge.

Me: Tell me a little bit about how you personally got involved with Leading Edge. You’re the faculty advisor now, so how did that happen?

Alan: Well, the way that happened is, the English Department had essentially said, “We’re not going to endorse or support this.” What’s the word? “Sponsor.” “We’re not going to sponsor this anymore.” And of course, any student operation needs a sponsor from the department, which usually that sponsorship doesn’t have to go away, you found this a little while back with the Life, the Universe, and Everything. They lost their sponsorship in the College of Humanities, and they were in danger of being cancelled. They found sponsorship in another college, thank goodness, but Leading Edge would’ve been in the same position. And it was talked among some of the people about making it private, but I don’t think it could’ve survived, as we’ve seen. It really needed the subsidies from the college to operate, and they’ve sort of been scrambling. And we’ll probably be able to do it, but without the facilities of the university and the Humanities Publication Center, it would be very difficult to run this kind of magazine out in the world.

Me: With whatever level of detail you feel is appropriate, what happened, from your perspective, with all of this funding stuff, with LTUE and Quark and Leading Edge all getting cut at the same time?

Alan: Well, it’s still a bit of a mystery, and I used to think, it used to look like there might be someone in the higher administration that was averse to sponsoring science fiction and fantasy, but I’m no longer sure that’s exactly the case. What definitely is the case is that the Dean of the College, and he’s on record of saying this, is that there’s a lot of organizations that he doesn’t want to support at the college level. He thinks that they need to find specific department “buy- in”—those are his exact words, you need “buy-in” from the departments—meaning the departments would take part of their operating budget and record-keeping and prioritize enough funds to keep those various kinds of organizations running. And that may be really what drove the exodus of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Money was just a little tight over here, and they have a little more money over in Communications and Fine Arts, ‘cause they actually have money-making operations over there from [various operations]. Oh, and ticket receipts from performances. So there’s a little more money from income available, and so it’s easier to

118 get sponsorship. Money’s a little bit tighter over here, and anything that ends up costing money is at risk. You really have to make a more proactive case to the use the department’s funds. And our chair, in our department, he doesn’t value us personally enough to fund us any further than the operating costs that we have just in the Humanities Publication Center. We’re welcome to that, as long as it’s just part of the general editing operations. And that poses some challenges for us, but it’s also good to see how far we can go on our low-fund/no-fund basis.

Me: It seems like there’s a lot of university politics going on.

Alan: Oh, sure. But we’re in an economic recession/depression, whatever you want to call it. Money’s tight everywhere, and so these kinds of things happen everywhere. Certain programs that aren’t as highly valued by people who have more power are at risk unless they can scramble and find ways to keep themselves afloat. So that’s where we’re at. So, yeah, it isn’t necessarily the case that somebody’s gunning for us because we’re fantasy and sci-fi, but what happens is they don’t value this fantasy/sci-fi fiction, and so they just don’t give us any help when they have a choice.

Me: For your opinion for the future of Leading Edge, what do the students and those involved need to do or continue to do?

Alan: We’re going to stay afloat by operating cheaply; operating at cost; meaning we use what people pay us: the full cost of the printing and the mailing, and if we want to keep paying authors, then we have to find ways to make just enough money to pay them. A pittance. It’s really a pittance, an honorarium, what we offer, a penny a word, it’s a tenth of what you’d get if you published with Analog or The Magazine of Science Fiction. And I think if we’re developing a developmental edit service we can make that.

Me: What are some of the things that you see as far as being unique to Leading Edge as far as what goes on with the operations?

Alan: Well, in a way it’s not unique. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in any fiction publication. You go to the few print publications that do short stories, like the ones we’ve named, and there are a few of those that are non-fantasy and science fiction. They just publish short stories. In any of those operations, you see exactly what you see here at Leading Edge: there’s a slush pile, there are slush readers who are the newcomers. Once they’ve been around a while, they’re advanced to an editing team, or they’ll pick a story and they’ll get it ready for publication. And so those steps in the publication process are familiar to anybody working out in the real world. It’s not common to have all of those steps in a university-subsidized operation.

Me: As faculty advisor, how do you choose to interact with the students who are working as staff at Leading Edge?

Alan: Mostly I don’t. I deal with the chief editor or editors, but my preferred way of dealing with this is to let it run. It’s been going long enough that it has its own traditions and processes. My job is to be the lifeguard. You know, the lifeguard just sits up there and if everybody’s following the rules and having a good time, the lifeguard, essentially, just sits and soaks up the sun. Gets paid at the end of the day. I don’t get paid, but I have the satisfaction of a job well done when the students produce an issue, when it’s good, and then I, even though I had very

119 little to do with it, I pat myself on the back and say, “Hey! They didn’t mess up! I’m so proud of them.” Once in a while, something comes up where I have to wade in and referee. And when we first took the operation over, there were some problems. Because English, frankly, had not advised or overseen as closely as they should’ve, ‘cause they didn’t care about it anymore. And so there were political problems amongst the various students, and so, for that first year or so, I was intervening more than I wanted to, knocking heads together, and lecturing about good corporate culture. But eventually those problems settled down. So I just set back, and let it run. Which is what I’d be doing now, except we have to get this developmental editing thing going, and that’s requiring a little more active teaching on my part. It happens. It’s not a bad thing. Just coincidentally, I’ve been teaching the fiction editing section of the editing course that covers that. The person who used to do that just died.

Me: What happened?

Alan: Valerie Holladay, didn’t you know?

Me: I had no idea she passed away. I had her for that class last semester. I did not even know.

Alan: You were her last class.

Me: I had no idea that she had passed away.

Alan: Sorry to drop that on you. Valerie passed away. She knew she had cancer; she let us know in January that she wouldn’t be teaching again for us in the fall, and so a decision had to be made at that point: Do we offer a fiction section, and if so, who’s going to teach it? There was really no one who had even any fiction editing experience apart from me, and most of my fiction editing experience comes from overseeing what Leading Edge does. And I don’t interfere, but I do watch what goes on.

Me: So even though you’re already established in your career and you’re working at a university, Leading Edge still is helping you do this professionally.

Alan: Sure, sure. Actually, I wouldn’t have been able to take this class on if I hadn’t overseen the Leading Edge operation and learning about how the fiction editing side works. I’d written a fair amount of fantasy/science fiction: 34 short stories and two novels. So I knew how they’re written, and I knew about self-editing, but I wouldn’t have been able to teach the fiction editing class without [Leading Edge]

Me: Is there any other way that Leading Edge has impacted your professional career?

Alan: Well, we’ll see. If this developmental editing thing works, then that means the models that we are using—the ones I just told you about—although they do work descriptively, I mean, you take any successful story, you find the patterns that we’ve been talking about. But the question is whether you can turn around and engineer a story using that same framework. And I think you can. It looks like you can. We just engineered that little short. But then the question is: Can that story be passed to blind reviewers and will they like it, not having seen it before, not being aware that it’s any different than any other story; will it stand out in a pile of slush?

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Me: That’s the experiment.

Alan: That’s the experiment. So it’s not an experiment I really set out to set up, but circumstances have conspired to give us this opportunity. To test this, as it were.

Me: Circumstances have done a lot of conspiring. I was talking to Dave Doering, the other day, and he said that circumstances have conspired such in the creation and the continuation of Leading Edge that he believes that there’s higher power at work here, making this thing happen.

Alan: There may be. It’s really good that we’re able to send students out of this program as well-prepared as they are. Over a period of years and decades, it means that people who come from BYU to the workplace will have influence.

Me: And how have we seen that happen so far?

Alan: Well, we’re still just getting started, really, because when English had the editing classes they didn’t do much with it. So students were trained, but they were not trained systematically or well. We’ve been training students more systematically and better the last almost a decade now. Say it’s been the last eight years, that we’ve really had our program on its feet. And it takes about eight years for somebody to go from an entry-level position to a position of influence. And we’re just starting to see former students in positions in some of the publishing houses around, and Doris Dant would know the students a little better than I do, ‘cause I’m just now becoming a more involved member of the faculty. I’ve been involved, but I haven’t been personally involved on the editing side except for the last two years. So I’m not as familiar with the students who came into the program a few years ago, but Mel and Doris are, so they’d be the ones to ask about who’s starting to come up and make an influence. I know there are some. And I just want us to know that my ambition now, as much as I have ambition in these sorts of things, is to have people working in fiction publishing in the next five years who know how to run a character and who know how to diagnose a plot. And we’re gonna see some very powerful stories come through that otherwise wouldn’t have made it. Because, first of all, they’re recognized for being good. I mean, you think of how many people rejected Harry Potter. Even though it had all the elements that we’ve talked about. It had the right kind of plot, it had the right kind of character pattern; it should have been snapped up. But it wasn’t, because most people can only evaluate stories intuitively; they can’t evaluate them the way a mechanic looks at a car and says, “Oh, this is in good condition; this is broken.” And we haven’t had that historically; it’s all just been intuitive. And so having editing in the linguistics program means that students are more conscious of the structures that they address as editors, rather than just suggesting things *arbitrarily+. And so we’ve been training students that way for a while now and having them influence more of the information technology side. And now that we’re gonna shift our emphasis toward fiction writing, we hope to see improvements in that area, and hopefully influence as well, with people reading it and

Me: Going forth to serve, right?

Alan: Yeah, going forth to serve. But that means you’ll be in armed, successful projects. We want our people to be in on that. It wasn’t in that condition when it came through the slush pile, but we’re in a condition to create something.

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Me: What’s your favorite experience you’ve had with Leading Edge?

Alan: Just a lot of nice moments, you know? Every time an issue comes out where I did have some input—meaning I looked at the proofs, essentially, and caught the last-minute hiccup that needed to be fixed. That was a good moment. A couple of issues back—maybe it was the issue before this one—there was a story which was broken, but no one knew what to do about plot.

Me: Can you tell us which specific story?

Alan: That was the robot girl. Do you remember the title of that one?

Me: “Mimicry.”

Alan: Was it “Mimicry,” where there’s this steampunk story? *I nod+ Yeah, yeah, yeah. That thing wasn’t right, but we just gave it a couple of adjustments, and in the end it was good. We fixed it. So that was a good moment. But that was one of the rare cases where I intervened.

Me: Anything else that you think ought to be added to the corpus of Leading Edge?

Alan: Oh, that’s probably enough. You’ve got enough work as it is.

Daniel Friend M, 24 Honors 300R Fall 2011 Deirdre Paulsen BYU

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Appendix A: Staff Letters from the Beginning of the Funding Crisis

Note: When the staff of Leading Edge first found out that our funding had been cancelled without our knowledge, we solicited letters on our facebook page to try and get our funding back. The letters were written to the Dean of the College of Humanities, John Rosenberg. As we learned more details about the funding decision, our strategy evolved, and the letters were never sent. However, as they were given to Leading Edge to be used in whatever ways would be most beneficial, and since they speak to the subject of this ethnography, I feel they ought to be included. The designations of “current” and “former” staff in the headings were accurate as of the writing of the letters; some are no longer correct as of the publication of this ethnography. To the best of my memory, the letters are recorded in the order they were received. They have not been edited in any way.

Nicholas Rose (current staff)

Working on the Leading Edge has given me a variety of useful skills in the world of editing and writing. I began as a slush reader, reading submissions, analyzing them, and writing comment sheets for them. This has helped me become a better writer, because I’ve been able to take a close look at what constitutes good and bad writing in fiction. I have since become a poetry director and am now working as a fiction director. These positions have helped me better understand how a publication staff operates, requiring me to organize submissions, records, and comment sheets, as well as interact with the people that submit their works to Leading Edge. I’ve done all this work for free, and am glad to be part of a team that delivers quality publications on a regular basis.

My work for Leading Edge was a major aspect of my resume, which helped me earn an internship position for the Intercultural Outreach Program at the Kennedy Center. There I edit CultureGuides—textbook packets about different countries in the world. Leading Edge helped prepare me for the work this editing position entails, and will hopefully lead to other job opportunities once I graduate.

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Dan Wells (former staff)

When I was in college (at BYU) I worked on the staff of a science fiction and fantasy magazine called Leading Edge. University magazines come in three flavors: the pro magazines, run by a hired staff of primarily non-students, the prestige magazines, staffed by students but heavily overseen by faculty, and the student magazines, run entirely by students with little or no faculty oversight. Each magazine has its purpose and place, but for my money there’s no question whatsoever that the most valuable student experience comes, unsurprisingly, in the student magazines. The others get more money, and look prettier, and get distributed more widely, but the student magazines actually teach you how to edit, proof, format, design, budget, plan, and otherwise run a magazine. This is the experience that Leading Edge gave me.

I don’t mean to imply that we didn’t have a faculty advisor; at the time I worked on it, our advisor was Linda Adams, and she remains a good friend to this day. But she subscribed to the Mama Bird philosophy of faculty advisorship, which was essentially “throw them out of the tree and see if they can figure out how to fly before they hit the ground.” She taught us to run a magazine by—imagine that—allowing us to run a magazine. If we had issues we couldn’t resolve she was always available to help, but for the most part we learned on the job, coming in cold and learning from older students and making real decisions and setting our own deadlines and staying up late to meet them and passing along what we’d learned to the next generation of students. Obviously we made poor decisions every now and then, but that’s kind of the point: better to make them on a student magazine than in a real job, post- graduation. We could see all the ramifications of our work, and we could figure out what went wrong, and we could fix it and do better next time.

Let me give you a quick example. We received a story that we loved, and we happily accepted it, edited it, and published it. We were almost instantly informed by a reader that the story had been plagiarized—we had paid someone for someone else’s work, and then published it without that someone else’s consent or knowledge. We had to contact the original author, apologize profusely, and come up with a plan to pay him for his work and make sure he got the credit for it. It was a long, difficult, embarrassing process, but through it we learned not only responsibility but caution; we learned how to avoid plagiarists, how to work with clients, how to resolve business and ethical issues, and how to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. Those are not the kinds of problems most publishing students face, but they are exactly the kind of problems actual publishers face, every day, and our experience on a student-run magazine prepared us for them better than class or seminar we ever took.

Leading Edge helped us in other ways, as well. Because of its nature as a science fiction magazine, it taught us about the science fiction publishing industry. We learned who the big players are, how they work, and what they want in both their fiction and their employees. We learned how the creation of art can be swayed and shaped and sometimes even stymied by the constraints of business and the pressures of the market. When we traveled to conventions and conferences, our status as small press editors helped us talk to a lot of very important industry leaders, and we were often surprised by how many of them were familiar with our magazine—Leading Edge is small, but people recognize it as a source of good writers, good artists, and good staff.

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Our work on Leading Edge gave me, my friends, and nearly four decades of other students an incredible education and a huge boost toward ongoing careers. That magazine has produced group after group of editors, writers, art directors, journalists, creative directors, illustrators, publishers, and more. We are senior editors at publishing houses. We are New York Times bestselling authors. We are creative professionals, small business owners, artists, and more. Leading Edge is not only one of the oldest magazines at BYU, it has a nearly unmatched track record for graduates going on to incredible success in the industry.

Later, on his blog, Brinestone, Dan wrote:

I also feel compelled to explain how I came to join the staff of Leading Edge. When I was a freshman, I would often find myself in the library looking for periodicals to use for one research paper or another. One day, I accidentally ended up finding the section with the science fiction and fantasy magazines, and because Leading Edge said it was BYU’s, I was curious. For months, whenever I had a spare half hour or so, I’d go to the library to read because each and every issue was so awesome. After a while, I tried a few issues of Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, but I always ended up going back to Leading Edge. I can’t remember now what it was, but I found the stories more accessible and entertaining, and the art was often better too. I was really surprised that a semi-pro magazine was putting out such a good product. Anyway, when I found out anyone can volunteer, I was there in a heartbeat. I don’t know if there’s any other person on the planet who’s read as many of the back issues as I have, but I can without hesitation say that they are very good and very much worth your money if you like speculative fiction.

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Douglas Summers-Stay (former staff)

I joined the staff of Leading Edge because I loved to read science fiction, not because I had any interest in publishing, editing, or proofreading; but I stayed there for five years and worked on all different aspects of the magazine, eventually becoming the head editor for a little while. Then I graduated, went to work as a teacher, and moved away.

A career in teaching didn’t work out for me, though, so I found myself looking for a new job in a field—any field—I didn’t have a degree in. I’m sure a lot of people find themselves in this situation. Luckily, because of all those years at Leading Edge, I had another skill set to fall back on. For the next two years, as I applied to graduate schools in order to change careers, I supported my family as a technical writer (which in practice means mostly editing, layout, and proofreading.) In the years since that time, the skills I learned at Leading Edge have helped me in writing scientific papers and in preparing my own book for publication.

Not everyone who volunteers at Leading Edge will end up with a career in writing or publishing. But everyone will come away with skills that will help them no matter what their profession.

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Laura Mathews Jorgensen (former staff)

I have a typical Leading Edge story. Just a fantasy lover who saw an opportunity to read fantasy while getting a bit of editing experience on the side. So I started off as a “slush puppy,” only going on Saturdays, but slowly Leading Edge drew me further in. I started going more and more and eventually became the Fiction Director where I signed my first rejection letter, and my second, and my third, until my signature has become so sloppy that it is hard to read. It wasn’t all rejections though. When we found a story that we loved, going over it in an editing group made it even better. It was nice to see other perspectives and others’ editing styles. Then seeing all the parts come together in the final product was like a beautiful symphony, all the pieces working together.

I think I can attribute to Leading Edge at least part of my desire to become an editor, and definitely being Fiction Director has helped me at my current job as Mock-up Specialist at a phone book company. Leading Edge was my first exposure to all the many aspects of putting a magazine together from first content to press to distribution. I even got my younger brother hooked on them, so I’m sure that if he goes to BYU that he will make Leading Edge a part of his experience there.

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Krista Furner (former staff)

I was so shy and uncomfortable around people when I went to college. My brother suggested I join him and his friends at his “club.” This was the start of me coming out of my shell. Leading Edge eases people into positions of authority by example and in a friendly environment. I started in what is referred to as the Slush Pile. Here, we learned to read, evaluate, edit, and offer comments on stories. During that time, students are introduced to all aspects of the magazine, and can decide which area they want to learn. It is a safe environment that has great student support to help you learn more about leadership. I eventually became the Circulation Director. It was my task to collect money sent in for magazines, and send out issues on time.

Through Leading Edge, I learned to handle money responsibly, and to keep a tight schedule on issuing magazines on time. I also learned to become who I am today. The people at Leading Edge are funny, encouraging, and good at what they do. They love reading and writing. At my time, there were two or three writing groups all working together learning to give and take criticism. You might recognize names like Brandon Sanderson, Peter Ahlstrom, and Dan Wells. They were at my time, and I learned that writing and editing can be more than just a hobby.

Since Leading Edge, I have worked as a teacher and at a credit union. I feel Leading Edge gave me the confidence I needed to be in front of a group of people (students) and gave me the credibility I needed to work at the credit union (handling money). Leading Edge is a place for students to learn. Not by studying it, or watching it, but by doing it! It gave me all the support I needed to believe in myself. This magazine saved me, and I owe it. I will never forget my time at Leading Edge. Please see just how important this magazine is for those who attend it.

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Charlie N. Holmberg (former staff)

I can honestly say that volunteering with Leading Edge magazine was the best experience I had during my undergrad at BYU. That magazine did so much for me—I learned the basics of publishing, I refined my editing skills, and I became a better writer. I started at Leading Edge reading slush pile stories and graduated as Production Director. Leading Edge not only helped me in a majority of my classes, but provided me extra credit! I made great friends and had a fantastic experience there. Honestly, Leading Edge magazine was the one thing that made my graduating resume at all impressive—it helped me get hired as a technical writer upon graduation because I had experience in the field. I could actually bring in back- copies of the magazine, open to the first page, and point to my name. That means something to employers. That means something to me.

I write this email as a plea to return funding to Leading Edge. We had a growing readership and a lot of genuine learning and fun at the magazine. It offers amateur writers a chance to be published and put something decent on a cover letter. It helps people like me get jobs in a struggling economy. It’s the best extracurricular activity BYU has to offer! So I beg you: please reconsider your budget cuts and allow Leading Edge to continue to grow.

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Ruth Owen (former staff)

I have recently learned that funding has been cut, once again, for Leading Edge magazine. This was very disappointing to hear, to say the least. I volunteered for Leading Edge for three years while at BYU, serving as slush puppy, assistant production director, and assistant art director. While doing so, I not only made good friendships, I learned many things that no other class could have taught me as well:

1. I learned what good writing looks like and what bad writing looks like. I used this to improve my own writing, both of fiction and of nonfiction (mostly academic and technical).

2. I learned to use QuarkXPress and InDesign.

3. I learned to edit, a skill that would land me my first editing job while at BYU and would eventually lead me to a career in technical editing. I now freelance, since I’m a stay-at-home mother, and I have gotten fiction editing jobs because of my experience at Leading Edge.

4. I learned much about why certain stories are published and why others aren’t. I now know what kinds of pressures acquisitions editors are under and how long it can take to get word back to authors as to whether their submissions have been accepted or rejected.

5. I learned, from writing responses to authors, how to articulate my feelings about a story clearly and concisely. This skill has taught me to think critically about things in general, to look at something and examine what is working and what isn’t, and explain why.

6. I learned to seek out skilled artists and contact them to request that they illustrate for a magazine. So far I haven’t used this skill, but it’s in my tool belt should I need to.

7. I gained confidence in my writing abilities. Three of my friends from Leading Edge, that I am aware of, have gone on to become published novelists (Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Janci Patterson). I reviewed their writing, and they have reviewed mine. I had all but given up on finishing my novel, but knowing that they did it has given me the push needed to start writing again, and I’m loving it. Whether I actually publish or not, having friends who are role models is very valuable, and I would never have met them if it weren’t for Leading Edge. Who knows? Perhaps someday I will get published and will be able to attribute my perseverance to Leading Edge as well.

There is not one class at BYU that I can trace so much of my success and fulfillment to. My only regret is that I have lost touch with many of my friends there since graduation. Please, if there is any way to maintain Leading Edge’s funding to allow it to continue to operate the way it did for me, choose that way. One or two fewer new computers in a lab on campus might be all it takes. I will be subscribing to the magazine for one year to show my support as well.

I thank you for your time.

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Ethan Skarstedt (former staff)

I myself had a limited experience at Leading Edge, mostly reading slush and doing the occasional illustration. But that was because I ended up working with “Life the Universe and Everything,” the sci-fi and fantasy symposium that gets put on in spite of itself every year at BYU. However, the basic desktop publishing and Photoshop skills I started with and which landed me the last job I held, for seven years, I learned through Leading Edge and the symposium together.

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Sabrina Clifford (former staff)

To Whom It May Concern:

I worked on Leading Edge from February 2009–April 2010. I was promoted to fiction director during the summer of 2009. While it would be impossible to tell you everything I gained from working on this journal, I can tell you that my editing education would not have been complete without it.

I was a nontraditional student. I returned to school with three small children and no real work experience outside the home or classroom. LE gave me a little work experience to help me get my first editing internship at the Maxwell Institute, and it doubled the experience on my résumé when I applied for my dream internship, the editing division at the LDS Church Curriculum Department, where I’m working now.

LE is where I learned how to work in an office environment. It’s where I learned both how to work with people I don’t necessary like and how to work with really good friends and still get things done. I learned to work with a team and make my voice heard without becoming a roadblock. I learned to work with deadlines and be responsible for my own workload. I learned firsthand what happens when people don’t pull their own weight and other people have to pick up the slack.

I took the fiction section of Genre and Substantive Editing, and the teacher taught everything she could in a two-month spring course, but there is only so much that can be taught in a classroom. At LE, I was actually able to put those things into practice: recognizing a good story, helping the story to be the best it can be, shaping the story to your audience and to company parameters, working with difficult authors, and more. These are things that can only be taught conceptually in the classroom. At LE, I put these concepts into practice issue after issue over a 15-month span.

Perhaps much of this can be said of any student journal. But there is something special about LE. I first realized this when I attended the Life, the Universe, and Everything conference shortly after I started volunteering at LE. Several of the panelists, including Stacy Whitman and Brandon Sanderson, said that they started out with LE during their BYU days. LE has a history and a reputation that you can’t replace. It draws submissions from writers of all ages and abilities from around the globe. Brandon Sanderson feels so strongly about the value of the LE experience that he offers extra credit for spending three meetings in the LE slush room.

Science fiction and fantasy are so specialized that they require their own techniques. Because they are so specialized, it is impractical to include these techniques in the standard curriculum for writing or editing and do them any justice. Brandon Sanderson teaches his class to an overfilled auditorium as often as his circumstances allow, and the editing department does offer the general fiction course I mentioned earlier, but these things need to be taught in a practicing, publishing environment. BYU needs LE.

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Kristina Kugler (former staff)

The Leading Edge was the most valuable experience of my undergraduate and graduate career at BYU. During the six years I attended Leading Edge meetings, I went from reading manuscripts in the slush pile, to taking care of all book keeping and circulation duties, to working in production, to being the head editor, to being a resource for the new editors as they learned the ropes.

By working on the staff of the Leading Edge I learned the following skills (among numerous others)

· How to responsibly handle someone else’s money · How to set a production schedule, and follow it through to meet deadlines · How to manage other people so that they are both happy and productive · How to lay out a professional-looking publication (increasing my design skills, my critical eye for details, and my knowledge of industry-standard software packages in the process) · How to deal with authors and illustrators · How to effectively develop a manuscript from a rough form to a polished story ready to publish · How to write an effective editorial for publication · How to persevere through set-backs and come out with an even stronger product

All of these skills, along with the extra practice in copyediting skills and other skills useful in the editing industry I received by working on the Leading Edge staff, have been invaluable to me in both my everyday life and in my career. My experience at the Leading Edge was a major factor in obtaining my first job after I graduated. The skills I learned there have helped me progress in my career, as I had valuable management training as well as experience with the nuts and bolts aspects of the publishing industry. I enjoyed my English classes, and the theoretical knowledge I received there was interesting, valuable, and helpful, but my experience at the Leading Edge gave me valuable practical experience to enhance all the knowledge from my other classes.

English majors often joke that they’ll either teach after school is done, or learn to say, “You want fries with that?” Well, I have found that while teaching is not my passion, editing is. I’ve also found that you really need practical experience to turn all the classroom knowledge into skills useful to an editing career. The Leading Edge gives students the skills they need to succeed. It receives submissions from all over the world, so it’s known beyond the campus boundaries, as well.

I know the Leading Edge has given me valuable contacts in my field, the knowledge and practical experience I’ve needed to grow and progress in my chosen field, and some of the best friends I’ve ever had. BYU is about improving the students in every way. Leading Edge was the embodiment of that ideal for me. I can’t think of another group or activity that came even close to being as fantastic of an experience for me. I will be so disappointed if it disappears.

Sincerely, Kristina (Roggio) Kugler (Leading Edge Staff member from 1999 to 2005)

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Jason Wallace (former staff)

Dear Editor,

I recently got an email about how Leading Edge was standing on precarious ground with the administration and budget cuts. I wanted to send in a letter giving my support, and pushing for the department continuing to support it.

Leading Edge was, quite possibly, the best experience I had while at BYU. For four years I met in the (now demolished) Humanities Publication Center three times a week, twelve months of the year, to sift through stories, talk with friends, and create a quality magazine. We always had from half a dozen to twenty people there (depending on the time of year), and basically all of us came for love of the craft.

Because of this, by the time I took the capstone class of the Editing minor and had to create a mock-up of an actual book, it seemed fairly redundant. I already had seven or eight Leading Edge publications under my belt, and in the process had covered just about every position from slush reader to layout designer to head editor. Due to an anniversary issue in that time, I'd even contacted and negotiated with professional authors like Orson Scott Card and L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

On the social side, almost all of the friends from BYU that I still keep in contact with I met at Leading Edge. They've now gone on to diverse careers as professional authors, editors, technical writers, web designers...a slew of careers that gives me a good starting network that's hard to build up from scratch.

I realize the university is probably going through budget constraints right now, and that requires tightening the belt. I understand that, but please don't let them do it by cutting off the very programs that are the most successful at giving the real-world experience the students need. Best of luck to y'all, and let me know if there is more I can do.

Jason Wallace Former Head Editor Leading Edge Magazine

PS: If you think it would help, you can mention that I'm currently getting a doctorate at Yale. I'm not sure if that would add ethos or sound like posturing, so I'll leave it to your discretion.

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Jared Barneck (former staff)

Hello,

Please do not cut Leading Edge the magazine.

It was the single best part of my BYU experience. It is also a very learning tool and has produced Authors such as Brandon Sanderson, who is probably also outraged that this magazine has been cut.

The magazine has not had the attention it needs to thrive. In 2004, I was inches away from allowing orders online but do to the thick bureaucracy at BYU, I did not finish the task during my tenure and online purchases are now only a recent addition.

This program would support itself easily and probably become a source of extra funds for scholarships if the following was done: 1. Along with the magazine, a story of choice was published online each month. 2. A staff member from the Advertising and Marketing department had a parallel project/club to advertise the book. 3. A 30th anniversary Anthology Best of Leading Edge (not magazine) was published. Get with Tor or Del Rey and they might help publish one. 4. The ability to order submissions online was improved. 5. The ability to submit and article online for $5.00 printing and handling fee is needed. Science Fiction and Fantasy is a big part of today's literature and Leading Edge puts Brigham Young University at the forefront of this genre.

I have a current subscription to Leading Edge and will be renewing my subscription.

Thanks,

Jared Barneck

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Ryan Hopman (former staff)

The Leading Edge

I was a member of the Leading Edge for 4 years. I got involved in the best possible way—my friends dragged me into it. I was not your typical member, however; I was an engineering major instead of an English major. I enjoyed reading listening, and sharing stories. I also enjoyed learning all the various aspects of the publishing world. I am very sad to hear that it is suffering again in the form of budget cuts and lack of support. I consider it the most valuable extracurricular experience of my college career.

I would say the majority of the things learned were directly applicable to anyone writing stories or getting into the publishing industry. Indeed, anybody wanting to do that would find the Leading Edge an invaluable experience. The value of learning about communication and publishing is high even for engineers. From my time at the Leading Edge, I learned about expressing myself in a clear fashion, I learned the drawbacks of including too many or too few details, and I learned about the power of creativity. I also learned about the amount of work involved in creating a professional publication, and became familiar with the tools of the trade and useful tricks used to aid in production. The importance of peer review was also taught.

All of those things are not unique to writers, journalists, or just print publication. Sci- fi and fantasy are a form of creative writing. I hold that all writing is creative (unless it is plagiarism, of course). Just as fantasy authors have to figure out how to describe the political system or a monster unique to that world, so must a historian when discussing ours. Science fiction and engineering are one in the same—the only difference is that one is discussing what he has just imagined, and the other is discussing what he has just created. While different rules exist for technical publications and for novels the goal is the same— clear and professional presentation of one’s work. Creativity is an essential part of that process.

The Leading Edge is one of the longest-running and most successful student publications on BYU campus. The fact that it’s entirely student run is another reason why the experience is so valuable. As a student working on the Leading Edge, you are involved with every aspect of producing the magazine. I recall having an academic advisor that made sure we didn’t stray from the goal or over any boundary lines, however the real work was done by the students. I think the Leading Edge is being undersold on its value and importance and the amount it can help students. I would consider it superior to an internship at a magazine or publishing house, since the students are in charge of everything from finding new stories, dealing with authors, adhering to a publication schedule, and bringing the magazine from concept to print. There is no way a person is going to have a more complete experience elsewhere. It also instills a respect for the process and the skills necessary to produce such a work. These days, with word processors that correct spelling and grammar and automatically format documents, people think that they have all the expertise they need. I have now seen the difference trained people can make, and gladly defer to their expertise.

After graduating from BYU, I went and got my masters in engineering from Georgia Tech. I notice one very important difference between the schools—at BYU, I was given the impression that faculty were foremost concerned with the students’ education. At Georgia

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Tech, we were a resource to help earn money. The professors would be glad to help, if they didn’t have anything more valuable (as in $$$$$) to do. At BYU, the students came first— everything was geared to make sure the students developed the skills necessary to succeed. The equipment wasn’t there because it made money, it was there to help the students to learn. One didn’t preclude the other, but the priorities were clear. I know I certainly appreciated the atmosphere of engaged learning found at BYU.

Perhaps that is the best argument for the Leading Edge. It is a valuable tool to educate. It does so using a medium that crosses all disciplines—sci-fi and fantasy. It is an extremely popular genre, one that has something for everybody. The experience teaches something that everybody could benefit from but most undervalue. The Leading Edge is a fun and effective way to hone indispensable and fundamental skills that are valuable throughout anyone’s career and life. I would be very sorry to see such a fantastic magazine disappear, and hope you will reconsider dropping the funding.

Sincerely, Ryan Hopman

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Dave Doering (former staff)

Fellow Edge-ites:

Congratulations on continuing our 30-year voyage to strange new worlds, seeking out a new life and new visualizations, to boldly craft what no one has read before!!

When I and a small group began the magazine just a little while ago (so it seems), none of us imagined what the next 30 years would bring--national awards, five, six (and many more!) bestselling local writers from its pages, New York publishing careers for others. Wow.

Most importantly, I congratulate you on the same hardy "can do" spirit that got the Leading Edge started. Yes, there's always been money problems. Always been worries for finding new content, new staffers, new art. But the important thing is that--come rain or shine-- there's two new issues every year chockful of fun fantasy and science fiction coming right from our home at BYU.

Some decried the notion of SF/F at BYU and doing a student journal. Why try? What good would it do? Yet now we see that not only did it work, it continues to work wonderfully.

So to Chris, Kristy, Daniel, Bethany, Emily, Tiffany, Sarah, Martha, Nicholas, Daniel T., Nyssa, Josh and Aaron--Thanks again for all your hard work and I look forward to we all celebrating on the 40th and even 50th Anniversary of Leading Edge!

Yours,

Dave Doering Raconteur 801-709-1701

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SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY 4087 JKB, Provo, Utah 84602 [email protected]

Dear Drake,

Thank you for your latest submission. As you know, Leading Edge is a semi-professional journal—not professional. Our primary aims are to help editing students learn their trade and to help new or aspiring authors get a start. This is why we go to the trouble of reading and critiquing multiple times every story we receive. Our editing students get the chance to give advice, and authors get to receive advice where they would usually not, as most professional publishers give no critiques of stories they reject; many publishers reject stories based on the cover letter alone. That is why I have taken the time to write this letter—because were we a professional publisher, I would have rejected your story based on its cover letter. First, it was far too long: a cover letter should not be longer than a page; preferably, it won’t even fill one. All I need from your cover letter is the title and length of your story, with perhaps a brief description of the story’s content, and any previous publishing credits you might have. A long letter seems rambling at best and self- absorbed at worst. Try to avoid talking too much about yourself, your life, or your approach to writing. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person, but this is a professional submission—not a personal ad. I don’t need to know that you might be “a bit mysterious and weird”; nor do I need a definition of programmers’ lingo. Be very careful of spelling and grammar in your letter. Every little mistake reflects poorly on your writing ability. (For instance, it’s “subtle,” not “subtile.”) Keep your writing simple and professional—don’t use slang or laid-back language such as “puke,” or “effin’,” and don’t use emoticons, ever. Even if you spell out the word “smile,” it is odd and unprofessional. Finally and most importantly, never write anything that might offend or irritate your publisher. Even a semi-professional publication like Leading Edge receives hundreds of submissions each year, but only accepts a few. We can afford to toss out any story, even if it is excellent. But if you want to get published, you can’t afford to offend publishers. For example, you began your cover letter by insulting our staff with the implication that the reason they rejected your last story is that it was just too complex or “subtile” for them. Perhaps so. But when I read such an implication, my first impression is that this is an author who has convinced himself that our critiques don’t apply to him; that his story is already what it needs to be. No editor wants to work with an author who won’t listen. In my experience, most authors who think their writing is deep and complex are fooling themselves. You state that you don’t think you can write a simple story. That’s too bad; as far as I’m concerned, if you can’t write something simple, then you definitely won’t be able to write something complex. Near the end of your letter, you share an interesting view of writing guidelines. And you’re right: if you have an “effin’” good reason for not following our guidelines, I will understand. I will also reject your story without a second thought, and wish you luck in finding a publication with less stringent rules. These are the sorts of things that would have caused me, were I editor of a professional publication, to reject your story without even reading it. I hope I have not come off as too arrogant or critical; I really am writing this letter with the hopes that it will be of genuine aid to you in your efforts to be published. But if I do come off as arrogant, remember: publishers can afford to; authors cannot.

Thank you for your interest in Leading Edge, and best of luck.

Sincerely,

Chris Baxter Editor

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Appendix A: My Funding Crisis Letter to the Dean

John R. Rosenberg Dean of the College of Humanities 4002 JFSB Provo, UT 84602

Professor Rosenberg:

I am a student in the College of Humanities currently pursuing a degree in English Language with a minor in Editing. I am considering adding a second minor in Spanish to round out my abilities. I am currently serving as an editor on the student journal Leading Edge. I am writing because of some very distressing news that the staff of Leading Edge received recently from our faculty adviser, Professor Alan Manning. Unknown to us all, our funding has been cut. This shock was as unexpected as it was disheartening. While I do not believe that Leading Edge is any more deserving of funds than any of the other excellent student journals on campus, I am utterly perplexed as to why the College of Humanities would so abruptly abandon the longest-established and most widely read journal of them all. Of course, I do admit that Leading Edge holds a special place in my heart. In fact, Leading Edge is a pivotal factor of why I decided to attend BYU in the first place. I had felt the Spirit directing me towards BYU for some time, but it was finding out that a journal existed where I could get real-world experience editing my favorite genre that confirmed and cemented my choice. The experience has been everything I hoped it would be and more. I have experience reading slush that showed me the writing level of real-world submissions; I know what to expect in a real job now. The process of tracking submissions and deciding what to publish is nearly identical to what I‘m learning about in my ELang 410R class—except that Leading Edge is more focused on helping aspiring writers learn, as a university institution should be. I learned my editing skills in class, it is true, but I‘ve been able to apply them in a real-world setting that involves money here at Leading Edge. I‘ve learned that dedication and consistency are valued as much as, if not more than, my knowledge of The Chicago Manual of Style. This will be just as true when I search for a job after graduation as it is now. Finally, I love Leading Edge so much because this is where I learned what I want to do for the rest of my life: this. I want to edit science fiction and fantasy for a living. I feel compelled to say a few words about science fiction while I‘m writing you. I love science fiction. I understand that many people don‘t, and I respect their right to a different opinion. I‘m not an avid fan of Bronte, and many people love her. But the amazing thing about science fiction is a romance can be set in space. A mystery can take place on Mars. In fact, every and any genre of fiction can be included in science fiction— time travel even gives us historical possibilities. Anything is possible, literally anything—and I use ―literally‖ here with its original meaning.

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Perhaps some people dismiss science fiction as ―unliterary‖ because of a first experience with a less than stellar (excuse the pun) example of the genre. I‘ll admit, Flash Gordon does not have a whole lot of literary value. But at the very least, it gets people to use their imaginations! Let me give you some more germane examples of science fiction and fantasy, coming from the most recent issues of Leading Edge. As we know, ―every thing which inviteth to do good,‖ (Moroni 7:16) is a good thing. A story in our last issue called ―What We Did to Judo,‖ which was written by a BYU student, teaches that treating someone like an actual human being can prevent them from doing atrocious things. The fact that the protagonist has quite literally lost his humanity to technology drives the point home much more poignantly than a character, say, in a wheelchair could. Like all good science fiction, this story invites us to question who we are, and find the divine nature that is cocooned within all of us. Sometimes the best cautionary tales are found on worlds where things don‘t go as they should. ―They Scream When They Hurt‖ in Issue #56 warns us just how far revenge can go if we don‘t stop it, and it‘s told in a voice more engaging than anything found in classical literature. Sometimes we just need to have a laugh, like in ―Decision LZ1527,‖ ―The Poor Man‘s Guide to Ghost Hunting,‖ or ―All This and Brains Too.‖ We are here to entertain as well as to instruct, and Leading Edge does it in a way reflects BYU standards. My favorite story that I‘ve ever worked on is still the cover story for Issue #58, ―Redemption Songs.‖ It‘s about beauty, it‘s about trust, and most of all it‘s about love that is ―stronger than the cords of death‖ (see D&C 121:43-4). It still gives me a genuine catharsis every time I read it. What could be more worthy of print than a story like that? All these worlds bring me to the aspect of speculative fiction that I love most: the sheer measure of creation that is involved in writing them. What does God do? He creates. He creates worlds without end. As editors, we help these embryonic world- creators make their worlds plausible. A good science fiction writer has to be more academic even than writers of fiction set in the present day. Both must do research, but the science fiction writer (and by extension, editor) has to make sure that his science is as accurate as humanly possible (see our upcoming story ―Crunch Time‖) or he will not be taken seriously. All writers must write what they know, but science fiction writers must take what they know of humanity and combine it with what could be. And therein lies the beauty of the genre. Contemporary fiction deals with what can be; historical fiction imagines what could have been, but only science fiction expands our horizons to can still become. Our present-day world is very much the science fiction of Jules Verne‘s day. In fact, it‘s probably stranger. No one but the prophets may know for sure what the future will be like in the years before the Second Coming, but we science fiction writers have some pretty good guesses. And to share them, we create the worlds that could be. Worlds without end. What could possibly be more important for the university whose mission ―is to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life‖ to support than this?

Respectfully and sorrowfully yours,

Daniel Friend Editor, Leading Edge Magazine

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