With a little more than a month before the festival, this is crunch time. Publications must be at the printer...like right now. In order to have all five publications ready (five!), authors, artists, designers, and editors have been logging in some very long hours lately. 

This delightful photograph of Richard and Claudia Bushman (taken by Jon Moe) is about as perfect a symbol as I can think of to explain what drives the Mormon Arts Center.  It's about love--for art, but love for the people making it, viewing it, studying it, supporting it, and bringing it to the limelight, too. I've noticed over the couple of years working on these projects that this affection for each other is a powerful buoying force. When one of us is overwhelmed and down, another senses it and comes to the rescue. 

Claudia Bushman is fond of telling us all about the value of publication. This makes perfect sense, given that she's written a mountain of books herself, but she was speaking more directly to the need to document history as it's happening. One of the Mormon Arts Center's priorities is publishing: old school, hold in your hand, turn-a-page books. Anybody who's ever written a book and seen it in print understands the thrill of it, but few can imagine what goes into making an object like that.

It's been fun to finally show people a detailed listing of what's up for the Festival. Over the last week, we've placed posters and a couple of thousand takeaway cards with many people in local church congregations near New York City. I like to watch their reactions to the cards. They invariably turn to the listing of events and are taken aback at the breadth of it all.