Briana Cullimore’s desire to be healthy led to a continuing struggle with multiple eating disorders and depression. She discusses using restriction/food as a coping mechanism, fighting with her parents over a treatment plan, coming to terms with needing help, and using the Atonement to help repair her parental relationship. She has seen her attitude change from anger to gratitude for her trials and experiences and offers insights into why certain aspects of Mormon culture might make some girls and women susceptible to eating disorders. When did your eating disorder begin? It started the summer of 2011, before my junior year of high school. I had gained weight in the winter, which we later found out was because of a thyroid problem. Over the summer I worked out and ate healthy to lose the weight. After losing the amount I had gained in the winter, I felt good so I just decided to keep up the pattern. Eventually I started taking it to the extreme. I would exercise 3-4 times a day and would only eat protein and vegetables. Around the time that school started my parents were getting worried because I was at a pretty low weight and my thoughts were completely consumed by working out and eating healthy. I became paranoid about anything I ate and would freak out if I had any sort of carbs. On top of that I was a perfectionist 4.0 student taking hard classes at school because I knew my junior year was important for college. And I was going to early morning seminary. Trying to balance school, seminary, training for sports, working out, and being hyper focused about what I ate became too overwhelming and I would lash out at my family because I had so much on my plate and on my mind. I was an emotional wreck with terrible mood swings. My parents wouldn’t let this go on, so they decided that the only option was to go to an eating disorder clinic. Do you have a negative opinion of eating disorder clinics because you felt like they treated you badly, or they didn’t listen to you or you were just in a space where you felt “don’t tell me what to eat, don’t tell me what to do”? I have a negative opinion of eating disorder clinics because I felt like they didn’t have my best interests at heart. At this point I didn’t think I had an eating disorder. I wasn’t fasting, I was just eating healthy and working out a lot. So I was being forced to go to this clinic very much against my will. When they took my initial vitals, I weighed 95 pounds (I am 5’5) and had a heart rate of 37. They wanted to admit me to inpatient right on the spot because they said my heart could give out at any moment. This obviously scared my parents. They stopped listening to me and only listened to what the eating disorder clinic people told them about me. Nobody ever included me in the decisions that were being made because they said I was thinking irrationally because of my eating disorder. It was a miracle that I convinced them to not admit me to inpatient, and instead to intensive outpatient. But in the following weeks they continued to believe that I needed to go to inpatient and would continually threaten to send me there if I didn’t gain weight fast. I didn’t want to go to inpatient because it would mean that I would miss school, and I couldn’t miss school. My mom said that I might have to repeat my junior year. As you can imagine, that made me extremely upset and was not an option in my mind. And it drove the wedge deeper between my parents and me. I didn’t know what to do because the amounts that I kept having to gain before each check-in kept getting higher and higher. I told the eating disorder clinic people and my parents that I would gain weight, but I wanted to do it in a healthy way because I knew that if I started eating really unhealthy, I wouldn’t be able to stop. But nobody believed me. And that’s exactly what ended up happening. Briana Cullimore with Her Mother, Soraya Over winter break they said that if I didn’t gain a huge amount of weight by the next checkup, I would be admitted over Christmas. So I started binging. I ate horribly and I ate a ton. And when I had my checkup, they commended me for what I had done. They wanted me to keep doing it. But at that point, I would have done it anyway. The rubber band had snapped, and my life has never been stable since. Because when I snapped, all forms of self-control and will power snapped with it. So I blamed the eating disorder clinic for this new eating disorder that I had developed, for destroying any form of will power I had, and for turning my parents against me and convincing them that this was the only way for me to get better. I know that’s common, going from restricting in whatever form, it’s like the pendulum swings to the direct opposite of that. Yeah, I think it’s difficult to go from restricting to eating whatever you want so quickly. And I knew about that pendulum, and I voiced my concern many times to the eating disorder clinic and to my parents, but nobody believed that would happen to me. The reason I would be in a horrible mood is because I wanted to eat those things like cinnamon rolls and pasta and cereal. But my self-restraint was incredibly strong, and so I refused to give into those cravings. But the pressure of gaining weight back so fast became too much, and my parents and the clinic were forcing me to eat these unhealthy things. So I snapped. And I went to the complete opposite of the spectrum. After restricting for so long, I couldn’t stop eating unhealthy things Often food, drugs, or other behaviors are used as a self-medication or coping mechanism for stressors or anxiety. What do you think is underneath your situation? Have you gotten to that space yet? I think for me it was my need to feel in control of things that were going on. I’m a perfectionist and it’s hard for me to not feel in control of the things going on around me. I don’t like unpredictability. There was a lot of change happening in my life, and I don’t do super well with change. With everything that was happening and maybe with going into a new grade, and with a lot of big decisions coming up with college and moving out, I think that food became something that I could control really well. The amount of time I put in towards working out and eating healthy was directly correlating to the results I was getting. If I worked hard, then I lost weight. I liked how simple the equation was. I liked being able to control what I ate and how I exercised because it was one of the few things I had complete control over. I think binging became sort of this other form of coping mechanism for anxiety. When I was anorexic, being very controlled and knowing what was going to happen helped me, because that’s how I always operated my life. But when I started binging it became this outlet that “You know, I’m super stressed out and freaking out about stuff, there’s food.” I have always had a big sweet tooth, so it tasted good and made me feel better for the time being. So food went from being an outlet for control to a crutch. How has your eating disorder affected your daily life, including your schoolwork? When my eating disorder switched from anorexia to binge eating, I felt like a large part of me, the strict, rigid part that could control things and get things done, had been torn out. When that rubber band snapped, it didn’t just snap with my health, it snapped with everything that I did in terms of lifestyle, my outlook on my life, my time, and my perception of myself. For a while I tried balancing the two – the very strict aspect of my life requiring the utmost willpower, and this very haphazard and unpredictable aspect of my life that resulted from having absolutely no willpower. As a perfectionist, I had always been on top of things, never got less than an A in school. After a while, though, I finally couldn’t keep balancing both, and I ended up withdrawing from fall semester my sophomore year of college. All amount of willpower was completely drained, and I stopped caring about school. I honestly thought I would never go back. My parents got scared when they discovered I hadn’t been going to my classes because this was so unlike me. They both came to Utah on separate occasions to try to get me to go back. But in my mind, I felt like there was no chance that I could repair what had been broken. My anorexic lifestyle could still fall in line with being productive, whereas when I binged, it was the exact opposite. It also tremendously hurt my self-esteem. I went from being able to fit into whatever I wanted to suddenly not being able to fit into anything. At my heaviest I had gained 75 pounds. That’s almost double what I used to weigh. I was fat and embarrassed about my appearance. I wore baggy clothes and never wanted to go out or be around other people. I was depressed and frustrated that I had gotten to this point, that I had no willpower, and felt absolutely no self-worth. How did it affect your spirituality and relationship with God? It affected it a lot. The whole time that I’ve been on this journey I was very frustrated with God. I didn’t understand why he was having me go through this. Probably more so with the binging, because with the binging came very severe depression. Over the last four years I’ve gone up and down with weight a lot, but whenever I start binging again and stumble, I have these moments where I feel like I can’t do it anymore. I felt like God wasn’t answering my prayers and wasn’t helping me when I felt like I was doing everything I should be doing. So whenever I would stumble, I drifted further and further away from the church and started making more and more mistakes that prevented me from feeling the spirit. At various points in time I stopped going to church because I didn’t feel like I was getting any benefit for going. I thought, why should I go to church and do good things when I’m just going to have to continue to deal with the same trial. I stopped relying on Heavenly Father and just fell into a vicious pattern of more sin, depression, and more distance from Him. At what point did you realize that you needed help? I was feeling so depressed and hopeless. I had such a bad relationship with food and honestly didn’t know what else to do. I had been completely humbled and had no pride left. I knew that other people had received help from Heavenly Father, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try one more time. So I poured my whole heart to Him and begged for help. I couldn’t continue to live this way anymore. What have you learned during this process? I’ve learned a lot about the nature of trials and have been able to understand the true scope of the Atonement. I’ve become more empathetic towards the things that people go through. I’ve experienced frustration, embarrassment, hopelessness, pain, and guilt. It has changed the way I view other people and gives me a greater appreciation for those who have gotten through hard times. Although these last few years have been extremely difficult, it has made me who I am today. I always think of that scripture in which Eve talks about how, if we never experience pain, we would never be able to experience joy and happiness, and that’s so true. I’ve experienced my lowest of lows, and lots of negative things, but consequently, I can appreciate certain things in life that I have taken for granted for so long. I have become so much more grateful for what I’ve been given and for the people that have come into my life. I have been able to notice the tender mercies in my life so much more. When I pray I am sometimes to the point of getting emotional because I could have been in a situation where I could’ve had a completely different trial, and I don’t know how I would have gone through that. It is astounding to me how much Heavenly Father knows each of us. What have you learned about the Atonement? I’ve gained a much stronger testimony of the Atonement throughout this whole process. I think what strengthened it the most was experiencing the enabling power of the Atonement. I used to only think of the Atonement when I sinned and needed to repent. But I because of the eating disorder experience, I realized that I was holding onto a lot of anger, frustration, and guilt. I couldn’t fully repair my relationship with my parents because I still couldn’t forgive them for the things with the eating disorder clinic. They had apologized many times, and I knew they truly felt bad and wished they would have handled the situation differently. I felt bad because I wanted to forgive them, but I kept blaming them for the situation I was in, which meant I hadn’t moved past it. I had been praying to be able to let go of that bitterness. Briana Cullimore I was asked to prepare to give a talk on this past Easter. The topic was the Atonement. As I was researching the enabling power of the Atonement, I started getting really emotional because I realized that this was how I was supposed to relieve that burden of anger towards my parents, as well as the burden of guilt that I continually put on myself whenever I make a mistake. Christ suffered for us so that he could take away our sins. If we repent we are giving that to Him. But that means also giving him the guilt that we feel and the anger we might have towards other people. Christ suffered so we don’t have to suffer. So why am I forcing this burden on myself when there is someone who wants to carry it for us? It was such a revelation for me and allowed me to truly move forward. I know you’re still in the process, but how have you found healing as you move forward? One of the big things is that I keep telling myself that this is a process. Life is truly a journey, as cliché as that is. In the past, if I would make a mistake and maybe binge one day, I would say, “well, I screwed up,” and would binge for the rest of the week. I think that goes back to punishing myself for the things that I did. Now I’ve really taken comfort in the fact that I still have a long life to live. If one day I mess up then it’s one day, and I can just keep getting back on the path. The Atonement has been huge to be able to forget about the things of the past and really move on. I’ve taken a lot of comfort in thinking about how I can help the Lord with these gifts he’s given me, and how I am supposed to help other people. Maybe in the past I would think it would be nice to be the weight that I want and not have an unhealthy relationship with food, but that was more of a selfish reason. Now I want to help other people with the things they struggle with, and I can’t do that until I get my stuff in order. What advice would you give to girls who might be struggling with an eating disorder? Do you feel like there are any cultural aspects particular to Mormonism that would predispose girls to eating disorders? I think that within the Mormon culture, there is a striving towards perfection, or to make it look like someone is perfect. Oftentimes we don’t like to admit that we are struggling with something and we put on a persona that everything is okay. I didn’t like to admit like there was something wrong with me. But holding everything inside really doesn’t help anyone. Admitting that you need help gives you the opportunity to get help and gives someone else the opportunity to help you. And if they look at you differently, then that’s their problem and not yours. It has taken me a really long time to get to the point where I realize that I need to stop caring about what other people think about me and if they look at me differently based on the things that I struggle with. Also, one of the reasons we are given trials is so that we can grow and so that we can help others. And one of the best ways to help others is sharing your experience and how you got through it. I have been so blessed to have the gospel in my life to give me this unique, eternal perspective about trials. It gives me purposed to keep evolving and to keep improving. If I had any advice to give to people who might be struggling with an eating disorder, it would be to stay close to your Heavenly Father through the entire process. Our purpose on this earth is to show Heavenly Father that no matter what we are going through, we will continue to stay close to Him. Heavenly Father wants to help you, but He can’t do that unless we ask Him for help. At A Glance Name: Briana Cullimore Location: St. Louis, Missouri Age: 21 Education: At BYU studying social studies teaching Favorite Hymn: If You Could Hie to Kolob Interview Produced by Nollie Haws

Carly Sessions, an Arizona native, found herself unemployed and bored after college and a year-long teaching internship. On a whim she decided to apply for law school with her husband. It was there that her passion for immigration law was ignited. Carly discusses her journey to become a lawyer, and the heartbreaking and often frustrating challenges it brings at work, home, and even at church. She is grateful for the opportunities God has given her to help his children while upholding the Church’s stance on immigration. How did you go from teaching to being a lawyer? That’s a great question. And I still ask myself that. In high school, I always said that I was going to go to law school. And in high school it was just because I was young and I was good at history and English. In my mind, people who were good at history and English go to law school and people who were good at math and science went to med school. And I wasn’t good at math and science so I was going to go to law school. Then I went to BYU and I decided to actually pursue teaching. I taught for a year, in Utah, during my first year of marriage to David. He was still at BYU. My first year of teaching was an internship. They paid me half a teacher’s salary and it counted as my student teaching, so I wasn’t technically licensed yet, but I did all the work of a first year teacher. I was hoping I would continue at that same school, that they’d be able to hire me and pay me a full salary — and then the recession hit. Utah had no money for teachers whatsoever so they had to replace me with another intern. Dave was still in school, so it’s not like we could move somewhere and I could teach somewhere else. I was like, “Man, what do I do now?” Dave was studying for the LSAT and so I thought, eh, I’ll just go to law school with David. I was kind of joking, but decided I’d at least take the LSAT. Carly Sessions and Her Husband He and I studied for the LSAT together. I took the LSAT and got a great score. Even at that point, I still wasn’t sure that I was going to go to law school. But then I got that great score, and thought, well, I might as well apply to some places. The first place I applied was to GW Law. It was one of our top choices and I got a full-ride scholarship. So I was like, “Okay.” I feel like God directs me. He opens one little door at a time. I told God, “I’m going to need a real clear indication if you want me to go to law school,” and then I got in, got a full-ride scholarship, David got into the same school, and it was one of our top choices. It felt clear that the answer was “Yes. If this is something you want, go for it. The doors are open to you.” So that’s how I went from teaching to being a lawyer. I was bored that summer. I didn’t have a job, so I studied for the LSAT. What did your mom and dad say when you told them you were going to law school? I was driving home from teaching high school the day that my principal told me they weren’t going to be able to renew my contract, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, when I had the thought “I should just go to law school with David.” Well, David was in class so I immediately called my mom, and when I told her my idea, she said, “That’s funny I just had the exact same thought.” So, the short answer is that they were very supportive. Did you go on a mission? I did. I went on a mission to Brazil halfway through college. Went to two years of undergrad, came back and had one year and then my student teaching year. I went to Florianopolis, in southern Brazil. If you’ve heard of it, I’ll give you a gold star because no one has ever heard of it! Do you have to pick a major while you’re in law school? Carly: No, you don’t have to pick a major. Most people find things they’re interested in and focus their course work on something specific, but you don’t have to. I went to law school with my background in education thinking I either wanted to be involved in educational law or immigration or international law of some sort. I think I was interested in immigration law because of my mission, but also when I taught high school I had a couple of undocumented students that I ended up helping a lot after school. They would come in and I would help them with their work. I remember one said to me once, “Why should I even try in high school? There’s nothing available to me. I don’t have my papers. I’m undocumented. What’s the point of even graduating high school?” It was heartbreaking. I also grew up in Arizona. Immigration is a hot button issue in Arizona, and so it was always on my mind and something I was very passionate about, very interested in. My first summer in law school I did two internships. I did one in education law and I did one in immigration. I hated my education one. It was boring! I loved the internship I did with immigration law. I don’t speak Spanish — I’m still learning. So you might ask why am I doing immigration law if I don’t speak Spanish? There are plenty of immigrants who aren’t Spanish speaking, but still I am learning it so I can be a better immigration lawyer. Tell me about your job and what you do and what your work is like. Carly: Sure. I graduated law school in May of 2014. I didn’t work much at all that first year. I was studying for the Bar. So I studied for and passed the bar that summer. Literally right after I finished the bar I found out I was pregnant with Anna. I had a baby on the way and I had Bennett already who was still a baby. So I had these two babies! I didn’t work that first year. But then, like I said, God always opens the right doors at the right times. Just two weeks after Anna was born, I got a call from a previous professor. He said, “Hey, I’ve got a friend who’s looking for someone to do some part-time immigration work. And they’re out by you, near Annapolis. Are you interested?” I was like, “Umm, yeah, actually. That sounds pretty ideal.” So I started that way and have been doing that. I currently have some of my own clients and I work for an organization called Kids in Need of Defense or KIND. They provide representation for immigrant children who arrive in the United States without parents — unaccompanied children. Are their parents here? Carly: Generally they’re coming to reunite with one or both parents. But when they made the journey here and when they got to the border they didn’t have parents and a lot of them don’t have parents at all. They’ll come here and live with a brother or sister or aunt or uncle. But the vast majority of them are coming to reunite with a parent. Where are your clients coming from? Carly: Central America. All my clients right now are from El Salvador or Guatemala. The clients with KIND, some of them might be from Honduras. The vast majority of them are children. Why are they immigrating to the United States? Carly: Well, take El Salvador. El Salvador and Guatemala are overridden with civil strife right now. The gangs basically run the country. If you are a teenager—and a poor teenager, which many of them are — you’re basically taking your life in your hands just to go to school. The gangs will charge people to go to school. They’ll stand outside the schools and make kids pay money to go into the school. Girls are targeted to become gang members’ girlfriends, which is basically just sex slavery. It’s basically you do or die. They’re taking their life in their hands to live in their country. Many of them have family members who live here and so despite how arduous the journey is to come here… what these kids have been through just to make the journey is heartbreaking. They are willing to take that risk and make that journey through Central America, through Mexico, and across the border because back home is so much worse. And then to come here to a country where they don’t speak the language, where they don’t know many people, where they can be kicked out at any time. They have no status here. They’re living in fear, living in shadows, working under the table, going to school, with what future ahead of them? That’s still better. That’s still a better option for them than the death threats and the rape and the drugs and the gang violence they’re facing in their home country. How do they get here? Carly: It costs thousands and thousands of dollars. A lot of their family members will go into huge debts to be able to pay a coyote, a guide, to bring them. They will take buses or cars through Central America. Mexico has really stepped up its border security and so a lot of kids aren’t riding the train anymore. It used to be that they could jump on a giant train called La Bestia, The Beast, that went straight through Mexico and they would ride on the top of it. Kids were dying all the time doing this because they would get knocked off, gangs would target them, people would be blackmailed on this train. But it went fast and it went all the way through Mexico. What they do now is get out at the border, between Guatemala and Mexico, they’ll sneak across that border and then they’ll get on a bus or car on the other side that will bring them up through Mexico. Then once they get to the U.S. border, they’ll do the same thing. You know, they’ll get out. They’ll walk across. They’ll sneak across. Most of them are caught and apprehended and put into immigration court. Immigration court is where they’re having to ask the judge to let them stay. There’s very few ways they’re allowed to stay, but they’re trying to prove that they qualify for one of those ways. Otherwise, they’ll be deported back to their home country. What happens if they are deported back to their country? Carly: They’re living in hiding, basically. Most of them drop out of school. If you’re a woman or a girl you don’t go out of the house unaccompanied. You live in poverty. You basically just try and survive. And there’s been several cases of people who have been deported and then killed. So it’s an extremely dangerous situation for Central Americans right now. They are, in my opinion, refugees in every sense of the word. They are fleeing extreme violence. They’re fleeing threats to their lives. They are being forced out of their country and trying to make a new life in a safe place. Not all immigrants are fleeing their countries to find a better life. There are immigrants who are coming here and committing terrible crimes, which makes it hard for people to know whether to build walls or extend their hands. How do we ensure our safety while helping migrants be safe? Carly: That is a really important point and I’m so glad you brought it up. There are absolutely people who come into the United States with bad intent. Our own citizens commit plenty of crimes and acts of terror, and we certainly want to protect ourselves from any additional threats. However, huge problems arise when people assume that any or all immigrants are a threat to our safety – or even that Americans who look like they might be immigrants, for that matter, are bad people. In my opinion, if a criminal or terrorist wants to find a way into the United States, a wall on the southern border is not going to stop them. The cost of a wall, and the harm it does to foreign relations, far outweigh any benefit it might produce. So how do we protect ourselves? We continue to enforce our laws and the systems already in place that are designed to keep out bad actors. I am very much in favor of deporting violent criminals. I am very much in favor of the extreme vetting that already takes place before people are allowed to come here legally. But we should not start with an assumption that immigrants are bad. I believe Satan uses fear and anger to make people feel threatened so they don’t have any room left in their hearts for faith, charity, or humility, and unfortunately I think we are seeing so much of that in people’s attitudes towards immigrants in the United States today. How do you still have hope? How do you give your clients hope? Carly: It’s really difficult. It’s really difficult. Honestly for a lot of them, and this puts a lot of pressure on me obviously, but just having an attorney gives them so much hope. The fact that they know, “Well I’ve got somebody on my side who understands this work.” You know, they understand how difficult it is. They understand that I’m not a miracle worker and I can’t guarantee anything. So they are living in a constant state of, “What’s going to happen to me and what does my future hold?” But I feel like when they come to meet with me that is their source of hope. They know they have an advocate. They’ve got somebody on their side who’s working hard. And that’s what I try to focus on. I try to focus on doing my job, doing the best I can. But yeah, there are sleepless nights. And there are huge disappointments. There was a case — I’m going to start crying — that I lost last year. I came home and I stayed in bed for two days because I just felt awful. I felt sick. It’s a woman who’s got a son my son’s age. We’re appealing it and her case isn’t over yet, but just that setback did take a toll on me, mentally, emotionally, physically. But I feel like it’s such important work that someone’s got to do it. I do have to take care of myself. I have to take care of my family, and my relationships. And make sure that I am taking care of myself so that I am able to help them. Because if I’m not taking care of myself then I’m of no use to anyone. Is your family able to help you get out of a work-related funk? Carly: Yeah. David is my equal partner in every sense of the word. He’s my best friend. He’s amazing. I feel very lucky I’ve got him as a partner and as a support. He’s very supportive of my work. I’ve probably spent more money than I’ve made, but he’s very supportive of that because he understands how important the work is. It’s important to him and he knows how important it is to me. He helps. My kids, some days they help, some days they don’t. I’ll be honest! Carly Sessions and Her Family How do you balance your roles as wife, mother, lawyer, primary teacher, and friend? Carly: Oh, that is the million dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t a lot of the time. It is a constant struggle to feel that I’m giving everyone the time and attention they need and deserve, including myself. And so, some days I’m more mother than I am attorney. And some days I’m more attorney than I am mother. It changes on a day to day basis. So I try to ask myself, what’s the most important thing for me to do right now and then how does that fit into the overall balance of what I’ve been doing lately? But that is how you balance it, right? Priorities come first. Carly: Right. You take it a day at a time and a lot of prayer and a lot of re-evaluation — constantly asking “am I doing this right?” which can be discouraging and can feel frustrating, but I feel like when God’s your partner, He’ll help you. He’ll give you what you need when you need it to be able to do all of the things He has asked you to do. I feel like he’s done that with me. Do you ever feel that He’s led you specifically in a case? Carly: I’m sure he has. I feel like when I’m doing what I know I’m supposed to be doing, then God is in the details whether I realize it or not. So I can’t point to something specific, but I’m sure he has. I mean, my clients are his children just as much as I’m his child. He has even more interest in their well-being than I do. And I pray for my clients, I pray about my cases, “How should I approach this? What should I do in this legal situation?” You know Jesus is the ultimate advocate. And so he understands how to advocate for people. I definitely pray and ask for direction. I’m positive that the thoughts I have and the actions I take are inspired and directed by him. Do you believe or feel your job is in alignment with the church’s stance on immigration? Carly: Absolutely. I know the church has been very careful not to get political as much as possible. There’s something called the Utah Compact, it was released probably 6 or 7 years ago at this point. It lays out general guidelines for how they believe the United States should approach immigration and it was signed by the church. I am very much in line with what it says in there about keeping families together, helping people to square themselves with the law, being humane in our approach toward them, and understanding their stories. So, yeah. I do feel like I’m in alignment with what the church has said. Within the LDS Church’s own history is a great story of migration, and fleeing an extermination order. Carly: We know what it’s like to be a religious refugee. We know what that means. I think we understand how the church has been strengthened and made better by various cultures contributing. As the church has spread throughout the world, it’s been made stronger, it’s been made better. The doctrine and the applications of the gospel in people’s lives have been more meaningful and deeper as we’re able to take them to various cultures. I think that we get it. Hopefully we get it. Have you ever received pushback from ward members who don’t agree with you on immigration? If so, does that test your testimony? Carly: Yes. That definitely tests my testimony. The recent election was very difficult for me because it felt very personal. And there were people who I love and respect and I know that they voted differently than I did. To know that they are smart, compassionate, good people—how could they vote for an immigration policy that is far from smart and far from compassionate? It made it very difficult for me to have the Christ-like love that I need to have for people. And that’s on me. It’s on me to have Christ-like love for people. But yes, it did test that.My testimony of the Savior, my testimony of my Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother’s love for me, people can’t take that away from me. That’s my personal relationship and so outside influences can’t really test that, but yes I do struggle to go to church with those who don’t agree with me on immigration. And that’s just how it is. And like I said, I know that’s on me and that I need to learn more Christ-like love and charity for them, but it is extremely difficult. Have you had pushback? Carly: Yes. This was interesting. When I was deciding to go to law school, we lived in Provo, Utah. I was the Relief Society President in my ward — it was a family ward, but there were a lot of newlyweds. I did get a lot of pushback about the decision to go to law school. People saying things like, “Oh, you’re going to law school? Well, when are you going to start your family? Or, “Well, what does that mean? Is your testimony going to be strong enough to go to law school?” And then I got to law school, and was one of very few Mormon women in there. My first year there was one other, and then one of my dearest friends was a year behind me. So at any given time there were two or three of us when I was in law school. And that was difficult. It didn’t test my testimony in any way, but it did put a little pressure on me, honestly. To feel like, “Okay, I’m the only Mormon woman here, I’ve got to stand up for what I believe in and I have to represent Mormon women well because I’m it. People will get their opinion of Mormon women by looking at me.” My ward in Virginia that we attended when we were in law school was wonderful. I didn’t get any sort of “What, you’re in law school?” kind of reaction from them. It was full of women who balanced motherhood and careers and were pursuing higher education. But yeah, that ward in Provo definitely gave me some pushback. It was confusing, very confusing at the time. Between God’s answers and cultural and outside pressures it was hard for me to make the decision to go to law school because I wasn’t sure which was which. I confused the opinions of men versus the opinions of God. It got a little bit muddled in my mind. I wasn’t sure because the opinions of men were coming from people from church. Carly Sessions I do feel like God has led me here. I feel like there are some lines in my Patriarchal Blessing that I feel have become directly applicable to the work that I’m doing. I feel like being an immigration lawyer will allow me to build God’s kingdom in unique ways and it already has. Is there anything you’d want people to know about immigration? Carly: Sure. Can I say two things? Yes. Carly: And the first one has nothing to do with immigration, but if there was one thing I would want people, especially Mormon women to know, it would be to trust the personal revelation that you’ve been given. You are entitled to revelation about the direction of your life and how to balance all the responsibilities that God has for you and the plans that He has for you. And it will look different for everyone. It will look very different for everyone. So trust what God has told you and trust your heart and your instinct and follow your dreams. God wants you to follow your dreams and wants you to build the beautiful life that you have imagined. And will support you and open the doors for you as you seek after good things (as it says in the 13th Article of Faith). Trust that personal revelation that He will give you and trust in His ability to lead you and guide you in every step of the way. That’s what I would say to Mormon women. The thing that I would say regarding immigration, is just to remember that we are all children of the same God. It doesn’t matter where we come from. It doesn’t matter what languages we speak. It doesn’t matter our socio-economic status or our education level. God loves the poor, uneducated woman from El Salvador as much as He loves the college educated, and the rich. He loves each and every person the same. At A Glance Name: Carly Sessions Married: Yes Occupation: Lawyer Interview Produced by Leslie Schwartz-Leeper

Deborah Soderholm married at 19 and was widowed at age 30 when her husband died from suicide. She continued her beloved teaching job as she waded through shock and grief, but chose to look to the future and vowed not to let the experience be a dark cloud over the lives of her two daughters. Deborah eventually reconnected with her “Superman,” a family friend whose wife died of leukemia, leaving him with two small children. They married and she became a stay-at-home mom to their blended family, for the first time in nine years. Deborah’s guiding philosophy now is to seize the day by developing talents and pursuing passions that create joy. How did you meet Red Hawk? I met Red Hawk when I interviewed him for a paper I was doing on Native Americans. I met him here in Williamsburg when I was only 18 years old. He was larger than life and full of generosity. There is no one like him. He was handsome, talented, and friendly to everyone. We were married for 11 years. We were going through some marital problems and I never thought that I would experience such a nightmare. I honestly didn’t know he was mentally ill until after he died. I didn’t see the signs then and I discovered too late to do anything. He died from suicide on November 25, 2011. We learn in support group that we don’t say “committed suicide.” It is an illness just like anything else but it affects the mind. He was in a very dark place, but I never thought that he would hurt himself. So when he did, it was an extreme shock to me and my family. He left me and our two beautiful daughters who were three and six at the time. Deborah Soderholm's Two Daughters with Their Father, Red Hawk What were the circumstances surrounding his death? We were apart over Thanksgiving weekend… apparently, he had planned out his entire suicide, his exit to the other side. I’ve never come across any other story, when I meet people who are survivors of suicide loss, quite like mine. He went to our ward building and had called members of the bishopric and said he was going to hurt himself and somehow between that conversation and when they arrived he had already taken his life. . He had packed up all of his clothes and gotten them out of our home. He had thought of everything so that I wouldn’t be the one to find him. I still to this day don’t know how the bishop and counselor have dealt with this because there was very little contact with them afterwards. I found out when police came to my door. I was at my parents’ at the time. I was screaming, and my mother was behind me and grabbed me and I remember her holding me for hours. I don’t even remember sleeping that night. The next day, I remember thinking that my girls’ lives are changed forever and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock. I was so in shock that I developed a stutter for a week, and I’ve never stuttered in my life. I think my brain couldn’t comprehend that he was gone. Deborah Soderholm's Deceased Husband, Red Hawk Another member of my parents’ ward who is a therapist came over and helped me figure out what the narrative would be. You can’t lie to children in a situation like this. Later that day I told the girls. The hardest thing I had to do was tell them that their daddy had died and that his brain was sick. That’s how we framed it. As they’ve gotten older, I’ve told them a little bit more to the story as it’s come up. What was the grieving process like for you? What were your emotions? Grief is a very hard thing to bear. I feel like it’s this thing that you carry and it hits you and you have no control over it. I got connected with a grief counselor, which was tremendously helpful because she helped me work through these feelings and the spontaneous crying. How to deal with the fact that it’s ok to be sad and things are going to be different and every first is going to sting without him. So it’s hard. People at church brought some meals but I didn’t go to church immediately afterward, I would say I took a little break. Not that I didn’t want to go to go to church, but it just didn’t feel right. It’s like an explosion in your life. You’re trying to pick up the pieces as you’re healing and dealing with things. I felt like I was continually getting punched in the gut or felt like I had a wound that kept getting ripped back open as I dealt with the aftermath I became a widow at the age of 30 and I had my girls to take care of. Throughout all of that, my priority was the girls. I thought, “I will not let this be a dark cloud over our lives. I want them to not suffer from this.” For many people, surviving the loss of a loved one to suicide becomes all-encompassing. So they, my girls, got me through. Deborah Soderholm and Her Daughters I also continued to work. I was teaching at a private school in Maryland and I only missed two weeks of work. I went back after the Christmas break. I remember crying that first day back, because everything was still going on, but everything felt different. So I threw myself into teaching and work and that was a great community. I think my church family still didn’t really know what to do. After a while I said to them, “I don’t like having dinner in my home and sitting down at the table with my girls because there’s an empty chair, and I have to be reminded of that every single dinner.” I would eat standing up and let the girls sit down and eat. I said, “Can you please invite us over for dinner? We want to be with people.” So they did that. One sister, just a couple weeks after he died said, “Come sing with me at a nursing home.” She played the piano and I would sing carols because I love to sing. That helped. That was a distraction. There was a while, a long time where I didn’t feel like praying. Not that I was mad at God, because not once did I ever blame God for this. I knew this was not Him, this was other dark forces and mental illness. I just couldn’t bring myself to connect to things on the other side. But yet, I never lost my faith in Heavenly Father helping me through it. So even though I wasn’t really going to church, I felt Him carry me through a lot of the aftermath. Tell me more about how you supported the girls. What are some of the things you did to make life seem more “normal”? I got grief books for kids and we would read them and try to talk about death. For each of these things that I would do, I would be thinking “I can’t believe I have to do this.” Everything was so sad and new and unbelievable. I enrolled my oldest daughter in a camp for children who had lost a parent and she learned some coping techniques. They did some really great exercises at the camp like lighting a candle or making a memory book and releasing balloons. Those are things we’ve continued to do over the years. They have special books with pictures of their daddy and them. I don’t want them to ever forget him and how much he loved them, because he really did. We visit his grave a few times a year. As things come up, we talk about them in a healthy way. I don’t shy away from that. But everything is age appropriate. We also went on some nice vacations together, just to get away. We took a trip out West to the Grand Canyon, visited friends and family, and made new memories together. We still do special trips. Now we do trips as a big family. At what point did you know that you wanted to get remarried? I was only 30. I thought that I would like to get married again down the road. I wanted to have a family, but I didn’t really have a timeline on it. I was just trying to find peace for about a year afterwards. I made a lot of decisions on my own that I had never made before. It felt like I had taken care of the girls well, and I had a good job. But I do remember asking and praying for a Superman. I remember saying to my kids and sister, “I need a Superman. Someone who’s going to understand what I’ve been through and who gets it but who’s going to be there for me. I just need a great guy, who is good at everything.” When I said I prayed for Superman, the night I met up with Patrick for the first time, and I hadn’t seen him in like 10 years, he was wearing a Superman shirt and a Superman belt buckle. it’s just very fitting for him because he’s such a strong person and so wonderful. And he is good at everything he does! Deborah Soderholm and Her Family How did you meet (now-husband) Patrick? That was a process of getting reacquainted with someone I already knew, but never thinking he would become my husband. My sister called and told me that Patrick’s wife had passed about 6 months prior. He had moved back to Williamsburg with his two little ones and he was really grieving. She said since I had been through the loss of a spouse, I should probably call him because I could relate to him more than anybody else. He had been friends with my brother, and I had been friends with his brothers. So I called him and we talked and he was able to release a lot of things and I understood a lot of things he was talking about. I think it was very therapeutic, and I eventually went down to Williamsburg. I had been in Maryland this whole time and we decided to get together and talk some more. We found that we had a really strong connection, and over the course of a few days we both felt that in some way we were led to each other. That he was an answer to my prayer, and he felt like we were being helped from the other side. We may have initially connected because of our heartbreaking experiences, but it became so much more and so much better than I could have imagined. Deborah Soderholm and Her Husband, Patrick How did it go, introducing Patrick and your kids to each other and introducing the idea that this could be a new family? It was about a year before we got married. His kids were younger, a girl and a boy. They were three and about 19 months when we began dating. Patrick’s wife passed away from complications with leukemia when the youngest was only 11 months old. It was a little crazy and a little hectic. I fell head over heels for Patrick very quickly, and so did he with me. And then we went, “Oh my gosh we have four kids between us. How do we do this?” So we were dating back and forth every weekend and bringing kids and going, “All right, let’s test this out. Let’s see if we can handle four kids on an outing in Washington D.C. Ok, we can do this.” It was a little bit more of a challenge when we got married. Bringing our families together and realizing how difficult that would be. That just led to a whole other host of challenges that have nothing to do with anything we had been through before. Deborah Soderholm and Her Husband My two girls were the older ones, his were little. When we got married, both of us made enormous changes to our lives so that we could be together. I left my dream job teaching to move to Williamsburg because this is where all of our families are. He was in the Navy and got a special assignment in Yorktown, which is close to Williamsburg, so that he wouldn’t be deployed or go off to sea. Essentially, the decisions were that if we want to be with each other, we need to be there for our children because of what they’ve been through and the losses they’ve had. He had already missed a lot of their lives because of the Navy, although the Navy was very good to him. So, the big decision was, “Once he gets out of the Navy, what’s he going to do?” I decided to stay home and became a stay-at-home mom for the first time after working for 9 years. We decided to just go full speed ahead to say, “I’m mom, he’s dad.” We don’t really refer to them as step-children. I sometimes say my “bonus children.” But if people ask me “How many children do you have?” I just say, “We have four,” and they go “Oh wow, that’s a lot of kids,” and I never really get into it. I then might say, “We’re a blended family.” I had to come to think of myself differently as a mom to four kids. And to being a stay-at-home mom during potty training and tantrums with children who weren’t my flesh and blood. It took an enormous amount of patience and energy to bond and come around. You have to open your heart so much. My bonus children are very different than my two girls in so many ways, I would say it took the other side of my brain to parent them. Patrick and I had a lot of talks about parenting the first year or two we were married. My girls were a little bit more easy to handle, but they had to get used to having little siblings. We work really hard on putting family first so that the kids have a good home environment where they know they’re safe and loved. I feel like Patrick and I both have given up equal things. Now he’s out of the Navy and we were blessed he found a great job in the area. We’ve settled into a beautiful home. We’re not going to move anytime soon. And we’re doing really well. Deborah Soderholm and Her Family Because your girls were older, were they a little more hesitant to call Patrick “Dad,” or engage in that way? We didn’t put any pressure on them to have them call him “Dad.” They called him Patrick for a while, but now they call him Daddy. And that means a lot, but we never put the pressure on them. Patrick’s kids, they just called me mommy. Patrick is very patient and so good with them. We lean on each other to help parent all of the kids. It’s a very heavy responsibility to be their mom. Not to diminish anything that fathers do, but if I am impatient with them or I don’t feel like I give my all, in the back of my mind is, “Well, their mommy can’t kiss them goodnight. Their mommy wishes she could be here to hug them, so I should never not do that.” It’s a lot of pressure. I don’t know if it’s real or I just put it on myself to make sure they’re ok because they lost their mom so young and they’re mostly only going to remember me. When people ask me, “How is it with four kids?” I’m like, “Well it’s really hard. Even though their biological dad is in the house, and with my girls, it’s their biological mom in the house, it’s not as simple as, “Ok, now you’re a family because mommy and daddy are married.” It takes a lot of work. Deborah Soderholm and Her Family What’s your philosophy guiding your family life? How do you honor the ones who have passed, yet celebrate the family you have now? We like to find things that connect them to their parents that have passed. Patrick’s daughter dances ballet and her mom was a dancer. She goes to the same studio that her mom taught and danced at and it’s a great way to connect with her mom. Patrick and I danced together in the Nutcracker with her in the same show, which was a really nice way to honor her mom. I hope that’s something she keeps doing. My oldest is 11, almost 12 now. She and I do theater, but her dad also was a performer. She’s done some film work in a show with Native Americans and that was a great way for her to connect with something her dad did as well. In school when they do Native American month, my girls will take in and share pictures of their dad or music that he produced. Patrick’s son is still a little guy, but we’re working on him! Patrick’s daughter will look up and see a pretty sky and say, “That’s my mommy up there,” and we say, “Yeah, that is.” When they have those memories or thoughts of them, we don’t ever stifle that. Deborah Soderholm and Her Husband Do you bring up the other parents in conversation or do you just take it as it comes naturally? Mostly naturally. But from time to time I’ll check in and ask, “How are you doing?” For instance, my oldest had to do some sort of project about her life up until now and she purposely left out her dad Red Hawk. In our household we’ll say “Daddy Red Hawk” and “Daddy Patrick” to differentiate. Or I’m Mommy and then there’s “Mommy Leah.” Anyway, she didn’t put her Daddy Red Hawk in her project. I wasn’t upset but I asked her, “Why didn’t you? It’s kind of part of your story.” She replied, “I don’t want my friends asking me about him and how he died.” That made me emotional, but I got it since she’s 11. She’s not quite ready for that explanation. You don’t want to stand out. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about Red Hawk, what we’ve been through, or Patrick doesn’t think about Leah. It’s a reminder of how blessed we are right now and that we don’t take anything for granted. Our threshold of what is an inconvenience or what bothers us is really high. It’s kind of a thing in my family where we’re like, “Oh, there’s a problem? Well, nobody died.” It sounds kind of morbid, but that’s the comparison. We’ve been through so much, I can get through anything. Small problems are nothing. As I go through life, when I greet people, I look them in the eye. I talk to people and I want to really listen and be aware of what people are going through. We don’t sweat the small stuff. As a family, we are more about having experiences rather than stuff, and really spending time together. We are also hopefully more compassionate towards people and their situations. We mourn with those that mourn, because we’ve been through it. Deborah Soderholm How has being back in Williamsburg helped you? Williamsburg is a really special place. It is where I met Red Hawk, it is also where I met Patrick and his family. We are surrounded by so many grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins that I feel like I am where I am supposed to be. It’s great for us and the kids. We have lots of babysitters so we can have date nights! I’ve been able to create a sense of community here. I’m involved in the history community, I’m involved in the theater community.Patrick and I have done community theatre together! My philosophy since this happened is to seize the day, and I’m trying new things that I’ve never tried before. I’ve been pursuing passions that I’ve always wanted to, like singing and performing. I still get to pursue my passion, which is history. I was a Social Studies teacher so I found some great volunteer opportunities. I’m just doing things that bring me joy. How have you found joy after this traumatic experience? I seize opportunities. I like going to see inspiring performances and shows, and I love good, uplifting music. My favorite group is The Tenors and I love Josh Groban. I’ve done some background work in a film because it was on my bucket list.. I said, “Oh I want to sing the National Anthem at an event,” and that happened. Honestly, when I’ve put things out there, things have happened and I can say that I truly believe that I’ve been blessed from the other side. Deborah Soderholm and Her Family I feel like Patrick and I have been extremely blessed and given everything that we need, particularly each other. Everything along the way has fallen into place for us, and that hasn’t gone unrecognized by me because every day I count my blessings. Someone who’s been through what I’ve been through might think, “You have a reason to be angry or depressed.” But I’m not looking back, I’m looking forward. We’re just in a really great place and I hope it continues. But in the back of my mind is, “What if the rug gets pulled out from under us again?” I think when you go through a tragedy it means it’s always in the back of the mind. So we look for things that bring us joy and we just do it and I find that when I put good things out there, they come back to me. Another effect of going through something that’s so traumatic is that I have developed some anxiety, and that’s no fun. I’ve learned what my triggers are and try to minimize it when it happens, but it does happen from time to time. How much of a role has counseling or therapy played in your healing? Immediately after Hawk died, I went to a grief counselor, which I would recommend to anyone who goes through something like the sudden loss of a loved one. I also saw a therapist to work through, “Now what? What’s the next step?” This was all before I reconnected with Patrick. So I am a big advocate of therapy. I had never been to a therapist before, but going through something like this really warranted it and it helps you reframe some of your thinking and work through the trauma. Patrick and I also attended a few therapy sessions before we got married to talk about some of these big issues of grieving a spouse and joining our families together. So that was really helpful. What role did your faith play in these experiences? Everything from Red Hawk’s death to your meeting Patrick, joining families, this whole healing process. How has it grown? Did you discover different aspects of it? Has the Atonement come to mean something different to you? I feel like Heavenly Father never left me alone, or else I would not be able to talk about this the way that I do and have gotten through what I did. I never felt alone, even in my darkest hours when I was on the floor bawling my eyes out at midnight and then getting up the next morning and going to work with puffy eyes. I knew that my Savior understood and was there for me as well. I think the Atonement helps me look at Red Hawk and try to grasp what he must have been going through to make that decision to end his life and struggling with mental illness and the darkness that he felt. I know now more than I ever did that the Adversary is real. And that’s not a great thing to know, I guess, but I know it. It helps me try to combat that in our home by making sure that we are listening to the Spirit and seeking things that are going to bring the Spirit and light into our lives. I still don’t fully understand or don’t know how to fully frame Red Hawk and what will happen to us in the afterlife. We were married in the temple and I haven’t had those questions answered yet. Patrick and I were married civilly, in a really great, fun wedding that we planned. That’s something that Patrick’s concerned about as well: What will happen to us? Patrick and I are active in church and our callings. We feel like we want to be examples to others to say, “You can do it. You can get through.” We’re very grateful for our blessings. We’ve only been married three years and we have a marriage where we look toward eternity, but we don’t really know what’s going to happen. We take every day as a gift. Deborah Soderholm and Her Husband I personally feel like I’m going to be ok. I am more worried about Hawk, when I see him again. About three months after Hawk died, the stake president came over and he said that we can’t judge somebody and their state of mind when they do that, and it doesn’t negate any covenants that they’ve made. But I do still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. I think Patrick would like us to know what we’re supposed to do, but we have gone to the temple and will just wait for revelation for us. What have you learned about yourself through this process. I learned that first, we can never predict what is going to happen in life. When Hawk died, it was so shocking. I never thought that this would happen to me. Never. I realized that I can get through and persevere and come out stronger. You don’t know until you go through it how strong you can be. Like I said, I made a goal that I wouldn’t let Hawk’s decision, although he wasn’t in his right mind, diminish the rest of my life. I am going to make the rest of my life full of good things, as well as for my children. I am so worried about them, that they will in some way be messed up. But as they are getting older, I feel more at peace like they’re going to be ok. I think that has to do with the decisions we’ve made and that we do go to church and we teach them to have faith and they have this great dad, Patrick, who uses his priesthood and is there for them. It’s wonderful. What are your feelings toward Red Hawk at this point? I think that even five years later, I’m still processing what happened. I may never really settle on one emotion and it probably fluctuates between sadness and anger. Because we believe that life goes on after this, I feel that, in a sense, he has been trying to help from the other side. In a way, I feel like he’s trying to redeem himself and still be there. I’ve had many spiritual experiences where I’ve felt that is what’s happening. I feel like when you lose a loved one, you are more sensitive to those prompting from the other side. It’s kind of a constant, like you value life more every day. I am blessed with this new life, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for what I went through. I do feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be. Deborah Soderholm with Her Sisters How has the experience with suicide affected your family members beyond your children? It has affected all of my family members, but I’ll talk about my two amazing sisters. I think all of us had a little bit of post traumatic stress, and my way of moving forward was doing things that bring me joy, making new memories with my girls, finding love again.. My oldest sister Rebecca was very affected by Hawk’s death and over the last couple years has become very much involved in suicide support groups in her hometown in North Carolina. She’s become a group counselor/mediator and has also become a suicide crisis line counselor. She’s also chaired suicide awareness walks, so we support her in doing that. She also has five kids. My other sister Sarah has six kids. I always thought she could be a doctor, She was a stay-at-home mom for about 18 years. She decided she wanted to help people in their worst moments, so she became an EMT. She went to night school, trained as a paramedic, went to fire academy, and is now a firefighter at the age of 42. She has done everything to balance her home and new career. She is a godsend to people in their worst moments. So it’s amazing and so sad that Hawk’s death has awakened everyone and made us more aware, but good is happening because of that. We’ll never be the same. At A Glance Name: Deborah Soderholm Age: 36 Location: Williamsburg, Virginia Marital History: Widowed, now remarried for 3 years Occupation: Prior high school teacher, now a stay-at-home mom and part-time museum program guide Convert to church?: my parents are converts and I was raised a member Schools attended: Brigham Young University, University of Oxford Favorite Hymn: Be Still My Soul Interview Produced by Nollie Haws

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye grew up in the Church. She earned her BA and her Ph.D. from Harvard University and now teaches history at University of Auckland in New Zealand. She and her husband, Joseph, are the parents of four children. You have a long family history in the Church. Can you outline it for me? My grandparents on both my Chinese side and my Japanese side joined the Church. My Chinese grandmother, Marjorie Ju Lew, grew up in Salt Lake City, where her father Gin Gor Ju was known as the Celery King and was famous for selling celery. He had immigrated from Guangdong Province in China. She claims that he was the person who pioneered the practice of using rubber bands to tie produce together. That’s hard to verify! But he was a farmer in Utah. They had Mormon neighbors, in particular a family that lived near them called the Sorensens. The two families had a symbiotic relationship. They were good friends and they helped each other in various ways. My great-grandfather, Gin Gor Ju, hired the sons to work on his farm, and this is how they paid for their LDS missions. The Ju family kept a cow, which the Sorensen kids milked. The Ju family kept the milk, and the Sorensens kept the cream. When my great-grandmother, Gor Shee Ju, lost a child, the Sorensens told her that there was a way for her to be reunited with that little boy eternally. That was when they joined the Church. My father’s side, the Japanese side, also came to Utah, but in a different way. They were “interned,” imprisoned rather, in the camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. They originally lived on the West coast in California and Washington State. There they had homes and farms. My grandmother and grandfather were native-born Americans who spoke English as their first language. In 1942, anti-Japanese sentiment spread throughout the United States. Roosevelt issued an executive order that all “persons of Japanese ancestry” were to be transported to camps in the middle of nowhere and locked up behind barbed wire. My grandmother and grandfather met and married in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. As the war drew to an end, they were given about twenty dollars and told to go and make a new life for themselves. So they ended up in Sanpete County, Utah, and that’s where Bessie Shizuko Murakami Inouye and Charles Ichiro Inouye encountered the Mormons. My father was from Utah but he eventually moved to California. So I grew up in California. I spent most of my life in the city of Costa Mesa in the Costa Mesa First Ward. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye and Her Children You’ve written eloquently about being a teenager, doing everything that was expected of you but still struggling with your beliefs. What’s an experience that captures that tension of wanting to do what was right but then wondering if that in itself was right? I have one memory that crystallized the problem in my mind. When I was a high school student I faithfully attended seminary and Sunday School. But one day my Sunday School teacher ridiculed the idea that the theory of evolution was correct. He said, “This is ridiculous. You think we came from monkeys?” I thought, “Well, I don’t know!” So I went to the counselor in my bishopric and he gave me a book that had been written by Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation. In that book it says it’s impossible to believe both in Jesus Christ and in the theory of evolution. And so I said, “OK, I guess that’s the position.” But I was still unsettled by it. My understanding of truth is that it’s like a line that you can continue to extend along a vector. If the line can be infinitely extended it’s true. But all of a sudden I felt like there were lines of scientific truth and religious truth, both pointing in different directions. At the same time I was being interviewed at BYU for the Hinckley Scholarship, which was a scholarship that was given to people who were getting high grades in math and science, among other things. So here I’d been invited to visit BYU because I had been getting high grades in science, in which the theory of evolution plays a very important role. And yet it was supposedly not ok to believe in the theory of evolution and in Jesus Christ at the same time! One night, when we were all hanging out, I asked the other girls interviewing for the scholarship–really smart girls—what they thought about the theory of evolution. They said, “Well, it seems like scientifically it’s a valid theory and it explains a lot of things.” And then I pulled out my Joseph Fielding Smith and said, “Look at this book!” Here was a Church president saying it’s impossible to believe in Jesus Christ and believe in evolution at the same time. Everyone was stymied. Nobody knew what to say. We didn’t know what to think. Later on during this same visit, I met with Bill Bradshaw, a biologist. So I asked him this question and he said, “Oh, evolution is beautiful! Evolution is wonderful! And Latter-day Saints frequently misunderstand it.” Then he produced for me an essay which he has since published, explaining the compatibility of the theory of evolution and Latter-day Saint theology. That was my earliest memory of feeling that my current understanding left me with a contradiction that I couldn’t immediately resolve. I had to wrestle with it, to go beyond my comfort zone and seek guidance. It took a thoughtful scholar who had mastered both the science and who had been a Latter-day Saint for a long time to help me understand how these two apparently clashing lines of scientific and religious truth related to each other and actually pointed in the same direction. A few years after this experience you served a mission. How did you decide to go on a mission? I’d always wanted to go on a mission. I just wasn’t sure I would be able to look people in the eye and say that certain Standard Missionary Propositions X, Y, and Z were true. As a high school student or as a college student I certainly felt that those things were true but that’s different from telling somebody else to believe that whatever you’re saying is true, to change their lives and rearrange their world views. It seems irresponsible to go on a mission and spread that kind of message if you’re not completely sure. So I finally went on a mission when I felt like I could take those positions. To get to this point, I leaned very hard on a friend of mine, also an undergraduate at Harvard, who left on a mission to Brazil after our freshman year. I corresponded with him on his mission about his experiences and reflected on what he was learning. Over the course of this dialogue, I finally decided that I could say what I needed to say as a missionary. I went on a mission to Taiwan after my junior year of college and then went back to Harvard for my senior year. It’s wonderful that another missionary’s conversation is part of what led you to the decision to serve. I think that’s part of how the church works. It’s through being thrown together all the time, living our lives together, that we develop relationships of trust. Through those relationships, we can live vicariously through other people. We are put into contact with the things they are experiencing. It’s this massive experience-consecration, in which someone’s experience, because of your closeness with them, becomes part of your own understanding. When they share their experience with you, or when you observe how they meet challenges and make choices, it’s not quite the same as having the experience yourself, but their insights, feelings, and righteousness all come to you in different ways. I think that’s what Mormonism does. It creates these communities of people who have had really different experiences and perspectives, and forces them to work together and love each other. That’s what I’ve found everywhere I’ve gone, from Spanish Fork all the way to New Zealand. What are some of the best ways you’ve seen that we consecrate or share experiences? This may seem kind of cliché, but I feel that sharing comes through our lessons—Relief Society lessons, college family home evening lessons. We’re teaching each other all the time. It’s a great format to exchange experiences and to supplement what you hear with your own experience. Our lay congregation structure is really conducive to that kind of exchange. You are now a scholar. What path brought you here? I’m a historian. I study Christianity in China. I started working in this particular field as an undergraduate at Harvard. I had to write a paper using primary sources and I discovered in the Harvard Library the unpublished manuscript papers of an American Methodist missionary who went to China in the late 1800s. I thought his papers were very interesting. Obviously as Mormons we’re very interested in missionaries, and I was amazed at the kinds of linguistic and cultural dilemmas this man was encountering. I watched him trying to figure out how to translate ideas that he had originally assumed were universal, easy-for-everyone-to-understand kinds of ideas, but which he then realized seemed absurd and ridiculous in a Chinese context. They simply did not make sense in this new context and he had to retool his assumptions about everything. I was fascinated by his particular struggles with language and with culture and with the bigger puzzle of the cultural worlds that shape people’s deepest beliefs. That assignment led into my senior thesis project which led into my proposal for graduate school. Then in graduate school I was really lucky to have someone come to Harvard who had been writing a book on Christianity in China, Henrietta Harrison. I started working on heterodox Christian movements. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye What does heterodox mean? Heterodox means the opposite of orthodox. So orthodox is “correct” belief and heterodox means “incorrect,” or more accurately, different or divergent belief. As a graduate student I began to learn more about the history of a church, the True Jesus Church, founded in 1917 in Beijing. Like our church, they believe that they are the one true church of Christ on the earth. I thought it was very compelling that the True Jesus Church has been seen by some as a cult or as a heterodox religion because I come from a religion that is also seen as a cult or a heterodox religion. So I was very willing to suspend judgment and investigate the True Jesus Church’s history, beliefs, and practices. There are actually many very compelling parallels between the True Jesus Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! So that’s the world I live in today: global Christianity, religious history, new religious movements. Tell me about the logistics of living in that world with a family. I understand you and your husband have taken turns being the primary breadwinner and also being the trailing spouse. When I went to grad school my husband followed me to Boston and found a job at a middle school, so now he has all these great stories from being a middle school math teacher in Malden, Massachusetts. And then I followed him to law school in Los Angeles at UCLA. While there I did my general exam preparation out of residence. And then when I did my PhD research in China he deferred his job with a corporate law firm for a year and was a stay-at-home parent with the kids. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye and Her Husband Then we went back the other way. In 2011 we moved to Hong Kong. By this point I had my Ph.D. and three children—it became four in 2012—so I was busy picking kids up from school and going to cello lessons and shopping and stuff like that. I had a regular part-time babysitter, which gave me a couple of hours each day to work in the archives at Hong Kong Baptist University. When I had a tiny baby, I took him with me to the archives and he just slept. I also taught a class at Hong Kong University on the history of religion in America, which was very fun. My husband was a lawyer in Hong Kong, which is basically the worst place in the world to be a lawyer. It was so terrible. If he came home early he got home at 10:30 PM. Normally it was more like midnight. Late was later than that. It was just not very sustainable in terms of having a good, balanced family life, so I decided to go on the job market. I got a job offer from University of Auckland. I wasn’t really serious about taking the job, but my husband, from his desk in his law office would daydream about this other fantasy life and google “New Zealand.” One day he came home and said, “They have glow worms in New Zealand. Let’s go see the glow worms!” So I said, “OK. Let’s go see the glow worms!” That was what brought us here. He was home with the kids for about a year and a half while we were figuring out our life in New Zealand and now he works at a law firm. He takes the kids to school and I pick them up. We have four kids; they are 10, 8, 6, 4. Three boys, and one girl. It’s an interesting career path! I’ve had other friends who have taken the same meandering route into academia. I think it’s common with many women academics. They don’t go full force for a while because the time when you’re usually establishing your career happens to correspond with the time people are establishing their families, and women often disproportionately bear that burden. Before going to grad school I talked to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and she said, “I had my family and then when my kids were basically grown up, I had my career.” So I felt like if Laurel could do that and still have the amazing academic career that she’s had, then it’s almost like a bonus, to be doing research now, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye and Her Children You and your husband have managed the transitions in your career paths by not necessarily staying tied to traditional roles. But I’ve read that before you married, while you very much wanted to marry your husband in the temple, you were intellectually uneasy with issues of patriarchy. Can you talk about that tension? It’s very interesting, right? Because the temple liturgy itself is very patriarchal, especially the marriage liturgy. It puts man in the position of God and the words and actions of God into the husband’s mouth and hands. So as I thought about getting married and going through that ritual it was ironic to me because I was an ordinance worker in the Boston temple at that time, with a thorough mastery of the entire temple liturgy. And yet my husband, by virtue of being male, was going to be the one speaking those words authoritatively, guided from the side by a male ordinance worker. I thought: I’m the one who knows the temple ceremonies and who guides people through the temple ordinances, and yet because he’s a man my husband is going to be the one who “instructs me,” and I’m just supposed to respond to what he says? Maybe that was a prideful attitude. But it made me think about the patriarchal order of the Church and about who we put in positions of power to speak powerful words. In this case I realized it wasn’t going to be me speaking powerful words, simply because I was a woman. That’s kind of difficult. On top of that, I had to ask myself, why is the liturgy structured this way? What meanings do these words convey? So I had to ask myself, what are these words trying to tell me? Is Joseph, my husband, supposed to be God to me? Am I supposed to worship him? Do whatever he says? These propositions didn’t sound like the foundation for a happy partnership. At the same time, I knew Joseph was a wonderful person. He was supportive of my plans to get a Ph.D., and I felt like he embraced everything that I was. I felt like he’d gotten that way because of his parents and his parents’ teachings, and because of his deep beliefs that he’d gotten through his lifelong training in the church. So, liturgically, I was being told to submit to a lower position within a patriarchal hierarchy, but functionally I was getting this awesome, egalitarian husband who loved and respected me, which is what you want in a husband! I thought it would be wonderful to be married to him for a really long time. So in this case, you have the patriarchal system on the one hand and then you have the living breathing human being on the other hand. The more substantial thing, the more immediate, persistent reality in my life is the human being, the person with whom you live and share your cares and raise a family. And I was in love with Joseph because he was so wonderful and smart and funny and so on. So I thought, that’s still a really good deal. I had also seen historically how even the temple liturgy has changed considerably over time. So I thought that maybe the troubling aspects of patriarchy within Mormon religious structures was not a deal-breaker because it was probably subject to future transformation. Have you found that experience has made a difference when people come to you for counsel who are struggling with their church membership? Does that inform how you talk to friends? I think in some ways we’re only good at counseling other people if we’ve actually experienced these or similar challenges ourselves. So I’m a very terrible mentor to people who have been, for example, sexually abused by male Church leaders, or who have been physically abused by their Mormon temple marriage husbands, and so on. I have not had those experiences myself, although I try to do what I can to foster a safe and supportive culture at church. Where I do feel I’m able to offer some counsel is with problems stemming from history, doctrine, liturgy—information, narratives, perspectives, the stuff in books, the stuff you make flowcharts out of. I feel that in my experience I really have found that the competing narratives that we think about, argue about, and worry about are not the core of Mormonism. The core of the faith as I understand it is our relationships with each other and the communities we build, and the relationships we collectively establish with each other and with God. Tell me about your family’s participation in your ward community. Our ward right now is quite small. I play the piano in Primary and my husband is the elders quorum president. He’s working really hard to revitalize the elders quorum and to get people to come into church. I really love going to church. All the times I’ve experienced church in a small unit it’s lots of fun. It’s a lot of work because you have to be involved but you get to know people and the kind of individual personalities of the people in the ward influence the culture of the ward noticeably, more than it would in a larger kind of institutional ward. It’s how I feel Mormonism works best organically. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye Are there other things you’d like to talk about? I wish that we as a Church would get a little better about talking about women. I feel that for various historical reasons this has become a sensitive subject for us. Which is in some ways silly because half of us are women. What would you hope for when it comes to talking about women? Especially in America, but also in places like Hong Kong and New Zealand, society has become partisan or polarized to the extent that if you express an opinion, that opinion immediately gets associated with a whole gaggle of ideas that’s quite complex and all-encompassing, though the scope of what you intended was much narrower. That partisanship can lead us to discount or ignore the positions or perspectives of women whom we perceive to be on the other side of whatever it is. You’re not talking about political partisanship but idea camps. Political partisanship is part of it but it’s not everything. It’s not Democrat and Republican. There are camps of women. I feel like we spend a lot of time showing how one camp is right and the other is wrong when that’s counter-productive. Are there ways you’ve found to try to change that dialogue? Well, I deliberately am cautious of affiliating with groups that have large platforms for that very reason. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to buy a set of knives. I’m Japanese, so in my kitchen I have many different kinds of sharp knives. It seems silly to me to think that some company could sell you a set and every single knife would be exactly the best kind of knife for every kind of job. My point is that I’m frustrated with parties, institutions, and organizations in general. Which is ironic because I love organization! I believe people can do a lot better in groups than they can separately. That’s one of the great things about the Church. It’s like an organization machine. Organization can be great, but partisanship is problematic. In the worst cases, it creates tribes of people who are invested in either seeing other tribes of people look discredited, or in talking over them. I have good friends who are members of groups, like Ordain Women or Mormon Women Stand or Big Ocean Women or other groups. Those groups do a lot of good in terms of the causes they espouse and the values that motivate them. All of those groups display Mormon women’s desires to act on the teachings of the gospel, using the tools we have to try to make the world or the Church a better place. I just think that we could do a better job, generally speaking, of making space for each other in the pantheon of Mormon women. A positive example of making space is a recent dialogue posted by Gina Colvin who is the podcast editor of A Thoughtful Faith. She just did an interview with Carolina Allen who is the head of Big Ocean Women. Gina is more on the liberal side of feminism: egalitarian, progressive, postcolonial. Carolina is a feminist too but is on the side that people would usually call more conservative, traditional, domestic, etc. That interview is an example of the kind of conversation that we need to be able to have more and more, conversations that really include everyone. Inclusivity can be a very exclusive term sometimes. For example, in the recent Women’s March, it was thrilling to see pictures of all those women all around the world protesting against various forms of misogyny. But what was sad in my eyes is that some women’s groups that were against abortion were specifically excluded from that march. If we’re talking about women’s power and women’s voices, then all the women should be there. Not just the women whom we think are the “real” feminists. Because who can say who the real feminists are when they’re all women? How can we not honor women’s voices and women’s positions? So maybe what you’re describing as the ideal is an inclusivity that includes disagreement. Yes, definitely. And obviously it’s hard for everyone to be in the same room when people are so different. But I feel like we should be able to do it, at least within the Mormon women realm. We have so much in common! We are so weird and awesome! At A Glance Name: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye Age: 37 Marital History: Married Children: 4 kids ages 10, 8, 6, 4 Occupation: Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Auckland Convert?: born in the church Schools Attended: Estancia High School, Harvard College, Harvard University Languages Spoken at Home: English, Chinese Favorite Hymn: In Humility, Our Savior; I Feel My Savior's Love Interview Produced by Annette Pimentel

Marlene Peterson believes that the desire to learn any subject begins in the heart, and is sparked by stories, music, imagery, and poetry — the Arts. She has built a free online library called Libraries of Hope: an open-source collection of stories, poetry, and classical artwork which parents and teachers can use to educate the hearts of children. She additionally has published more than seventy printed volumes of this collection. She has felt the collaboration of the Spirit through her personal journey of learning and creation. She is the mother of nine children, including eight daughters, and is a popular speaker at home education forums across the United States. What is the vision behind the Libraries of Hope? When I first started building Libraries of Hope, I didn’t have the complete vision. But we learn by doing! I’ve come to appreciate that my purpose in all this has been to learn and to teach the lost art of educating the hearts of children. I say “lost arts” because we have become such an academic-centered and mind-focused culture, that we’ve kind of been neglecting the heart. The law of nature says that what we don’t use atrophies from disuse. So we’re finding a hard-heartedness in our world. And the danger of that is hard-heartedness really blocks the Spirit, blocks the light, the joy and the love. Libraries of Hope is a free online pool of resources to warm and open the hearts of children, and also to help teach mothers and fathers how to educate children’s hearts. We need more art and music and poetry and pictures, because those are the language that the heart understands. That’s how we soften hearts. Within Libraries of Hope I talk about the “Well-Educated Heart,” because we have focused too much on educating the mind at the expense of the heart. I came across the writings of Charles Darwin, and he said his big regret as he got older was that he hadn’t taken time to listen to some music and read some poetry. He read an account in his journal from when he was a young man, about his being in a Brazilian forest and just being overcome with the wonder and the beauty of the forest and feeling there was a higher power. He said that he could no longer feel those things, because that part of him had atrophied, and that it was a great loss to his happiness. So that is what this is all about: Libraries of Hope is meant to help parents to warm and open the hearts of the children. Academics are good! Science and math are good. But we need this balance in our lives. Photo Credit: AnnaLee Baldwin Why do you think that stories and music and poems are such powerful teachers? Children don’t have the capacity to reason when they are born — they have this wonderful gift of several years when the heart is open and impressionable; and the heart responds to the arts, to story! That’s the language the heart understands. The first step in learning anything is to feel desire. The arts kindle desire! The arts reach a place that’s deeper than words. When you think about Jesus with the Nephites, the deeper his messages went into their hearts, the fewer words they had to express it. It got to the point where “no tongue could speak” what they saw and felt. I came across a poem that said, “The deeps of our souls, like the deeps of the ocean, are silent.” Music and imagery travel where words can’t reach. If we give children the right kinds of stories and music, we give them a desire for beauty and goodness that will last their entire life. We’re bypassing that foundation when we just jump into the academics without allowing the arts to really nourish the soil where the academic learning is going to grow from. Do you see a way that the arts could be integrated better with the academics? Can they influence each other? I think the purpose of the arts is to awaken desire and to stir feeling, so they are naturally integrated. When we teach science we tend to jump into the textbook approach, but we bypass that part where children fall in love with the world, and feel wonder. So the way the arts and the academics integrate is that the arts are used to open hearts: to awaken that desire to know more, and to love it. Then you fill in the detail work with the laws and the facts and the information. The big downfall I see is that schools that integrate art into the studies still tend to approach it from a very mind-based way. The way you know you’ve reached the mind is that you can test and measure it. So if you put a work of art in front of a student, you might say, “Okay, what technique did the artist use? What are the components that make this work of art what it is?” Whereas art at the heart level — you can’t test or measure it. There aren’t words to express it. We don’t allow that time for children to just feel it because we are a test-and-measure culture. They absolutely need to work together. They both have a role to play. What I’ve come to understand is art first, and then science. Heart first, and then mind. What is the task of the parent in educating the heart? I was just reading this in 3 Nephi, where Jesus is ministering to the Nephites, and he asks for them to bring bread and wine. He instructs the twelve whom he has chosen to fill themselves first, and then feed the multitude. That is the pattern I stress in the Well-Educated Heart: mothers and fathers first fill their own hearts until it naturally starts to spill out. If you have a parent telling a story out of duty, as an assignment, it’s not going to have the same impact as a story that the parent loves and wants to share with their child. That’s when there’s connection, when there’s this other layer that begins to flow between parent and child. So the first responsibility is for parents to warm and fill their own hearts. And then share. I focus on homeschoolers because they have the luxury of more time, but this absolutely fits in with traditional schooling. Schools are going to focus on the mind, and if parents understand that they need this balance, they need to be sure that at home they’re balancing with heart. The good thing about art is that it’s in very small pieces. It doesn’t take long to share a story, or to listen to some music. Just put some music on while you’re eating dinner! And all of these things begin to warm the heart. Marlene Blomquist Peterson and Her Family You mentioned turning on music during dinner. I’m interested in other ways you see parents of young children fitting self-education and development into their schedules, and sharing the arts with their children. My daughter has five little girls, and she says, “Oh mom, I wish I could have had a time in my life to learn all of this before the children came.” When you have little children you are so busy! In this season of life you probably don’t have a lot of time to do all you’d like to feed your heart. So with young children, I say you just learn with them! If you missed out on fairy tales growing up, you’re going to learn with them as you share the fairy tales with them. If you missed out on Mother Goose rhymes, you’re going to learn as you share them with your children. So it’s not like you have to block out three hours of your day for self-education. You’re going to be educated along the way with your children. I think if you can always be just one step ahead of them, you’ll be just fine. You don’t have to arrive at this moment of “okay, I’m fully prepared now.” It’s a process. If you picture a mother duck with her little ducklings, they just follow along and do whatever she does. I’ve never seen a duck that is behind her ducklings, quacking at them and trying to push them along! If I picture that in my mind they’re just scattering in all directions. They don’t have a clue where to go or what to do. Children are looking for an example to follow — that is another one of those beautiful laws of nature. The young seek for something to attach their hearts to. And what they attach to, they grow to be like. I’m interested in what role your own mother has played as you have developed this philosophy. My mother is now almost 96, and her mind is still so sharp! The gift my mother gave me was that she didn’t hover over me. She didn’t schedule my life or manage it. The environment was set up, and she gave me the freedom to allow those impressions to happen in my heart. When I was nine years old, we moved to La Cañada, California, and my house was right across the street from Descanso Gardens. I think it’s about 1700 acres of gardens. When I lived there it was free to the public — I could just walk across the street and into this beautiful garden. So much of the foundation of my life were the lessons learned in that garden! When you walked in, there was this beautiful pond with swans and ducks and a grassy area, a canopy of oaks, and forests of camellia bushes and rose gardens. It was like heaven to me. If I had come home and my mom had said, “Okay, what did you do, what did you think about? Did you do this or that?” It would have killed the whole experience. I think of my home — we had a piano, which my mother played. So I wanted to play! When I was six I asked if I could learn to play, and she found a teacher down the street. I don’t remember her ever saying, “Okay did you practice? Here’s your practice time.” I wanted to play. The biggest motivator was that my dad would come lie down on the couch and say, “Would you play the piano for me?” and I’d play for him. Then he’d say, “Oh, I love to hear you play the piano.” And that’s big motivation! It is! I just had this wonderful environment. All the things I needed were there, and the freedom to enjoy them. We had books! There wasn’t an “age-appropriate” shelf. I was just as likely to pull out the journals of Wilford Woodruff and tackle it, as Alice in Wonderland, because it was just all there! And anything I pulled out was good. That was the gift she gave me. I don’t think she knew that’s what she was doing — she was busy. But she created the environment, and she led by example: she was a reader, she loved music, and loved being in nature. That makes me feel better about the days I’m too busy for my children. I think time is a tremendous gift we don’t give our children. We structure their days and there’s no time for them to reflect, and have these impressions. I didn’t have a lot of toys! So I would sit there and imagine with twigs and leaves. It was glorious. My imagination was my playground. My mother gave me time — she was just busy doing stuff, I don’t think it was planned out. But as I reflect back I’m grateful. What about your own children? Were they all homeschooled? It was me who had the restlessness about education. They were public-schooled, and charter-schooled, and homeschooled. It really was individual! We have nine children, and I don’t think there’s any two of them that did the same thing. But I just always felt like there was something missing. I hated school growing up. I was a really good student, but it felt like a prison to me, and I just wanted something more for my children. Now they’ve all graduated from universities, and several have earned advanced degrees. So I guess from the world’s standpoint, yay! We did it right. But I was always looking for something different. If you talk to my children I think they would probably say that I inadvertently gave them that gift of finding their own way because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. There wasn’t much structure to what happened at home. You graduated from college yourself, when you already were a mother of several children. Can you tell me about your experience balancing school with family? The credit goes to my mother. My parents knew I wanted to finish my degree that I had mostly put on hold when I started having children. I took a class here and there as I could. When I was expecting our fourth baby, my mother offered to come to my home and tend children while I attended class. It was a crazy three semesters. I think I finished two years’ worth of courses in that time! I lived in Salt Lake and took classes at the BYU Salt Lake Center, BYU Provo and home study. I studied in snatches of time. My little children cheered me on. I remember missing a final because I had a baby on that day. But it was such a sense of great satisfaction to finish, and I owe it all to my mother. She deserved a cap and gown as well. Marlene Blomquist Peterson on the Day of Her Graduation from BYU Where along that journey did you start developing the Well-Educated Heart, and the Libraries of Hope? It took form in probably the last ten to fifteen years. When our youngest was getting ready to leave home, I had a friend who asked for my help. She had adopted this little school in Nairobi, Kenya, and she asked if I would like to help her try to figure out some things that we could do with this school. She would show me pictures of these little children. A lot of them were orphans, and all they had was this makeshift classroom with tin walls that made the room unbearably hot, dirt floors, and little benches. The children were so hungry to learn. I would look at them and think, a lot of these kids might not even make it to adulthood. If they’re only going to be on the earth for a short time, shouldn’t education be giving them something for the here and now? So my restlessness was back in full force. The thought that was driving me was, “What is God’s purpose for education, and what is His method?” With this restlessness, I woke up in the middle of the night (the Spirit wakes us up at 3:00, because our minds are just too cluttered in the daytime!), and I went downstairs to my library of books. I had a shelf of the sixteen volumes of Teachings of the Prophets. And I felt, “Start here.” So for the next year I went through every word in those, and took hundreds of pages of notes, on anything that the Lord had to say about learning and education. And then I felt I should do it for the standard works. And I did! And that became my standard of truth. As I studied educational philosophies and methods, that’s what I would compare them with. From that study, what I came to believe is that God’s purpose in education is to prepare children to live lives of joy. That’s why He created us! Man is that we might have joy. And why would He have any lesser plan in His plan for education, than to prepare us for that joy? His way of doing it is best said in Isaiah, “And all our children shall be taught of the Lord.” In the writings of Charlotte Mason I discovered the statement, “true education is between a child’s soul and God.” So our purpose, as I see it, is to awaken a desire. The Book of Mormon talks about “secret combinations” who do works of darkness and are forces of destruction. Lately I’ve come to understand that this pattern for learning is a “sacred combination” for releasing light. And this sacred combination starts with feeling desires in the heart for that which is good and beautiful and right, and then you teach obedience to correct principles — the mind and the science part, the law part. Combining the two together, heart and mind, releases light. And all of God’s greatest gifts are found in the fruits of that light, which gives us understanding, which fills us with joy and love and peace. God’s purpose is joy; his message is that we should learn by the Spirit. The way that we do it is with this sacred combination of heart and mind. Marlene Blomquist Peterson, Photo Credit: AnnaLee Baldwin You asked specifically about where Libraries of Hope was born. When I came to understand the importance of stories, I had this idea to create a small library of books, filled with stories for children. Stories that would give them hope. Again, I had these little children in Africa in mind. It was a shower moment (good ideas come in the shower a lot). It would be called Libraries of Hope. And that’s where it was born! I had no idea how to go about it, and it’s been quite a journey. The initial library ended up with over sixty volumes of stories I gathered. In the beginning I couldn’t have seen where this was going to go because the technology didn’t exist yet that has since opened the doors for other layers to unfold. So this little library of books is the foundation, and everything else has layered and grown from that core of books. I felt such a guiding hand in the selecting of stories. When I was all finished, I was reading in D&C 88 where the Lord basically lays out His curriculum: that we should learn all things that are in the earth and above the earth, and the wars and perplexities of the nations, etc. And as I looked at this little library, it was all in there. And I didn’t do that! I feel like He helped me build it along the way, and that this library was a complete learning foundation for a child. Of course learning is forever, but the library awakens the desire of learning for all subjects. Photo Credit: AnnaLee Baldwin How should parents and teachers use the art with children? I think we often expose little children to art that’s beyond their comprehension, and they don’t like it because it doesn’t relate to anything that they’re familiar with. In the Libraries of Hope, I link to art from the era of Classical Realism — artworks that depict children in families and nature scenes, and stories from history. I look at art from this period, and I find it so “pure” that a child could understand it. How do you use it? You let them see it! And you tell them the stories behind it, to get them started. Use stories to awaken the love of fine art! But allow children to have their own reaction to the art. There is no need to prompt them; they’ll feel it on their own. Just give them exposure. I actually went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a couple weeks ago. I’d walk into a room and there would be an art piece that I had seen before as a little reproduction, and it would just take my breath away! They’re always so much bigger, or smaller, than I realized. I understand how much is conveyed by the actual artwork, and these pictures that I post, they’ll never replace the real thing. But they can help to lay a foundation of familiarity, so that when children do go to the museums and see the actual work of art, they’ll be drawn to it. Picking Blossoms, Emile Claus As you’ve developed the Well-Educated Heart philosophy over the last few years, have you felt your own heart change? Absolutely. So much more joy and clarity! My regret is that I didn’t find these things sixty years ago. Every day I think, “Oh, I’m getting older! There’s so much more I want to learn! And so much more I want to do.” I kind of feel cheated, that so much of my life hasn’t had these things awakened. And I think that’s what drives me. I want children to have a whole life of just enjoying what’s been prepared for us. It has all happened so gradually, I think we don’t understand what has just been gifted to us in the last ten years. All these masterpieces of art that not even royalty could have seen — that were buried in palaces and estates and museums — they have been put up on the internet! We can access them for free. And the literature that you would have to travel and get permission to go into a museum to view, it’s all online for free! YouTube has only been around about ten years, and it has given us music that has been composed by the noblest minds that have ever lived. You can hear it performed by the finest musicians from all over the world. The greatest treasures for the heart have been re-gifted to us in the last ten years. It is this generation of mothers that has been prepared. If they can awaken a desire in their children to partake of the arts, and combine it with the advances of the intellect that we’ve been working on the last hundred years — if we can combine the heart and the mind, then we’re going to see this burst of light on the earth that’s been prophesied. It’s all coming together and it’s exciting. And they’re feeling it! They are hungry to learn, and it’s all been prepared. If they have the desire and if they start. I think the biggest obstacle to the Spirit is that we don’t give the Spirit much to work with. When the earth was created, it wasn’t created from nothing. It was created from matter unorganized. So our job is to give the Spirit raw matter to organize. And the Spirit does a beautiful job of that. We just have to treasure the Arts up in our hearts so He has something to work upon. Where do you get your confidence as a mother, and as an educator? Generally speaking, confidence comes from knowing that you are aligned to correct principles. And there’s no short-cut for study. Actually, one of my children said, “Mom, moms are listening to what you say. You are risking their children’s lives!” I thought, that’s a tremendous responsibility to feel that people are implementing these things. And my confidence comes back to that golden standard of truth: to that time of study where I fed on the words of the prophets and the scriptures. Everything I say I can back up with that golden standard. And if I can’t, then I don’t talk about it. But I find that truth has a way of being demonstrated everywhere. I find the confidence grow because I see there is a pattern in this life to the things that awaken us. I see this sacred combination, this pattern for learning, unfold in others’ lives, and my confidence grows. What role has your faith played in this journey? This has been a journey of faith. When I first had the idea for Libraries of Hope, the questions were, “So, what’s your business plan? How are you going to market this? How are you going to get funding?” And my answer was, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” But the impression in my heart was that the Lord was preparing a network of mothers, and that when the time was right, he was going to begin to write messages on my heart, so that when I shared those messages it would resonate in their hearts and they would have the desire to want to know more. And that is exactly what has happened! In the last couple of years, those messages have started to come. And there’s been over a thousand mothers whom I’m aware of, who have come from all over the world. Often I’ll get a letter and they’ll say, “I don’t know how I found you, but when I heard your message it resonated in my heart and I want to know more.” I get letters from families saying, we are incorporating these things and there is a new measure of joy in our home. I guess my message is that the Lord is doing a work that we are all a part of. And my little role is to provide resources — a start. I would hope that many others will join in, and add to the rich field of resources available. But the work is going to be done by the mothers — I’ve said it before, He is preparing their hearts. Because this is a critical moment, where this light is about to burst forth upon the earth. The job of the mothers is to awaken desire through the arts, and to teach their children to obey correct principles. Those two in combination will bring a measure of light and joy and love into the world. The message is that we must awaken desire in children’s hearts. Do you have a message for our readers via a favorite story or poem? There was a story I made my mom read to me over and over again. I wish I had the book — it had red and blue stripes on it, and contained stories of people’s lives. One story was about Jane Addams. When she was a little girl, her dad took her on a carriage ride. They went through the poorest section of town. Jane was just so sad — the children were dirty, and they were in rags, and there was trash around the yards, and the doors were hanging off their hinges. She asked her dad, “Why do people live like this?” And he said, “It’s because they don’t know anything better.” So when Jane grew up, she went to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago where there were a lot of immigrants, and she bought this big house. She lined the walls with fine art, and filled it with music and books. Then she invited everybody into her home, to come and be uplifted and inspired by all that was good. They in turn took it to their homes and improved their own lives. That idea has been planted in my heart. That’s how I envision Libraries of Hope. It’s a place to come and to be uplifted and inspired by the finest things that have been gifted to us from the ages. And as they fill your heart, you incorporate them in your own home and family, and feel uplifted and inspired. And that’s what this is all about. At A Glance Name: Marlene Blomquist Peterson Age: 61 Location: Appomattox, Virginia Marital history: Married to Brent Peterson for 42 years Children: 8 daughters, 1 son Occupation: President, Libraries of Hope Schools Attended: Bachelors in Child Development and Family Relations, BYU Languages Spoken at Home: English, some Swedish Favorite Hymn: O My Father Website: www.librariesofhope.com Interview Produced by Meredith Nelson

Mariana Castro Heath has traveled around the world for her studies and her archeological work. Born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal, Mariana graduated with a BA in Archeology and Anthropology with Honors at BYU, and is now an Ertegun Scholar and MPhil Candidate in Classical Archeology at the University of Oxford. She has been described as a “Renaissance Woman”—her love for archeology, film, photography, journalism, and the Gospel show an insatiable desire to keep learning throughout her life and bring beauty to the world. Challenges in the archeological field have helped her be more self-aware, and have taught her that God loves all of His children, no matter what time period or culture. Tell me about your love for archeology. Where did that love start and what made you want to pursue that path? I didn’t know I wanted to be an archeologist until my last year in high school. It was not my childhood dream like it is for most people. When I tell people, “I’m an archeologist,” people say, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to be an archeologist,” but when I was a child, I didn’t. What I did love growing up was history. I loved it when people told me little stories or big stories. I just loved them. I grew up in Portugal with my grandma and my dad telling me a lot of stories. When I got to fifth grade, that’s when I really started receiving more of a history education, and I realized that I loved it. But I also loved other things; I loved other disciplines. History was the discipline I was best at. But I also loved photography. I received my first camera in fifth grade, and I started documenting everything. For a very long time I wanted to be a photographer or photojournalist because it would allow me to travel and allow me to see all of these wonderful places that I had heard about, but at the same time it would allow me to document them and keep them safe. It was only when I became much older that I realized that archeology was just such a perfect combination of everything I wanted to do. I realized that my passion was not really photography or history, my passion was documenting. My passion was to document things and to not lose them. I guess that terrifies me, the loss of moments and of experiences and of history. At the same time, archeology would allow me to travel and to see the world and engage in the communities at a deeper level than just being a tourist or just being an outsider photographer. With archeology you are actually living with people and learning about their lives. It was a perfect combination. Mariana Biking with Her Grandmother in Greece Was there a specific moment that helped you realize that archeology combined your love of documenting and your love of history? I only realized this a lot more recently. I think when I was making the decision to study archeology, my decision was much more driven by realizing that all the other things I loved—theatre, cinema, photography, and journalism—could be learned without going to college. Archeology, in the middle of all these things, was the only one where I had to go to college. But, the realization of my love of documenting has come from a lot of different things, and not just archeology. It has come from me doing genealogy work, continuing my passion for photography, and trying to become a little more self-aware. Through that process, I realized that all of my passions combine, and what they all have in common is this documentation process. For example, I have a blog, where I don’t write anything at all, but I put everything I learn about the stories of my family, and my photographs, and every time I see something beautiful that I think is going to get lost on YouTube or Google, I put it there too so that everything is very well-archived. And so one day, if someone needs to find a little package of beautiful things about humanity, it will be there. Documenting is important to you because you don’t want beautiful things to be lost. In your work—in your digs and in your studies—what does it feel like to re-discover something that was forgotten for so many years? The process of rediscovery is constant in the field and in my studies. In the field is a completely different experience because you’re uncovering things and people for the first time in 2000 years. The sites that I’ve excavated in Petra, for example. In my studies, I’m often reading things that other people haven’t uncovered. It’s a little bit like uncovering it again, because a lot of these things are in books or reports that nobody has looked at in 50 years! But reading those reports is a different feeling than on the sites, because it’s not as new—it’s not you being the first person to touch it since the person who owned it touched it, so it’s a different connection. But in Petra, for example, I often have the experience of being the first person to touch something again, especially when digging graves. It’s particularly special when you find a body, because suddenly you realize, wait, this is actually a person. He’s the same height as my brother. Perfect teeth. He was probably a good-looking young man, about my age. And he’s here, lying with a rock in his head. So those experiences are really, really interesting. Mariana at the Acropolis in Athens It’s a very spiritual experience to do archaeology, because it’s the Spirit of Elijah in its ultimate degree! You are making a connection with someone whose name you don’t know, but you think, “What will it be when this person and I meet? I knew so much about you without knowing anything about you.” It’s very profound in that sense. But then we also find beautiful shiny things like gold and jewelry, and that’s also very exciting. On one hand you have humanity, but on the other you have everything that humanity is able to do with the world. It’s just amazing to see the creative potential of human beings. You find things you would never expect to find. And it just adds to how amazing humanity is. How do you view the role of archeology in today’s world? I think an important role of archeology, especially nowadays when it is very difficult to explain to people the value of humanities, is by showing how the past can help us lead a more meaningful present. The way I find my work more meaningful is by applying everything I learn in archelogy to everything I can do in the present. Archaeology, for example, impacts the way modern people perceive and shape their identity. In that sense we have an incredible responsibility not only to individuals but to regions, states, and international relations. Imagine for example the debate over the Parthenon marbles, or the Bust of Nefertiti. People today are desperately engaged in the past through political debates over who owns artifacts that belong to their “millennial cultures,” which is in itself highly debatable. We also have the responsibility to deliver unbiased knowledge about the past, educate the next generation, and protect sites that are being destroyed and looted as we speak. What are some other lessons archeology has taught you? I have learned to see people different than me as children of God. On one hand you have dead people teaching you all of these amazing and unexpected things about humanity and our millennial connection with the divine, but on the other hand you are living with all of these living people who also teach you other things about humanity that you never thought about. People who believe in completely different things than you do. People who are nomads from the desert, and they still think that they are descendants of these ancient people. People who cannot really see past tomorrow. People who live in a community and who are much more focused on family and tribal connections than they are on individualistic pursuits, for example. Living with these people and working with these people has taught me so much. Engaging with people so different from me expands my comprehension of what a human being can be, and how vast and diverse God’s love for all his children actually is. Mariana on Her Wedding Day in Manhattan You mentioned that archeology gives you a deeper experience than just being a tourist or an outside photographer. Do you have some examples of that? Absolutely. Archeology makes you go outside your comfort zone. And you become more than yourself when you go outside of your comfort zone. Let me tell you, living with Bedouin women and men is going outside of your comfort zone. The same goes for other places. When I excavated in Belize, I lived with Mexican and Guatemalan people, and that was a different experience than living with Bedouin. Those are people that you don’t really meet unless you go on these archeological excursions. As an archeologist, you meet people at a deeper level. They are our hosts, and in that capacity we have a relationship of trust and understanding. They become your friends; they become your family. They really do. They feed you. They give you a house. And when you leave they say, “always come back.” How would you say that the love of God has influenced your profession? It’s just made me so much more patient and kind. I’m pushed to be the best of myself around these people because I not only owe them so much, but because of their example. Because they are so wonderful to me, a foreigner. I’m not saying that people where I live are not as wonderful, but it’s a different type of mentality in the Middle East. Where I work and why I like to work there is in part not because of the dead or archeology, but because of the living people who remind me to be better. And to see how these people discuss and read the Quran has also been enlightening. They have such a love for God, even in the most remote places. I become a better professional by interacting with these people and by letting them expand my range of human experience. Underwater Archaeology in Greece You’ve been all over the world for archeology and for school. Right now you are pursuing an MPhil at the University of Oxford. Why did you choose Oxford for your higher education? I chose Oxford because I wanted to have the experience of going to university with the type of education that was different than the American education. I wanted to get the largest range of education I could get, and to get the other side of the spectrum. In America, archeology is taught very differently than in Britain. I had an American education at BYU, but I also wanted the British education. Oxford seemed like an obvious choice because it’s one of the best universities in the world, it has one of the best programs in archeology in the world, and it has a supervisor who I thought I could work really well with. And in the end it was also because I was blessed with funding through the Ertegun Scholarship Programme. And who doesn’t want to live the Harry Potter experience? Everyone, obviously. But of course, we know that Oxford is not Harry Potter. Oxford is an incredible experience, but it’s also really hard. What are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced at Oxford and what has helped you overcome them? I think the answer to that question is that an Oxford education is not made to make you feel good about yourself. It’s really made to make you realize how ignorant you are. But if there’s something that Oxford has taught me, it’s how to think more critically. I’ve become a lot more critical of the things I hear. I’m not skeptical, but I take everything with a grain of salt, especially if it’s not sourced by three people. At the same time, Oxford is such a unique place because you’re dealing with people from all over the world, especially at a graduate level. It’s fascinating. It has been so great for my education because these people know what they’re saying and are so educated. It’s so inspiring. But at the same time it’s a little bit frustrating, because you realize that I do not have the personality to become like them. I could never be that invested in just one thing. I have had to do some serious soul searching. I’m much more like a Renaissance woman. I like a lot of things, and I just don’t see myself focusing on one area, or one culture, or one field of research for the rest of my life. It’s just not my personality. In that respect, Oxford has helped me to gain and to know myself. I thought that academia is what I wanted to do. I thought this was all I wanted to do. But the more time I spend here, the more I realize that I do not want to constrain myself. I want to do the opposite. I want to enlarge my horizons. So maybe that’s a good thing. Oxford has helped me to realize how much bigger everything can become and I do not regret coming here. Mariana on Her Last Day at BYU What do you see your life becoming? And how have your years at Oxford taught you to become more self-aware? Ideally, I would like to be a part-time professor and I would also like to spend time raising a family. I think that’s important as well. But you really do have to know yourself. Like it’s said at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself.” I really believe that. You need to know how you are going to be happy. Oxford has taught me that I’m not super in love with academia, which is an important thing to know about myself. It has also taught me how good I feel being a little bit more domestic sometimes. I think ideally, the path of life that would not make me go insane would be to be a part-time professor, without all the pressures of being a tenured professor, but still being able to teach. I love teaching. Where did you gain your love for teaching? When I taught Sunday School at BYU. I taught Old Testament and it was great. I really gained a passion for sharing insights. There’s something transcendental about having an epiphany and sharing it with other people. I love that. And I think we should all do that. Also, I love being open about questions and doubts and complexes that we all have. I am becoming a lot more comfortable with sharing my complexes with people, being honest with how I see myself. And that has really helped me to realize that what I think of myself is not what other people think of me, which is healthy. Teaching has helped me to become a lot more confident and healthy and insightful, and it motivates me to be more intelligent. So that is something I know about myself—that I love teaching. I think the only way I will not go insane is by dividing my life between the things that I love instead of just focusing on just family or just focusing on just work. I don’t think that will bring me a lot of happiness. But ideally, I would have an archeological project, take my children into the field, show them the archeology, be a part-time professor, and also take time to be at home. Ideally, that’s my life. Mariana Castro Heath How do you feel God’s hand directing your life? Do you feel His hand? Sometimes I struggle with the silence of God. I know rationally that God cannot forget me. But sometimes the silence lasts for so long and it’s so intense no matter how hard I plead for some direction and guidance in my life, and that is hard. Something that taught me about the silence of God was actually the movie “Silence,” which I saw a few days ago. The movie is rated R and very violent, but I learned a lot from it. The movie is about priests—Portuguese Jesuit priests—who go to Japan in the 17th century to try to convert the Japanese to Christianity, but they are faced with all sorts of persecution. They are all killed and tortured. In the end, there is this last priest who has survived by assimilating to Japanese culture. They basically tell him that he can either join them or die. So he joins them. And in the end, he realizes that even though God was silent to him, God spoke through him to other people. That’s how God spoke, through this missionary’s actions. That was a powerful lesson for me. Also in those moments when I struggle with silence, I remember that scripture in Isaiah—“Can a mother forget her suckling child? Yes, but I will not forget thee” (Isaiah 49:10). That’s one of my favorite scriptures because it reminds that despite all the silence in my decisions in how I want to lead my life, I know He somehow must be approving, because He has promised never to forget me. Another thing that helps me is something my dad told me: we are here to discover our value, not to prove it to the Father. The Father already knows our worth, so we’re here to discover who we really are. Archeology is the life path that has helped me the most in discovering who I am and my limits. My physical limits, my psychological limits, my emotional limits. It’s a challenging profession. But it’s so rewarding. The challenges of archeology and the self-awareness it brings reminds me of this scripture, Romans 12:2. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Isn’t that amazing? That all of these things need to be seen in an eternal perspective, and when we do that, they become so much more meaningful. It’s so beautiful to see how we renew our minds every time we do something that challenges us. For me, Oxford is like that, archeology is like that. They challenge me and renew my life. At A Glance Name: Mariana Castro Heath Age: 24 Location: Oxford, United Kingdom Marital History: Married Children: 0 Occupation: Graduate student Convert?: Born in the church Schools Attended: BYU, University of Oxford Languages Spoken at Home: Portuguese, English Favorite Hymn: How Firm a Foundation Website: http://the-sky-is-purple.weebly.com/ Interview Produced by Megan Armknecht

Trisha Leimer was raising her family in Frankfurt, Germany when the global refugee crisis hit a tipping point in 2015. As she volunteered in and out of camps and continued to work with refugees, she developed personal relationships and realized how intertwined their stories are with our own. Together with five other people, she co-founded Their Story is Our Story: Giving Voice to Refugees, a group of artists and writers committed to sharing refugees’ stories in words and images. She talks about the “divine choreography” that pulled them together, as well as personal and gospel insights she has gained while befriending refugees and inviting them into her life. Tell me how you first got involved with refugees. We had lived in Frankfurt for about 15 years, and my daughter was going to school there. We received an email during Fall break informing all of the parents that the school gym was no longer going to be used for sports, but that it was going to be converted to an emergency reception center for refugees. This was in the Fall of 2015 when these huge waves of refugees were pouring over the border into Germany. They let us know that there was going to be an information evening and that we could go to the city hall for a meeting with the mayor to talk about it. So we went, my daughter and I, and I walked into this auditorium with 400 people in attendance. I was sure that these German parents were going to pound the table and say, “Not our school! And not on our campus!” But no, it was just the opposite. It was amazing to me that everyone was really excited about it. They had microphones set up in the aisle, and people lined up one after the other and said, “Well, is there anything we can do? I’m really worried that this isn’t going to be good enough for them. How are they going to be comfortable in this gym?” The way the German government handled the sudden influx of people into Germany was to just farm them out at the border to different states, and then the states would farm them out to counties and then these counties would have to figure out where to house them… sometimes with just a few hours’ notice. Abandoned warehouses, hospitals, military barracks, school gyms and even churches were quickly converted into refugee centers. And that’s where I started—I would drop off my daughter every Wednesday and then park and go into the gymnasium. I taught German. I brought knitting supplies and we would go back into one of the changing rooms which they had converted into a prayer room/activity room. I’d sit on the floor or on benches with all these women, crocheting and talking. We couldn’t really understand each other, but we communicated pretty well using gestures and smiles. People would come in and pray next to us. I learned a lot those first four months that I was there. Then they closed it down and moved these refugees to more permanent housing, about an hour away from us – a tent city camp that fluctuated between 500-800 residents. They wouldn’t let us in there; we could only go to a tent outside the camp where they would have social activities. The sister missionaries from the European offices had been helping me gather yarn and things, and they asked if they could come, which they did. They’re amazing, and actually won an award for exemplary volunteer work. Trisha Leimer You see a lot of news reports about people who are not too thrilled about what’s going on in their backyard. You went into it with this expectation that people would be unhappy about receiving refugees, and then you were just blown away by their reactions. It sounds like there are a lot more people who have wanted to help than have been opposed to it. I’ve been amazed. I’ve thought a lot about this because of my experience moving to this country as an American. I was told Germans can be very cold. I am married to one, but he had been in the States for many years already when we met and he was kind of a Yankee already. So it was really hard moving here. It’s hard to get through to their soft middle: Germans are kind of like an egg – maybe hard on the outside, but soft in the middle if you can get in. I’ve really held a lot of respect for the German people. I love them. And I’m really glad I live here, but I was really surprised because I honestly expected that they would be more opposed than they were. I started having conversations with people, and I noticed as I was going into these camps that a lot of the German volunteers were older. They were in their 60s, 70s, retired. And they were so sweet with these people! They were super patient, and outside of the camp they would drive refugees to different offices to get paperwork or doctors’ appointments, and just started taking people under their wings. I asked the volunteers about this and they said, “I saw these pictures of people walking on the road along the Balkan Route towards Germany,” and it took them back to when they were young, just after the war, when they had to leave the Eastern areas of Germany, Poland and some other regions. They had to flee overnight because the Russians were coming. They left with nothing – usually their fathers were still gone or dead and it was a mother and children walking with just what they could carry. And they were given a space in a barn by a farmer or a basement apartment. They saw themselves in these refugees. These people that I’ve found to be some of the toughest people to get to know, and some of the hardest people – they are kind of crusty, because they’ve been through a lot – they were the ones who really reached out. It just melted them. It’s amazing how a situation like World War II and all the bad things that happened there could prepare a country to do what they’re doing right now. Trisha Leimer What have been some of your more impactful experiences volunteering in refugee camps? Actually, most of the people that I work with aren’t in a camp now. So, for instance, last Tuesday I went to a lawyer with a family from Afghanistan who just received their answer from their interviews for asylum. Each person over 18 gets an interview. They wait usually about 7-8 months before they get interviewed, and they’re super nervous on that day. They go in and tell their story about why they can’t go back to their home country, why it would be dangerous for them, why they’re seeking asylum. The German government provides them with a translator and somebody who asks the questions and records the interview. And then the recording is sent to a committee that decides whether or not this person has grounds to receive asylum and is truly a refugee. As a policy right now, most of the Afghans are being denied asylum, which just scares them to death because they face being sent back to the country they fled from. It’s so awful. Most of the TSOS interviews we’ve done have been with Afghans. If you read any one of them, on anyone’s scale on any level, they should not go back. But the German government for political reasons has decided that Afghanistan is a safe country and they’ve made an agreement with the Afghan government to pay to help reestablish these people in their home country. Well, you know they’re never going to see that money. So they get this yellow letter in the mail, finally after a year, telling them they will be shipped back to the country they left in desperation, and they panic. They call, and they say “Trish, we’ve got 2 weeks to file an appeal.” So, we have to go find a lawyer and ask them to represent them, and then file an appeal, and pay more than €1000, and then the government cannot ship them out until you’ve been given due process. So I did that on Tuesday. Then on Friday I went to visit a woman I met right in the very beginnings in that gym. She’s from Aleppo, Syria. She had been living in a house with 25 other women and children. They were stacked in rooms, 5 people to a room. And then there’s a whole level with just men. It’s really bad. It’s just a bad situation. And she’s been in there for about 5 months. But she found a new apartment, so we went there and I brought some donated furniture. People give me things all the time – my garage is full. We drove back to her house, we had tea in her little room and celebrated her birthday. She talked about her family and how she misses them. She has three sons who are still in Afghanistan with her husband, teenage boys. She has been given asylum but it’s only for one year, and then they will reopen her case and see if she’s integrating, if she’s trying to learn the language. She has to show that she’s making it and being a productive citizen. That’s kind of what I do: I help them with integration, I help them with paperwork, with legal work, with furniture, with moving. I let them cook for me now that they’re not in the refugee camps … hosting is a big deal in their cultures and they’re really proud when they can invite us over and cook us a meal, even though we eat on the floor, or they cook on the floor. What was the launching point for Their Story is Our Story: Giving Voice to Refugees (TSOS)? What prompted you to start this organization? That was amazing. We were going to the camp I mentioned. My good friend, Melissa Dalton-Bradford and I had been working in the gym together, and we decided we’d just keep going to the people we knew. [Editor’s note, Melissa Dalton-Bradford is co-founder of TSOS, and gave an interview for MWP in 2013]. We would drive an hour once a week to this place and then drive an hour back, and we’d have these conversations on the way – it was wonderful, we miss it. And we started talking about recording these stories and how unfair the things were that we were hearing from the U.S. – it was all during the Trump hype, during the election year. I was just amazed at the misconceptions and the false information people were getting. I knew that if they could spend ten minutes with one of these people, they would change their minds. I just knew that. One day, when this was really, really pressing on me, I received a message from a good friend from college. She was part of a wives-of-bishops Facebook page and someone [Lindsay Silsby] had posted on that page that she was a photographer in London and that she had been having this recurring dream about going with her mission friend, Garrett [Gibbons], who was a filmmaker, to the mainland to help refugee children. That same day I got another email from Liz [Thayer], who I had known here in Frankfurt. Both came in on that same day, and it was an answer to prayers. So, I said, “Well, I will follow this, Heavenly Father, if this is what you want.” It just seemed like a pretty amazing coincidence to me. Trisha Leimer Tell me a little bit about the name, “Their Story Is Our Story,” and your hopes for the organization. You’ve mentioned that hearing people’s stories can change minds and soften hearts. Definitely, that’s the main goal: to help people have a balance to what they hear in the press and hear in the U.S. Here [in Germany] also, there’s definitely a pendulum that’s swinging back the other direction. A lot of fear here as well. So, we’re trying to dispel the fear, dispel the misunderstanding by just letting them tell their story. We found that art was one of the best ways to do it. I think the pictures and the photographs, the paintings and the video of them, it just really lets them tell about themselves in a way that speaks to people. Most refugees don’t readily speak about their past. They don’t talk about their experiences and the things that they left behind, because they’re all in the same boat if you think about it: they’re all suffering. And they’re very closed and mistrustful because of their past experiences. But it was absolutely amazing! In the camp in Greece, every tent stood in line to sit down in front of our cameras, and talk about their experiences! Then they would stand up one after the other and just take a deep breath, and it was like a cleansing thing for them. “[Deep breath] I feel so much better, thank you. Thank you for listening.” We hadn’t expected that at all. We were thinking we would really have to get their trust before they would open up. It’s been an incredible thing to witness. We stay in touch on a personal level. Because I’m here, I can help them also. There’s a lot of contact. It helps them just to be in contact with somebody – to let them know somebody cares. Trisha Leimer Some of the stories that you’re helping to tell at TSOS are pretty dark. They’re heartbreaking at times. How do you, personally and as an organization, find hope as you’re faced with this flood of human suffering? It’s hard. There are definitely days where I go pick up my husband from work and I’ll just say, “This was a heavy day.” But the blessings far outweigh the difficulties! The greatest blessing is witnessing the dignity and strength of these my brothers and sisters. I was thinking about this today in church, that these people are so resilient. They’re thankful for everything. They get frustrated and impatient, and they have a lot going on in their heads. They’re dealing with a lot of emotions and a lot of leftovers from what they’ve experienced, of course. But I have so much respect for them. As I get their trust and as we establish relationships, I’m getting to know them on different levels and it’s very rewarding. It’s difficult and sometimes just like being a mom. You have to say, “Well, that doesn’t work,” or, “You need to change, this isn’t going to help you,” or “That expectation is unrealistic. Take a look at what’s happening and think about it.” But for the most part, I come away thinking “Wow, these people are amazing.” I’ve seen things I never thought I would see, heard of things that I never thought I would – normally in life you’ll meet maybe one or two families that have experienced this magnitude of tragedy, but I’ve met dozens. Trisha Leimer What have you learned about people’s relationship, and your relationship, to God through your experiences with TSOS and helping refugees? The one thing that comes to mind is my view of Christ-like love. What does it mean to have charity? I see the Good Samaritan and that whole parable in a completely different light. You have different kinds of giving going on here. You have donations, where you give money, you give socks, you give wool, or yarn. And that’s nice, and then I went to the next level, and I would take that stuff and I’d walk into a camp, and I was like Santa Claus to them. They’d say, “Trisha! Trisha!” and they’d give me hugs, and they’d take my stuff. And that’s really nice. It’s very rewarding, and it’s kind of selfish, although it does also help them. It’s important. But I think that the most difficult is probably the most rewarding. And that’s when you really – like the Samaritan did – you pick them up, you carry them with you. You bring them into your lives. You have to go through some training in order to get into some of these camps – and the people there gave us a list of things you do, and things you don’t do. And I did every one of the things they said you don’t do. “You don’t give them your number, you don’t let them in your home, you don’t ask them about their experiences, you don’t talk to them.” It took all the compassion out of it! It was very much a business/volunteer type thing. And I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t. And I’m glad I didn’t, because this is how I’ve really been able to help them. They say over, and over again, “I want to feel like I’m human. I want people to know that we’re humans just like you,” all they want is a peaceful place to live. “A place where we can work and contribute and do our thing,” and in order to get that, it’s pretty much out of their hands. They have been thrown into a situation where so much is out of their control, and they need people to take care of them. The best way for me to take care of them is to help them take care of themselves. To help them learn a language, help them learn how things work here, go to the grocery store, show them where things are, tell them what things are called, help them get into the schools, help them find work. All of that. And that’s what the Samaritan did. He didn’t donate. He didn’t leave the guy on the road and go back to his ward and say, “Ok, we really need to figure something out here for this guy.” No. He picked him up, he took him on his donkey. He took him to a place where he could help him. Made sure he was safe, made sure he was taken care of, and made sure that he was emotionally taken care of. I think that’s what I’ve learned. Trisha Leimer I see the Lord’s hand so clearly in this migration of so many, from lands where they had no chance to hear the Gospel to places where they can. And their tragedies and suffering have brought their hearts to a place where they are open to it. It is not by chance that our family is here right now, and I feel our backgrounds and our own experiences as foreigners here help us to identify with them, to show them meaningful support. I see it as such a pivotal time and a fulfillment of prophecy. When I read Mormon’s writings in the Book of Mormon now, I see it through the eyes of my displaced friends from the East. Mormon says he has seen our day and is writing to us. I wonder if we aren’t a bit prideful in thinking he is referring to western society. When we say that Moroni saw our day, and that Mormon was speaking to us, I always pictured them seeing wide streets, white picket fences, green front lawns, traffic, big cars and Walmart. Now I am wondering if the war chapters weren’t written for the millions of people who are experiencing those very same atrocities today, and if Ether didn’t perhaps see minarets and people in headscarves eating falafel. And all of the water crossings to a promised land, the tree of life… these all have very deep, real meanings for these people. Perhaps Mormon took the trouble to write about this war and destruction because he saw the terrible destruction taking place today and knew his experiences would benefit them, that they would find comfort and strength and would relate to Mormon and his son, Moroni and all they witnessed and went through. There is no doubt that the Book of Mormon is shining forth and pulling them in. In fact, Isaiah prophesied of this very thing. It is amazing how he pointed to the very areas where these people are coming from. These are areas where our missionaries cannot yet go, but here they are, coming to us by the hundreds of thousands. This situation really isn’t so different from the Anti-Nephi-Lehis having to flee from their brothers, the Lamanites, in order to save their lives. The Nephites agree to give them an entire city and the lands around it, and they agree to protect them while respecting their covenant not to take up arms. This is a time in the world’s history when 60 million people are fleeing from people who want to kill them. They are at the mercy of those lands to which they are fleeing. The only difference is that they have no advocate like Ammon or the sons of Mosiah to speak for them. We are being asked to make room for these people, if not literally, then figuratively, as the refugees stream into Europe and into Germany and ask for protection. Most are eager to become active, contributing citizens and do their part. Most did not want to leave – most had beautiful homes, good jobs, were educated and loved their lives. That was taken away from them in the last several very violent and destructive years. We need to read this part of the Book of Mormon again and take a look at the way the Nephites handled it. Melissa once commented that we humans connect on our broken edges. Our refugee friends have been through so much, and many are broken. Something happens when we reach out in love and connect. When we allow ourselves to mourn with them and feel with them. Even when we can’t speak with each other, even when I can’t even imagine what they have been through, even then – love connects us and something happens. Those broken edges really are what it’s all about. What we do with the edges when we are broken, the method we use to patch them up, speaks volumes about who and what we are. A loving, reaching human connection along those fissures is extremely powerful, even celestial. At A Glance Name: Trisha Leimer Age: 48 Location: Frankfurt, Germany Marital History: Married since 1989 to Axel H. Leimer Children: Stefan (26) Jessica (24) Christian (21) Aki (19) Natasha (17) Occupation: Child Care Assistant at local grades school, refugee volunteer Convert?: Born in the Church Schools Attended: BYU, BYU-Jerusalem Languages Spoken: German, English Favorite Hymn: Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing Website: www.tsosrefugees.org Interview Produced by Lydia Defranchi (TSOS Translation Coordinator)

Kay Conder was only 34 years old when she and her husband of 13 years divorced, in 1984. She was left to raise six kids between the ages of 2-10 by herself. Now at 68, she discusses how she managed, how views within the church membership and leadership have changed over the years, and the lessons she’s learned along the way. Did you ever think “why me?” And if so, what did you come up with? I have thought about “why me” sometimes. Why can’t I have the perfect family? Why can’t I have a comfortable home and know how to make it pleasant? Sometimes it’s why me, why can’t I have all this stuff? But then I realize that’s not what my calling was here on this earth. It wasn’t to be rich and famous—to have millions of dollars. I’ve always felt that anything Heavenly Father gave me was for my benefit, to help me learn and progress. I have a child who was born with medical needs who needed a lot of attention. I’ve always felt blessed with her. I could love her like no one else could. She could have been really rejected in another home. I’ve always felt it was a special calling for me to have her and be able to help her grow and become the woman that she is. When it comes to my divorce, I think there’s something to be learned from a divorce. I learned what it’s like to be lonely, I mean really lonely. I learned how to be compassionate, and how to survive in different situations. There’s just always something for me to learn. I think I said sometimes, “Why do I have to do this?” But then I’d think: Patience. I really needed to learn patience, not just with other people, but patience with myself. Photo Credit: Tanya Pavlis Was it as common in the 1980s to be divorced as it is now? Not as much. I think that’s one reason I went to church because I wanted my children to have that stability they didn’t have in the home. Back then divorce was a little less prevalent, and so it seemed like there had to be something wrong. I felt that people were judging me or had judged me and I was not looked upon as favorably as I was before the divorce. Before, people had said, “Oh, you’re married and you have a family,” and now that I was divorced, it was, “What did she do to get divorced? Was it infidelity on his part? Is she going to make it?” People have all these questions, but they don’t want to ask—so it just builds up, you know? A lot of it was probably my imagination and they couldn’t have cared less. Everybody had their own family to worry about. The church teaches you that you’re married for eternity and you should be able to work out all these problems. You can try hard, but if your spouse is not trying just as hard then there comes a time when you have say, “I’ve given it my all.” I think a marriage is a constant coming together of minds and if not, you need to have a compromise of some sort. When you feel the Spirit say that it’s better for the kids not to be exposed to so much fighting, yelling, and carrying on, it’s time to listen. You lived in a very small Idaho town. How did that affect your experience around the divorce? In a small town, people have more of a tendency to know each other and everybody’s business. On the other end, it was a small farming town and so everyone was busy with their farms or their kids and didn’t have as much time. I felt like everyone was talking about me, but in hindsight, it probably wasn’t true. Kay Conder, Photo Credit: Lauren Lockett What was it like raising six kids between the ages of 2-10 by yourself? I never felt like there was enough time to divide and conquer. Being organized was a huge key. The hardest part was trying to balance everything and keep it within a small budget. I didn’t have a million dollars coming in. It was always a juggling act to make sure the kids had the necessities of life and to pay the bills. If you take all the concerns and responsibilities you have with one child and multiply it by six that’s how I was feeling. All of my kids had different personalities and quirks, which was its own set of challenges. Sometimes I felt mentally and physically exhausted or drained. Between work and family, there was no time for me. It didn’t feel like there was a respite until people grew up and moved away. But then there’s a new set of worries. What was it like being a single mom? It was very frustrating. I didn’t feel like I had anybody to talk to. I felt like I didn’t have all the answers. If there was contention it remained between me and my children because I felt I should handle it alone, or at least give it a good shot. Photo Credit: Tanya Pavlis Did you ever wish you had time to date? Yes and no. I dated a couple of guys and they just weren’t the ones. My self-esteem was so low after the divorce that I made bad choices when it came to dating. When I actually felt better about myself the opportunity never presented itself. When I moved to Utah I tried to go to the singles dances, but it felt like a meat market. I probably didn’t give it a fair shot, but there seemed to be more girls than guys, and the guys who were there were trying to find someone younger and cuter, who didn’t have a lot of baggage. It wasn’t worth the effort. I felt like if Heavenly Father wanted me to have somebody he would put somebody in my path. In my Patriarchal Blessing it says I’ll have a tough life but in the end it will all work out, and so I just felt like this was part of my life. Do you ever feel discouraged about never remarrying? Yes. You know if you watch a movie or you read something and it really touches you? Those are the times when I miss having somebody there to talk with about it. There are times when I really want to snuggle and there’s nobody here. I just make my cat come lie by me and I pet him and he purrs, but it’s not the same. Did you feel ashamed or like you had failed somehow? I’ve always felt I failed somehow. This is the way it’s taught: you get married and you support your spouse and he should support you and you make this wonderful marriage. And even though they tell you it’s not always easy, you don’t really understand until you’re in the middle of it. You question: is it me? Is it him? I felt like it was always my fault. I didn’t support him. I didn’t do this or do that. Did I put too much pressure on him? It was always my questions about what I did wrong that made him fail. I feel like I failed my children financially. I feel I failed them somewhat as a mother. I wasn’t always there when they needed to talk. And when I was ready to talk they weren’t. So there’s an emotional disconnect I think. Kay Conder, Photo Credit: Tanya Pavlis Can you list all of the jobs you’ve had since being a single mom? I think so. I was an insurance nurse that did the physicals for insurance companies. I worked at the landfill, regulating the traffic, and where they could dump. I learned to drive a D-7 Cat. I recycled a lot, and it paid the bills. I mean, we’d make about $300-$400 a month just recycling cans and copper and whatever. I worked at Gooding Hospital until we moved and then I’ve been at the University of Utah ever since, for 29 years. What did you do at the University of Utah? I worked for Maternal Newborn Care. We took care of mothers postpartum/antepartum. We took care of babies. I worked in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit once in a while. Sometimes I went over to help Labor and Delivery, but I didn’t do the deliveries, I just took care of the babies. I was also a Charge Nurse. What was the hardest part about being a working mom? Trying to balance work hours with family, while also trying to make the family financially stable. You’re trying to save some money or get a little bit ahead, but then they need shoes, they need clothes, they need food, and they need a roof over their head. So you feel like you need to put more hours in to make that money, but then it’s taking away hours that you could spend with your family. Trying to find that balance was really hard. Kay Conder, Photo Credit: Tanya Pavlis How did you parent while working such long hours? How did I parent? Poorly [laughs]. Well, when my kids were younger and we had just moved to Utah, I worked in the evenings. I would try to call them every two hours to check up on them. We would have family prayer on the phone. On my days off, I tried to make it all about my kids. It helped me be more organized I think. Every day was somebody else’s day to be in charge. The kids learned how to cook and do different things they probably wouldn’t have learned if I had been a stay at home mom. Do you feel like you missed out on anything by working? Everything. Well, I felt like my ideal was to have this perfectly manicured house, have the laundry always done, have the meals planned, decorate for each holiday, be in the PTA or be a room mother, and being able to be with my family in the evenings and not be so tired that I couldn’t see straight. I wish I could have had more actual conversations instead of yes, no, I don’t care, go do what you want because I’m too tired to think about it right now. I missed out being a leader for my girls at church. Maybe I would have been called to mutual or something like that where I would have had a little bit more influence. I might have been able to have more time for FHE or things like that, which could have given me an influence. There’s so many teaching moments at home and I missed a lot of those. I’m grateful that other people helped raised my kids to be the people they are. Kay and Her Daughter Leslie, Photo Credit: Tanya Pavlis What do you think or hope your children gained by having such a hardworking mom who sacrificed so much for them? I hope they understand the value of work. That through prayer anything is possible. You can find some comfort in your Heavenly Father. I hope they gained a value of education. It seems like more and more people want an education, but it’s so expensive, so they give up on their dreams. I hope my kids never give up on their dreams. I hope they figure out what they want and go after it even if it takes a long time. What are you most proud of when it comes to your career? I’m proud that I’ve stuck with a job and a place for so long. I think there’s something to be said for stability and stick-to-it-ness. I’m proud that when I left the U of U, people cared that I was leaving. They cared about me and I cared about them. I’m proud that I was able to provide for my family. I felt like I gave really good care as a nurse, especially to the babies. What are you most proud of when it comes to your children? They have all grown up to be responsible. Everyone has had their trials, but in the long run they’ve found themselves in the gospel and found themselves as people. There’s always room for improvement and self-reflection—perpetual growth. They care about their community, the schools they attend, their children and setting good examples for them, their health, and that they go to church. I’m proud that they’re my children. When I talk about my children I don’t have to apologize. They are honestly good people and they seek after good things. They are kind and considerate of each other and of other people. They’ve given me wonderful grandchildren. Your mother came to live with you and your kids the last 10 years of her life, how did you handle that along with everything else? Sometimes it was very good, especially when she was in better health, because I knew my kids were in good hands. She would watch over them and try to guide them the best she could. Other times I got frustrated because every generation learns more than their parents, and so sometimes she’d want me to do something that just wasn’t my way. I felt like I had more psychology classes and sociology classes and more tools for compromising or coping. I believed that you always have to lead with love. It wasn’t hard for me until the last five years when it was almost constant care for my mother. Instead of dividing my time in half with my family and work I now had to divide my time between my mom, my family, and work—along with whatever the church was asking me to do. But, like most women, I often took care of family before I took care of myself. It kind of got thin in places, but I’m grateful that the Lord gave me that strength. What was the hardest part about going to church alone with your kids? It seemed like back then all of the talks were about family, maybe not so much now. Activities for the ward were, “Bring your family.” I didn’t feel complete because I didn’t have a spouse and so it didn’t feel like a family. It’s hard to rein six kids in. Am I keeping my kids quiet enough? Have I taught them enough? I just felt judged a lot. It’s probably my internal insecurities; I’d often ask, “Is it worth taking them out or should I just stay in?” And then I would feel judged again, thinking people would say, “She can’t discipline her children.” Kay at Her Daughter's Wedding Did you ever miss having a priesthood holder in your home? Yes. Lots. I couldn’t wait until Cody and Aaron, my sons, received the Aaronic Priesthood because it meant I had priesthood holders in my home. It’s not the same as having a Melchizedek Priesthood holder in your home who can bless your kids when they’re sick. I think the leadership should come from a priesthood holder. He sets the example as far as having family prayer or calling on people or even Family Home Evening. Even though the mother is the nurturer, I feel like if she does it right, she would be the main support system and be able to help her husband be the leader. I don’t mean that she’s subservient. I think that’s part of our calling as a wife and mother that we support our children and we support our husband. In return they support us when we are doing things that are needful. How did you rely on the priesthood leadership in the ward? Sometimes I talked to them about my finances and got help financially and sometimes food-wise from the Bishop’s Storehouse. We called on my home teachers or the bishopric when we needed blessings. I would have talks with them while I was trying to gain my status back as a member. I also tried to listen to or read conference talks to help me have the knowledge I needed to tend to my children and to myself. Did your testimony ever waiver? I don’t think my testimony ever waivered. I think my physical being waivered. I’ve always known what was right from wrong and even when I was doing things that were wrong, I knew that I could repent I could come back and He was waiting for me, but it was up to me to make that penance. How did you, or do you, strengthen your testimony? I try to read the scriptures every day. I try to pray and I work on my prayers because I feel like they don’t even reach the roof sometimes. My prayers have always been constant—I may not kneel down and say everything all at once. I think bearing your testimony helps. I try to be prepared for Sunday and keep the Sabbath Day holy. I try to read the lessons that are going to be presented in Sunday School and Relief Society so that I can contribute, but also so I can be receptive to learning new ideas. Plus, I think it helps you to keep the Sabbath Day holy when you are prepared. It makes you feel the Spirit. I’ve tried to study about the Sacrament and I try to make that a more meaningful time in my life. What advice do you have for single women or single moms? Stay close to your Home Teachers and Visiting Teachers and when needed, your Bishopric. Never break those contacts, and let them know how important they are to you in your life. I feel like more and more the brethren have said, “Don’t worry about being single.” No matter what, the Lord will provide for us in this life or the next. Be prayerful. Always be prayerful. And study hard. Even if you’re not learning things like you do in school, you can always learn something new and different. At A Glance Name: Kay Lynn Conder Age: 68 Location: Bountiful, Utah Marital History: Divorced Children: 6 children living 1 deceased. Holly: 43, Heidi: 42: Elisa: 41, Aaron 39, Cody 37, Leslie 35. (Lyle: Died a few hours after he was born.) Occupation: Retired Registered Nurse Schools Attended: Ricks College (Now BYUI), Imperial Valley College Favorite Hymn: Families Can Be Together Forever Interview Produced by Leslie Schwartz-Leeper

Cecilie Lundgreen, known as CC, is a Norwegian professional golfer. As she was climbing the ranks of European pro golfers, she lost several loved ones in a short space of time. She became friends with two Mormon women golfers from Africa, her coach Reeve Nield and golf pro Laurette Maritz, who offered her a glimpse of the Gospel. CC was baptized in 2002, shortly after she also lost her mother whose support she credits for her success. With Reeve and Laurette, CC runs a non-profit called Eyes4Zimbabwe, which provides cataract surgery, and life-saving food and supplies for impoverished families in Zimbabwe, where CC lives part of every year. Her faith in Jesus Christ is the center of her life, and she feels she represents Him as she continues to compete on the green. Tell me about your journey to becoming a professional golfer. I grew up in Norway in a troubled home with loud voices, alcohol, and abuse. When I was eleven years old, my mother finally left my father. That summer I spent most of my time with my grandparents. My grandfather told me I’d better learn to play golf, and off we went. Golf changed my life. I quickly took to the sport, practiced hard and started to represent my club. I represented Norway for the first time when I was 15 in the ‘unofficial’ World Championships in Italy. It was awesome and I decided I wanted to play more. Through golf, I could bring a measure of pride and recognition to my family, since in my small hometown everyone knew our troubles. I began to dream of life as a professional golfer. My mother let me spend summers without a job if I worked hard at golf, extended myself, and developed the talent others saw. Dedication, hard work, and a lot of practice finally paid off when I was granted a scholarship to Florida Atlantic University in America to further my education—and my golf. Cecilie ("CC") Lundgreen It was hard, at age nineteen, to leave my mother and fly across the world to attend university. She had raised me with all the love she could give and had taught me to be levelheaded. But she was not religious. We never attended church, and religion was never spoken of, so I didn’t really believe in anything or anyone. Most of my extended family were atheists, so no one spoke of religion or of Heavenly Father—except Grandma Lundgreen, who kept reminding us that the Lord is kind. At the time, I just laughed it off. I attended school for five years while playing golf and having a fantastic life. I was such a ‘hot shot’ and played great golf, had the opportunity to travel the world as an amateur for Norway and met so many amazing people. I thought I was on my way to stardom! And I was. For a while. Cecilie ("CC") Lundgreen What led you to start thinking about religion? Over the next several years, life seemed to be made of tragedy. The grandfather who taught me to play golf died when I was seventeen, and I was angry. Then a young golfer I knew died from cancer, and a friend’s seven-year-old daughter was struck by lightning while playing on the playground with her brother, suffering permanent physical damage. My best friend died just before her twenty-second birthday from an undetected birth defect. I was furious! People I cared deeply about were dying all around me. I did not understand why, and I was desperate to find out what happened to them. Where did they go? Would I ever see them again? What was the meaning of all this? It seemed no one could give me the answers. I was heartbroken. During my first year in Florida, my father died after a battle with liver cancer caused by his alcoholism. I was angry with him and with the world in general. I struggled to find meaning in it all. I joined the ‘Ladies European Tour’ after receiving my bachelor’s degree, and focused on my BIG goal, to be the Top Female Golfer in the World! I know, cheesy when you think of it—wanting to be the best in the world. However, it kept me focused and serious about my ‘job’ as a golf professional. I soon became the “famous golfer” in Norway. I’ll admit I loved receiving so much positive recognition from so many people. CC Then I met my two Mormon angels, Reeve and Laurette. Laurette was a professional golfer from South Africa and Reeve was her golf coach from Zimbabwe. We soon became good friends. When I started touring Europe, my mother and stepfather often traveled to watch me play. My mom saw Reeve giving Laurette a putting lesson one day and said, ‘‘Please teach my daughter how to putt! She is useless at it!” So, through my mother’s inspiration, Reeve became my coach. Reeve, Laurette, and I were sitting at a friend’s kitchen table one day when the subject came up of faith and what we believed. I had quite a few things to say! I spilled out my feelings about how I didn’t believe in anything, and how there was no God because if there was, how could He make such horrible things happen to me and my family, and by the way, where is my dad now and my best friend who died much too early? Reeve listened patiently, and then she gently shared what they believed as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I knew very little about the Mormons and had no interest in learning more. Remember, I was going to be rich and famous – the TOP GOLFER IN THE WORLD! So I didn’t have much time for any gospel. I was ranked 28th in Europe at the time, and I was moving up! Since my childhood had been such a struggle, these goals had been my incentive. Silly me. My friendship with Reeve and Laurette grew, and we started traveling together. They sometimes shared their faith with me. I felt the Spirit strongly when she spoke, but I was too afraid to say anything. I began to feel remorse for some things I had done when I was younger, and my anger toward my father who had “ruined my life” disappeared as I heard about forgiveness and moving on. I also learned of God’s great love for all mankind and about how He wants us to conduct our lives. It all made me feel so good. Laurette Maritz, Reeve Nield, and CC But fame and fortune were still at the top of my list. I eventually visited Reeve in Zimbabwe. While there, I experienced, learned, watched, and felt. Family home evening was my favorite time. They enjoyed each other’s company, shared spiritual thoughts, played, laughed, and were one big happy family. It was marvelous! During the first one I attended, Reeve’s four-year-old niece was conducting and exclaimed, ‘‘…and CC is giving the opening prayer!’’ I panicked, not remembering having ever said a prayer before. I was saved when her three-year-old sister shouted, “No, I want to say it!” Phew…. Little did I know there would also be a closing prayer. When I heard, “…CC will say the closing prayer,” I looked around for someone to rescue me. All I saw were folded arms and closed eyes. So I said my first prayer, amazed at the feeling that came over me as I did so. I even attended the Mormon church and had to admit I began to enjoy it. I began looking at life in a different light. Things seemed brighter. I smiled more and became a kinder person. My life was changing, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. My mom eventually asked what I was up to. When I told her, her response was: “Well, Cecilie, I believe your head is on straight. So I will support whatever decision you make. I trust you.” The rest of my family gave me a hard time, but Mom’s words warmed and comforted my heart. How grateful I was for her! Then something happened that I certainly hadn’t planned. My mother suddenly got sick. My life was in turmoil. I turned to the Lord, I pleaded and prayed, begged and cried for Him to grant me this one wish—to save my mother. CC and Her Mother The doctors tried everything to help her, but nothing changed her condition. Then one day, as I knelt in prayer in my living room, I knew that I had to let her go. But instead of rage, my newfound knowledge gave me a peaceful feeling. I knew I would see her again one day. I held my mother’s hand as they turned off the respirator and she left us. She was fifty-seven years old, a victim of a brain aneurism. I was mourning, I was distraught, and I felt lost in many ways. Yet I knew I had found the greatest joy in my life, the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this hard and humble time, I developed a strong testimony. Its power, its kindness, its perfectness. Two weeks after my mother’s funeral, I was baptized. A day I will always remember. For about 6 months I didn’t play golf. I hated it! I had lost so much time with my mother because of that stupid golf game of mine. Yet, my mom had sacrificed so much so that I would have the opportunity to travel and play golf. Whenever I saw a golf course, I cried. Whenever I tried to go practice or play I cried. Reeve was just tender and gentle about it. She slowly got me back on the golf course letting me know how sad my mom would have been knowing this was my dream and knowing the sacrifice she had made for me to get where I was. I got back on the golf course and decided to take my mom with me on Tour. It was the best decision I ever made.I am not the number one player in the world right now, and I probably never will be. But I am the best person I can be at this point in my life with golf, with the gospel and with myself. I am very happy just the way things are. What is your daily training regimen? My training regimen is different from day to day… depends on where we are and what is needed. In the off season in Zimbabwe, we just go play a round of golf 4-6 days per week, depending on weather and how close we are to the start of the season. I used to play squash, however when my knee started bothering me I started swimming instead. I really liked that so ended up swimming 1 km per day. I felt my body got stronger that way and it helped my golf swing. Lifting weights and going to the gym doesn’t work in golf. Your muscles get too big and bulky and slow releasing of the power. I need slim, long muscles that can act quickly and last for 4-6 hours every day. I stretch a lot and try to stay flexible. Great for the golf game! CC's Coach, Reeve, Lining Her Up For a Putt Just a childish question: Have you ever been competing with Suzann Pettersen or Tiger Woods? Tutta (Suzann Pettersen) and I have played together for many years. When we were younger she beat me then I beat her. And then one day… she just took off! Literally as she won the French Open one year and then took off for America and the BIG dream of playing on the LPGA. She has just done amazingly well and represents Norway well also. I see her almost every year during some of our bigger events and then we chat. But since she lives in Orlando and I live everywhere else, I don’t see her much anymore. I met Tiger Woods in 1994. I played VM individually in Paris at the Norwegian team, Tiger at the American. I met him at a party there and that is the only time. I don’t think he is a good representative for the sport. What are you doing in your “spare” time? When I’m at home without a golf tournament on the schedule I like to spend time with friends and family. I laugh a lot and love to make other people laugh. I listen to a lot of music and then I eat a whole lot! I love food! That is my favorite interest I think, after golf of course! I never used to know how to cook but my golf coach, Reeve Nield, taught me. So now I’m in trouble, I want to eat home-cooked, healthy food all the time. What is it like to be a Christian Mormon in an environment of top professional athletes? It is actually fun to be different in a very non-religious environment. But I do believe many athletes pray because they so desperately want to succeed and live their dream. I have experienced ignorance, curiosity, shock, and acceptance being a Christian Mormon woman on Tour. They all have their views and they all ‘think’ they know what we believe and how we live. It is actually fun how they think they know more about our religion than we do. Cracks me up! I have experienced golfers who clean up their act, their language and don’t drink or smoke as much when they are around us out of respect. I have been asked if I do not drink of smoke because I’m a professional athlete. And many times YES would be the easy answer, just to avoid the awkwardness or confrontation. However, it is a great missionary opportunity if I tell them why I really don’t drink or smoke. So I tell them the truth! I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! And I love it! CC's Golfball. She is a Proud Norwegian How can you practice “going to Church” when traveling worldwide? Wherever I go I find a chapel. (I do have to work some Sundays unfortunately.) There’s no better place to be on a Sunday. I miss my ward in Fredrikstad, I miss the members and my Young Women but I find new friends wherever I go. I keep the Sabbath Day holy if I have to work, by ONLY playing church music and by not spending any money. I would go VERY hungry if I haven’t prepared and bought food on Saturday, and I leave the golf course as soon as I finish. I do not discuss the day ‘at work’ with the coach after my round—that just has to wait until later. CC Serves in the Young Women Organization, and Teaches Online Seminary to Youth all Over Norway. Here are Members of Her Ward Youth at Her Home in Norway. Who are you heroes, in sports and in the Church? My sporting hero must be Annika Sorenstam. She is a legendary golfer who broke every record and set the bar so high that we all just marveled at what she accomplished! When I first turned Pro, my mom bought her book for me as a gift and told me to read it. The book was called Daring to Succeed! It had a great impact on me. I have met many members of our church, leaders and the man in the street, and it is hard to choose one person who is my hero. But I must say there are a few people that have had a GREAT impact on my life. Firstly I must say Reeve Nield. She is my golf coach, my manager, my missionary and my best friend. She had more faith in me than I ever had in myself and she taught me to think bigger and do more. Elaine Dalton (former Young Women General President) is another hero of mine. She is an absolutely fantastic human being. And knowing her personally makes me love and respect her even more. Her message is clear and true and it has motivated and molded me into being the Young Women leader I want to be and to strive for. My favorite quote from Sister Dalton is: ‘One virtuous Young Woman, led by the Spirit, CAN change the world!’ That is what I am trying to teach my Young Women. That they, through their testimonies and way of living can change the world! They might not change the WHOLE world, but they can change the world for one person. Someone loved me and believed enough in me to change my world, by introducing me to the gospel and I will forever be grateful for that. Elaine Dalton with CC and Her Norwegian Young Women, Who Flew to Salt Lake City for General Conference in 2012. English Peak. How long do you think you will carry on as a top golfer? I don’t know how long I will be playing professional golf—as long as I have fun and feel that I can compete at a high level, I will play. But if my Prince Charming shows up tomorrow and asks me to marry him in the Temple, I might leave the golf clubs behind and run! Besides golf, you have taken a real interest in the situation of blind people in Zimbabwe. Can you tell about your life in that country? When I’m in Zimbabwe (I live there in the winters) we are up early, we do our exercises and training and then we work with our charity ‘Eyes4Zimbabwe’. I LOVE the Zimbabwean people and I love to help them in any way I can. Eyes4Zimbabwe is trying to bring relief to those who cannot help themselves and to lighten their burden in a troubled world. We find so many people to help, and we do all that we can do to lift their burdens. What a privilege! Can you tell more about the charity organization Eyes4Zimbabwe that you are running with Reeve and Laurette? Eyes4Zimbabwe is a non-profit charity organization in Zimbabwe that was started in 1996 by Reeve and Laurette. Reeve Nield who is second generation Zimbabwean, has a great love for her people and wanted to help in any way possible. So after having witnessed a young 12 year old girl receive her sight after a 20 min cataract surgery, she decided to do something to change the lives of thousands of Zimbabweans. As Reeve and Laurette were walking down the 18th hole of her local golf club in Zimbabwe, Reeve realized that through golf fund raising events they could raise money to purchase the much-needed medical supplies that could help give sight to thousands of Zimbabweans. They found Doctors that were willing to perform the surgeries for free, use of hospital operating rooms were donated for free and nurses spent their free time helping Eyes4Zimbabwe. Laurette, Reeve, and CC Speaking at a Youth Camp Together Miracles happened before their eyes and blind people began to receive their sight back due to their kind hearts and help. As sight was given to 4-5 thousand newborns, children, youth and adults, Zimbabwe was in dire straits. There was no food, parents could not afford sending their children to school, and the number of orphans was getting higher and higher. As Eyes4Zimbabwe had received kind help to ship forty-foot containers free of charge, they realized that more could be done. So forty-foot containers were donated and were then filled with food, clothing, medical supplies, medical equipment, school supplies, hygiene supplies etc. that would help the destitute and less fortunate. The Children Who Receive Cataract Surgery Through CC's Non-Profit Eyes4Zimbabwe Have Vision 24 Hours After Surgery Since we are all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints we went to the church and through the Church’s Emergency Relief. We received the ‘miracle porridge’ ATMIT, a food supplement that will boost the immune system and bring strength to a weakening and dying body. Eyes4Zimbabwe is trying to limit the number of orphans by keeping their HIV/AIDS affected parents alive by feeding them ATMIT. In rural clinics, through the dispensaries we are administering ATMIT to all nutritionally vulnerable people regardless of age. It also serves as a vital meal supplement for expectant mothers who await delivery in very difficult conditions at these clinics. We never seem to have adequate quantities of ATMIT. It is a goal of our organization to obtain funding and support to establish a factory locally, which is capable of manufacturing the porridge. We have several feeding programs around the country which are administered and operated through government schools and rural clinics, we conduct them specifically in nutritionally deficient areas. In the schools we feed all children one meal a day, which increases school attendance and schools have also noted marked improvement in cognitive abilities. In total, we are feeding approximately 4500 children a day during the school terms. We have also distributed school libraries and school supplies to several underprivileged schools. This includes desks and chairs. CC with Her Coach, Non-Profit Partner, and Best Friend Reeve Nield You have now been a member of the church for 12 years. How is your faith today? After I got baptized, I felt peace and a reason to live. I also found guidance and hope, I loved being part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Trials became easier, and I started welcoming challenges to my faith. I found love and happiness in a completely different form. Sadly, I lost contact with most of my remaining family when I joined the Church, due to their disapproval. But I knew I had found the true church, and I knew I was happy. No one could take that away from me. Now I live in a home filled with love, peace, happiness, laughter, and the Spirit of the Lord. Life has much more meaning when the Lord is the center of it. I might still travel from continent to continent as a professional golfer. I might still sign autographs and wave to a clapping crowd. But I do it with direction and purpose as a member of the Church and a representative of our Heavenly Father. I am proud to be His daughter.Grandma Lundgreen was right. The Lord really is kind. At A Glance Name: Cecilie "CC" Lundgreen (everyone calls me CC) Age: 44 Location: Sarpsborg, Norway Marital History: Single Occupation: Professional golfer (20 years since I turned Pro!) Convert to Church?: Baptized Nov. 14, 2002 Schools Attended: I went to the Sports Academy during my high school years in Sarpsborg, then attended Florida Atlantic University on a golf scholarship from 1993-1998. I received a degree in Arts and Education (majored in Elementary Education and minored in the German language). Languages Spoken at Home: Hmm... I was raised speaking Norwegian (although my father was raised speaking Danish), but I speak Swedish, Danish, English, and German (the "celestial language" according to President Uchtdorf!) as well. Favorite Hymn: "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," "I Love to See the Temple," "God Be With You 'Til We Meet Again" Personal Website: www.eyes4zimbabwe.org Interview Produced by Eline Amundson, who first published it on her site MormonKvinner.com in 2014.

Luisa Perkins began reading and then writing stories as a young girl as a way to find peace and escape from a troubled home life. She is now an acclaimed author who has published many books and essays, including Dispirited and The Book of Jeremiah: Premonition. Her latest novel, Prayers in Bath, centers on an LDS female archaeologist who discovers an ancient text that changes her view on the world and herself. Luisa deeply believes in the power of stories and their necessity in helping readers find community and home. Luisa lives in California with her husband and six children. Tell me about where your love for writing began and when you started writing. I started writing when I was a small child. I learned to read very early, and since I had a rather difficult childhood I read a lot for escape. Even when I was really young, I thought about how people writing books was such a gift to me. It was a gift to have that escape and I wanted to give that gift to other people. It’s just always something I wanted to do, to contribute to the world of books. I started writing stories when I was a little kid and off and on as a teenager, so it’s always been something that’s been a part of me. When I got married and first started having kids, I took a lot of breaks because there was always so much going on, and I focused a lot more on short form. I would do song lyrics or essays or things that could be completed pretty quickly, so I was away from long-form fiction for a long time, but then in 2007 I started writing novels again. Can I ask what some of your favorite books were growing up? My very favorite children’s book is one that no one’s ever heard of. It’s called The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton. And it’s pretty brilliant. I’ve probably read it 20 times. But you know, I liked other children’s classics like The Secret Garden, and the Little House on the Prairie books. I liked to read about girls and women a lot, so I liked books like Anne of Green Gables. And I loved to read about happy families. I found myself drawn to books that featured happy families, because I didn’t know how to make one—I had never seen a happy family close up in real life, so I loved A Wrinkle in Time and all its sequels. I read them not only for the fun fantasy aspect of the books, but because that family was just so nurturing and warm and they really enjoyed each other’s company. Louisa May Alcott has a lesser-known book called Eight Cousins, and I’d read it over and over again for the same reason. I loved all the Little Women books too, but Eight Cousins for some reason really struck a chord with me. Was The Diamond in the Window a book that featured a happy family? Was that what drew you to it? I have never read it before. Well, it’s set in Concord, Massachusetts, and I grew up in California but always wanted to move to New York or New England, and it’s a really terrific fantasy. I’m also really drawn to books about houses, especially magical houses. It’s about a brother and sister. They bicker but they love each other, and they’re being raised by their aunt and uncle—and so they have a very happy family, but also a very unconventional family, which also appealed to me. And there are lots of references to Alcott and Thoreau and Emerson and all the writers in Concord, and the book introduced me to all of those. I think I first read Little Women after I read The Diamond in the Window because I wanted to learn more about Louisa May Alcott after reading that book. So it was kind of a gateway book for me. Luisa Perkins and Her Son So you kept reading and writing while you were growing up. What did you study at university? Did you study English or a different major? I started at BYU, but then I left and moved to New York City when I was 21 to save up for a mission. When I got home from my mission I got married pretty quickly, but I hadn’t finished school yet so I finished my degree through BYU’s independent study program. At that time, it was a really interesting conservatory program, and my Bachelor’s Degree is in Independent Study, but my emphasis was in Writing. So for my senior project, I did a lot of research and character sketches and world building for a fantasy novel, and then I wrote a long outline and presented that as my senior project. What are the questions or themes you cover in your own writing? I’m sure it’s different depending on what ideas you’re thinking about at the time, but are there questions or ideas that you like to grapple with in your own writing? I write about home a lot, and about different aspects of home. My novel Dispirited, which is probably my best-known book, is really all about what it means to be home, not only in your house but in your family and in your body. And Prayers in Bath, too, is very much about home. The main woman feels like an outsider in a lot of ways. She’s a convert to the Church, she has been struggling with infertility, she and her husband are living in Bath and they’re Americans, so she comes from this place of being on the outside. She struggles a lot with belonging, and then the experiences she encounters in the novel bring her to the very inside of the Church and the Gospel in kind of an unconventional way. Where would you say you have found home for yourself? I feel like I am very lucky that I have a fantastic husband. But even when you have a fantastic husband, you have to work really hard at creating home. And again, you have to have that passion for working hard and that’s important. I find home in my own children, I have 6 kids, and so I feel at home with them. And then once in a while you have a friend or two, and you just feel understood by them. For me, a lot of home is feeling like people understand me. For example, moving to a new ward at one point was rough for me because I didn’t feel that. It seemed like people valued me for what I could do, but not for who I was. So that was a rough transition for me because I felt seen, but not understood. I also feel at home with good writer friends, and with other women in the Church who I feel really understand me. Home and understanding are closely linked for me. Luisa Perkins and Her Family on Vacation in France In Prayers in Bath your main character finds and translates an ancient text—where did you come up with the idea for that? A friend of mine from Wales mentioned these real-life curse tablets that are on display in Bath. I’m excited to go see them in real life this summer; I haven’t seen them yet. And these curse tablets—they weren’t always curses. They were sometimes prayers, and people would scratch them onto lead and roll them up and throw them into the hot springs there in Bath. They were usually prayers to Minerva Sulis, the local manifestation of Minerva that the Romans co-opted, or to Mercury, usually asking for revenge, or to bring someone’s wife back to them. I found that idea of prayers being thrown into the water so interesting. Other pieces of the story that came to me were the Glastonbury Legend that I go into a lot into the book. What is the Glastonbury Legend? The Glastonbury Legend is an English legend that when Christ was a child, He was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and spent time there. It’s a big deal to a lot of people in England. I don’t know if you know the William Blake poem “Jerusalem,” but it references this legend. The words of it are pretty amazing. To paraphrase “Did Jesus come here? Did He do things here?” And the legend is a big part of the novel. I wanted to have this ancient scroll that the main character finds be an account of the resurrected Christ visiting England again and doing what he does with the Nephites, since in 3 Nephi, He says He’s going to go do that. So, spoiler, but that’s what my character translates. And does the main character struggle with that in any way? Yes, she does. And her husband struggles with that because she’s translated scripture and she’s a woman. That becomes a big source of conflict for them for a while, and I grapple with the issues of the questions of what women can and cannot do, inside and outside the Church. I hope I did it in a way that’s not threatening, because I am very committed and faithful to the Church and to the Gospel. But I think that there are things that can change and will change with women in the Church, and women in the Gospel, for that matter. Are women’s issues—especially issues with women, faith, and believing—common themes you grapple with in your writing? Well, yes and no. Not to the overt degree that my character does in Prayers in Bath. I’ve mainly written about female main characters, and they always have some kind of spiritual existential struggle. I think that’s something I’ll continue to explore in my writing as long as I’m around. It’s not something that’s easily resolvable. Luisa Perkins and Her Husband Yes, and it’s something that’s so individual. But has writing about women’s existential spiritual struggles helped you resolve issues or look at things in a different light? I think that any writer is not just wanting to tell stories but is also on a quest for self-knowledge. Any good writer is on that quest. Sometimes people ask me if characters are based on me, or anybody else, and I almost always say, “All of my characters have some of me in them—not just the protagonist, but all my characters have a bit of me in them.” I tend to get deep emotionally into my writing process. It’s very immersive as far as the emotions go. If I’m writing a sad scene, it will make me cry. If I’m writing a scary scene, I’ll be kind of freaked out. I hope that comes across to the reader, that I put a lot of emotion into my work. A couple times I’ve taken on writing projects because people said that they would pay me to do it, and that never works out the way I’d like it to, because I can’t just toss stuff out; I have to make it my own, if that makes sense. Along those lines, how does your faith shape your creative process or shape your writing? A couple of different ways. One is the fact that I write at all. I’ve always felt very strongly that we shouldn’t just be consumers, we should be creators. You can be creating a garden or a relationship or a legal brief, or however you create, but we should all have some kind of creation in our lives and not just be mindlessly consuming all the time. That’s one of the reasons I write, because I feel that’s what God wants us to do. He wants us to be creating. My faith also affects themes and scenarios. One time I had an idea for a novel about four women who are good friends, and this other woman who is not very mentally well wants to become a part of their group and belong with them. The group of four women are torn. They are LDS women, so they want to be kind, but they don’t want her in their group. So they try really hard to be nice and friendly, but their tension navigates the questions of what’s our boundary and how do we negotiate being everyone’s friend and everyone’s neighbor, but wanting to have our own group? A publisher was really interested in the idea, because it’s a mystery story. The woman who is odd disappears. So you see the story through the eyes of these four women who are trying to figure out what happened with the odd woman and also dealing with a lot of guilt, because they feel like they might have had a part of where she’s gone off to. The publisher was interested in it, and I sent him the first several chapters of the story. But he said, “Oh, I really like it. The thing that I just can’t get my mind around is why would these women be so nice? If they don’t like her, why wouldn’t they just say, ‘Get lost?’” And I thought, “You’ve never been to Relief Society, have you?” But he wasn’t a member of the Church, so that’s something he literally could not get. It was hard for him to understand that so many times in our culture, we have that tension between wanting to love everyone but wanting to have our own group—at least I have. I think we all have. Anyway, he ended up rejecting the story because he didn’t find it believable, and that tension was core to the story. But he was a New York publisher and not a member of the Church, and I think that maybe if I had marketed it to LDS publishers, I don’t think that would have been an issue at all. Luisa Perkins So how have you noticed this tension of inclusion in your own life and what has helped you find that balance in the Church? I think that one reason why I try to be more inclusive is because I’m an introvert, and I’ve been on the other side. I’ve been the needy one that other people have tried to push away. When I grew up, the child of a divorced woman—at least in my generation—was almost like a leprosy that people thought would be catching to other people’s children, this brokenness they saw. And because I have been on the other side of not belonging, and because it’s very easy for me to put myself in other people’s shoes, it can be hard for me to negotiate boundaries. I don’t know if I’ve been graceful in negotiating them. I still struggle with boundaries and knowing when enough is enough, when it’s okay to say no, etc. I’m 50 years old and still trying to figure things out. The Church can be a very extroverted Church, and that can sometimes be difficult for introverted people. What has helped you, as an introvert, get outside of your comfort zone in an extroverted Church? I think it’s interesting you say that because we do talk about getting outside of ourselves, but we’re trying to create a place of refuge for everyone, so how do we allow discomfort for ourselves to create comfort for others? That’s a really interesting question. Honestly, I don’t think that I would be as skilled a teacher as I am if it weren’t for the Church, because of having to accept callings. When I got my first teaching calling, I was 16 years old and I had 12 Sunbeams to teach. I was painfully shy around adults, but this was teaching 3-year-olds. Looking back on it, I think, who would trust a 16-year-old with twelve 3-year-olds? But I guess my ward was desperate. So that eased me into social interaction with a group, whereas if I’d been given a calling to teach in Relief Society or Young Women right away, that would have been a bridge too far. So now I’m much more comfortable in front of groups of people, whereas if I didn’t have the Church and those gentle exhortations to get outside of myself, I don’t think I would have grown in those ways quite so easily. I really believe people can do anything if they just practice enough. I’ve been teaching for 34 years in the Church one way or another, and you tend to get good enough if you keep doing something that long. What about writing? There has to be talent there, but there also has to be practice, and putting yourself out there for agents and getting rejections and all those different things. There are a lot of women in the Church—women of my generation—early- and mid-20s, who want to be writers and authors. What advice would you have for LDS women who want to pursue writing? I’d ask anyone who wants to be a writer to ask themselves really honestly, “Do I want to be a writer or do I want to write?” I’ve known successful writers of both kinds. I’ve known people who are successful writers, not necessarily because they love writing, but they love being a writer and talking about writing. I also know a lot of unsuccessful people who talk about writing, but never really do it. I think you have to enjoy at least part of the process of it in order to be able to do it successfully and be able to do it as long as you need to do it to get good at it. My first novel came out when I was 28. I thought it was a was a pretty good book and that I did a pretty good job. And looking back I still think it’s fine, but now I’ve gotten better with time, and I think that should be everybody’s goal. You need enough passion for writing to keep doing it, even when it’s hard, and even when you’ve gotten 100 rejection letters. I’ve received more than I can count. You have to get over that. You have to be able to show your work to people and not fall apart when they tell you what doesn’t work about it. I’ve seen quite a few people struggle with that. They’ll have their husband or their visiting teacher read their story and they’ll say, “It’s wonderful!” But then they send it to New York and it gets trashed, and probably rightfully so. And then they’ll retreat and think, “Oh, I’m not going to do that anymore.” But you have to dance between vulnerability and resilience, and that only comes from experiencing rejection and having enough faith in yourself to get up and try again. Luisa Perkins Who are some of your favorite authors now? Has it changed at all since you were young? Writers like Mark Helprin, Umberto Eco—those are two of my big favorites. Margaret Atwood and Susanna Clarke as well. Those are some of my desert island writers. Things I’d go back to over and over again. That’s wonderful criteria for re-reading—sheer enjoyment. Is there anything else that you’d like to bring up or that you wanted to mention? There was a woman at church who gave a talk a couple of weeks ago and it’s been something I’ve been thinking about ever since—she talked about objectification. And she talked about how we’re all familiar with objectification from a negative standpoint, but she thinks it’s a lot less often that we talk about positive objectification. For example, we love somebody, but we love them for what they do for us instead of who they are. My daughter and I were talking about this today at a service project. We were asking, “Do you even think it’s possible and positive to do that?” And, yes. We love the Savior. We don’t love Him personally; we don’t know His personality or we don’t know what His favorite food is, but we love what He did for us. So I think that positive objectification can be the beginning of a deeper love. But I think that a lot of times we’re comfortable with loving people for just the surface and loving people for their roles. I think it’s a childlike love. For example, you love your grandma, simply because she’s your grandma, but then you’re surprised to learn about the things she did when she was 20. So that’s something I’ll be exploring a bit more, and I think more people should think about this concept. I think that it’s especially important in the Church that we’re able to do this because we will sometimes have our testimonies shaken by someone’s flaws, especially church leaders’ flaws. We need to ask ourselves, do we love someone because they’re the stake president or because they’re human? It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently because my husband was called to be the stake president almost a year ago this week, and in a sense I kind of feel like an imposter, because I’ve looked at stake presidents’ wives all my life and never—I don’t think I’ve looked at them as real people. So here I am a stake president’s wife and thinking, “Boy, we’ve got them fooled!” When I think of all those other people who have been here in this role I just wonder if they’ve also wrestled with the responsibility that comes from this title. The authority and mantle obviously matter, but who the person is matters too, and they will bring their own talents into whatever calling they’re given. And that’s why grace is so important. Because I’m going to have bad days and people are going to see me behaving badly and I just have to hope that grace will cover me when I’m not at my best. Is there anything else you’d like to say about writing, life, stories? Just that we learn through stories in the Church and I think stories are really important in the gospel. We learn through stories in the temple, we learn through stories in the scriptures, and I always hope that people will be a little bit broader in what they’ll accept in a story. Stories can help us deal with unanswered questions. The whole Church was started because of a question, and we have to be okay with questions that don’t get answered right away, or ever, in this life. But stories can help. At A Glance Name: Luisa Perkins Age: 50 Location: Sierra Madre, California Marital History: Married in 1990 to Patrick Perkins Children: Six children, ages 23, 20, 18, 16, 13, 9 Occupation: Writer Schools Attended: BA from BYU; MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts Languages Spoken at Home: English, French Favorite Hymn: Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee Personal Website: http://kashkawan.squarespace.com/ Interview Produced by Megan Armknecht

Erica Glenn believes in the power of music and the healing process of creativity, and has seen from experiences around the world how creativity fosters communities. She started composing her own music from a very young age and has written and produced her own musicals, including The Weaver of Raveloe, which was performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston in 2014. She also actively uses her music abilities to bless others’ lives, whether it is through performance or teaching. Erica has received her education at Arizona State University, Longy School of Music, Harvard University, and is currently pursuing a DMA in Choral Conducting at Arizona State University. In the past you have said that you’ve lived a circuitous life. Where did that start? Probably with my decision to turn down the Hinckley scholarship at BYU to attend Arizona State University as an undergrad. That step of faith (which was difficult at the time!) led to a life of being willing to travel from place to place as it was needed. I’ve lived in Arizona, England, Ukraine, Boston, New York, and Russia for school, a mission, research, and two master’s programs. It’s been an interesting path. Lots of unexpected detours! And now I’m headed back to ASU for a doctoral program. Something that runs deep in your life’s connections is the thread of music. What started your love of music? I think there are two answers: First of all, as Mormons, music is in our blood. Whether or not we come directly from pioneer stock, we all inherit the musical heritage of our spiritual ancestors when we join the Church. My personal love of music stems from my grandmother, who was a concert pianist and my piano teacher. My mom, who has a Master’s in Humanities, is also a great appreciator of the arts, so our home was always filled with classical music. My mom is a remarkable woman; she’s the kind of person who could convince a stone that it had potential! She encouraged all of us to dream big and work hard. She did her best to facilitate our dreams and to model what it takes to push through discouragement and make big things happen. Erica Glenn in a Piano Recital at Age 8 When did you first begin composing? I was always putting on neighborhood productions in my backyard. I thought I was an adult when I was a child; I really did! In kindergarten, I informed the teacher that I was going to produce The Nutcracker. I brought in costumes and a cassette tape with recorded sections of the music. It was serious business for me. Around the same time, I remember practicing the piano at home and suddenly realizing, “Hey! I don’t just have to play what others have written. I can write my own music.” I was always experimenting with things—melodies layered on top of each other, instrumental combinations. It’s like my brain is half musician and half scientist, which is useful for a composer. I wrote my first full-length musical when I was 10 and my second when I was 12. The show was based on one of my favorite childhood novels, Dancing Shoes, and I had the privilege of seeing it produced at a couple of theaters in Utah when I was 14. Erica Glenn at Age 14 Performing as the Character Rachel in Villa Playhouse's Production of Her Original Musical, Dancing Shoes What an incredible opportunity to have at such a young age. What did you learn from it? The whole experience lit a fire beneath me. It was a crash course in what it takes to get a new script to the stage. Writing musicals isn’t just about “composing”—it’s about weaving a narrative and working directly with people in a very hands-on way in order to move an audience. There’s something magical and collaborative about creating a “thing” where nothing has existed before—something that makes me feel a closeness to God. Has it always been easy for you to compose music? Or was there a time when it was more difficult? Composing was always natural. . .until I got back from my mission to Ukraine. There’s no reverse-MTC to prepare you for the cultural and spiritual shock of returning home. I loved Ukraine. I came away with such a deep love for the people, but it was more difficult than anything I had ever done before. In those early months post-mission, I felt directionless—something I’d never experienced before. I couldn’t rekindle my love of writing music, which was almost scary. I never had to search for motivation or inspiration—it just came. And suddenly it just wasn’t coming. Erica Glenn in St. Petersburg, Russia What helped you get back into musical composition? As doors in Utah seemed to be slamming shut, I felt prompted to become a nanny in Boston as I applied for grad schools on the East Coast. It was while I was working for my nanny family that I became involved in Boston’s music scene and decided to pick up an old project—adapting George Eliot’s Silas Marner for the stage. Silas Marner has always been one of my favorite novels; it combines the sweeping themes of a story like Les Mis with the psychological depth of one like The Secret Garden. It’s a drama of epic proportions that somehow never loses its intimacy and humanity—a musical just waiting to happen. I began with a pivotal moment in the book and built a song around that moment. From there the show grew outward organically (which isn’t to say that it didn’t go through dozens—maybe hundreds!—of rewrites). In the end, The Weaver of Raveloe was produced at the New York Musical Theatre Festival and received a fully-staged premiere at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston with Dallyn Bayles in the lead and Melissa Leilani Larsen as my new co-writer. And somewhere along the way, you got two master’s degrees in Boston? Yes. My first was at Longy Conservatory in Music Composition, and the second was at Harvard in The Arts in Education. I went back for that second master’s after working for a year as faculty at the Franklin School for the Performing Arts and Dean College and realizing that, eventually, I wanted to open my own performing arts school. Attending Harvard was like drinking from the end of a fire-hose. I couldn’t get enough of the research opportunities, internships, lectures, and community outreach experiences. What were some of the most meaningful opportunities for you during your time in Boston? While I was at Longy, I began developing a theory about the therapeutic benefits of singing and Dalcroze Eurhythmics for orphans in Eastern Europe with RAD (a Fetal Alcohol Syndrome disorder). In 2015, a colleague and I traveled to St. Petersburg to explore the potential impact of this approach with Russian orphans. The results were very promising, and we were invited to present our research at the 2016 Western Division ACDA Conference in Pasadena. It was beautiful to see the way past experiences with music, Eastern Europe, and the Russian language were all coming together to allow me to serve others in ways that were meaningful to me. Another pivotal experience was my internship with Broadway composer Charles Strouse (who composed the music for Annie and Bye, Bye, Birdie). Tell me how you got that internship. Well, the summer after my first year at Longy, I wanted to do something that would really move me towards my musical goals, so I started looking into internships. Nothing grabbed me. I took a step back and thought, “If I could craft the perfect internship for myself, what would it look like?” I knew I’d want to shadow a Broadway composer. I decided to be gutsy and send out some emails. Did you find anyone to email? Not right away. Big-name Broadway composers don’t just put their information out there. In the end, I ran across a page that was set up for Charles Strouse’s 80th birthday so that people could write “happy birthday” messages. I thought, “Okay, this is probably deactivated, and it’s not even set up for this purpose, but I’m going to write and let Mr. Strouse know how much I loved his musicals growing up and who I am and what I want to do.” The very next day I got a call from Charles Strouse himself! I almost dropped the phone. He told me that he’d never had an intern before but that I reminded him of his younger self and that he remembered Frank Loesser reaching out to him when he was a young man. I moved to New York, and they paid me a small stipend to do some assistant music directing and transcriptions. It was an amazing, immersive experience. I discovered that once you have an “in,” red tape disappears and connections are easy. I found myself working as a go-between for Charles Strouse and Richard Maltby (who wrote Miss Saigon) during brainstorming sessions for a new musical. It was surreal. Erica Glenn Performing as Maria in The Sound of Music (Franklin Performing Arts Company, 2013) That is incredible! Were you able to find affordable housing in New York? It was cheapest to live with nuns, actually. Really? What was that like? The nuns were very sweet! People think they just stay in the convent, but they actually saw Sister Act when it opened on Broadway, and they were the celebrities of the show (everyone clapped when they came in!). The convent had been converted into a residence hall for girls between the ages of 18 and 25, and I was one of the only Americans. You would come down to breakfast every morning and meet young people from all over the world! What an education! It really was! It opened the door for the production of my show at the NY Musical Theatre Festival and led me to the Marvin Hamlisch Broadway Conductors Program in NYC, which was instrumental in kindling my interest in conducting. How have you seen the hand of God directing the experiences in your life, and how has He used your talents to bless others? After finishing my master’s at Harvard, for example, I was determined to start a performing arts school somewhere on the East Coast. Then one of my Harvard friends told me about a new school called the American International School of Utah. I wasn’t really interested in moving back to Utah. But the superintendent called me up for a chat about educational philosophy, and after our conversation, he asked if I’d consider building and directing an innovative performing arts department at AISU! I hung up in shock, but I knew already that it was right. All of the logistics fell into place within a matter of days, and I took the job. Erica Glenn Dancing at the Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah And you were able to use your educational experiences in designing the school and the performing arts department? Absolutely! Education can feel very theoretical and abstract, but Harvard did a great job of “operating at the nexus of practice, policy, and research.” They were very hands-on. I had already established a performing arts program at low-income community center in Boston, I’d worked as an intern at the American Repertory Theatre, and I’d engaged with the cutting-edge research coming out of Project Zero, so I knew exactly what I wanted at AISU. I was hired as part of the senior management team and was able to have a say in designing the whole school—what it was going to look like, how it was going to function. I thought that would be the most exciting part of the whole offer. I soon learned that working directly with students as the school’s choir director was the truly transformational thing—transformational for me and hopefully for the kids, too. I didn’t realize that the Lord needed to use me in those specific ways at that specific time, but He did. How has working with the students changed you? It has given me even deeper insight into what music can do for individuals. I didn’t anticipate that we’d have so many kids with special needs, autism, depression, anxiety, bipolar, PTSD. We’ve had two completed suicides and dozens of attempts. The beauty of our school is that it attracts kids who have struggled in traditional settings, and its innovative structure gives these kids a second chance. Our students were hungry for a safe learning environment, and my choir members bonded instantly. Music has been a literal medicine for these kids. I’ve watched many stop using drugs, start earning 4.0s, apply to colleges, and change their entire outlook on life. The collaborative creativity and success they experience in a choral setting fuels their confidence. They think, “Oh, I can succeed at anything I really put my mind to!” And for a lot of these kids, that’s a revelation. Erica Glenn That is amazing to hear how music has formed such a community at your school. Where else have you seen music form community? Definitely through our heritage as Mormons. Music has sustained us as a people. Winter Quarters was a bleak place, for example—heavy storms, extreme suffering, malaria outbreaks. 2,000 people died. It’s interesting to me that Brigham Young received very specific revelation there, and part of that revelation was, “If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with the prayer of praise and thanksgiving,” which seems almost like frustrating advice under the circumstances! It does seem a bit counterintuitive. Exactly! But I think there’s a reason it was given at that point and not during a time of happiness and plenty. This wasn’t just a suggestion; it was an actual commandment from the Lord–something that was probably meant to help the people survive in a very literal way. Brigham Young recognized that music is an intrinsic part of who we are as human beings. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s so much more than just an outlet or release or form of entertainment. Erica Glenn Performing as Mary in "Mary Poppins" (Covey Center, 2015) That’s beautiful. I think so too. I also think that music also helps us understand our spiritual selves more fully and gain emotional strength during times of adversity. For the pioneers, music was a potent medicine that traveled easily and cost nothing. And it’s the same for us. Music is equally available for everyone. It’s hard to pinpoint why it is so powerful (although science confirms the bonding and therapeutic effects of singing-released oxytocin). But it undeniably unites us and uplifts us and expresses who we are in an intensely personal way. Music combats feelings of loneliness and isolation in a manner that few other things can. It also helps develop empathy and attention to subtlety and nuance—qualities that seem to be rapidly removing themselves in this world. Across political and racial and economic divides, there’s this lack of empathy which affects our ability to discern between truth and error (in all their subtleties). How has creativity helped you become more like Christ? Creativity is an antidote for desensitization. Active participation in the creative process keeps our hearts, our minds, and our ears tuned to the whisperings of the Spirit, which leads us to Christlike love. There are two forces in the world: the creative force and the destructive force. And we all know which eternal power represents which. Our Articles of Faith tell us, “If there is anything lovely or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” When I think about the kids in my school, so many of them are subjected to destructive forces at home and in their communities. Some of them have parents that tear them down, peers that tear them down, a world that tears them down, and so engaging in something that is creative is profound and healing. It really is. It’s a miracle. It pulls them back from that destructive spiral and points them in the direction of godliness. There is something vitally important about learning to create rather than destroy, whether it’s creating strong communities or producing a work of art. Again, I think back to that experience when I was 14, watching a show I had written come to life on stage, creating something that hadn’t been there before. There is nothing more fulfilling, especially if it brings joy to others. When community and creativity come together, there is power. Erica Glenn That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you wanted to mention or bring up about music, creativity, or communities? I think one of the wonderful things about Mormon culture is the natural communities that arise from the Church structure. No matter where you go in the world, you’re going to find a ward. You’re going to find people who share your basic values and welcome you with open arms. There is a danger, though: sometimes people can feel lonely when they don’t fit into one of the naturally preexisting communities that the Church has established. Church doctrine celebrates diversity, but Church culture doesn’t always align. Those with divergent political opinions or an unusual life trajectory can feel disenfranchised. My hope is that we can all be open-minded and loving and actively create communities and contribute to solutions (rather than standing by passively or critically). There are always ways to connect with those around us. That’s part of the creative impulse. Erica Glenn Do you have any examples of looking actively for solutions in creating community that you’d like to share? Have you heard anything about Mormon Women for Ethical Government? I’ll mention this briefly, since I think it’s a great example. People both in and out of the Church have felt discouraged by the current political climate and, frankly, a little helpless. A few months ago, my mom, a couple friends, and I began discussing ways we could make a difference. When my mom set up a Facebook group as a brainstorming platform, none of us had any idea how quickly our numbers would balloon. I added friends, and those people started adding friends, and within a week and a half, there were over 2,000 members. It was inspiring. We now have chapters in 40 of the 50 states. And what is the purpose of the group? It’s a non-partisan group dedicated to peaceful activism. Our mantra is, “We will not be complicit by being complacent.” It’s meant to be a constructive place for solutions, not just a place to air concerns or fling dirt. We have about 5,000 members now, and those 5,000 voices have combined to enact real change. When you have 5,000 people on Facebook who see a notice to call their representative about a certain issue, it does make a difference. I would consider Mormon Women for Ethical Government one of many communities that are actively confronting destructive forces in creative ways. Whether your tool is music or political activism or anything in between, I think the Lord can use those gifts to create communities and influence the world for the better. At A Glance Name: Erica Glenn Age: 31 Location: Mesa, Arizona Marital History: Single Occupation: Director of Performing Arts at the American International School of Utah; Doctoral Teaching Assistant at Arizona State University; Freelance Composer and Playwright Schools Attended: Arizona State University, Longy Conservatory, Harvard Languages Spoken at Home: English, occasionally Russian Favorite Hymn: “Abide with Me” Website: www.ericakyreeglenn.com Interview Produced by Megan Armknecht

Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick developed a strong testimony of faith and a love of singing at a very early age. These gifts helped comfort her through the death of loved ones, and saved her own life on multiple occasions. Charity is an opera singer, an author, a recipient of two double lung transplants, a survivor of cancer, and she’s not even 35 years old. She discusses all of this in her new memoir, The Encore: A Memoir in Three Acts. Charity has learned to value the gift of time, and believes that while we live we should create. When did you begin singing? Oh gosh, I knew I wanted to be an opera singer when I was five and so I was singing before that. I think my mom put me into my first formal auditioned choir when I was three. So I’ve been singing for a really long time. You come from a family of go-getters. Your entire family is extremely motivated. How did your parents raise so many children to accomplish so much in such short periods of time? Chores, healthy competition and survivors’ guilt / responsibility were all very powerful motivators. We had a lot of chores growing up and school was a lot more fun than chores, so we were always looking for an excuse to do schoolwork instead of chores. With competition, we weren’t exactly competing against each other, but none of us wanted to be the weak link. Being homeschooled didn’t give us a norm to judge ourselves against and so fear that we would fall behind was this excellent motivator. I don’t think any of us could really stomach the idea of letting anyone down who came before us or afterward. We didn’t want to let our parents down. We didn’t want to let ourselves down. We didn’t want to let our ancestors down either. I talk about both of these things at greater length in my book, but my maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors and my baby brother died when I was very young. Their legacies reminded us all that there were a lot of lives we needed to make up for. Charity Tillemann-Dick You received your bachelor’s degree in politics and economics right? Yes Did you choose politics because of your grandfather? I allude to this in The Encore, but with a name like Charity Sunshine, I wanted to be taken seriously and I had a hunch that wasn’t going to happen if I was a musician. I started college very young and my fields of study gave me a great grounding in writing and research. I intended to study music too, but I went to a very small Jesuit college and they didn’t have a music program. While I was there, I did a petition drive to establish a music program. By the time I graduated we had a minor in music and now they have a wonderful music program at the school, but it was a little late for me. I was planning on going to law school. Right after I graduated, I planned to work for my state party, but my aunt was running for congress so I went to New Hampshire to help on her campaign. It was very emotionally and physically demanding – especially because it was family — so I made time to practice my piano and singing at least a few times a week. As I would sing by that keyboard, it was the only time during that season I felt joy. By the end of the campaigns, I knew I’d just hate myself if I didn’t at least try my hand at music and I’m so glad I did. I think I’d be dead if I’d gone to law school. You were diagnosed in 2004 with Idiopathic Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PH) at the age of 20. Five years later you had your first double lung transplant. Then two years after that you had another double lung transplant. Could you tell me about your surgeries? The first surgery was really hard. I was in a coma for 34 days. I was in the hospital for 100 days and then I was recovering at home for about four months. I really didn’t want that first transplant. It’s funny because it didn’t seem to want me either. It rejected after a year, but I’m grateful for those Texas lungs. I would have died without them. I found out about the rejection a year before my second transplant. Within a few months, I saw my physical abilities significantly decline. And then I got this transplant I didn’t expect. This time I was up in two days. I was off the ventilator in a week. I was out of the hospital in a month and a half. I got out of the hospital in March and my first performance was in May at the Indianapolis Opera. It was a really different trajectory. And so far it’s been a really good match. Charity Tillemann-Dick When were you diagnosed with cancer? I had my first cancer late in 2015. In 2016 it got worse. It metastasized. Cancer, you never totally recover from. That’s the crummy thing about it. You’re never out of the woods. It’s been a journey. Me and my big brother, Jesus, have gotten into big fights over this one. #truestory. There’s so many different types of cancer, but to add a lung transplant to that, how does that work? What was that like for you? Everyone should be an organ donor. It is one of the greatest gifts we can give one another. Transplant gave me my life back but it also compromises the immune system. So cells my immune system would have likely killed off in a normal person turned into very poorly differentiated and serious cancer cells that reproduced extremely quickly. This all happened at the same month that a contract on my dream house fell through, my editor left my publisher, the church policy change of 2015 took place leading to my crisis of faith and I gave my mom the first draft of my manuscript, putting significant strain on our relationship. That month, I thought this freckle on my forehead was changing. It was biopsied and I felt like my dermatologist wasn’t taking it seriously. Meanwhile, it was growing every single day, changing and getting bigger. By the time they took it out, it was the size of a spherical kumquat right in the middle of my forehead. Then, it metastasized, moving to my parotid gland and invading my facial nerve. It went from the size of a pinhead to the size of my fist in two and a half weeks. My treatment was managed at the same hospital where I received my transplant. I was on high doses of chemotherapy and I had daily radiation treatments. My already suppressed immune system was crazy weak so I wasn’t really supposed to be around people. I housesat for a friend who lived in Cleveland. My husband was there. Other than going for treatment, I didn’t go anywhere. So for a few months, I didn’t go to church. The missionaries or members of the ward brought me the sacrament for three months. It was really important for me. I read my scriptures a lot. I prayed even though I didn’t really want to talk with God. I yelled a lot. For the first time in my life I got into screaming matches with my Heavenly Family. It was a one-way screaming match. They didn’t scream back. I felt like they had screamed by what had happened to me with the cancer. I think it was good. I think it allowed me the space I needed to figure out how I was going to function in this new capacity. I was really grateful that I didn’t have to deal with my community and people that I knew because I couldn’t face myself. And when you can’t face yourself it’s really hard to know how you’re going to face others. You are able to weave your testimony so seamlessly and so beautifully throughout your book, did you feel like you had to share things about your faith? For me, it was very natural to talk about my faith. I could not write a memoir without writing about my relationship with my Heavenly Father and my spiritual community. I think sometimes we confuse the one for being both. As a community, we are woefully imperfect. Sometimes, my relationship with my heavenly parents feels that way too. I really do feel like Jesus and Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother are a part of my family. Sometimes, they are these wonderful, benevolent forces of love and sometimes I feel totally neglected. It feels like a very human relationship. Mormon theology really helps with that. Sometimes I’m like, why isn’t Heavenly Mother in charge? She’d be nicer. But my faith is so integral to the person I am that the different aspects of the very real relationships I have with Mormonism and my heavenly family would have been impossible to extricate from the story. Did you ever feel that your prayers weren’t being heard or going unanswered and if so, how did you deal with that? So here’s the hard thing. I always feel my prayers are answered, but frequently they’re not answered in the way I want them to be answered. It’s so annoying. Sometimes, its more than annoying, sometimes it’s life-threatening. When I was waiting for my second transplant, I kept getting blessings telling me to be patient. This was when I was on pretty advanced life support and it didn’t feel like we had room for patience. While there were all sorts of things that happened that let me know that God did see me and he did hear me, it was just very challenging to heed the answers I was getting. With cancer, I felt a real spiritual absence. It was my cross-bearing moment. I knew that something was on the other side and I knew that God was aware of me, I just didn’t feel it. It might have been because I was so hurt and angry that I couldn’t face God. I felt so hurt. I had been through so much. That He could stand by and let my physical identity be marred along with all of the other identities I had to reimagine or shed felt cruel. While the experience was unimaginably spiritually lonely, people filled in in a way I didn’t expect them to. I have found that when I experience a spiritual absence there’s a human presence that I’m not used to. Charity Tillemann-Dick In one of your TED Talks you say, “Death has kind of been a defining thing in your life.” How have all of the deaths in your family and your personally facing it changed your perspective on life? I love life. It’s the most incredible adventure that we’re all on together and I just want to make sure that I live exactly the life I’m supposed to. That responsibility can almost be scarier than death, which from where we sit, looks relatively straightforward. I’m confident that whenever I ultimately die, it will be my time. That part of my story, I don’t have that much influence over. I have a lot to do with what happens now which is this massive responsibility. I think it was one of the things that made writing my book so painful – so stressful. I had this publishing deal and I knew telling mine and by association, my family’s story was this trust and living up to it was extraordinarily challenging. If I wasn’t honest enough, the story wouldn’t be any good or true. If I was too honest, I knew I would hurt people I love. In certain respects, that experience was a microcosm of life. We have this time on earth and the opportunity to make something of our lives which can create good, bad, or some of both. It’s a lot of pressure. Are you still singing? Yes! I have my debut at Symphony Hall in Boston coming up on October 15th. I’m debuting this beautiful song cycle. Then I’ll be in 12 cities over the next couple of months doing events, going to bookstores and doing performances. Would you ever want to write another book? If I said yes to that question, my husband might just kill me. While the end result is very rewarding, memoirs are very punishing. So what are you working on next? I’ve launched an initiative with Donate Life America called the Donate Life #MyEncore challenge. It’s all about second chances, redemption, storytelling and saving lives. You share a story of your own second chance on Facebook or Instagram, register as an organ donor at www.donatelife.net/myencore and tag and challenge five friends to join you. Charity Tillemann-Dick What advice would you give young people about using time wisely, accomplishing their goals, and living their dreams? Some clichés are true. Time is everything we have here. When we die, no one will regret binge-watching too little TV. Our birthright is to create in whatever context we can. I may or may not be able to have babies, but I am creating things all the time. Not everyone sings, not everyone dances, not everyone writes; we don’t have the same gifts and the same talents. We are as different as the components of our bodies. So go make something. Go make a relationship. Go make a phone call. Go make a community group. Participate in making something. There’s a group of women in Utah who started this group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which I love. In a little way, I’ve been involved in building it. That’s what we do in the church too, we build up the Kingdom of Zion on earth. But this action is what allows for second chances, for redemption – for each of our own encores in life. At A Glance Name: Charity Tillemann-Dick Age: 34 Location: Washington, DC Marital History: Married Occupation: Soprano, presenter, and writer Schools Attended: Regis University, Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Liszt Academy of Music Favorite Hymn: Changes all the time, but right now, “God is Love” Website: www.charitysunshine.com Interview Produced by Leslie Schwartz-Leeper