Part 2: Gestating a Book

Chapter 3: Waiting

Once the manuscript went to BCC in October, things were quiet. We occasionally had a phone conversation and Ashli posted things on the @cherisheddoctrine Instagram, but we were waiting for the publisher to do the layout and whatever else it is that publishers do to prep a book. (I actually don’t know – I’ve asked various people but that doesn’t seem to be question important enough for anyone to answer.)

For Christmas, I made quilted pillows. Heavenly Mother is represented to me in flowers, so I made a flower block for each of the three of us – McArthur is coral, Ashli is pink, I’m purple. Heavenly Mother is the 4th flower in white and pale blue (blue is the Indian color for deity). You can barely see it but it’s pulling everything together. I sent one to each of them, and kept a third for myself.

March 14, 2023: Ashli, McArthur, and I were interviewed for the Listen, Learn & Love podcast with Richard Ostler. We wanted so badly to represent Heavenly Mother well, to share the book as a testimony builder … the entire time we were recording, I was very on edge to be precise in what I said, not make any kind of reaction, and apparently it worked! As soon as we got off the Zoom meeting, I relaxed down and the phone rang immediately with McArthur and Ashli to review the whole experience, and for McArthur to tell us that during the recording, she had a text message that BCC was ready to send the layout PDF document for the final check.

That kicked off the whirlwind of the next two weeks.

McArthur contacted a graphic designer friend to make the cover, and our subtitle was tweaked just to get it to fit onto our little 4×6 inch book. We originally had something long and kind of laborious: “Celebrating the Joy of the Doctrine of Heavenly Mother.” Kate cut it to “The Joy of Our Mother in Heaven.” Much better! The flowers were put around the edge as a border as a sort of gift to me from McArthur, because … flowers …

I went over the entire manuscript to see how everything lined up in the page layout (when we turned it in, it was one huge google doc with no page breaks) – Andrew, the BCC layout guy, nailed it. It is so beautiful. While I was reviewing it, I had the distinct thought (which I cherish – haha if you understand the reference) that we did it. We did what Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother wanted us to do. This is it.

There were missed things here and there – not a big deal and easy to fix, but we had a punch list and the updated PDF emailed back and forth for about two weeks. I was also finishing a Richard Ostler manuscript – Listen, Learn & Love 3 – at the exact same time. So my family didn’t see much of me in the second half of March. That didn’t make them very happy, but fortunately, book projects go in waves. There’s a lot of downtime, and the “tie yourself to a chair and work like crazy on the computer” push is a few weeks at the most. Most of the time creating a book is at a much more manageable pace.

April 10, 2023: uploaded to amazon! We should have had a link three to five days later. We did not. We hit refresh on our Amazon app A LOT over the next couple of weeks. But nothing.

We finally heard after a couple of weeks that our mini size is not standard, so it takes Amazon a lot longer to do their thing of creating a hard copy book. So we just had to wait.

And wait.

End of April: Over multiple texts and phone calls, McArthur and Ashli and I discussed long and hard about doing a book tour with NO BOOKS. We were scheduled to be in Utah for book tour events May 4-7, so now what?

Well, this whole project is to teach about Heavenly Mother. The books are just one vehicle to share testimony of Her – we can share testimony of Her by meeting with people and speaking. It’s not about the book, so we decided to go forward with it anyway.

To be continued … Part 4: Utah

Part 1: Heavenly Mother is an Instagrammer

Chapter 2: Gestating a Book

May 2022: McArthur travels around the US, and even internationally sometimes, to speak at firesides and other gatherings about the doctrine of Heavenly Mother. This month, she went to North Carolina and spoke at a Heavenly Mother fireside in Ashli’s stake. Then she flew up to New York and spoke at a Heavenly Mother public event hosted by the LDS Women Project. I drove down to Brooklyn for the event, and loved meeting in person McArthur, her co-author Bethany Brady Spalding, and the LDSWP editor in chief Liz Ostler for the first time. I was a little starstruck – I’ve been following McArthur and Bethany and buying their books for a long time. But they are so comfortable with everyone they meet that it was never a big deal.

I chauffeured McArthur for the next two days, up to my house in Connecticut. We had tried to host a stake fireside but it was canceled just the week before.

Tangent: when we arranged for me to host McArthur, I contacted my stake leaders and said hey, this author is coming into town, can we have her speak? We didn’t even set it up for a Heavenly Mother topic – it was women in the scriptures, because she has also written books (published by Church authorized Deseret Book) about that. I had a couple of lengthy conversations with the stake president to reassure him that no, we wouldn’t get into “false doctrine” or teach girls to pray to Heavenly Mother or anything scary (while I rolled my eyes that this type of panic is even a thing), and he approved us to go ahead.

It was really frustrating to try to set it up – reserve the building, announce it to the wards, etc – no one had any interest in helping or participating, including people in my own ward. Then less than a week before, a mysterious person saw my Facebook post about the LDSWP event, apparently assumed it was my stake fireside, and called the Area Seventy (??) who then called the stake president and ordered him to cancel the fireside. Not many people saw that Facebook post because it wasn’t public, so while I will never know who called the area leader, there are only a couple of people it could be. Two years later, I am still shocked and disgusted that likely a woman went over the stake president’s head to deliberately cancel a fireside for women about women.

What we did instead: The morning after the LDSWP event, McArthur and I had a brunch at my house with about a dozen women to talk about how to talk about Heavenly Mother in ways that people won’t freak out about. The Sacred Silence is the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced. Patriarchy says, “Women are so needed and amazing! So we will respect Heavenly Mother by pretending She doesn’t exist because She is too sacred to talk about.”

Event 3 was an independent gathering of LDS people (not an official event so it didn’t have to be approved by any leader) in Boston – I drove McArthur up there and stayed for the meeting and then sent her on her way. Zach Davis arranged for and hosted the gathering and there was a lot more discussion that time than McArthur giving a speech as she typically does other presentations. I don’t remember much, this far removed from it, but I enjoyed the give-and-take.

Summer 2022: the book project had to sit for a little while, while my family moved from Connecticut to Virginia. We had ended submissions in the spring – Ashli and McArthur read everything and chosen what would be included, Ashli sent acceptance letters. Then everything came to me to sort into the topical chapters and create the huge master document to make the book.

The second big decision during the summer – after the book structure – was the title, credit to McArthur. The catchy phrase in Church literature is that the belief in Heavenly Mother is a “cherished and distinctive doctrine.” And we wanted people to recognize that this is a joyful doctrine, not a scary one to be afraid of. Cherish is an action – and we wanted exactly that – the action of cherishing the joy of this doctrine and belief. And that’s how we settled on Cherish: The Joy of Our Mother in Heaven.

September 2022: it took over 100 hours in September and the first week or two in October to place and edit all of the submissions into the master document for Cherish. There’s not a lot to say about this phase – I spend a lot of time at my computer bouncing between files – copying and downloading submissions from this file and putting them in that file. On October 13, off it went to BCC Press, the small publisher we chose to work with for the project.

To be continued … Part 3: Waiting

I’m baffled at myself for not writing all of this as it happened – what kind of journalist am I … But better late than never.

So here’s the WHOLE STORY from my perspective. McArthur and Ashli will have different details.

Chapter 1: Heavenly Mother Is An Instagrammer

Spring 2021: Instagram is a mysterious thing that prompted “Suggested Accounts” of LDS women artists, and a wave of Heavenly Mother art showed up in my feed. So beautiful! When you follow one, another shows up, one thing leads to another in the algorithm world, and the next thing you know, I was following more than 20 artists, all with some kind of Heavenly Mother depiction in their portfolios. Number one pick for me: “Worlds Without Number” by Rose Datoc Dall.

One of the artists posted a question box: “What led you to seek out Heavenly Mother?” Hmm … well, I didn’t seek Her … She just showed up. On Instagram. Wait a minute … She came looking for ME. Hello, Mother!

October/November-ish 2021: I had previously connected with McArthur through the LDS Women Project (not because of Heavenly Mother) – she writes essays for the LDSWP and had referred some people for me to interview. One evening, she posted on Instagram (!!!!) a call for submissions for a Heavenly Mother poetry book and my immediate thought was, “I don’t write poetry, I wonder if I could edit it for her.” So I sent a DM suggesting that, and she replied to ask for my phone number. We talked and she wanted to run the idea past her collaborator Ashli, who I didn’t know, but as far as she was concerned, the job was mine. McArthur is all about action – she’s sees something, grabs her phone, and gets it done. Do not underestimate McArthur. The time I saw the original post to ending our phone call was less than 20 minutes.

Another conversation introduced me to Ashli Carnicelli, whose idea this book had been in the first place: 365 reflections and poems and art about Heavenly Mother, a “thought a day for a year” type of book.

The overarching decision before we even started was that this book would align with the stated doctrine of the LDS Church – the Heavenly Mother gospel topics essay. McArthur and Ashli had both gone to the temple to pray about doing the book, and they felt prompted to hold to that standard. We know that many women feel constrained by the essay and are unhappy with various cultural restrictions placed on the conversation. And we want them to grow and expand their light! But THIS project would color inside the lines for a lot of reasons, but the main one is – because God said so.

We worked as a 3-member team from the beginning. Ashli and McArthur were handling intake and acceptance for all the submissions, and then I would organize everything into the actual manuscript draft. I started a spreadsheet to make sure the different types of entries were spread out – every ten would be an art piece, mix the reflections with the poetry, that sort of thing.

General Conference, April 2022: There was a lot of Instagram gossip that apostles were giving stake leader training around the US to put a damper on discussions about Heavenly Mother – concerns of “doctrinal drift.” (If you ask me, doctrinal drift is to NOT teach a belief in Her existence, but … nobody asked me.) You can notch me in the column of Not Happy when Elder Renlund spoke in the women’s session to briefly mention the gospel topics essay as the ONLY thing we know about Heavenly Mother, and then he talked about other things. There’s been only one other time in my life I’ve been that deeply disappointed in church leaders.

McArthur swooped in to talk me off the cliff – yes, the essay is short but there’s a lot of doctrine in those paragraphs. It’s based on a huge paper from BYU titled “A Mother There.” Go read THAT. And how many people knew the gospel topics essay even existed, let alone read it? Far fewer than you’d hope. Many church members in other countries – she travels internationally a lot – don’t know that this is in our doctrine at all, and HE SAID IN GENERAL CONFERENCE THAT WE HAVE A HEAVENLY MOTHER. All those people around the world, hearing that for the first time!

It took me a couple of days and I still have to consciously focus on the positives sometimes, but okay … we can go forward with this.

Maybe … McArthur has a lot of contacts at church headquarters and there were enough red flags after that general conference that we talked about revising the book, or pausing it, or something … We all wanted to go forward but the question was how. There needed to be a change. I was feeling snarky and said, “Fine. If they want the gospel topics essay, they can have the gospel topics essay.”

There it is. There’s the change.

All of our accepted submissions already aligned with the essay – we didn’t have to change any of that. Only the outline changed. We restructured the book to literally follow the essay. Instead of 365 random thoughts in no order, we pulled 12 doctrinal statements out of the essay, started each chapter with an essay quote, and sorted the entries by topic into the chapters.

To be continued … Part 2: Gestating a Book