Hopefully you’ve heard by now that the last few weeks have been a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Meridian Magazine. As the daughter of the both the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, I have been a fly on the wall (and sometimes a fly in the ointment) in the life of this publication. I thought I would share a few memorable episodes to take you behind the scenes of Meridian, especially for those of you who have been our readers or authors for years.

A huge part of the battle of a daily magazine is getting content to fill each day. You scrape and search and ask the best authors and thinkers you know to contribute something, only to blink and find another day is here and you need even more. My parents always encouraged me to contribute to the line-up (even asking me to facilitate a “scripture pictures” section for children’s drawings when I was still not even a teenager yet). I resisted for years, but finally the Christmas of my freshman year at BYU, I gave my parents the most expensive gift I ever have—the promise of a regular column from me on the life and times of being a young single adult striving to live the Gospel.

The things I wrote were short, passing thoughts, really, on the struggles of finding your way at the crossroads of nearly every big decision of your life. Sometimes it felt like a burden to have to come up with something, but over months and years, I felt that my brain had been shaped by the exercise to look at every challenge and try to see the lesson; to derive a narrative from everything that happened.

The Blind Date

And readers on Meridian seemed to enjoy the results, which was encouraging to my little twenty-something heart, trying to find significance in what I was doing. In fact, one reader reached out to me and said that from my columns, she was certain that I would be perfect for her son. It was a strange email to receive and yet, I hadn’t seemed to find my someone yet, so why not him?

She wanted to set us up on a blind date. He had wisely requested that we talk on the phone first so he could get to know me at least a little and ask me properly himself. That phone call came and I paced the front yard of the all-green old house that I lived in with six other girls, which we affectionately nicknamed “poison ivy”, chatting with him and finding we really might have a pretty good time together. He asked me on the date, and I said yes.

It was not until I arrived at the date that I learned that his family was coming too, including the avid reader who had set us up in the first place, his mother.

We had a family picnic and as we sat, his mother seemed to be staring at me, thoughtfully. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she said, “You do look better without bangs.” It seemed completely out of the blue. Sensing this, she clarified, “you wrote in one of your columns that you weren’t sure if you liked the bangs you got, I do think you look better without them.” A valid opinion I suppose, only a little ill-timed since I was sitting there with bangs and couldn’t do a thing about it. It was strange to think that people out there that didn’t actually know me at all remembered details of my thoughts on random subjects like that.

Despite the strangeness of the dynamic, I ended the date fairly impressed with this boy, but whether it was the bangs or something else, we never went on a second date.

Meeting Your Heroes

But Meridian has brought me chances to meet other people who did seem to leave impressed. As an actress, writer, and sometimes short film director, I have taken every chance I could to interview and get to know members of the Latter-day Saint film community and have gotten to write many features on new films and inspiring projects. One opportunity I specifically sought out was the chance to interview Don Bluth, the legendary director of such animated classics as An American Tale, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Thumbelina, and Anastasia.

He agreed to take some time to talk with me. I was so nervous about how it would be because I had been watching his films my entire life. Scenes and songs that he directed were things I had quoted a thousand times, and unlike my usual assignments, we weren’t scheduled to chat about one particular film project, I was writing a profile on his entire career. I didn’t know what to say or where to start. I felt like a little kid who had been given half an hour to ask Santa Claus how he does it.

The worry turned out to be unnecessary. Within moments of saying hello, Don was talking to me like we were old friends and mentioning names like “Steven Spielberg” and “Walt Disney” as if they were old chums we both knew from the neighborhood. He talked to me like a fellow artist and it was one of a few important times where someone of that level of accomplishment in the industry has done that and made it feel like I belong in a place that otherwise feels like an absolute fortress of gatekeepers.

I wrote the article and sent the link to Don through his assistant. I didn’t hear back right away, though readers seemed to enjoy it. It was not until a few weeks later, as I was sitting down for a dinner with friends from high school I hadn’t seen in years, that I saw a voicemail come through on my phone from his assistant. As we waited for the others to arrive, I quickly listened to the message. She said that Don had loved the article, in fact, he had said that it was his favorite thing that had ever been written about him. Probably the best compliment on my writing that I have ever received.

“The Girl Who Walked”

Another unforgettable moment in my coverage of all things faith-based film was an invitation to attend the press junket for a Christian film that included them flying me to Los Angeles and putting me up with scores of other journalists in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It’s a hotel you might recognize as the venue for the Golden Globe Awards since 1961.

I felt like a little kid and quite out of my league. It felt like I really wasn’t experienced enough to be there. Had they invited the right girl? We were given a little schedule of events that included a screening of the film. I noticed that the screening room was just a few blocks away from the hotel and those few blocks are kind of a famous part of Beverly Hills, so I figured I would use the chance to stroll my way over and see what I could see along the way. It seemed the most logical and innocuous of decisions I could make.

Only, when I arrived, I found out that all of the other journalists at the junket had met in the lobby and been given transportation together to the venue and all were dumb-founded by my arriving alone. Word got out that I had walked, and for the rest of the junket, I was known as “that girl who walked”. At our five-course dinner that night from a celebrity chef, I approached the table and was greeted with, “oh yes, the girl who walked”. The next morning someone approached me in the hotel lobby asking if I was “that girl who walked”—he was actually inquiring whether I would like to share a cab to the airport, so apparently, they didn’t just assume I walk everywhere.

I never knew a whole reputation could grow out one tiny decision to walk a few blocks, but apparently it could. Oddly enough, the “otherness” that grew out of something so silly, freed me to be myself the rest of the weekend. If I was already the unusual, eccentric one, it didn’t matter what else I did that wasn’t perfectly in line with the pattern of other junkets that I had never been to. I was probably just the kind of person that dances to the beat of her own drum in their eyes now. Or rather…walks to it.

The Promotion  

It was just a few months later that I was living for a time, after graduating from college, in my parents’ home while I saved up some money to move to the East Coast. They were getting ready to go to a possible site for Nephi’s Bountiful in Oman and were going to be mostly off-grid for a month.

My mom came into my room one night, overcome with stress. They had recently hired a new associate editor and it wasn’t working out. With the skeletal staff Meridian has always kept, the associate editor would basically run the show in their absence and they wouldn’t even have frequent enough internet access to check in and make sure things were alright. She was afraid things would fall apart if they left it in the hands of this new hire.

I don’t know whether she came in planning to enquire or whether airing her feelings just came around to it, but she ultimately asked how I would feel about taking the job—just for the month. Well, when one of the people you love the most, seems desperate for help and you are available, it’s hard for the answer to be anything but yes.

The Best Part of the Job, The Worst Part of the Job

Now, I have been doing that job for over 10 years (the one month favor kind of got away from me). It has always been something I could do anywhere there was wifi, and I have stretched the limits of what that could include. I have loaded and sent out articles from the McDonalds inside of a metro station in Vienna, Austria; sat under the check-in desk of a darkened hostel lobby in Scotland; sent off final notes from Moshi, Tanzania just before embarking on a hike of Kilimanjaro; and most recently tried to eke out any signal I could get on a Nile riverboat and then on the raucous waves of the North Sea.

I am deeply grateful that I have had a job all this time with the flexibility to follow me across the world. But the best part of the job, by far, is hearing from readers about the impact a particular article had on them.

Incidentally, hearing from readers can also be the worst part of the job. We have quite simple guidelines for what comments we will publish. We are not averse to dissenting opinions, they just can’t 1) attack the author 2) attack the Church 3) use profanity. It’s stunning how rarely someone expresses a counterargument to what has been said without wandering into one of those three problems. Once we ran an article that riled up a lot of people and it happened to be on Halloween. So, I sat there, incidentally dressed as Cleopatra, reading page after page of angry and quite personally biting comments and got sadder and sadder. When I went to get the mail, the garbage man saw me and nodded politely and it was the nicest thing anyone had done for me all day, I may or may not have welled up in tears.

But most of the comments worth remembering are the good ones and they really are the best part of the job. In particular, I love the times when I have decided to pull up an archival article to run on a certain day and as I look through pages and pages of options, I feel a little draw to one in particular. I wouldn’t have thought it was inspiration, but the next morning I will wake up to a comment from someone that says they needed to hear those exact thoughts on just this topic that very day and it was a huge answer to prayer for them. And I realize that the Spirit was quietly working on me on their behalf. It happens that way all the time and it reminds me how aware the Lord is of each of you and your needs.

I’m glad Meridian can be a tool for answering prayers and that I can be a small instrument in helping that happen. We hope to continue to keep doing it for many more years to come.

Happy 25th anniversary to Meridian Magazine! CLICK HERE to help it keep publishing for another 25 years.