Why Emma Denied Polygamy (Cheryl Bruno)

What's the reason Emma denied polygamy just before her death? Was Emma Smith bound to secrecy? Was it a trauma response? Cheryl Bruno answers that in our next conversation...



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Introduction to Book Editing

GT  00:44  Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I'm excited to have a very busy author back on the show. For those of you who didn't see the previous segment, could you reintroduce yourself?



Cheryl  00:56  I’m Cheryl Bruno, and I'm editor of this new book, Secret Covenants.



GT  01:01  She's been a very busy author, as you know, if you watched the last segment. We just watched her co-author with John Dinger. Cheryl's written, well edited. Can you talk a little bit about the editing process? What is involved when you bring together all these different authors, because there's like 12 or so we talked about that before, but tell us about that.



Cheryl  01:27  Okay, so as I've said before, Gary Bergera, over at Signature Books, when he was still there, before he retired, asked me to put together a book made of essays about polygamy. I think the original conception was that I would bring together essays that had already been written and then just put them into a book. But I thought that I would like to have new insights on early Mormon polygamy, because it's been so long since we had Brian Hales book come out, or Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness. It has been many years since that came out, and so I thought we could come up with some new insights. I asked a group of authors to get together and write me a chapter for this book. I chose many authors that were well known for writing about polygamy. Then I have a few new ones that this is their first publication, and it makes for a very great book.



GT  02:24  It's a great book too.



Cheryl  02:27  The editing process is very intense. When I first was asking these authors to write for me, first I had to have a conception of what the book would be, so that they just didn't go off in all directions. Because I wanted it to be a cohesive book, so I had to be able to pitch what it was going to look like to these authors, so that they could fit their ideas into this cohesive whole. Then they sent me their first drafts. In many cases, because I gave them a idea of how long I wanted it to be, and I had 10 authors, and I didn't want to go over like 200 pages, but it actually did go quite over 200 pages; 400 pages, twice as long. But some of the authors were very enthusiastic and gave me 80 pages. So, I had to cut quite a bit. You know how sad it is for an author, for their editor, to just cut their baby in half.



GT  03:31  So you make them do it. Don't you?



Cheryl  03:33  Yes, but I would give them information on what I felt wasn't needed. In many cases, I did just line through [text] because it's hard sometimes for an author to see when they've spent so much time on their book what [to cut.] They think everything is important. So sometimes you have to give them a little bit of help on that.



GT  03:55  Okay.



Cheryl  03:56  We went back and forth, cutting a lot of them. Then when we thought we had it cut, they wanted to add more. They found something else. So, that was a really interesting process that we went through. I had to wrestle some. Some of the article or chapters had a tone that I didn't want to have in the book, because I wanted to strike a very scholarly tone. I did not want to be anti-Mormon in any way, and yet…