I had forgotten she plays the drums. Or that she once wrote the Itty Bitty Salt Lake City feature for the Deseret News.

Amazing what you discover while researching a piece on someone you thought you already knew a lot about.

Elaine Jarvik is a woman of numerous talents: 27 years as a writer with the local LDS Church-owned newspaper, followed by a stint doing a few stories for The Salt Lake Tribune, all alongside a successful career as a playwright – her latest, “Based on a True Story,” sold out before rehearsals even began. I mean, who does that?

She won’t lay claim to the title “reporter” because “I’ll ask questions, but I’m not really great at digging out information,” she says; but will accept “feature writer” since that’s precisely what she did so well for so long. Who knows how many successful productions it will take before she’s willing to call herself a playwright? “I still have a little nametag they gave me at Humana [Festival of New American Plays] that says ‘Elaine Jarvik  . . .  Playwright’ and I keep that where I can see it every day,” she says with a quick laugh.

But she does dig when she writes features and is known for digging deep. I still vividly recall her 1995 story about “The Little Lama Who Loves Power Rangers” – a Bountiful first-grader who was the 23rd reincarnation of an important Tibetan religious figure. He would soon leave Utah to train in a monastery far, far away, giving up the American toys (all but one) he loved so dearly.

Another starts like this:

The robe is black, with a rope around the waist and fabric that drapes voluminously through the sleeves. So now, as Mike Zimmerman stands before his teacher and prepares to sit, he must arrange the robe just so, folding and tucking and folding some more.

He once was chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court. In those days he wore a different black robe, but that was then and this is now, and, as any Buddhist knows, then is not so important. In those days he sat on the bench. Now he is sitting, cross-legged, on the floor.

In his deep, serious voice he begins: “Goso said, ‘To give an example, it is like a buffalo passing through a window. The head, the horns and the four legs have already passed through, but the tail has not. Why is it that the tail cannot?”

In Zen Buddhism, this is called a koan — the kind of inscrutable paradox most famously expressed in the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

How does she DO that? You want to read on and on and on. And, of course, you will.

Jarvik truly likes going deeper into any religion and just about any other subject she comes across. She prefers longer-form stories, creative nonfiction. “I like just the writing part of it,” she states firmly.

While she was growing up in Maryland, her mother worked for the Department of the Army in their marksmanship program affiliated with the NRA and her father was an economist with the Commerce Department in Washington, D.C. Jake Levin was also a poet whose work infrequently appeared in The New York Times and who wrote gags for cartoonists just for fun as well as quips – Nepotism: putting on heirs – that were often published in the Wall Street Journal and Saturday Evening Post. He encouraged his daughter to compose a few poems when she was 7 or 8 and then put them in a scrapbook for her – Jarvik’s earliest experience as a published writer.

Later in life, at Syracuse University in New York, she changed her journalism major after discovering she was too shy to do interviews. (These days, she says, “I’m a little awkward; I don’t think I’m shy.”) Diploma in hand, she considered the Peace Corps, “but I would have been a disaster,” and decided on the prestigious master’s program in journalism at Illinois’ Northwestern University, despite previous reservations about the field. “I knew how to write,” she recalls. “In high school I realized that even if I didn’t understand what I was talking about I could make it sound good.”

At Northwestern, assigned to interview congressional delegates in Washington, D.C., she discovered, “I really do love writing. I will write anything,” she says with a smile, making the analogy that she loves to play the drums: “I will play any kind of music as long as I get to play the drums.”  She has played for 25 years.

After a newspaper job in Washington, she married and moved to Italy where her now ex-husband, Robert Jarvik of artificial heart fame, attended medical school. They would later move to Utah and have the two children he has not seen in decades. Those events eventually led to a play, (“a man enters”), written by Jarvik with their artist/author daughter Kate Jarvik Birch, produced in 2011 at Salt Lake Acting Company. (Birch lives a few houses down the street from her mother; son Tyler is in Portland. Grandchildren range in age from 8 to 20.) “I don’t know why I stayed here,” Jarvik muses. “But I’m kind of the victim of inertia, fear of change: kids in school, friends. I am not LDS but went to work for the Deseret News and felt part of this culture. They treated me really well. This whole state has treated me very well.”

At the News, Jarvik only worked full time for about a year and a half until the birth of her son, then freelanced for nine years before returning to the paper full time. She also worked for the now-defunct Utah Holiday magazine and currently writes profiles for the U’s Continuum. An inveterate freelancer, she likes being productive (trying to write something every morning) and spent six months last year working on a book on the Vietnam war.

Jarvik used to write longhand, when the children were small, because her manual typewriter was noisy and would wake them. “I thought I would never be able to compose on a typewriter. Now, I can’t think through a pen.” Today she uses a computer, a Mac Air, but says she is a very slow writer. “I labor at it.” And she deletes a lot.

She always wanted a desk by a window, too. Now that she has one, Jarvik has discovered that when you write, “you really don’t look out the window all that much.”

The collaborative effort with her daughter was not Jarvik’s first play. After thinking she would like to write the book to a musical based on a newspaper story she had written “about missed connections, like ‘I Saw You’ in the back of City Weekly,” she started reading books about playwriting “and was basically self-taught” early on. She took a workshop at SLAC around 2004 from noted New York-based playwright J.T. Rogers. With encouragement and help from Robert Benjamin, a high school friend who ended up a physicist in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and also writes plays, she began working on a form called the 10-Minute Play. Her short work, “Dead Right,” about a person wondering what someone would say about them in their obituary, was one of four plays selected out of more than 1,200 submissions at the 2008 Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. It has since been published in a textbook, The Bedford Introduction to Literature,where it shares company with playwrights such as Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. “Dead Right” has now been produced in some10 states and Canada. “The Coming Ice Age,” a prequel to that play, about the person who was in the obituary, was produced by Pygmalion Theatre Company in 2010.

A year ago December, Jarvik wrote “Marry Christmas,” for Plan-B, about what it felt like to people she interviewed to get married during that 17-day window when same-sex marriage became legal in Utah after the state’s Amendment 3 was declared unconstitutional. It was creative nonfiction for the theater. “People already know the outcome so you have to tell it in an engaging way,” says the playwright.

“Two Stories,” for SLAC last February, was another play about “things that get under my skin,” she says. There were two threads to the story. One follows a journalist, a feature writer, natch, afraid she is going to lose her job. The other is about “people who build monster houses and block the view of somebody next door. So it’s about privacy and who gets to control what and who gets to control the story you’re telling,” says the playwright. We reviewed it here.

Jarvik explains that her current play at Plan-B, “Based on a True Story,” is about trying “to understand faith and comfort” —Jarvik is a non-believer but attends the nearby Presbyterian church, where she enjoys the sense of community, playing the drums, and the “incredible sermons of Pastor and poet Scott Dalgarno, being reminded each week to be a better person.” It’s also about time travel. The story takes place in 2046, after a malfunction in a time machine that was supposed to let you go backwards. The intake worker at the shelter where Megan ends up in the future on a search for her husband is a guy named Chuck with troubles of his own.

Asked what it’s like to give her play over to a director, Jarvik says, “I like to have control, so it’s hard, but I trust these people completely, so that’s not the problem. For me, the problem is that I’m always dissatisfied with my own work so I start seeing what I would like to have changed – and it’s too late.”

“I know the director and actors understand my plays better than I do.” She says that their interpretations can sometimes surprise her. “That’s how theater works.”

Later, while pondering what her favorite feature story of all time might be (we ask the most insightful questions, don’t we?) Jarvik mentions an incredible windstorm that occurred one Christmas “around the time Sony was hacked. And garbage cans were blown over and people’s stuff, their secrets, got spread all over the neighborhood. I picked up a lot of it and put it back into the cans. Think of it: nature hacking people’s secrets. There’s got to be a play there . . . “

The ever-imaginative Elaine Jarvik is on another role.

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.