Jake Stigers

Writing program notes for local theaters is one of my favorite projects. I usually get to choose any topic I think will help give audiences context and enhance their enjoyment of the shows and concerts they see. I've written program notes for everything from American Ballet Theater to vocal ensembles like Chanticleer and the Indigo Girls to local and touring productions of musicals including Rent, Kinky Boots and Hello, Dolly! This essay is for the 2018 national tour of Les Misérables that stopped at the University of Iowa's gorgeous Hancher Auditorium.

First Lutheran Church in Cedar Rapids, IA, celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2018 and recruited me to produce a commemorative book to honor the occasion. Armed with a small group of contributors and fact-finders—along with vast libraries of photos and documents—I spent 13 months researching, interviewing, writing and editing an 88-page, coffee-table-worthy publication that arrived from the printer just in time to make meaningful 2018 Christmas gifts. Instead of replicating the meandering, essay-laden anniversary books of the past, I created a yearbook format that contained each idea on one focused spread. I also organized the book into sections that demarcated three important aspects of the church: the building, the people and the mission. We had an extremely limited budget that priced out any design agencies, so I created templates on Shutterfly and laid out the entire book myself. The finished product was an immediate hit and was praised both for its thoughtful, thorough content and its professional look and tone. 

When I joined a high-end gym in the Chicago Loop in the late 2000s, I asked for their biggest, meanest trainer to make me SWOLE.

I did get their biggest trainer, but instead of being mean he was slow, methodical, smart … and OK, maybe a little bit mean as he pushed me quite successfully toward achieving and exceeding my swole goals.

Fast-forward to the late 2010s. I’m living and working in Iowa and he’s parlayed his slow, methodical, smart methodologies into opening—and killing a whole new generation of people at—his own, very successful gym. He’d written a book to share his business practices and acumen with other small-business entrepreneurs, and he contacted me to be his editor.

I present clients with three tiers of involvement options when I edit their work:

1. Basic proofing for spelling, grammar, style, etc.

2. Add fact-checking and content review through a more critical eye.

3. Add rewriting/recasting copy for clarity, structure or other issues, plus incorporate best practices as needed for marketing/web copy.

He chose the second option for his book, so while keeping his unique voice intact, I helped streamline his copy and content and make sure he didn’t lie about how swole I currently was … or wasn’t.

We ended up with something he’s quite proud of, and he’s since self-published the book with great success on Amazon and other platforms.

Here’s a little secret: I’m not a wine person. But I love the challenge of learning so much about an unfamiliar product, lifestyle or vendor that I can write about it with enough authority to fool the experts.

Wine Insiders was a wine-of-the-month club for people who were new to the world of oenology and wanted both to educate themselves and to try new wines curated for them by experts.

So we created The Insider monthly newsletter as part of a retention program for existing customers. And I got busy learning everything I could as part of my mission to educate my fellow wine novices.

We printed the newsletter on paper that felt like a wine label to help pay off the “insider” aspect of the brand. And I packed it with a range of useful information including profiles of wineries, educational descriptions of varietals, recipes, food pairings—and a monthly four-page spread of tasting notes for the wines that were shipped to customers every month.

I’m still not a wine drinker, but I can say cuvée and Châteauneuf-du-Pape like a seasoned pro.

Writing catalogs requires—in addition to a hyper-organized disposition—the ability to learn a lot about a lot of products and write concise, authoritative copy to sell all of it. These catalogs are so ancient that they sell software on CD-ROMs that have to be mailed. But they gave me an opportunity to work with major brands and IPs … and they show that I’ve worked deep in the trenches, I came up for air with quality work, and I’m a SURVIVOR.