Who We Are
We are four siblings who believe in the power of light. Each of us has different talents, from writing to composing to teaching, but we share a common goal: to craft awesome, creative, and inspiring works and share those works with the world.
Our journey began twenty-seven years ago, when our mother took the leap of faith to homeschool us from kindergarten through ninth grade. Growing up as the best of friends, we fed off each other’s ideas, creating stories, poems, and music together and encouraging each other to do our very best.
In 2015, when three of us began studying at the same university, we arranged to meet every Friday for lunch at a beautiful enclosed courtyard in the student center. There we swapped stories, shared ideas, and sang songs on a public-use piano. Eventually, we came up with a name for our weekly meetings: Atrium of Light.
An atrium is a central courtyard of a building, usually enclosed in glass and often filled with plants or landscaping. For us, the title “Atrium of Light” represented a center of gathering, a place of renewal, and a sanctum of light.
Gradually, our weekly meetings began to attract friends, classmates, and even strangers. Soon our vision expanded: Why limit Atrium of Light to a weekly gathering of friends? Why not share our works with the world?
Our Mission
We believe that the world can never have too much light, truth, and goodness. Negative things are being created all the time, whether it’s tragic events, conflict within families or communities, or media that is crude, violent, or depressing. To counteract this stream of darkness, the world needs a constant supply of media that is wholesome, clean, uplifting, and inspiring.
The works we create span a wide variety of genres, from choral music to piano compositions, from haikus to fantasy novels, from blogs to scholarly articles. The Atrium of Light website provides a platform for hosting this diversity of content in a common space. Our hope is that when you are drawn to our site by one of our works, you’ll stick around to explore some others.
All four of us are active, committed members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As such, all of our works reflect Christian values and ideas. While some of our content is written specifically for Latter-day Saints, much is accessible to a general audience. And so we hope that regardless of your specific beliefs or affiliation, you can find content on this site that uplifts and empowers you.
Contributors
Tyler Madsen
Tyler is a chemical engineering major who doubles as a software engineer. He loves science and math, sometimes working through integrals as a way to calm his mind. Fantasy stories have been his passion since age 14, when he was introduced to a bunch of other fantasy aficionados at a Boy Scout camp where he worked. He is in the process of writing Doria, a sci-fi/fantasy mix about dwarves digging a mine on Earth in the intergalactic future.
Tyler is married and has two young sons. He loves God, and hopes that his writing can help people be entertained without encountering elements that drive away the Lord’s Spirit. His favorite hobby is playing Magic the Gathering, for which he designs his own custom cards. His motto is that good fiction should have five elements: joy, discovery, valor, mystery, and destruction.
CJ Madsen
CJ is a graduate music student, studying choral conducting at Brigham Young University. He loves playing piano, organizing organ, vocalizing voice, churning out compositions, and articulating arrangements. He wishes he could bellow bagpipes. CJ and the love of his life have three (soon to be four) children, who give CJ constant inspiration for slapstick stories and improvised music.
CJ is dedicated to creating and sharing works of art that bring light and goodness to people’s lives, particularly the light and goodness of Jesus Christ. In addition to his wife and children, the greatest creative inspirations in CJ’s life are his siblings, his elementary school classmates, and his middle school chums, all of whom (thanks to his homeschooling background from ages 5 to 15) happen to be the same.
Audrey Jolly
Audrey credits her three brothers for sparking her fascination with language and communication styles. As a child, Audrey would try to sneakily write down or record the witty banter and spontaneous roleplay between Tyler, CJ, and Jeremy so that she could analyze it in more detail. In recent years, she has channeled her language interests toward being a blogger, speech language technician, editor, and ESL teacher.
While earning her bachelor’s degree in communication disorders at BYU, Audrey met her husband when they both volunteered as editors on a linguistics journal, and they now have two young children. Her greatest passion is being a mother, and she hopes that, through examples like Atrium of Light, her children will be inspired to use their talents to change the world.
Jeremy Madsen
Styling himself a “word nerd,” Jeremy’s passion for the written word began when he spent his childhood reading the library books checked out by his older siblings. Since then, he has blossomed into a writer, editor, and scholar. He studied at BYU majoring in ancient Near Eastern studies, where he spent most of his time explaining to people what his major was. Jeremy delights in languages: he can speak fluently in Spanish, read competently in Biblical Hebrew, decipher debt notes in Old Assyrian, stumble through phrases in German, and even hum a little Hurrian.
Jeremy is currently working on a blog about spiritual topics and a young-adult fantasy novel about a pyromancer trying to save his soul. Jeremy’s writing philosophy is that stories are powerful when they are real, and they are real when they reflect the laws of the universe. Jeremy credits his siblings for introducing him to the love of his life, to whom he is now joyously married. He, his wife, and their infant daughter now live in Columbus, Ohio.
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