Levi Edgar Young

I think we sometimes assume that Utah was in some kind of literary isolation from the rest of the world, ignored by national and international authors, except to lampoon Mormons, and populated by few who had any knowledge of or opinion about current notable works. Of course, a minute’s thought and perhaps a little research into the period of Mormon literature’s “Lost Generation” shows that can’t possibly be true.

Still, it sometimes seems a little strange when General Authorities seem to know them personally.

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I had planned on reading Stephen Carter’s What of the Night? on the side, as I worked to plow through other books I wanted to get through. It was a book of personal essays, so it would be easy I thought to read one or two a day, while focusing on the full length fiction on my new pile of books I wanted to read and review. About a day and a half after starting the first essay I had read the entire book in two sittings. Granted, the book is a slim one (168 pages), but the book had caught me off guard with how entrancing and poignant it truly was.

Carter’s voice is intimate—exposed. He speaks of faith and doubt and spirit and family and struggle with the disarming honesty that causes you to lay your judgmental attitudes aside and simply listen to his complex thoughts and simple heart. His tales include his time with Eugene England before he died, the disappointments and triumphs of a Mormon mission, a tutorial through clippings with his grandmother, bright Alaskan lights and dark Alaskan doubts, a black sheep brother who showed him the way, the weight of priesthood, and the liberation of the Spirit. Each essay was carefully crafted like a sonnet or a piece of excellent cinema. Ponderous, vulnerable, honest, loving, good, afraid. Many of the things we carefully sidestep, Carter plunged into and felt his way through it, even when it became painful. It’s a brave, beautiful piece of work. Personal essays aren’t my typical reading, but this particular collection had me enraptured and made me want to pick up some more of Eugene England just to get some more of that style of intimacy and quietly spoken lives.

Now I do have a beef with one of the essays, “The Departed.” I started writing it about in this review, but then realized how disproportionate my discussion about that one essay was becoming in regards to the context of the whole book. So if you’re interested in reading my comments about Richard Dutcher and Eugene England in context of What of the Night? go to this other post here.

As it is, though, I wanted this short review to highlight how truly moved I was by Carter’s work. I recommend it enthusiastically without hesitation. Those who read it will be blessed by an insightful mind, a compassionate soul, and a troubled heart.

One of my favorite personal essays in Stephen Carter’s book What of the Night? is “A Brief Tour of England: My Year With Gene.” It told Carter’s perspective of that mistreated hero of Mormon literature, Eugene England, and his last days on earth. Carter was England’s assistant at UVSC (now UVU) and in the essay he paints a picture of a tireless, slightly eccentric, and loving man who pushed the cause of Mormon Letters (and Mormonism itself) with his entire will and force of character. After running into problems at BYU and being chastised by certain General Authorities, you could feel England’s broken heart when Carter recorded his words, “You don’t know what it is like to hear what I heard from men I believe have authority from God” (p. 18). Knowing England’s background and how he was forced out of BYU, it was all the more powerful then, after that experience, England stated firmly his continued commitment to the Gospel, “Some people don’t believe me when I say this, but I have spent my entire life being an apologist for the Gospel, because I know it’s true”(p. 23).

However, I couldn’t help juxtaposing that beautiful essay about Eugene England with the one Carter wrote about Richard Dutcher, “The Departed.” I still really like Dutcher, and think his Mormon films are some of the best in the genre. He’s a man who I have met briefly and still very much admire. So I’m going to try hard not to judge Dutcher too harshly in my following comments, as I believe he still has a valuable voice and I believe, even after he left the Church, his legacy for Mormon Cinema and the Mormon Arts is an extremely positive one. But I have to say my peace about Carter’s approach to Dutcher’s moment in the sun in the history of Mormon Letters. (more) »

Jonathan Langford emailed me the link to this Failblog post recently. It reads: “If you were a cannibal and were eating the protagonist from your novel, which side dishes would be appropriate? Explain.”

He suggested that it might be fun to a Mormon literary version. Here are mine — feel free to add your own via the comment box:

“The parents of the protagonist in Margaret Young’s Salvador drive her in a white van with a big red stripe and navy blue hubcaps to El Salvador. The mother calls it the Yankee Doodle Dan Van. Is that an appropriate use of our nation’s flag?”

“Explain why even though Kit in Coke Newell’s On the Road to Heaven joins the Church and serves a mission, his past as a mountain hippy makes him unfit to marry your niece and/or granddaughter.”

“Why does Doug Thayer hate rich people?”

“Is Josi S. Kilpack’s culinary mystery series against the Word of Wisdom? Shouldn’t it be more like Carob Brownie or Banana?”

“What do you think the ‘B’ stands for in Linda Hoffman Kimball’s The Marketing of Sister B?”

George F. Richards ca. 1915

When I came across this text I laughed out loud at the anachronisms and decided I had to include it, even thought it is perhaps just a variation on the General Conference theme of caution over what we read. But then, as far as literary criticism goes, this is the subject most Mormons hear most about—so much so that today it seems to define the LDS market.

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National award winning playwright Mahonri Stewart has just had two of his plays The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun published through Zarahemla Books. Stewart, a Utah native who is now pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University, has had over a dozen over his plays produced and has won awards for his writing through the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., the Hale Centre Theatre, and the LDS Film Festival.

The two plays included in the volume are both about the struggles people have to find, or keep, faith. Swallow the Sun is about author C.S. Lewis, the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia and other popular books. Known as a valiant defender of Christianity, it is less known that C.S. Lewis was once an entrenched atheist. “Swallow the Sun is a story of a struggle against God,” said Stewart. “Lewis loved mythology and that sort of thing, so in a way there is a part of him that would have liked to believe. But he refused to be ‘taken in.’ However, along his path there were people like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote Lord of the Rings, that showed him that there were thinking people, intellectuals, who believed this stuff. At first he fought them tooth and nail but, bit by bit, he started to see their reasons.”

The other play included in the volume, The Fading Flower, also addresses the struggle for faith, but from a different context. It tells the story of the family of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, years after he was murdered. The story focuses most on Emma and her little known son David Hyrum Smith, “We hear a lot about Joseph Smith III, because he tried to carry on his father’s legacy by accepting leadership in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in opposition to the LDS faith led by Brigham Young in Utah,” said Stewart. “But I think David’s story is even more interesting. He went west as a missionary for the RLDS faith, to convert us Mormons over here. But the information he found out about his father from the Utah Mormons knocked him for a loop. He started to realize that not everything his mother and brother had led him to believe may be accurate. He then set out on a search for the truth that led to him some very uncomfortable places, personally.”

The publisher supporting this volume of plays, Zarahemla Books, publishes “provocative, unconventional, yet ultimately faith-affirming stories that yield new insights into Mormon culture and humanity.” Christopher Bigelow, the publisher behind Zarahemla Books, is thrilled to have brought two of Stewart’s plays into their repertoire, “Ever since Zarahemla Books started in 2006, I’ve wanted to include Mormon drama in our offerings,” said publisher Christopher Bigelow. “Mahonri Stewart is Mormonism’s preeminent young, emerging playwright, and Zarahemla is honored to publish his work. We know readers will enjoy experiencing these plays in book form, and we hope this volume also helps pave the way for future productions of the plays.”

The Fading Flower and Swallow the Sun can be purchased at Zarahemla’s website www.zarahemlabooks.com and will also soon be available through Amazon and other booksellers.

One of the most unusual Mormon terms is Ahman, which appears twice in the Doctrine and Covenants (other than in the term Adam-ondi-ahman)—in 78:20 and 95:17. In both of these scriptures it is part of the term Son Ahman and equivalent to Christ. So, then what does Ahman mean?

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Zarahemla Books hits the sweet spot again with its latest book offering, Luisa Perkins’ Dispirited. The supernatural thriller/YA dark fantasy is a worthy addition to Zarahemla’s quality library of Mormon literature, and continues to showcase the diversity Zarahemla displays on its shelf. Zarahemla is as much of a home for genre fiction, as it is high brow literary novels, as it is for personal essays, as it is for short stories, as it is now for Mormon drama (full disclosure: Zarahemla Books will be publishing a book of two of my plays in the next few weeks, as well as an anthology of Mormon Drama which I helped pull together later this Summer… but I was a big fan of ZB’s approach long before those projects). Dispirited continues Zarahemla’s big tent tradition with its blend of dark, magical realism and young adult sensibility (with a dash of the bizarre just to throw you off kilter).

Dispirited jumps right into the conflict in its first chapter when a young boy named Blake is grieving for his dead mother and so stumbles upon the ability to separate his spirit from his body (astral projection). Thus he travels to the astral plane in search for his mother. However, Blake is in for a rude awakening (or unawakening) when he tries to get back into his body, as he discovers that it has been possessed by a powerful evil spirit who has no intention of giving the poor child his body back. In the next chapter we are introduced to Cathy, years after the inciting incident. Cathy is the step sister of “Blake,” and becomes our main protagonist. The real Blake, now an exiled spirit out of his body, enlists Cathy in the battle over the possession and right to his body.  And then we’re off to the races, plot wise.

I found the initial premise fascinating, partly because I felt it was plausible. I have known people (including a personal friend of mine, as well as a Wiccan who I baptized on my mission) who had claimed to have accomplished this feat of “astral planing,” where they could separate themselves from their bodies, travel in a different plane of existence, and then return to their body (although my friend from my mission claimed that she had difficulty getting back into her body, so she never attempted the experience again). As a believer in this kind of supernatural possibility, having had a few difficult to explain supernatural scenarios in my own life, Perkins had me at the get go with this initial conflict. The central premise seemed real and organic, especially from a Mormon worldview. Sometimes magical realism, from the perspective of a Mormon, simply becomes realism. (more) »