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Is There Deep Play in Heaven? Or Rest Well, Brother Swenson, Rest Well

By Tyler Chadwick | 2.08.12

On the afternoon of the first
resurrection, I want to sit on my sister May’s bench and read
her new poems. So, maybe, if you’re still around when I go under,
I wonder—could you burn me, turn me into ash, and slip me in
[the family plot] somewhere?

–Paul Swenson, “Family Plot”

*

I received news last Friday morning (2/3) from Paul Swenson’s good friend and fellow poet Alex Caldiero that Paul passed away around noon last Thursday. I didn’t know Paul personally—we spoke on the phone once and interacted a bit via email while I was compiling Fire in the Pasture—but I do know for certain that his passing, which came after a long bout of unsettled health, leaves a void in the world of Mormon poetry, one that may continually be filled with the language he left behind and with any language and personal and cultural change that language inspires.

Paul had a playful, Blues-inspired lyric and his poems often come across as clever and witty—even, to some, bitter—more than profound. In fact, Deseret News’ Jerry Johnston panned Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake, Paul’s first poetry collection and an exploration of (among other things) Mormon conceptions of deity, ritual, and embodiment, as a “waste [of] space,” the overly playful ravings of a Scrooge. (Odd image that: raising a playful Ebenezer. . .) Stephen Carter suggests that while the “interpretation of Mormonism” Paul explores in his poems is, yes, “forever inventive, forever reflective, and forever playful,” Paul’s playfulness is “deep.” It’s more than mere wit, more than a child’s attempt to inflame his elders, as Johnston suggests it is. Stephen observes that Paul’s “deep play” works after the manner theorized by Jeremy Bentham, British utilitarian philosopher, though Bentham was curmudgeonly about the benefits of such play. Says Stephen, Bentham “describes deep play as when a person is engaged in an activity where, ‘the stakes are so high that . . . it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.’” As Jennifer Reifsneider, Curator of Collections at the Missoula Art Museum, has it in her discussion of the “joyful revelry and subversive whimsy” present in the MAM collection, deep play “arises when the potential for loss far outweighs the potential for gain.” So it occurs when the player gambles social, cultural, and spiritual standing against a compulsion to play with subjects others think too serious to consider with anything less than deep solemnity (if at all)—as when a Mormon poet tinkers publicly with religious and cultural taboos (like Mother in Heaven and sexuality), exposing himself, as it were, on the chapel’s front lawn. (Reference the image above, in which Paul is pictured “at a candlelight vigil for Lynne Knavel Whitesides during her church court.”) (more) »

The Artist in the City of Zion

By Jonathan Langford | 2.08.12

In Part 4 of Nephi Anderson’s classic novel Added Upon, the king of Poland visits the city of Zion during the Millennium to see and better understand the new order that has overtaken the world. Strolling with a companion and a guide, he comes across a man who seems to be one of the (as yet otherwise unseen) idle rich:

Approaching a beautiful sheet of water bordered by flowering bushes, lawns, and well-kept walks, they saw a man sitting on a bench by the lake. As his occupation seemed to be throwing bread crumbs to the swans in the water, the King and his companion concluded that here, at last, they had discovered one of the idle rich, whom they still had in their own country. Remand expressed his thought to the guide.

“He idle?” was the reply. “Oh, no; he is one of our hardest working men. That is one of our most popular writers, and in many people’s opinion, our best. We must not disturb him now, but we will sit down here and observe him. We are told that when he is planning one of his famous chapters of a story, he comes down to this lake and feeds the swans.”

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Bright Angels & Familiars:
“Born of the Water” by Wayne Jorgensen

By Theric Jepson | 2.07.12

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In his introduction to this book, Eugene England describes Joregensen’s fiction as “meticulously-crafted.” This seems like  a good spot to begin discussing ”Born of the Water.”

The story is loaded. It would take us months to tap it of all its symbolic potential. It’s structure is surprisingly complicated without ever seeming at all disjointed or forced or confused. The way it connects generations and deaths and baptisms and resurrections is frankly stunning, but—as I realize I’ve just scheduled this post to go live on my father’s birthday—I think I’ll focus on the father-son relationships.

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Monsters & Mormons at LTUE this Friday (Feb. 10)

By Wm | 2.06.12

A panel of Monsters & Mormons contributors will be discussing the anthology at 10 a.m. Friday, Feb. 11, 2012, at the Life, the Universe, and Everything conference held this year at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT.

The panel will be moderated by Dan Wells and feature Nathan Shumate, Eric James Stone, Jaleta Clegg, EC Buck and Steven Peck. They’ll talk about how their stories came about, the delights and dangers of mixing Mormonism with genre fiction, and more. It’s gonna be great.

Click here for conference registration details. Note that it uses UVU’s enrollment process so you will need to register for an account.

Call for submissions: It’s LONNOL Month on WIZ

By Patricia Karamesines | 2.06.12

Valentine_378 antique Valentine glass heart

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month has arrived on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad.  Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the topic of amour while making references to nature.  We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love.  Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to a wild thing of one species or another or perhaps you’ve composed a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear, please consider sending it to WIZ.  Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) plush carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll attend the month-long celebration.  Come join us at WIZ and help thaw out February.

Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Keeping Journals — Junius F. Wells

By Kent Larsen | 2.05.12

0---WellsJuniusF-c1905Keeping a journal is perhaps one of the few areas where the advice given to the general membership of the Church and that given to aspiring writers is similar. Still today we occasionally hear the advice from the pulpit, usually in the context of how this will improve our spiritual lives. In contrast, writers have traditionally been given the advice to keep a journal in order to improve their writing and provide material for their creative lives.

Unfortunately, at least in terms of Church members, I suspect this has been one of the most ignored pieces of advice to come from Church leadership. Any historian of Mormonism will tell you that, even among Church leaders, diaries and journals are few and far between. And even when they exist, the events that we see as important now, were too often not seen as important in the diaries and journals of participants. Alas, I am, myself, guilty of this failure.

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Steven Peck reading from The Scholar of Moab today at BYU library

By Harlow Clark | 2.03.12

Steven Peck will be reading from his novel The Scholar of Moab. today, Friday Feb 3, at noon in the basement auditorium of the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. He brought me by a review copy the other day and we had a good chat. He moved to Moab when he was in high school, after the uranium boom and before the tourist boom. Should be a good reading.

I told him I’m intrigued by the petroglyph on the cover, which makes the design is similar to the cover of Patricia Karamesines’ The Pictograph Murders. They’re both mysteries of sorts, so I’ll be interested to compare approaches. I should have more after the event, and maybe some pictures.

Bright Angels & Familiars:
“Hit the Frolicking, Rippling Brooks” by Karen Rosenbaum

By Theric Jepson | 2.02.12

.

I must admit I would find it difficult to talk badly about this story if it deserved it (it doesn’t) as Karen is a friend of mine and, arguably, a large part of the reason life has resulted in me doing story-by-story reviews of a two-decade-old Mormon-short-story collection.

After graduating from BYU I joined the AML-List and took a menial job. With my brain untaxed at work, I aimed my thinking at the AML-List. Which ignored me. Sometimes the email I rewrote three times couldn’t get past the moderators because the day’s volume had already been capped off with a pair of three-sentence witticisms from Richard Dutcher; but I kept trying to get attention, jumping and waving my arms from the back of the room.

Anyway, fastforward a couple years and Karen Rosenbaum, then fiction editor at Dialogue, picked up my short story “The Widower,” and edited it to a new level of excellence. This was an important learning experience for me; plus, it let me feel that maybe the world of Mormon letters had a place for me after all.

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