One of the things I appreciated about your piece was that it was more of a prose poem than an outright, normal fiction piece. I think a lot of LDS writing is strongest when it is posing questions and probing the stories we tell ourselves instead of trying to answer everything. I wonder if regular fiction imposes more of a need to tie things up–which is where so many stories run into trouble!

I’m beginning to see that. It’s kind of uncanny, but then again, it totally hits at the mix of ancient and modern, demotic and elitist, frivolous and philosophical that I love so the fact that it wasn’t just a Jeopardy question, but rather a Jeopardy question in a movie about basketball hustlers who play with notions of race and ability in order to win bets, is all rather odd and delicious.

Your choice of the quince for the forbidden fruit resulted in a funny association for me because I grew up in the south (okay, the northern end of the south) where japonica, or Japanese quince, was a common ornamental. It produces an incredibly acidic fruit, a small, hard, green, apple-like thing. So when I hit that line the word “quince” came as a total citric surprise.

But even funnier for me is your revisiting Wikipedia and seeing the cultural associations list and finding, much to your surprise, that in your imaginings about the quince you had pretty much nailed it. Not to sound like a know it all (I’m more of a know-next-to-nothing-at-all), but experience suggests strongly to me that when you start playing in the upper realms of language, this sort of thing happens with unnerving frequency. I think that among other things it has something to do with tapping into archetype, the “old stories” that lie at the roots of our lives.

Re: III, This piece is the one that I’m most afraid people will misunderstand or not so much misunderstand as project their reaction to it on to me as a person. I’m afraid that active, believing LDS may think that I’m sympathetic towards the speaker.

News flash: Readers are going to project all kinds of things on to you as a person. That’s how it is when you send your language out there. It’s part of writing.

One of the most chilling things that has ever happened to me: A man who I later realized had terrible intentions upon my soul read one of my poems, then said, “You have revealed yourself to me, my dear! Yes, you’ve revealed yourself.”

IV: To be honest, I’m not sure I get the story. Why does it end the way it does? What’s with the whole the tree is the cross is the man thing? Why reassert the tree angle?

Again, from my childhood in the south. The dogwood tree is a crooked tree that erupts in cross-shaped white flowers in the spring, each petal bearing a mark at its tip that looks like stigma, a scar left from tearing away from a nail. The dogwood tree, as the story goes, was once a tall, straight tree, but one was cut down and used in the wood for the cross upon which Christ was crucified. For their participation in the killing of Jesus, dogwood trees were cursed. Never again would they grow straight and proud, but only gnarled and dwarfed in comparison to what they once were. Furthermore, their flowers, which really are rather beautiful, would forever bear stigmata as a reminder of the tree’s shame for its role in the crucifixion.

Talk about projection! But it’s because of this story from my childhood that the tree/cross/man transfiguration wasn’t a stretch for me.

Enough for now. I’ll await the arrival of my Irreantum so I can play this game with all the appropriate pieces.