I mentioned briefly the opportunity to see the Utah premiere of White on Rice last weekend. Well, the bad news is that I know nothing so far of future cities the film may open in and whether or not it will make it to Minneapolis, New York or Wichita Falls. (I’m leaning towards a bit [...]

Print copies of my book No Going Back are now available from Zarahemla Books and Amazon.com. (And at a pretty  hefty discount off the cover price, too.)
No Going Back is a coming-of-age novel about a gay Mormon teenager who is torn between his feelings and his desire to stay in the Church. The cover [...]

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This is not my review of Elna Baker’s new book. This is an accident. I read her first chapter then nine minutes later gave birth to a healthy essay. This sort of thing can happen, even with virginal New York Mormons like Elna. I promise I will do whatever it takes — count to 100 [...]

Apologies for breaking into your Saturday with an impertinent spur of the moment AMV post, but I just saw the Mormon movie I’ve been waiting to see and there is a limited chance this weekend for those of you in Utah to get to attend a screening and meet the director and actors, so I [...]

Inasmuch as the crowdsourcing of Mormon short stories available online (e.g. Short Story Friday) has been quite successful, the time has now come to extend the same efforts to poetry.
Here’s a list of possible sources to get things started — if you have additional sources, link to them in the comments section or e-mail me [...]

Many thanks to Mark Athitakis (@mathitak) of American Fiction Notes for bringing to my attention an excellent commentary on the contemporary American short story by John Barry at City Pages. In his commentary “Dead End: Has a single James Joyce short story unduly influenced contemporary American short fiction?,” Barry complains that American short story writers [...]

I had an unexpected reaction to Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art — on the one hand I found it sort of mundane and obvious. The themes she hits didn’t strike me as all that fresh or uncommon. On the other hand, the way she goes about describing them, and the [...]

We’ve all heard the sentiment, I think. Independent bookstores are better than those inhuman chains, whose employees don’t even know books and whose policies made it impossible for new authors to break into the market. A few months ago, a friend made these same familiar claims, that chains of bookstores, especially Barnes & Noble, are [...]

Several things happened during Haley Hatch Freeman’s time in the spirit world: she was given the choice to return to earth life, she was shown one of her future children, she was reunited with her dead sister and dead grandmother, she was commanded to learn sign language, and she was commanded to write a book [...]

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.
A couple of months ago, I was listening to an interview on NPR with someone who was talking about the death of mass marketing and mass media. I can’t really do justice to the man’s arguments — I didn’t hear the whole thing, and besides, [...]

This past week has been quite busy for news about the LDS market and the publishing industry. The following are noteworthy:

Cedar Fort saw unexpected promotional success with Melissa Moore’s book, Shattered Silence, which will be the subject of an Oprah episode that airs September 17th.
Deseret Management announced that the websites of Deseret Book, KSL, the [...]

We’re starting back up with feature Fridays at AMV. Starting late, but starting nonetheless, and we’re kicking off with the return of Short Story Friday. Today (actually tonight), it’s a story by Todd Robert Petersen. Why? Because his Marilyn Brown Unpublished Novel Award-winning Rift* has just been published by Zarahemla Books. For more on Rift, [...]

Remember Anneke’s awesome post about Minerva Teichert’s use of a particular shade of red and how she and her friend wished it came as a crayon? Well I suggested that it’d make for a great t-shirt, and Anneke, who is a design goddess, came through with a pop-art Minerva Red crayon design. I really like [...]

First, a quick update: My book, No Going Back, is wending its way toward publication with Zarahemla Books this fall, and should be out (a term I use advisedly in this context) within the next couple of months. Much, much thanks to all of you who read and commented and some or all of it; [...]

OK, if you are at BYU, classes started a week ago, and you just had a nice long three-day weekend to get organized for the semester. Its early in the semester still, so you are probably not yet behind. It should be a good time to pickup where we left off with our discussion of [...]

I wasn’t going to do another round up post so soon, but three big pieces of news broke over the weekend (and in to yesterday — which was still my weekend because me and the family went to the Minnesota State Fair) that deserve a mention:
1. The winners of the Irreantum Fiction Contest and the [...]