PRESS RELEASE:
WHAT: Farewell To Eden, a national award winning play written by Mahonri Stewart and directed by Kathryn Laycock Little.
WHEN: January 15-25, 2010. Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, with 2 pm matinees on Saturdays.
WHERE: The Provo Theatre (100 North, 105 East, Provo, UT 84606)
TICKETS: $12 for general public; $10 for students and seniors; [...]

Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (Amazon) lives up to the hype given it by Stephen Carter, Angela Hallstrom and Lisa Torcasso Downing over at The Red Brick Store. Yes, writers of fiction and theater need to adapt it for their own uses, and McKee overreaches in places, and like [...]

Benson Parkinson, founder of the AML-List and co-founder of Irreantum, was kind enough to send me a copy of his essay “Three Kinds of Appropriateness” for posting here at AMV. It used to be posted on the Association for Mormon Letters website, but it got lost in the shuffle a while back. It hopefully will [...]

Last night I was reading the second chapter of Seth Lerer’s Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Amazon), and was struck by a phrase from Archbishop Wulfstan’s 1014 sermon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, a phrase that Lerer calls “as powerfully alliterative as anything in poetry” (35): “Ac worhtan lust us to lage” (or [...]

We don’t often delve into the history of Mormonism in the arts, although I don’t think that is by design. More likely, this history is simply not very well known among even those of us who write about Mormon culture, and, I suspect, many details simply aren’t known. Other details were known at one time, [...]

When Steve first sent this to me for review for Popcorn Popping (because in the beginning if either Steve, Brian G. or I were going to post our own work the other two had to agree that it was worth posting), I experienced one of those authorial twinges of pain because it was exactly like [...]

In celebration not only of the coolest  holiday season but also of the arrival of the winter solstice on Monday, December 21st, A Motley Vision’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone has launched a haiku chain, an open thread whereon haiku-ers might skip and dance together in 17-syllable jigs.
My American Heritage Dictionary tells me that “haiku” [...]

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When I first heard of this anthology, I did not know it was intended to be a yearly series. So when I noticed the 2009 on the cover I was thrilled.
The anthology includes work from Irreantum to The Iowa Review and points inbetween. A goodly percentage of it is from LDSy publications, but not at all all — [...]

Yesterday, I posted an excerpt from Jeremy Grimshaw’s new book The Island of Bali is Littered with Prayers, which is available from Mormon Artists Group. Younger denizens of the Bloggernacle might not recognize Jeremy’s name, but he started an excellent blog focused on Mormon culture called Orson’s Telescope way back in February, 2004. He brought [...]

Last week Mormon Artists Group announced the availability of a fine edition version of BYU Assistant Professor of Music Jeremy Grimshaw’s The Island of Bali is Littered with Prayers, an account of his trip to the island to study gamelan music and subsequent efforts to start a gamelan orchestra in Utah. I’m pleased to bring [...]

This is a deceptively simple poem best read in the context of the entire project (The FOB Bible). It’s seems a bit underdeveloped in isolation. And yet it still accomplishes what many of us seem to be working on these days — a riffing on scripture that asserts both literalism and metaphor or fable-ness. That [...]

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This is the second in a series. The first part of our interview was about Ms Hallstom’s novel-in-stories Bound on Earth. This is about her editorship of the literary journal Irreantum. The third part, on the short-story collection she mentions below, will appear in A Motley Vision next year.
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Describe what you see in submissions. [...]

The latest (v. 42, no. 4) issue of Dialogue features another important Mormon film article by Randy Astle* titled “What Is Mormon Cinema? Defining the Genre.” Astle pulls together work by Mormon (Preston Hunter) and non-Mormon film critics (Hamid Naficy, Rick Altman) in an attempt to position Mormon film as somewhere (Astle says “positioned in [...]

For those of you keeping track: this year I read sixty-eight books (if you don’t include the Calvin and Hobbes and Fox Trot compilations I skim while brushing my teeth and the countless picture books I’ve read my kiddos) and twenty-four of them were Mormon–not quite as many as last year and not enough of [...]

I like to reward work of Mormon narrative art that is well crafted AND made available for free online so I awaited the Mormon Artist Contest Issue (which my sister Katherine co-edited and my other sister Ann helped copyedit) with much anticipation. It features work by Mormon artists under the age of 30, and AMV’s [...]

Some time ago, I started following John Granger’s Twilight studies blog, “Forks High School Professor” as a corollary to my own academic interest in Meyer’s books. Granger made a name for himself as Dean of Harry Potter Studies when he took J.K. Rowling’s books as subjects worthy of academic study. And now he’s trying his [...]

I kinda owe Shannon Hale an apology. I read The Actor and the Housewife: A Novel several months ago and then didn’t write a post about it.
That’s actually not why I owe her an apology. I wouldn’t presume to suggest that I should say something about everything even slightly Mormon related that hits the public [...]