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My wife is the bulletin-sculptor in our ward, and I help out by meeting the bishop’s request that each speaker have a short bio written about them. It was in this pursuit that I learned the reason our high counselor has such frabjous hair: He is a painter.
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With what I learned in writing the bio and [...]

Wm writes: Andrew Hall has really outdone himself this year with this look at the Mormon market which features not only works published but a run down of the players in the market as well as some original reporting on them. Sadly, Andrew is probably not going to be able to also do a look [...]

Wm writes: Once again AMV is proud to bring you Andrew Hall’s Year in Review in Mormon letters.
The story of the year in nationally published literature by Mormons was the memoir.  Two Mormon women, Elna Baker and Kathryn Lynard Soper produced honest and interesting life stories, to excellent reviews. While other Mormon authors sold more [...]

What makes this story appropriate for Short Story Friday is not the content of the work or the religious affiliation of the author, but rather the fact that the translator is LDS and introduced in to an LDS context (his circle of friends on Facebook — and then by submitting it to me). It’s a [...]

My play Farewell To Eden, which has its closing performances this Friday, Saturday (matinee and evening, and Monday) at the Provo Theatre (105 East, 100 North in Provo), has been getting some good press. As some shameless self promotion and a plug for the closing performances, I wanted to share a couple of the positive reviews.
First, [...]

So now that I’ve explored the origins of the term radical middle in relation to Mormon arts and culture, and teased out some of the issues related to the middle, it’s time to get radical. In the first post, I mentioned a radical movement in British Islam and noted the adjectives (creative, positive, revolutionary …) [...]

The middle is an appealing place to be albeit a difficult place to define and defend. And it brings with it its own dangers. By very definition it relies on other operative ideologies and is thus too often reactive. By inclination, as I mention in the first post, it tends to be wish-washy and self-conscious [...]

Several months ago Theric asked me to define the radical middle — this term that I and others at AMV have been throwing around. More recently, Association for Mormon Letters President Boyd Petersen invoked the same phrase in his inaugural post on The Dawning of a Brighter Day. I’m hesitant to write manifestos or get [...]

I’ll be honest — I chose this poem for this week’s Payday Poetry because I wanted to reward Tyler for answering the call when I made the plea for more submissions last month. But I also like the poem itself: the staccato pop of it and the focus on the meaning of marking.
Title: Marking the [...]

Right now, Chris Bigelow and I are collaborating on a volume tentatively titled “The Latter-Day Saint Family Encyclopdia,” which will be published this fall by Thunder Bay Press and sold fairly widely. As you might imagine, we’re taking advantage of the opportunity to write a good, meaty entry on Mormon literature. Chris has posted my [...]

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.
Fear is, I’ve come to realize, one of my great personal enemies as a creative writer (along with laziness). Part of this is probably just because of the kind of person I am. I suspect, though, that part of it may be endemic to the [...]

My local library system just happens to have acquired Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality (Amazon). Based on the table of contents, it would appear the all the Mormonism-related content is found in Marc E. Shaw’s contribution “For the Strength of Bella? Meyer, Vampires and Mormonsim” (pages 227-236). Here is  my [...]

Several months ago I was working through in my mind a project I was writing for my friend Danor Gerald and Jaclyn Hales. Danor and Jaclyn are very talented actors and I was hoping to design a show especially geared towards their particular talents. I originally was thinking of a one man show for Danor, [...]

I am 50 pages into a re-reading of Margaret Blair Young’s second novel Salvador (Aspen Books, 1992). I first read it in the early part of this decade and captivated by her teeming prose, pseudo-elements of magic realism (more on that later, hopefully), and use of humor. It all rushed back with the first page.
Let [...]

What are some of the major developments in Mormon literature over the past 20 years? Being under the painfully pleasant necessity of writing a short article (500-1000 words) during the next week on Mormon literature for a forthcoming reference work, this is something I’ve had occasion to ponder. I have an excellent source for [...]