Theric: Last Saturday after I saw two of your paintings on a friend’s wall, Casey, I hopped online and spent a while perusing your work online. I was struck by how intentionally religious so much of your work is — specifically in the names of works, bits of temple iconography, images from old Church clip [...]

The Christian Science Monitor had a recent article about the annual Diagram Prize for most bizarre book title*. This year’s winner was: Crocheting Adventures With Hypberbolic Planes.

This evening is the annual Young Women’s meeting (which I always associate with General Conference), and General Conference itself begins next week. Over the past few years I’ve come up with a few things that I focus on as I listen to each Conference, in addition to the messages, and I’m now wondering:
What do you [...]

Note: This started as an entry for my personal/book blog, which focuses primarily (so far) on No Going Back and its reception. However, I quickly realized that what I was writing was taking a far more theoretical/literary direction. So I decided to cross-post it here, with apologies if needed, on the theory that I’d love [...]

Orson Scott Card said that his historical novel, Saints, was a “love song to my people.” Full of fiery characters debating quintessential Mormon dilemmas against the backdrop of a historically-charged time period, it was a ballad that delighted and disturbed both mainstream Mormon readers and OSC’s readers who subscribed to other faiths. David Farland’s In [...]

The sixth of at least nine posts and an introduction. See also Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, Part I, Introduction
With the end of the LDS Church’s efforts to “gather” members from the mission field to Utah and the beginning of correlation at the beginning of the 20th Century, foreign missions underwent a [...]

Theric: Thanks so much for participating, both of you. Let me start by congratulating Sandra on her AML Award for online writing. Hilariously enough, on your blog you had said just the week before that you “only learned about it [the AML] a few weeks ago.” How does it feel to go from ignorant to [...]

Wilderness Interface Zone’s Spring Poetry Runoff has begun.  It’s packed with festivities, including, of course, the Spring Poetry Runoff Contest, a haiku chain in which anybody may participate, music, and non-competing guest posts.  This week we have scheduled poetry by Davey Morrison, Karen Kelsay, Gabriel Aresti Jr., and Mary-Celeste Lewis—all very vernal in nature and [...]

I’ve been thinking about the cost of Mormon journals lately and wondering how much I’d pay per year to receive every short story and poem published during that year by Irreantum, Dialogue, Sunstone, Segullah and BYU Studies. I’m not sure, so I’m going to ask all of you. Now, ignore the fact that this is [...]

By now Our Visions, Our Voices: A Mormon Women’s Literary Tour has received quite a bit of coverage in the Bloggernacle, including Kent’s post here at AMV, and posts at Segullah, Feminist Mormon Housewives and By Common Consent.  Zoe Murdock, who I interviewed last year about her novel Torn by God, is participating in the [...]

I’m apparently just doing announcements today (which is why I’m breaking the rule and doing two posts in a day), so here is one that I’ve been working on — the Portuguese-language Parley P. Pratt Mormon Short Story Contest (link is to a Portuguese-language website). Below is the text in English of the contest announcement:

Since I’m behind and won’t have my weekly post on the History of Mormon Publishing this week, I thought I’d pass along the news about the Mormon Women’s Literary Tour that starts this coming Monday in California and proceeds to venues in Arizona and Utah through the end of the month.

Part One may be found here.
Both Austenland and A & H tackle romantic fantasies and the nature of romantic comedies, their “grotesque mimicry of actual love (A & H 304).”  And when Becky tries to decide whether or not she could actually love Felix romantically, she writes a screenplay with a movie ending.  But the [...]

Shannon Hale is the author of several young adult novels—including Enna Burning (reviewed here), the Newbery Award winner The Princess Academy, and, most recently, Forest Born.  She has also published two adult novels, Austenland and The Actor and the Housewife. The latter provoked strong responses among Shannon’s readers, and no wonder.  It’s a bold work [...]

I think we should celebrate the free-ebook-ing for ebook week of the Fob Bible by featuring a poem from it. So here it is:
Title: Moses and Aron
Poet: Will Bishop
Publication Info: 2009, The Fob Bible, published by Peculiar Pages
Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.
If Will and I weren’t both Mormon, I don’t suppose I could [...]

Liberating Paradox(i)es: Tensions, Texts of Comparison, Twitter, and Emma Lou Thayne
After finishing part 3 with a reading of Timothy Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”—a reading based in and flowing from a nodal model of Mormon culture—I fully intended to move into an extended exploration of Waterman’s suggestions for Mormon criticism: 1) read [...]

The fifth of eight posts and an introduction. See also Part IV, Part III, Part II, Part I, Introduction
“Works of fiction, novels, tales and light reading of that description ought not to be read by young people. They are not food for your mind…”[1]

UPDATE: Call for Submissions
As Terryl Givens documents in The Viper on the Hearth (Amazon), from Zane Grey to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mormons served as stock villains in the early days of genre fiction (both pre-pulp and pulp heyday). We propose to recast, reclaim and simply mess with that tradition by making Mormon characters, [...]

The Vernal Equinox arrives Saturday, March 20.  To celebrate spring’s arrival last year, Wilderness Interface Zone, A Motley Vision’s companion blog, ran a Spring Poetry Run-off that turned out to be lots of fun.  So beginning March 19, we’re running WIZ’s Second Annual Spring Poetry Run-off, this time as a poetry contest!
In keeping with WIZ’s [...]

Although I remembered most of the plot of Salvador (Amazon), re-reading it five or six years after my initial encounter with it was still an experience of surprise and intensity. And oddly, I think it was an even more intense experience because since I already knew, sorta recalled the basic narrative  and thematic arc for [...]

Note: This is just a teaser, really, to prepare you for Part 4. (Coming next week.)
That, or it’s mid-term week and I haven’t had time to flesh out the next post.
Either way. On to Part 3.5.
Roughing Out a Theory and a Course in Mormon Lit
i. The Theory
As I was scripturing this morning in Jacob 5, [...]

The fourth of eight posts and an introduction. See also Part III, Part II, Part I, Introduction
The arrival of the transcontinental railroad to Utah in 1869 marked the end of a period of relative isolation for the LDS Church. It also came just at the end of a period of almost no Mormon publishing in [...]

I have a ton of updates for ya’ll so let’s get right to it:
AML Awards + Annual Meeting: Here’s a link to the AML Awards for 2009, including the award citations; Tyler has write ups of several sessions at chasing the long white cloud. I’ll reserve my take on this year’s awards for the comments [...]