That first impression was less about what Nancy actually said and more about what she did. Nancy rarely answered Sunday School questions with words. Fairly often she gave a sound–some of which were musical, others guttural, and others as “humphs” or “ah-ha’s.” Other times she simply gave a movement: a flip of the hand or a drop of the arm or a roll of the head. When she did answer with words she usually started with, “I don’t know where this is coming from but I just find myself thinking. . .” And then the blank would be filled in with anything but what the teacher was expecting. When she was called as the Relief Society chorister instead of leading the music with standard 4/4 loops or 3/4 triangles Nancy waved her arms in circles and walked the room as if she were gathering our voices and hearing them and mixing them in some sort of harmonic alchemy. She would then nod and look at each of us and smile as if thanking us. Our half-hearted sounds had somehow turned to gold in her ears.

Nancy isn’t your standard “Utah Mormon” or “Molly Mormon” or whatever other label we use to describe each other. Nancy is something else. Nancy is unorthodox, but in a truly unorthodox way. She isn’t jaded or disaffected (which seems to be the standard version of unorthodoxy). She is unorthodox in a real way. An honest way. A faithful way.

I was doing my second tour of duty on the Enrichment committee when I finally got to know Nancy better. She offered to run an “expressive arts experience” for the sisters and it was my job to help her set up and take down and make sure the opening prayer got said. It was an easy-peasy, run-of-the-mill, do-it-with-my-eyes-shut assignment.

When I arrived that evening Nancy had already draped the door to the gym with red and orange fabric and posted a sign that said, “Silence Only.” She was contemplating adding flames to the door frames–somehow it just seemed right–but didn’t want to scare anyone off. When I entered the gym she had set up tables with clay, tarps on the floor dotted with small, empty canvases, and a big drum circle outlined with scarves.

This Enrichment was going to be something else. I completely forgot about the prayer.

That night only a few sisters showed up, but each left with several pieces of her own “art” and a slight smile on her face. As they walked out of the gym Nancy commented on each work and what she’d remember about it. Basking in Nancy’s glow, I felt like a three year old–but in a good way. Like I’d just played harder than I knew I could and felt things for the first time and learned things that I didn’t yet have the words to describe but couldn’t wait to discover.

Nancy said, “Jesus created the Earth. He is an artist. THE Artist. And He made each of us just like Himself. He made us to be artists. Each of us is the writer and painter and dancer of our own experience. We may not be experts but we are artists.”

Tonight we had another expressive arts experience for Enrichment. This time it was folded into our annual Relief Society Garden Party and there was a great turnout. “What color is Christ to you?” Nancy began. There were a lot of sidelong glances and giggles. A few sisters even asked if she was serious. But each picked out a single pastel, closed her eyes, and meditated on Christ and let the crayon guide itself. Then Nancy invited us to put ourselves into the image. What color were we? How did we fit ourselves into our vision of Christ? What did He mean to us? Then, what words would we add to the image?

Women began to panic a little. How were they supposed to draw the right thing with their eyes closed? How could they pick the right words when (for some of them) English wasn’t their first language and (for the rest of them) they weren’t even writers? Coloring and free-associating seemed silly and more than a little embarrassing. What was everyone else going to think?

One by one, as Nancy directed us, we gave in and played at creating something. We let go of our everyday selves and tried to find out what color Jesus really was. Lots of sisters picked cool blues because Christ calmed them and held them up like water does. Some sisters picked yellow because Christ was the light. Some made Him circle, like a hug, and others drew Him like a river. One sister even drew a turnip (she said she couldn’t explain it but it just came out of the crayon. Maybe because Christ nourishes her?). In another picture the sister drew a mermaid and layered Christ around her in different shades of water–some of which were yellow because she remembered someone describing faith as a glowworm and Christ was like a glowworm to her. And maybe, just maybe, we were all like glowworms for Jesus.

At some point, the Spirit snuck in and sisters were bearing testimony through simple art and disambiguated yet meaningful words, without even realizing it. And I couldn’t help but think that this was Mormonism at its best. People with little in common leaving behind their skill sets and comfort zones to bear–to create–testimony of a real, living Christ and fumbling to incorporate His light into their lives in artful ways. And through the process becoming just a little more like Him.

Farland chooses to tell the story of the Willie handcart company through the eyes of three of the company’s most historically grounded members: Captain James G. Willie, educated non-Mormon British immigrant Eliza Gadd, and guileless Dane Baline Mortensen. Rotating through the three character’s perspectives Farland brings to light not only the struggles of the destitute handcart pioneers but struggles central to the adoption of the LDS faith.

Captain Willie, as Farland recreates him, struggles as leader of the handcart pioneers when temporal concerns (fresh water, food, weather) don’t bend to his spiritual authority. As much as Willie wants to get his pioneers across the plains before winter sets in and lives are lost, what he really wants is to keep their faith in God intact. When faced with a massive storm and nowhere to hide, Willie doesn’t pray for the elements to be tempered so that the company can avoid hardship but so that the non-member Eliza Gadd will become a believer. As the trek continues and apostles glide through in comfortable carriages leaving only inspirational speeches and broken promises Willie’s own testimony comes under fire. He asks himself, is it okay to doubt the words of an apostle? Is the seemingly cursed trek and the ever-rising death count really God’s will? Are all trials evidence of sin? Why does God let bad things happen to good people?

Eliza Gadd’s spirituality acts not only as a catalyst for Captain Willie’s questioning but also as an entry point for modern readers who may not be able to comprehend why the handcart pioneers set out at all. As the only non-member of the company Eliza isn’t afraid to point out the strangeness of polygamy and other Mormon beliefs or the heavy reliance on charismatic leaders in place of logical thinking. And while her overall character arc seems a little forced, she poses probably the most important question for a modern reader: does asking questions make a person essentially unfaithful? Is there a way for a “thinking person” to accept an essentially non-rational religion?

Baline Mortensen is everything Eliza Gadd and Captain Willie are not. She doesn’t doubt, question, or over-think. She prays for guidance and acts on her feelings, convinced that even though she is only ten years old she is powerful enough to be angel to others in the handcart company and speed them to Zion. It is Baline, however, who ends up paying the ultimate price for her faith. Captain Willie suffers severe frostbite and loses his pride. Eliza loses her husband and several children. But both survive the trek and both receive spiritual boons. Baline–who pulled cripples through mudbeds and gave up her ration for a best friend with dysentary–freezes to death while searching for firewood in a snowstorm and gnawing on her own knuckles to stave off starvation. She is the ultimate Saint, consecrating her all and lending substance to the somewhat frightening idea that a true religion requires its people to sacrifice everything.

In the Company of Angels is at turns inspiring and gruesome (Farland doesn’t flinch at details of Indian attacks or rampant disease) and will likely offend some readers. Other readers will be offended by the book’s frank discussion of the personal failures of priesthood holders. Also, it is not without flaws: the characters lack subtlety and there are times the prose could use finessing. The book is self-published and there are sections with quite a few typos. But In the Company of Angels is clearly the work of a man who has grappled with the dilemmas of a faith-based life and loves his religion and will therefore resonate with many readers. In writing this novel Farland has secured himself a place with Mormon literary mainstays like Gerald Lund and Orson Scott Card and In the Company of Angels will likely be widely read and appreciated.

(Here’s a link to the trailer. Couldn’t figure out how to embed it. Also, here’s a link to Darius Gray and Margaret Young talking about the film.)

I got the film through interlibrary loan (a literary Mormon mommy’s best friend!!) and facebooked anyone else I thought would be interested in watching it. Lots of people were interested, but only a few friends were interested enough to clear out time to come watch it.

The good stuff about the movie:

* It had a lot of good historical information that, for me, reframed the issue of blacks and the priesthood. Call me ill-informed, seminary and institute graduate that I am, but I had never heard of Elijah Abel or Jane Manning James. To my mind their stories show that this has never been a simple case of prejudice or Old South paternalism. I always felt the question was not adequately addressed by the one seminary video on the second Official Declaration. It also can’t be explained away in one nay-saying, Mormon-hating diatribe. This is a complicated issue and No One Knows does a good job of embracing the complicated nature of the question.

*It also had a lot of good info on how the Church interacted with the modern civil rights movement. I had heard of the Genesis Group only in passing and to find out it was actually sponsored by the Church and came about through a group of black men working with white priesthood leaders was inspiring to me. So often, it seems, Church members who are struggling with very real disaffecting issues think their priesthood leaders don’t want to hear about it. The Genesis Group suggests that maybe they do. And maybe they can help.

*The MUSIC! Wow. I love me a good spiritual. There is something about that soulfulness that makes me tremble–in a good way. The music in the film is great. However, it did make my next sacrament meeting seem a little dry. . .

*All the personal interviews were another highlight for me. This movie doesn’t spend too much time constructing a sweeping historical time line. Instead it tells stories of individuals and honors their experiences. For me, this is the most authentic type of literature out there. The film definitely has a pro-LDS bias, but I was okay with that because well, I’m pro-LDS and because I think on a meta level this film is the story of how Darius Gray reconciled his strong feelings of the Church’s truth with the real-life difficulties he faced as a black man in the Church. Gray, and Young, are obviously thoughtful, kind people and this film evokes both those things.

The not-so-good: (I would call this section the bad, but I don’t think any of these things were bad. Just shortcomings.)

*The length. The film is only 73 minutes long. Its list of deleted scenes and unused material is almost as long as the film itself and is full of interesting tidbits–the one about the Dialogue article that epitomized the policy debate and the stories of LDS interracial couples are the two most memorable in my mind. It made me sad that the producers/directors didn’t/couldn’t find a way to include more of that stuff in the main body of the film. Leaving all that material out detracted from the richness of the rest of the film.

*Vague citations. For all of the great info this movie has it doesn’t really provide any concrete way of following up on these issues. The film used lots of quotations from Church leaders that seemed to be pulled out of thin air. In my mind it matters if a Brigham Young quotation came from his personal journal or an address to the US government or the Journal of Discourses. Especially on an issue like this where part of what is at stake is the Church’s institutional image and policies. If a central question to the discussion of black and the priesthood is “Was the ban a doctrine or was it a policy?” where and how Church officials said things becomes extremely important. I have no doubt that the filmmakers did their research; I just wish it had been more transparent. When quoting someone most documentaries include citations in small print at the bottom of the screen. I’m not sure why this film didn’t.

*The art. The documentary includes shots of some beautiful memorials and sculptures about the black LDS experience but NEVER tells you where they are. I want to know if they are somewhere in the south or if I can stop by and see some in person next time I’m in Utah. They also didn’t give credit to the artists (at least not that I saw) of those works. (It occurs to me as I write this that maybe all the sculptures are tombstones? If so, that would explain some of it. . .) Also, I think the film could have been enriched if it had included other forms of art by black LDS artists. Maybe there isn’t a lot out there to use or maybe there simply wasn’t enough money. But I wish some of that stuff had been included.

*The question of audience. Like I hinted at before, this film is an important piece of the puzzle for me when it comes to race issues and my religion. It doesn’t have all the answers. If anything I have more questions now than I did before. But they are new questions and new pathways of thinking and I feel like the film didn’t anticipate that. I feel like the filmmakers were talking to people who had lived it and just needed a little catharsis. This seemed true for the group I watched the film with. Of the six of us who showed up I was the only one who was not alive when the policy change occurred. (My husband, who is six years older than me, was only two so the content of the film was new to him too). In viewing the film this age discrepancy turned out to be a big deal. When the movie was done they each shared a few sentences about what they remembered about that day and, in particular, their parents’ reactions. Then they moved on. After five minutes of discussion they were satiated on this topic. For someone like me, who doesn’t remember this, who didn’t live it, I needed a little more time to digest and think about it. That’s probably why I wanted the film to be longer.

All in all, I’m glad I watched the film. It was certainly worth the interlibrary loan. And I actually think it would be a great piece for book clubs to do. I know it’s not an actual book, but it is a good length for a group viewing and a discussion. (Your discussion might be more fruitful than mine!) The $25 sticker price seems a little steep, but I imagine if I had bought this film I would lend it out to people fairly often. It’s a great film that I hope people will be able to access for a long time and point to as part of their inevitable discussions about race and the Church. If you haven’t seen it yet, get to the library or the website today–it’s worth it.

In the wake of our recent AMV discussions about Stephenie Meyer it seemed to me that actual readers were not being fairly represented, especially outside the world of Mormon letters. Most of the people who write scholarly articles and papers are the type of people who wouldn’t be reading Meyer in the first place–unless they can find a way to use her books and Mormon identity to further their personal agendas. I want to put actual readers (and non-readers) of Meyer’s books on the record. To that end, I have put together a questionnaire that I need you all to take. Well, at least all the ladies out there. Sorry guys, for right now I’m focusing on the female readers’ responses. I plan on compiling the responses and putting together a paper for Reading Until Dawn to get this stuff on the record in a way that the scholarly folks will hopefully pay attention to. So whether you’re a lover or a hater, Team Edward or Team Jacob, even if you have not read the books, if you are female and you have any thoughts on the Twilight phenomenon I want to know what they are. Seriously. Email me and I will reply with the questionnaire.

Thank you!

Books I wish I owned:

Byuck by our very own Theric, er, I mean, Eric Jepson. This is the best link I could conjure up for this quirky never-published novel about the fight to stay single while attending BYU. So sad it never made it into print. Maybe if we’re all really nice Theric will serialize it on his blog!

No Going Backwards by Jonathon Langdon. Gay Mormon teen. Need more? Then check out the website.

Slumming by Kristen D. Randle (To read my interview with Randle click here.) What I loved about this book was how uncompromisingly Mormon it was and how uncompromisingly national market it was. Okay. It wasn’t exactly Gossip Girl, but the fact that the book works in both worlds made me so happy.

Breaking Rank by Kristen D. Randle. This one had closet Mormons but the teenage protagonist’s decision making process was so true to teenage Mormons. I loved it.

Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems I had no idea how awesome Mormon poetry was until I bought this. It was truly the best forty-six cents I ever spent!

The Year My Son and I Were Born: A Story of Down Syndrome, Motherhood, and Self-Discovery by Kathryn Lynard Soper. If you know a Mormon mommy who loves memoirs and haven’t bought this book yet for her, then now is the time. Seriously beautiful book.

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams. I read this one for an ecobiography writing seminar and I was glad. TTW is a controversial and watershed figure not only in Mormon environmental writing but also in Mormon feminist writing and Mormonism as a culture and not just a religion. This book, part memoir and part ecology lesson, is a great place to start with her.

Long After Dark by Todd Robert Petersen. This book really pushed my litmus test, making me extremely uncomfortable in the process, but I felt like it was done artfully and purposefully and that made me glad. Read my interview with Todd Robert Petersen for more.

The Conversion of Jeff Williams by Douglas Thayer. This book about a California teen’s summer in the heartland of Mormonism is the novel that will shut the mouth of all the your Mormon fiction naysaying friends. Beautifully written, intensely thoughtful, this is one that demands repeat readings.

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George. For you readers who love teen fiction (it’s okay to admit it; I do too!) or just enjoy having a thought provoking book to read with your kids, this creative amalgam of Norse mythology and the Cupid/Psyche myth will delight. George is popular for her Dragon Slippers series and if you liked those you will LOVE this one.

The Candy Shop War by Brandon Mull. I love tween literature that encourages questioning and viewpoint broadening without being all Lord of the Flies or One Fat Summer about it. By creating an old lady of dubious motivations who makes candies that give kids super powers Mull does a great job of entertaining and pushing kids to think about consequences without preaching or settling for easy answers. I’m still waiting for a ten year old to read this book so I can chat with them about it. Really well done.

Books that were worth the inter-library loan:

Benediction: a Book of Stories by Neal Chandler. (Not everyone loves this book. A lot of people find it offensive. But I thought it was such a great parody of some of the wilder small town personalities I grew up with. Read my original post here.)

The Only Alien on the Planet by Kristen D. Randle. (Basically a novelization of the old “Cipher in the Snow” story. Interesting!)

Secrets by Blaine M. Yorgason (Quintessential Deseret Book “issue” novel. Tackles an important subject but tends to gloss over the difficulties.)

People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture by Terryl L. Givens (Probably the most important book for Mormon culture scholars and you should read it. But you might not tackle it more than once.)

A FUTURE FOR TOMORROW – Surviving Anorexia – My Spiritual Journey by Haley Hatch Freeman (Read my original review here. I also believe that this book should not be read without also reading Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine–just to give some context the psychotic break of it all.)

Books that are worth reading if someone hands it to you:

Circle Dance by Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Hold On, the Light Will Come: And Other Lessons My Songs Have Taught Me by Michael McLean

Abinadi by Heather B. Moore (For more of my thoughts on this book read here.)

River Secrets (The Books of Bayern)River Secrets (The Books of Bayern, #3) by Shannon Hale

Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA by Lance Allred (My original review.)

Austenland: A Novel by Shannon Hale

Dragon Flight (Dragon Adventures) by Jessica Day George

All this has got me wondering, what Mormon books did you read this year and what did you think? Any you enjoyed enough to shell out money for? I need recommendations for next year!

I was driving to the vacuum store today for a repair when I almost veered off the road because of a bumper sticker. Um, yeah, a bumper sticker. Caught completely off guard, I tailgated the dirty blue Plymouth for at least a block to make sure I was seeing things clearly. I was. There in rip-off bold, black lettering complete with the plump, red heart was, “I *heart* Nauvoo.” As in, “I *heart* NYC”, except, well, Mormon-ed.

Now,I’ve mentioned Mormon-ing before and how fun it is. For about as long as we’ve existed as a cultural group we’ve chosen to interpret things according to our particular belief system–whether it be a popular movie or a literary character or even political events and national disasters (any rumors of Last Days and food storage going around your ward right now?). I can’t think of any greater perk to being involved in Mormon arts than the enjoyment I get from Mormon-ing stuff.

But this bumper sticker struck me as different. Probably because I didn’t exactly recognize that couple driving the car (The husband had a long enough beard that he had tied it with multiple hair ties. I would’ve remembered seeing him at stake conference. The wife looked like someone I’d been introduced to, though.) and because it struck me as a complete rip-off. Maybe there were some sort of witty cultural undertones that I missed that would have legitimized it. Or maybe it’s that the “I *heart* fill-in-the-blank” is so cliche in American culture that it’s filtered into “txt spk” so I shouldn’t have been surprised. But this bumper sticker seemed cheap somehow. Too easy. Too much like the romance/suspense/chicklit novels that make up the bulk of the national market and the knockoffs that make up LDS market. Or the popular, EFY style music that sounds like so many innocuous pop on the radio.

(You’ve seen the missionary version of “Hey There Delilah” and it’s counterpart “Hey BYU Girl” right? The vocals are a little painful, but the lyrics are so stereotypical Mormon it’s worth a listen. And while you’re there check the comments; other Mormons loved these like they love case lot sales!)

The other thing that surprised me was how delighted I was to accidentally come across some other Mormons–even if I wasn’t sure I recognized them. It made me wonder how much time I subconsciously spend looking for signs that other Mormons are doing what I’m doing, reading what I’m reading, thinking what I’m thinking. How much I appreciate the knowing wink in my direction, even if it isn’t all that witty or cool.

I look for the usual tells: a CTR ring, BYU apparel, a “Mormon smile” garment line, or the signature pants-tug-upon-standing. There’s also the age of the mother and the number of kids she has. If a gal is in her twenties and has more than two–and she resembles the kids so I’m sure she’s not the nanny–I figure she’s Mormon and I start looking for other signs. There’s also the way Mormons talk: using expressions like “You have to be kidding me” or “Holy buckets!” (which happens to be my personal favorite) instead of “Oh my G–.” Cullen family apparel seems to be a reliable tell amongst twenty-something Mormon gals, too. Or, if it’s a man in question, the use of euphemisms like “frick” and a proclivity for pairing white button-down shirts with khaki pants at formal events. I’m surprised how much I appreciate these little quirks about our culture and, dorky as they may be, they always make me smile when I come across them.

So I want to know about you all. Do you look for Mormon tells? What signs give away the Mormons you run into? If you could coin a Mormon bumper sticker what would it say? And, perhaps most importantly, what have you Mormon-ed lately?

Freeman’s story seems like the story of so many other teenage girls. With adolescence budding on her body and boys buzzing around her mind, Freeman–a young LDS teen from Scipio, Utah–finds an avenue of control that will ease her anxiety about all the changes she’s going through and that also brings her a more secure place in the social pecking order: dieting. What begins as some innocent missed meals and some innocent weight loss (she complains her new braces are too tight and she can’t eat) morphs into a much more dangerous illness when Freeman internalizes a few compliments too deeply and begins dieting and exercising to the extreme. Over the course of a year Freeman loses more than half her body weight, is taken out of school, suffers a psychotic break with reality, almost dies, is finally hospitalized and begins the long road to recovery.

But along the way Freeman’s confessional (and fairly conventional) eating disorder tale takes a major detour from the well-trod path of anorexia memoir. When Freeman is at her weakest physically but her parents are still afraid of hospitalizing her, her body is possessed and her spirit is taken to the spirit world to avoid the pain associated with the exorcisms her loved ones on earth are performing. During her time there Freeman learns many things, one of which is the commandment to write a book. The spirit of her dead sister, Heidi, tells her “Part of your purpose on earth is to write a book . . . You need to write a book about your eating disorder and this experience, so you can helps others” (p 153). It is this vision that informs and reforms her narrative from beginning to end, especially by lending purpose and meaning to Freeman’s experiences.

(From the possession onward, Freeman’s story remains a detour from most eating disorders. Despite what one of the hospital technicians says, possession is not common for women with eating disorders. Most eating disordered individuals don’t suffer massive psychotic breakdowns. At one point Freeman displays characteristics of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but because the doctors believed her case was hopeless they fell just short of formally diagnosing her. Freeman seems to disagree with those doctors, but compared to most eating disordered people, many of Freeman’s experiences are outside the scope of anorexia.)

Because Freeman is out to helps others she spends a lot of narrative time explaining the ins and out of anorexia; how to hide food, how to avoid meals, how to purge through exercise, how tired she is, how easily she bruises, are all explained in great detail. For readers who have never struggled with eating disorders or read other works on anorexia that information is helpful and enlightening. For young readers, especially female LDS teenagers, they will probably be comforted by those facts because they will know they are not alone. Over the course of the book, however, these physical details became tedious–especially near the end of the book when they are supplied in place of the emotional details about the issues fueling Freeman’s illness. For me, as a woman who has struggled with an eating disorder (combination anorexia and bulimia) and seen eating disorders and food and exercise compulsions/addictions plague the lives of my grandmother and sister, I needed more from Freeman. I wanted her to shed light not only on the physical aspects but the emotional and spiritual aspects of her illness and her healing. I needed to see how she understood herself better so that I could maybe understand myself (and my loved ones) better too. Simply put, it left me unsatisfied.

Also because of the visionary purpose of her book, the purpose of teaching others, Freeman makes a few nontraditional (and, for this reader, confusing) choices–the most obvious of which is the choice to tell the first half of her story backwards. Freeman starts the book in the middle of her story, right before she is hospitalized, and then works her way back to a critical moment when she is praised for her braces-induced weight loss. She then skips back to the middle of the story and tells of her possession, vision, and exorcism with her story ending in her release from the hospital and a few remaining epilogue-like chapters about her marriage and children. Freeman explains her chronological choices in the introduction to the book, “The reason behind this is to show the later severity of the disorder, before presenting the small symptoms and my earlier thought process, which in natural order may be overlooked.” She then cautions the reader to “be aware of dates and chapter headings” so as to avoid confusion. Not only was it confusing to read in reverse order, but it had the opposite effect pf what Freeman intended. Where she was hoping to emphasize the severity of the illness it instead made the symptoms peter out and starved the dramatic arc of the book.

All in all, though, Freeman’s book is a good first step. By owning up to the disease and how her family, friends, and teachers fueled it and missed opportunities to help her, Freeman is saying a lot of things other people (especially LDS people) aren’t willing to say. She’s telling a lot of truth, she’s educating a lot people, and because of her likable personality she is getting people that normally wouldn’t talk and think about this illness to do so. (It shouldn’t be surprising that Freeman ended up self-publishing her book through Granite Publishing. I can’t imagine Deseret Book would want to publish a story like this. Although, Cedar Fort has good track record with issues-driven memoirs.) The message of hope and recovery–the fact that Freeman is able to have children is nothing short of miraculous–is an important one to relay to individuals struggling with these issues. Freeman’s quotation of scripture and requests for priesthood blessings outline important spiritual components of mental/emotional wellness. But, because of the editorial weaknesses in the book and the skirting of any in-depth discussion of underlying psychological issues, this book feels a little empty. Reading this book is a bit like being an anorexic at a formal dinner: You do your best to get full by nibbling around the edges, but you’re just not satisfied because you can’t get to the meat of it all.

While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive you can read my interview with Todd Robert Petersen. It’ll ease the ache. I promise. You might not agree with everything Petersen says, but you’ll be glad you took the time to think about it.

Oh, and he has a new book coming out!

Laura Craner: When the vision for Long After Dark was born?

Todd Robert Petersen: I was studying with Brian Evenson at Oklahoma State University, which is where he went after leaving BYU. I went up to see him in his office and said, “Hey, man. I just hit a trifecta in the Sunstone contest.” He was pleased. He kind of laughed. He said, “You should do a whole book of those Mormon stories and I’d write an introduction for it if you want.” Seriously, before that moment, I hadn’t thought about a project like this at all. I was only mildly aware that there was something that could be called Mormon literature. I wasn’t trying to write it, I was just trying to explore religious themes in my writing because I was a religious person and I was interested in the struggles and conflicts that religious people have. What I was doing was pretty much the weirdest thing going on in my workshops. Creative writing programs are a pretty secular environment. So, I was working on the premise that if I could make a religious story play in a graduate creative writing workshop it would probably avoid some of the pitfalls of “religious writing.”

LC: What made you write such a Mormon book?

TRP: I asked myself that question a lot, especially after pretty much all of the presses that do Mormon stuff said they couldn’t do the book, and I tried everybody, including Deseret. Everyone who responded to the book said they liked the writing but they either didn’t do short stories or the content wasn’t right for their readers. I had an early response from Cedar Fort, but that turned into more of a author subsidy deal, so I passed. After that I stuck the collection away and tried to forget about it. In the meantime, a lot of the stories had been published on their own in venues like Dialogue, Irreantum, and so forth. A couple appeared in national university-based literary journals, but I couldn’t get anyone interested in the stories as a book.

Chris Bigelow’s Zarahemla Books changed all that. He was looking to publish Mormon stuff with a bit of an edge. He’d read many of the short stories as they’d been published in the literary magazines. It was a perfect fit, really. Because of his publishing model (he does short printing runs digitally as opposed to offset print runs, which have to be bigger to make the set up costs worth it. I think this kind of printing model is a really big deal, especially for small publishers who want to get less corporate kinds of material out there.), the book can sell slow and steady and stay viable.

LC: One of the surprising things about Long After Dark is how atypical most of the Mormons in it are (i.e. Luis, the Argentinian in “Now and at the Hour of Our Death”, and John, the Rwandan, in “Quietly”).

TRP: I’m not sure what a typical Mormon is. I joined the Church in Oregon and lived outside of Utah for a really long time before moving to Cedar City and experiencing an abundance of Mormons. I think I used to know, or that I used to have some idea what that was, but the more I meet people, especially as I serve in Church callings, the less I seem to know. This new guy in our ward looks like a typical Mormon in his Sunday clothes, but the other day as he was reaching for some napkins at a ward barbecue, I noticed a red and black skull tattoo on his right bicep. I loved it as much as the tattoo of the young women’s medallion my friend Liz has on her shoulder. This guy cries about the 4th of July and started his answer to a question in priesthood with the phrase, “When I was getting out of jail and staying at my mom’s house…” So, looks can be deceiving. I am almost always surprised by people.

Typicality is all a matter of perspective. The idea of typical or stereotypical is interesting because it makes me automatically start thinking about people who don’t fit the category. Isn’t that how we define categories anyway? We are what we aren’t.

LC: Where did the inspiration for those “atypical” characters come from? Were they based on real people?

TRP: I don’t believe in acts of pure imagination as creation out of nothing, like the Big Bang. I’m always watching people and taking notes. I have this catalogue in my notebooks of bits and pieces stashed, waiting for the right situation. My wife sews, and she does the same thing with fabric. She has all these bins and piles of material she’s saved and reclaimed from old clothes. For her, part (maybe even most) of the joy of a sewing project is going through all that fabric, making selections. Many of my characters are amalgamations of people I run across or know. I try to make sure they I mix them up pretty well to avoid that problem you get in Woody Allen movies, where someone gets furious because they are in your story and they don’t like what you’ve done to them. . . Writers are larcenous. I feel bad about that sometimes. It might make us bad friends.

LC: What kind of response have you gotten from readers?

TRP: It seems like people are most disturbed by the sex in the novella, “Family History.” I tried pretty hard to play that the way Alfred Hitchcock might have done. The sex is all there, but it’s not in there. I hope that distinction makes sense. That first section is also supposed to represent the telestial world. That’s why I have the stars, moon, and sun marking each section. The telestial world is supposed to be full of chaos, enmity, and trouble. Still the sex bugs people a little, even non-Mormons. A colleague of mine took umbrage with the term “monkey sex,” which I use. She thought I was being a little hard on the simians. So, you can’t please everybody, and that’s okay. Art is (or can be) good practice for learning how to deal with the troubles of this world.

LC: Has that response changed at all over the last couple of years?

TRP: Response, generally, has been really good. Salt Lake City Weekly gave the book an ARTYS Award, which is great. I love getting props for a book of Mormon stories from a publication that also runs gay and bi-sexual personal ads. Reviews have been really strong, too. I was pleasantly surprised, as was Chris Bigelow. The coolest thing that happened was that my neighbor Sue came over after reading the book. She wanted to talk about it. She’s in her 70s and said that the stories made her think of the people in her family with troubles of their own. I think I like that kind of thing, you know a variation of the Holden Cauldfield line where he says a good book makes you wish you could call up the writer. I think it was cool that my neighbor just came over. I really liked that, and I wish it would happen more often.

LC: What can you tell me about your upcoming novel, Rift?

TRP: It’s been a long project for me. I started it in the fall of 2001, when I first got to Utah. I took the main character, Jens Thorsen, from a few short stories I’d written about this crotchety old Mormon guy—he appears in the opening story in Long After Dark. I wrote two more and figured that I wasn’t done with this guy, or that he wasn’t done with me. I took a few trips from Cedar to Sanpete County, where the book is set, and the place really captivated me. My wife has a lot of family there, in Manti and Spring City. It seems like a place frozen in time, which captured my imagination.

I took the basic idea for the novel from an 1869 Harriet Beecher Stowe local color piece by called “The Village Do-Nothing.” It’s about a guy who seems to just putter around, but he’s really looking after his neighbors in a small village in the Northeast. His wife and a lot of people in town think he is neglectful and a bit disrespectful, and it causes all kinds of tension. I felt like this fit the context of small towns anywhere, but especially in an isolated, tight-knit, church-based community like the ones in Sanpete County.

Rift is about a retired highway contractor who is trying to fill up the days by keeping this crazy home teaching route, one that he has assigned to himself. There’s an old lady who thinks her husband is coming back from the other side to see her, a family whose son is incarcerated for some antics with a gun, the Jewish doctor and his wife, an inactive man dying of emphysema. He’s also nursing an old feud with the bishop, who’s wayward daughter returns at the beginning of the novel. There’s also some shady land dealings, a barber shop, and dash of Lysistrada.

I’m pretty excited to have it finished and out. I’ve worked on it on and off (mostly on) for a really long time. I’m anxious to move on to some other projects that have been sitting on blocks in the garage. It comes out some time this fall. It’s getting ready for printing right now.

LC: Your writing, especially in Long After Dark, really walks the line between gritty and gratuitous in its visceral details and subject matter. (Skinny dipping! Murder! Wild sex!) Does that make it harder to find a publisher?

TRP: You can get skinny dipping, murder, and wild sex out of story of David, can’t you? I think it’s not a problem of content but context. The world is full of these kinds of things, and I think writers have to deal with the world. Since I teach at a state university in Utah with a high percentage of Mormon students, I find myself in a really strange position. Students seem to expect that literature is going to be free of subject matter drawn from the world we live in. I make sure we always have a discussion of the important distinction between representing something and advocating for it. I try to make sure that I don’t advocate for murder in my fiction but rather show its effects, or its causes. I might advocate for skinny dipping, though, it is a truly joyous experience.

For me the problem in Mormon writing is that Mormons as a group are so disinclined towards conflict. This perspective makes most fiction impossible. But look again at the scriptures–they are full of visceral details and conflict and bad choices. In fact, I often point out to my students and in Gospel Doctrine class that the standard works lack happy endings. I mean, have you read Revelation? It makes me think of what would happen if Sauron slit Frodo’s throat and took the ring for himself. In the Book of Mormon, Moroni wanders the countryside dodging blood thirsty marauders like some character out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Joseph Smith is murdered at the end of the Doctrine and Covenants. The one thing I have taken from the scriptures is that the good guys are going to blow it and the bad guy is going to win, for now, at least.

What I tried to do was write a book with real stuff from the real world in it, then I tried to match it with some sense that somewhere down the line everything is going to be okay, maybe not now, but someday. That feels more like the world I live in. In a perfect world where nothing goes really wrong, we wouldn’t need Jesus, and I’m not sure I want to write about a world that doesn’t need saving.

Todd Robert Petersen lives in Cedar City and teaches creative writing and visual studies in the English Department at Southern Utah University. He studied film in college and has a master’s degree (Northern Arizona University) and PhD in Creative Writing and Critical Theory (Oklahoma State University). His second book, Rift, won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award and will be published by Zarahemla books in the fall of 2009.

For the players, our would-be heroes, the story is completely different. When you are the one lacing up the shoes what’s good or bad, right or wrong, smart or stupid, can be startlingly confusing–especially if you are deaf, obsessive-compulsive, fundamentalist Mormon kid who wants to play for the NBA. Or in other words, especially if you are Lance Allred.

At first glance Lance Allred is nobody’s hero. Despite his larger-than-life height of nearly seven feet, he is no Kobe or Shaq or Michael Jordan. He doesn’t endorse a product. He doesn’t have a fancy car. He doesn’t even hog the ball. In fact, he can barely cover his rent. He is an NBA player, one of those cultral demigods? Allred’s memoir, Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA, is his emphatic answer to that question.

Born in sleepy, isolated Pinesdale, Montana–a sort of sister-wife city of fundamentalist Mormon leaderRulon Allred–in 1981, Allred was just one more grubby kid running around the wilderness. Despite the fact that he was born legally deaf and wore hearing aids to maximize his almost non-existent residual hearing Lance described an idyllic childhood. “When people ask me what it was like growing up in a polygamist community, I simply shrug and answer that it was wonderful and I wouldn’t change those memories for anything. I loved growing up in Pinesdale” (7).

As Allred grew, cracks in Pinesdale’s idyllic veneer began to show. His Sunday school teacher told him he was cursed with deafness because he was unfaithful in the preexistence. His father’s second wife left him and he never took another. When an aunt was forced into marriage and Allred’s father spoke out against the marriage it was the beginning of the end. After bankruptcy, a shady real estate deal, a three year lawsuit, and death threats Allred’s family was free of the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) and absolutely destitute. Lance was thirteen years old.

It was about this same time that Allred’s obsessive-compulsive disorder began to surface. After seeing The Mask, Allred began to obsess in the manner that has become known as H-OCD where the individual obsesses about whether or not he is gay without knowing it. Despite his complete lack of athletic prowess (in addition to be severely hearing impaired Allred also has inner ear problems that affect his balance. And he’s asthmatic.) Allred decided to channel his obsessive nature into basketball.

His compulsive nature kept Allred putting up free throws and practicing layups until he found himself a small town high school hero. His basketball skills then took him to University of Utah on scholarship (where he clashed with Coach Rick Majerus and possibly got the ball rolling–so to speak–to get the bigoted man fired. Majerus told Allred he was a “disgrace to cripples” concluding that “if I were in a wheelchair and saw you play basketball, I’d shoot myself.” [145-146].), to Weber State University, then to Turkey, France, and Spain as part of the European league and eventually the NBA D-League. Basketball was the constant in his life and it guided his decisions.

Enmeshed with the basketball story is the story of Allred’s deafness and OCD, but also his spirituality. Shortly after his family left the AUB polygamous sect, his family met the LDS missionaries and was eventually joined that church. Now, perhaps because of his upbringing or maybe just because of his obstinate and colorful nature, Allred is like no other Mormon. He opted to not serve a mission, he swears fairly freely, and hates BYU (he calls out the school in two separate footnotes on pages 104 and 164). But he also takes the time to accurately explain aspects of LDS belief, he lives the Word of Wisdom, he includes a letter written to his Heavenly Father in the book and proclaims–under his breath–that he is a child of God before every game (238). He is a strange, and very likable J. Golden Kimball type, mixture of reality and faith.

Allred’s book, like his life, is complicated. It is strange and touching and funny. It is full of odd characters and big personalities. And, even though Allred’s clipped style and sometimes overlong explanations of allusions make the reader stumble, it is the expertly rendered personalities and oddities and sentiments that make this memoir special and drive it to its satisfying conclusion: Allred playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers; Allred turning adversity into good and finding the heroism in his imperfect, not-super-star self in the process; Allred pushing through loss after loss into the biggest win–achieving his dream.

And They Were Not Ashamed is the “new’ Mormon sex book because it was published more recently than the one that was floating around when I got married. The one people were giving out as wedding gifts when my DH and I celebrated our nuptials was by Stephen E. Lamb and Douglas E. Brinely. (Tangential question: Why do strangers give newlyweds books about sex? Really, why? Are you so afraid my parents never brought it up that you feel compelled to help out? I just don’t get that.) We received not one but two copies of the hard, silver-jacketed tome with the open-yet-frozen-in-their-separation lilies and I read it–out of curiosity and because all my unmarried friends wanted to know what was in it. Although it was full of useful information, I was disappointed to find that it was pretty much the opposite of its subject matter: cold, clinical, boring. This was how people who believe sex is a gift from God talk about it?

And They Were Not Ashamed was originally published in March of 2004 and went into a second printing in November of that same year. From what I understand it is now in its fifth printing and word of mouth keeps this book moving. You can even get it as an audio book. (Um, awkward?) My own sister called me and told me she was reading it and sending it to me so we could talk about. The last book she did that with? Khaled Hosseini’s The Kiterunner.

So why is this book a big deal? Four words: The Good Girl Syndrome or “the deeply internalized feelings and attitudes that rigidly emphasize only the negatives associated with sexuality” (2). Brotherson hits all the usual discussion points like the commonality of sexual dissatisfaction, physiology lessons, and relationship tips, but before all that she details the fairly common, and perhaps mainly LDS, “Good Girl” mindset: Sex is bad. No matter what. In any circumstance. Except for maybe procreation. And it is up to the girls to keep men in check. (Because all women are meant to stay as innocent as girls while boys turn into men and do whatever they want.) Brotherson’s entire book, even the title in its reference to Adam and Eve, argues passionately against those false and debilitating ideas.

I can see where Brotherson is coming from. I was raised by two well-meaning LDS parents who wanted to teach their kids to CTR about “intimacy.” My mother, a nurse and prenatal educator, took me to class with her so I had plenty of technical information on intercourse and its consequences. My Young Women leaders gave the yearly lesson on the pretzel versus the chocolate (see also: the licked cupcake). My dad taught family home evening lessons on chastity so many times he developed a pamphlet that he handed out to any teenager who walked in the house. The message was the same everywhere I looked: It’s bad. It’s dangerous. And whatever it was it wasn’t sex-y. Only dirty and low people talked about it like that. In fact, my friends and I preferred to spell it out rather than say it. And even then we couldn’t own the word. We spelled it s-e-c-k-s.

One rocky adolescence later, I went to college and a visiting professor asked me to explain May Swenson’s “Bleeding” and why straight people think it’s about sex. My newly-wed brain fritzed. I blushed. I coughed. I hemmed. I hawed. And I punted the question off on my forty-something, non-LDS motherly group partner. While I worked on recovering my breath I realized something: If I was going to survive as a writer, as an artist, I needed to figure out how to talk about sex in an upfront way. The example set by that specific professor seemed too disrespectful to me, as did many of the approaches my fellow students took. I myself probably crossed a couple lines while figuring out how to reconcile the “worldly” way of sex and the gospel way. Confronting the beast that is human sexuality was difficult for this Good Girl but I did it. The looks I get at Relief Society book club discussions tell me that many other women haven’t that yet. I probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t forced to.

Keeping this in mind, how sex is handled in an LDS/Mormon work of art can make or break it. Think about how Mormons handle movies. Violence? The most orthodox might turn away but most don’t even flinch. Sex? Mormons walk out of the theater or turn off the TV. It’s similar for books. If it’s violent, well, that’s part of life. If it’s dirty, well, it’s trash.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily knocking this approach. I think it’s important to draw lines and boundaries and say there are places we are not willing to go. I think it’s important to respect where other people draw their lines. But I also think it’s important to understand why we are drawing those lines where we are drawing them. Are we drawing them based on true principles or culturally-filtered emotional responses to those principles?

Take, as one example, Heather Moore’s . Moore makes several interpretative changes to the Abinadi story, the biggest of which is that Abinadi is a young man deeply in love. The object of his affection: Raquel, the daughter of one of King Noah’s priests. Moore works hard to make Raquel a likable character that LDS readers will identify with. She is beautiful, smart, kind, spunky; cut out of the same mold as the female protagonists in books by Rachel Anne Nunes and Anita Stansfield.

Raquel’s big character-developing moment comes when her father is forced to offer her up to be one of King Noah’s concubines. Raquel, in all her spunky splendor, fights her way out of Noah’s lustful clutches and into Abinadi’s righteous, loving arms, thereby putting everyone she loves (her family, a young scout named Ben, and Abinadi’s own mother) in mortal danger. It is this moment that makes her a heroine.

Raquel, in many ways, is the stereotypical Good Girl. (She worries incessantly about the fact that Noah kissed her before she fought back and she and Abinadi don’t kiss until their wedding day.) The death of everyone she loves and her own death are a small price to pay for her sexual purity. Similar story lines exist in Dean Hughes’ Children of the Promise series and Gerald Lund’s Kingdom and the Crown series. What a young woman is willing to sacrifice for her virtue is emblematic of her righteousness.

Raquel’s foil is the also beautiful but already defiled Maia. Maia is the newest of King Noah’s wives and has dutifully submitted to marriage to a most despicable man to save her family and herself. Maia suffers physical abuse and risks her life to save Raquel but is not a heroine until she escapes the castle–again, at her own peril–and admits her true love for the newly repented Alma. Moore has stated that the sequel to Abinadi will be a book about Alma, so the jury is still out on Maia’s character. How she will fare as a licked cupcake remains to be seen. But one message is clear: the true test of a girl’s worth is in how much she is willing to sacrifice for her virtue. No other factor weighs as heavily–not even sacrificing herself for her family’s safety.

Does this sound like doctrine? It’s not something I’ve ever read in scripture or heard over the pulpit. There are, however, plenty of sources that point to the opposite. Good girls can enjoy sex. (For the doctrinal validity of that statement read And They Were Not Ashamed. Brotherson has all sorts of sources.) Victims of sexual abuse can find healing and don’t need to sacrifice everything they hold dear to get it. Virtue is important, but for a lot of reasons that are bigger and more complicated than pamphlets or cupcakes or morality tales. What would happen if our art represented those things instead of tired, polarizing oppositions?

The Good Girl Syndrome is heavily embedded in our culture, it’s nearly institutionalized on a ward level, and seems to be a real sticking point with people who have left the Church. (I’m not linking to anyone because I don’t want to throw readers into a hornet’s nest. But if you really want to know just google “licked cupcake.”) So-called ex-mo’s abhor the emotional and sexual frustration it causes. On the flip side, conservative Mormon culture seems to take a lot of comfort from the clear lines the Good Girl mindset draws.

The arts, naturally, are where those extremes collide and duke it out. I firmly believe the Good Girl syndrome is one reason why Twilight was so successful (and provocative) among Mormon women. Those books manage to affirm both the expression, and enjoyment, of female sexuality and the importance of preserving a girl’s virtue. Maybe it’s also part of the reason why LDS romances are such a big part of the market. All those Good Girls are looking for something to guide them from their no man’s land to the sexual reciprocity God meant for couples to have.