This is the third post in a five or six part series that explores the ethics of Latter-day Saint literature and criticism. In part two, “In Exchange for the Soul”, I extend the paradoxes of existence more deeply into the realm of literature, exploring how our literary experience with them can become an “intelligent [...]

This is the second post in a five or six part series that explores the ethics of Latter-day Saint literature and criticism. In part one, I introduce the dissonance between Mormon theology and Mormon culture, pointing specifically to how the artifacts of that culture—particularly our letters—often fail to engage the eternally rich and redemptive ethical [...]

The Tragic Tell of Mormon Morality: Exposing the Achilles’ Heel of Jerry Johnston’s Commodified Theology, or An Ethics of Latter-day Saint Reading—Part I
(The title’s a mouthful, I know.)
This is the first post in a five or six part series (to run on Thursdays) that explores the ethics of Latter-day Saint literature and criticism. Working within [...]

Note: this is the third in a series of posts of ideas for improving/growing/sustaining the field of Mormon narrative arts.
There are plenty of online stores selling Mormon fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. From the various LDS publishers Web sites to Mormon-oriented stores like LDS Living and Latter-day Harvest to national super sellers like Amazon.com.
The [...]

Fires of the Mind was produced in the Margetts Arena Theatre, BYU, in November, 1974. It was a play I hadn’t even heard of until Eric Samuelsen (BYU’s Playwriting professor) suggested it to me as a possibility for a Mormon Theater Anthology I’m editing for Zarahemla Books.

Part Two may be found here. 
When a writer presumes an audience for her work based upon whom she believes readers of similar works to be, she fictionalizes her audience, integrating them into her imaginative effort.  When readers imagine a writer’s life based upon what they understand her work to mean, they fictionalize her right back.

Part One may be found here.
Writer-focused audience theories position the writer center stage in both the writer-audience relationship and in the creative process.  Indeed, it is to the writer’s shapely role that most literary critics’ eyes inevitably rove.

Theories about the audience’s role in the writer-audience relationship show up as pale shadows tacked on the heels of inquiries into the writer’s purpose and product.  I can’t help but wonder what that means. Is the audience’s role really fully subordinate to the role of the creative writer, or have we merely overlooked characteristics of audience that point us toward livelier models of the writer/audience relationship?  Is the Internet [...]