–Paul Swenson, “Family Plot”

*

I received news last Friday morning (2/3) from Paul Swenson’s good friend and fellow poet Alex Caldiero that Paul passed away around noon last Thursday. I didn’t know Paul personally—we spoke on the phone once and interacted a bit via email while I was compiling Fire in the Pasture—but I do know for certain that his passing, which came after a long bout of unsettled health, leaves a void in the world of Mormon poetry, one that may continually be filled with the language he left behind and with any language and personal and cultural change that language inspires.

Paul had a playful, Blues-inspired lyric and his poems often come across as clever and witty—even, to some, bitter—more than profound. In fact, Deseret News’ Jerry Johnston panned Iced at the Ward, Burned at the Stake, Paul’s first poetry collection and an exploration of (among other things) Mormon conceptions of deity, ritual, and embodiment, as a “waste [of] space,” the overly playful ravings of a Scrooge. (Odd image that: raising a playful Ebenezer. . .) Stephen Carter suggests that while the “interpretation of Mormonism” Paul explores in his poems is, yes, “forever inventive, forever reflective, and forever playful,” Paul’s playfulness is “deep.” It’s more than mere wit, more than a child’s attempt to inflame his elders, as Johnston suggests it is. Stephen observes that Paul’s “deep play” works after the manner theorized by Jeremy Bentham, British utilitarian philosopher, though Bentham was curmudgeonly about the benefits of such play. Says Stephen, Bentham “describes deep play as when a person is engaged in an activity where, ‘the stakes are so high that . . . it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.’” As Jennifer Reifsneider, Curator of Collections at the Missoula Art Museum, has it in her discussion of the “joyful revelry and subversive whimsy” present in the MAM collection, deep play “arises when the potential for loss far outweighs the potential for gain.” So it occurs when the player gambles social, cultural, and spiritual standing against a compulsion to play with subjects others think too serious to consider with anything less than deep solemnity (if at all)—as when a Mormon poet tinkers publicly with religious and cultural taboos (like Mother in Heaven and sexuality), exposing himself, as it were, on the chapel’s front lawn. (Reference the image above, in which Paul is pictured “at a candlelight vigil for Lynne Knavel Whitesides during her church court.”)

But isn’t a poet in part someone who instinctively plays with words, and who plays with them deeply and well? Someone who, in process of such playing, speaks to our deepest personal and cultural needs and desires? I’ve said elsewhere that poetry is a mark of cultural health, that it’s an indication, as Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Hass says, that “a lot of people [in the culture are] literate and alive.” This is so because “[y]ou have to have some kind of interior life to make [and to enjoy] a work of art and in a world as busy and heedless as this one we need all the consciousness we can muster” in order not to wither on the vine, as it were. So poetry—like living a creative life, in general—comes in part of introspection and carries with it an abiding awareness that the inner life matters. And it matters not only because deepening our awareness of what’s on the inside requires that we make time to ponder, to sift through and reflect upon matters of the soul and our lived experience in the world. But also because self-awareness and creativity require imagination, which enables us to step into another’s soul and to consider the world as experienced from another’s perspective. Because imagination ultimately isn’t confined to the boundaries of lived experience, it becomes space of endless, deep play—space where the conscious and less-than-conscious minds come together to question, to make sense of, to critique, and to expand our relationship with the material and immaterial worlds.

Paul, like his sister, May Swenson, before him, occupied and pushed against the boundaries of this space. Sometimes these siblings even tried to represent the space concretely on the page. May did it more extensively than Paul, but Paul tried it, nonetheless. In her concrete poem, “Bleeding,” May lets space trickle through the text, a gap I view—in conjunction with the poem’s content—as a representation of trickling blood, a gaping wound, the gap between women (the seeping gash) and men (the unrelenting knife). This negative space thus contributes to the meaning of the poem. Paul did something similar with his aptly titled poem, “Negative Space,” in which he talks, of all things, about the difficulty of “being Mormon / and having”—*gasp*—”nipples.”

The text of the poem is presented in two pointed columns. The left column opens to the right, like a “less-than” sign; and the right opens to the left, like “greater than.” Taken together these columns circumscribe a diamond-shaped inner court. Negative space is thus quite literally at the center of Paul’s poem. And this emptiness signifies the negative space present a) in the poet’s life as a joyfully embodied being, one who took pleasure in “[h]aving hard nipples,” in being fully sexed and fully sexual even though he lived amidst a people often conditioned to be suspicious of and to put off the body and its needs and desires; and b) in the “mind” of Mormon culture generally, where the correlated body—as the mannequins and comic strip bodies in the poem—has been stripped of its nipples. This “censor[ed],” “emasculated,” “nervously neutered” male body is meant to be the standard against which everyday Mormons gauge their sexuality. But, the poet points out, this body is “purely negative space.” Its presence, he seems to be saying, represents the conspicuous absence of erotic desire, of sexual play—even of cultural play—in much of Mormonism’s religious and cultural aesthetic.

So Paul, the poet, frolicked in this space, filling it with Blues-infused rhythms, with everyday language and passions and conviction, with earthly meditations on the divine. By so singing the body electric, I think he hoped to stir the kingdom up a bit, to encourage his readers to think a bit more deeply about and to play a bit more deeply with the popular, though perhaps not fully doctrinal, beliefs and institutions of Mormonism. And all this to the end of facilitating a more expansive “Mormon mind” and soul. This expanded being is one that could eventually be assigned, perhaps, to organize “the big reunion party,” as Paul calls the celestial afterlife in another poem (though maybe we could also call it an after party). Here Paul and his sister—and anyone else who’d care to join them—gather in an open field the afternoon of the first resurrection (as Paul hopes for in “Family Plot,” the last poem in his first book), sharing new and old poems, playing deeply, wittily, imaginatively, with the structure of the universe, with Heaven’s language, Heaven’s culture, and Heaven’s institutions. Their incorruptible bodies fully nippled, eternally rested, eternally ripe.

(Cross-posted here.)

In his introduction to this book, Eugene England describes Joregensen’s fiction as “meticulously-crafted.” This seems like  a good spot to begin discussing ”Born of the Water.”

The story is loaded. It would take us months to tap it of all its symbolic potential. It’s structure is surprisingly complicated without ever seeming at all disjointed or forced or confused. The way it connects generations and deaths and baptisms and resurrections is frankly stunning, but—as I realize I’ve just scheduled this post to go live on my father’s birthday—I think I’ll focus on the father-son relationships.

There are several. The primary one is between the protagonist and his father, but there are relationships between other sons and that father, that father and his own father; that father’s father makes a brief appearance; add to that the relationship of a Father Heavenly to any of the other characters, and potential surrogate fathers, and we have a complicated web of nurturing male relationships.

But, at least on the surface, the primary relationship never ceases to be the protagonist and his father.

The protagonist son was traumatized in a swimming pool at a young age by . . . someone . . . only to be rescued by his father. ““It’s all right, Carlie, I’m here. He’s gone. It’s all right.” That experience led to a fear of water, which prevents him from being baptized at age eight. His father, who, from his own age of eight has been refusing to be baptized and who declares a greater affinity for earth than water, gradually teaches his son to swim and not to fear the water. Which leads to Carlie’s baptism at age ten. A move his father inadvertently prepared him for, and, ultimately, serves as a symbolic separation between them.

Yet as the son experiences the sublimity of his new relationship with a different Father, his earthly father interrupts his musings to take him to the mountains to check on his hired sheepherder and his sheep.

(Herding sheep, of course, is socially less in the West than herding cattle, but Carlie’s father “wasn’t a cowboy but a sheepherder” (as was his father before him). And, after all, wasn’t that other shepherd despised and rejected of men as well?)

At the camp, waiting for the sheepherder and the dogs to return, father invites son to help kill and clean a sheep—a task he’d always been able to avoid before—and, having finished,

What surprised him was his father’s face, that it was without revulsion yet without pleasure too, except the satisfaction of having done the thing neatly, the same as when he oiled some kid’s squeaky tricycle or got the water regulated in all the furrows of the garden. What surprised him more was himself, that he too felt this a matter of fact, a kind of work, new, but after the first startling slash of the knife just something to see and do. But it was death and it would feed them.

They eat the yearling lamb and are filled.

The story does not end there, and the two grow closer and closer till they stand together on the edge of the world, take it all in, and declare it good.

The story has much more to offer. Go, return, report.

I must admit I would find it difficult to talk badly about this story if it deserved it (it doesn’t) as Karen is a friend of mine and, arguably, a large part of the reason life has resulted in me doing story-by-story reviews of a two-decade-old Mormon-short-story collection.

After graduating from BYU I joined the AML-List and took a menial job. With my brain untaxed at work, I aimed my thinking at the AML-List. Which ignored me. Sometimes the email I rewrote three times couldn’t get past the moderators because the day’s volume had already been capped off with a pair of three-sentence witticisms from Richard Dutcher; but I kept trying to get attention, jumping and waving my arms from the back of the room.

Anyway, fastforward a couple years and Karen Rosenbaum, then fiction editor at Dialogue, picked up my short story “The Widower,” and edited it to a new level of excellence. This was an important learning experience for me; plus, it let me feel that maybe the world of Mormon letters had a place for me after all.

Karen was friends with Eugene England and he approached her to write fiction for Dialogue in its early days. The second piece of fiction Dialogue published was one of Karen’s stories and she’s been a staple on the scene ever since. This particular story was published by Dialogue in 1978 and received an honorable mention in short fiction at the AML Awards that year.

The voice is extremely conversational—to the point many details are utterly lost as the speaker clearly assumes you can see what she sees and that you know what she knows. I was worried about this at first, but in the end it proved a sensible choice. The story is very meta (the protagonist is grading creative-writing assignments throughout, to say nothing of the final paragraph or the early discussion of cliches reflected in the title), signaling which tropes could have filled in the gaps had such filling been necessary.

The story might also be somewhat autobiographical (Karen’s husband is named Ben, though I don’t know if they were married in 1978; Karen taught college-level creative writing, though I don’t know if was doing so in 1978), but this too just serves to suggest ways to fill in gaps that don’t need to be filled.

But I was not certain what was going on in those gaps until the story ended unexpectedly and all that was left was for me to smile and say aloud, in genuine surprise, that was just right.

It’s short. Check it out.

This Saturday at Claremont Graduate University, Sunstone West, a small tidier Sunstone Symposium, will feature panels about two Peculiar Pages book. (Note that times and participants are subject to clarification.)

The first, Monsters & Mormons, accomplished with the help of A Motley Vision and the most fun currently available in print. Participating authors Erik Peterson (”Bichos”) and Brian Gibson (”The Eye Opener”) will be talking about their works as well as reading their own and others’ stories. Responding to their presentation will be Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at Claremont, and the author of The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Also featured are several poets from Fire in the Pasture. Featuring editor, poet, and AMV-contributor Tyler Chadwick discussing a Javen Tanner poem, and, in a separate session, readings from Tyler, Neil Aitkin, Karen Kelsay, Elisa Pulido, Laura Stott, Holly Welker, and, we hope, more.

Sunstone West is always great fun and you’ll want to catch other panels and presentations while you’re there.

Come to L.A.!

Register today!

1. Relatively spoiler-free backcopy.

“To Jordan Fairchild, the dark-haired girl renting his basement apartment seems somewhat quiet and reclusive. Just a business arrangement, he thinks, as he watches her sign the name ‘Nattie Hand’ on the contract. Though two thousand miles away, Celeste Betancourt, an attractive Georgetown graduate student he met through a mutual friend, has captured his attention. A budding friendship with Nattie soon begins to bloom. Little does Jordan know his girl-next-door renter is none other than the world-famous pop star, a.k.a. Natalia Antonali, who recently disappeared from the public eye; little does he know how much his friendship will come to mean to her, how, for the first time a love begins to grow, untainted by ‘Natalia,’ and how she hopes Jordan never discovers the truth.”

2. Why there aren’t really any spoilers up there

Across a Harvested Field is told from Jordan’s p-o-v—mostly. In fact, although the book never egregiously violated his point of view, the selection of details does not always match what he would focus on. Result? The fact that Natalia and Nattie are the same person is evident to the reader almost immediately—yet Jordan doesn’t figure it out for . . . well, a long time. At first, you might want to call him what romance fans label TSTL. But that thought is always followed by the simple fact that a real person with an incognito celebrity living in his basement is unlikely to assume that the face on the tabloid is the same one downstairs.

Ever met someone famous? Ever noticed how, IRL, they are surprisingly lifesized?

They don’t live in my basement.

They wouldn’t fit in my basement.

3. So does it obey any rules of romance?

Or, better question, is it a romance?

Yes. Clearly. (Slight but utterly unsurprising spoiler in next paragraph.)

It has a happy ending, as is necessary, but which happy ending it will provide is unclear for a long time and, for a while, whether it will provide a happy ending (in terms of a satisfying romantic relationship) at all is unclear.

And in the end, I’m not sure the “happy ending” is really what Across a Harvested Field is about anyway. I realized this when I read the Marilyn Brown Novel Award citation by Jen Wahlquist; she describes the book as being about ”the multi-layered process of grieving.”

And that’s exactly right.

4. So Jordan’s sad?

Heck yes he’s sad! His wife and two kids were killed in a car crash last year! He’s 28 and living alone in the house he planned to entertain grandkids in! How could he not be sad?

Writing about sadness is tough though. And it takes a while for Goble to find his feet. But again, like the TSTL issue, when I stopped to figure out what was “wrong” with his telling, nothing was. Life doesn’t stop when your family dies. What’s the right way to depict this liminal space between living and utter grief? I don’t know. And if I did, who’s to say Jordan’s grief observance should match mine?

That said, I think Goble didn’t quite pull off that transitional grief during the first half of the book. He gets better as the novel proceeds, however, and the “the multi-layered process of grieving” he displays is, in the final analysis, very well done.

5. Favorite moments

Although it can’t really count as enjoyable, I was impressed with how much Goble could make me hate—with a painful immediacy—the paparazzi.

But unquestionably my favorite part—the part that nearly brought me to tears with how lovely it is—is Jordan’s wrestling match with his brother. You doubt me? Read the book. You’ll see what I mean. That is a beautiful, cathartic scene. And one of the best two pages of brotherly love I can cite.

Also, one kiss in the book is so exactly what an honest kiss between two affection-starved humans should be. It certainly sped my heartrate up.

The high school stuff. Sure, in part that’s because I work at a high school, and, admittedly, some details were off (how Ashleigh and Diego arrived in the same Spanish class is beyond me), but that’s basically what working at a high school is like. It’s a lot of good, a lot of bad, a certain amount of politically keeping certain girls on one side of your desk.

6. Final notes

This book has an unnecessarily large number of developed characters. The most obvious example is the high school’s astonishingly well educated janitor. His character never really goes anywhere (is he a monomythic wise-old-man? some other useful symbol?) yet he is complicated and opaque. I appreciate notes like that in my fiction.

And, finally, it is a romance. Don’t let the plot’s coulds and couldn’ts get in the way of enjoying a great human story of love and creation.

Well worth a read.

.

read wm’s interview with goble

Zarahemla Books is, in my opinion, the most valuable brand in Mormon letters today. I can’t think of another publisher (of any type) whose books I’m as likely to pick up just because of who them. And while I may never finish Hooligan (even though I have recently repented of my Douglas Thayer skepticism), Zarahemla keeps proving my faith in them well placed.

They’re the Pixar of MoLit!

David Clark’s The Death of a Disco Dancer is a brilliant book. I was lucky that I started reading it the same day my classes had to take a mandated test, freeing me from teaching responsibilities. Before I was a quarter of the way through, I had disturbed my students with merry snorts—and had had to hide my teary eyes—as I tore through the pages in utter glee, trying to read as much as I could before I had to collect their work. In the end, I finished the book in two calendar days. Which is just not something I do anymore. (Of the novels I read last year, the only ones that can compete in terms of my reading speed are Dan Wells’s and Robison Wells’s*—it’s been a good year for Mormon fun, it would seem.) But Disco Dancer was unlike those propulsive books in that, well, for one thing, it’s not a thriller. It’s just a regular old story about a family.

Which gets to why I’ll be buying a copy for my mother (even though it says “nuts” and “balls” far too often for her taste): This book made me recognize my love for my mother in a way I too rarely do. Now, several days after finishing it, I’m still riding that buzz.

I want to say less about the story in this review than the backcover does (I didn’t read it and I’m glad I didn’t), but suffice it to say that the book is about more than one summer  in the early ’80s. It’s about life and the passing of time and it manages to hit that passage through several generations with a simplicity and artistic integrity I admire. Because the book plays games with time (both flashbacks and flashforwards) that most books fail at. That Clark played and won speaks to his skill as a stylist.

Speaking of style, how about that title? How about disco in general? Now, disco doesn’t have a big role to play in the text of the book (though adolescence and disco? what a metaphor!) except on a symbolic level, one layer of which Clark spoke to Wm about. And the book’s “Playlist” (read: table of contents) is all disco songs.

(Aside: I made a Spotify playlist of all the songs on the Playlist—or nearly all of them. A couple are missing from the Spotify library and a in a couple couple other cases I may have picked the wrong song. I think Phil Collins is probably the wrong guy, for instance.)

But what are this book’s strengths? Let’s start at the end, shall we? Clark has the fortitude to end the story where he should and not ten steps later when all the reader’s question could have reached a more tidy resolution. He has captured a time and place so perfectly it feels like documentary footage of 1981 Scarsdale, Arizona. He’s funny. He drew tears without being the least sentimental. Both the laffs and the tears are fully earned by real characters engaging in real life. He knows the power and the value of a good tangent (with the exception of the bear story, every digression is just the right length and helps us understand Who What and Why with elegance). He engages with the ambiguity of all things stereotypically good (religion) and bad (darn teenagers!). He never drives a joke into the ground until it is no longer funny yet still rising from the grave. He deals with topics heavy (with lightness but not undue lightness—for instance the pathos of dementia with its uncomfortable humor) and light (without ignoring their own little gravities).

Which brings me back to disco. We often dismiss it now, but let’s remember: those were real musicians playing real instruments and playing music so fun the world danced despite itself . . . until it realized how ridiculous it looked and slunk back into a dark corner. Like a budding teenager.

What I’m most curious about is what a 2012 teenager reading this book will think. Because in some ways I feel unfairly primed for this book. My mother is currently caring for her mother, just as the protagonist’s mother is caring for her mother. I work with teenagers and I’m old enough to have children that resemble those in this novel. And I was once a boy myself.

And so I can’t say for sure that the book would work as well aimed at a YA audience as it does on me as an adult. But no question: it does work on me as an adult.

Highly recommended.

Or newish, rather. Harrell’s collection (A Sense of Order and Other Stories) came out in 2010 and Townsend’s (Mormon Fairy Tales) in 2011.

(Obligatory notes: Harrell’s book was originally given by his publisher to Karen Rosenbaum who wrote about it in Dialogue and then passed it on to me; Townsend’s was given to me with the idea that I might eventually review it.)

I finished reading A Sense of Order (skip to review) in April and stopped reading Mormon Fairy Tales shortly thereafter. Since then I’ve been meaning to take my (copious) notes and write about them.

But I’m not writing this post because I’ve figured out how to write about these books together, but because I will never figure out how unless I do.

First I should address the obvious point I’ve already made: I did not like Townsend’s book enough to finish it. And I must be clear that this has nothing to do with his role as The Gay Gadfly of Mormon Letters. As decent reviews of his fiction show, Townsend is not without skill. In fact, there were stories in Mormon Fairy Tales which, in conceit, were pretty terrific. It’s the execution that is lacking.

Perhaps that’s because, unlike some of his previous collections, Mormon Fairy Tales consists of stories not previously published? Perhaps without the help of a magazine editor, Townsend cannot sculpt them into an excellent final form? If so, I see no shame in this. Frankly, anyone who thinks their best work is done without aid of an editor is, in a word, wrong. On the other hand, having a score of stories and the modern publishing scene being what it is, why not just put out a book?

“The Three Nephites Get Syphilis” is a good example of what I’m talking about. Here’s the foundational conceit: Tired of marrying women who then grow old and die, the Three Nephites turn to each other to meet their “needs.” But now they’re getting on each other’s nerves and go to see an LDS therapist (who, being LDS, doesn’t like gay people). Solid enough idea. But not a story.

(It does, however, have one genuinely funny line which I will quote now so I don’t seem like a total hater:

“Oh, he [Alma the Younger, who married the Three] was resurrected by then. We met him at a brunch shortly after Jesus showed up.”

“Nephites had brunches?”

“We were a very advanced people.” [41])

Essentially, every story in the book (I did read most of them) has the same two-part moral—some emphasize one half, some the other:

1. the proper attitude toward Mormonism is the breaking free of its shackles
2. Mormons aren’t as good as they’ld have us believe (often evidenced by the fact that they would have us believe they are good)

Mormonism is a weight and Mormon characters either suffer from a horrible guilt or they try to inflict it on everyone else. I don’t doubt that this is part of Townsend’s history with the faith, but this is fiction right? Shouldn’t fiction have some nuance?

Anyway, everything I liked about this book devolved into making me annoyed.

The first story, “Spirit Prison Blues,” sets the theme; it starts off “balanced” between being silly and thoughtful, then ends up pretending not to moralize. “The Black Sea” (a heavy-handed abortion story, sample line: “Abortion was next to murder on the list of sins.”) introduces the collection’s repeating image of oil spills (interesting, but not much was ever done with it.) “The Suicide Police” was probably the best story in the collection, but, in the end, is about just another crazy person.

As I read, I started rooting for the author, hoping he would pull off a really great why-Mormonism-sucks story, but he just kept falling short. (This was a weird situation to find myself in, to say the least.)

In conclusion, let me talk about the collection’s final story.

“Death at the Temple of Inscriptions” is another great starting point. Sad-to-be-estranged-from-the-faith-of-his-fathers, respectable gay man is marrying the love of his life (someone not at all sad to have left Mormonism behind) atop a Mezoamerican Temple as that location would make their nuptials seem “a step between civil and celestial marriage, a substitute that would do until the real thing became available” ().

The primary sin this story commits is this: Fiction shall be more believable than nonfiction. For instance, our protagonist once received a postcard that reads, “I hope all the lesbians swim back to Africa with a faggot under each arm” (276). While such a postcard may indeed have been written sometime somewhere (read comments on newspaper websites lately?), fiction must be more believable than reality. And this just feels like a great line that popped into a writer’s head one fine afternoon. Also, attending this wedding in Mexico will be Susan Sarandon, Elijah Wood, Amy Adams, etc. Also, a boy baptized by our protag on his mission, now a bishop, feels

willing to make his own political stand by telling the Church he endorsed our marriage. I hoped it wouldn’t get him in trouble, but of course the strict authoritarian nature of the Church allowed no dissension whatever, so that hope was probably in vain. (279)

Sigh.

I suppose it’s handy for Townsend to turn the Church into nothing more than a boogeyman, but it’s cheap and dishonest shortcut-storytelling. But in case things aren’t obvious enough already, “Death at the Temple of Inscriptions” also includes terrorists taking over an airplane, Prop 8, Deepwater Horizon, flat characters who hate gay men, flat characters who love gay men, etc etc etc.

The real problem (besides everything listed above) is that these stories allow no room for ambiguity. Townsend never lets the reader escape a story without being told exactly what to think. I hate that at the best of times. Doesn’t everyone? Isn’t that the complaint people are always throwing at Jack Weyland?

And that’s all you need to know. Mormon Fairy Tales is like a weaker Weyland collection only with a generous seasoning of sex and different politics.

Ambiguity is, however, practically an article of faith in Jack Harrell’s Sense of Order, which you’ll know if you, like me, have drooled over “Calling and Election” which I’ve told so many people to read that I ought to be collecting a paycheck. So the highest praise I can give this volume is to say that “Calling and Election” is not its best story. It also, I’m afraid, falls a bit short at times, but over all it’s a pretty great book and, by my judgment, the second best book of Mormon fiction I read in 2011.

Not all the stories in Sense of Order are explicitly Mormon. “The Trestle,” for instance, contains a matter-of-fact supernaturalism that I associate with much Mormon fiction (including Townsend’s) without ever being so much Mormon. (Pretty sly story though.)

Like some of Townsend’s stories that I was complaining about, “The Trestle” could very easily have descended into mere gimmickry. But I can’t assign an agenda to this story—I have to work through it’s layers of meaning on my own. Which is the difference, I think, between literature and didacticism.

To consider “Calling and Election” again, it’s not clear whether it’s protagonist is sane or not, whether Brother Lucy is sent from the Church or if he is the devil (or both simultaneously). And the moral of the story? Welllll. Let’s just say that some people think the story is a beautiful meditation on faith and sacrifice while others think it attacks faith.

I think my favorite story in the collection is its first story, “Tregan’s Mettle” (originally “A Visit for Tregan“) in which the least actively Mormon kid in an overwhelmingly Mormon town is joined by Jesus at a Megadeth concert.

Again: this could be a gimmick. This story could have very easily been nothing more than a dozen-page gag of the type I wrote of above. But it isn’t. First of all, it’s thirty pages long (winkwink), but more importantly, it asks some serious questions about the relationship between God and his people. First, for all the talk we Mormons make about “other people” telling God he can’t have prophets anymore, we like to keep God all boxed up ourselves. While the reaction of this town to Tregan’s experience is overly harsh, it never quite pushes past the believability line. Because, seriously, Jesus? at a Megadeth concert? really?

But Tregan, let’s be honest, has much more in common with Samuel or Mary or Joseph Smith than, say, Thomas S. Monson. He’s a good kid thrown by [God?] into a situation that makes people—often good people—lift their eyebrows at him.

Then Tregan makes a move that’s totally and utterly unexpected to anyone who knows how Mormon stories are supposed to play out. And Jesus reacts in a way I didn’t expect but, upon further reflection, probably should have.

Really, my only complaint is the final sentence. (”. . . from this moment nothing would ever be the same,” Harrell? Really?)

But then, I’m not sure endings are Harrell’s strength. “A Prophet’s Story” (excerpted in Sunstone) gives us a prophet in the Monson mold (actually, he seems more Hinckleyesque, but I suppose that’s irrelevant) slightly trapped in his role who meets a friend. Kind of like The Prince and the Pauper perhaps, only without proper switching of places. Terrific story. Rather anticlimactic ending.

The other odd bit to the collection is its short-shorts, which often are just that: short.

But that doesn’t get in the way of what he’s done successfully. The way the stories overlap and refer to each other (the Adam and Eve imagery, for instance) is notable, and a story like “Godsight”—which I could easily describe to you in language that would make you certain it must be a vile antiMormon tract, is in fact a beautiful meditation on Gethsemene. I kid you not.

And that’s what fiction can do. It can be something other than what it seems to be.

I don’t care what side of which line you’re on. If your fiction tells me what to think and leaves no room for ambiguity, no thank you. But if your fiction leads me see the world as more beautiful because more complex, then you’re doing something right.

A Sense of Order provides just such an effect.

I don’t know what this story means. Maybe you can tell me. It certainly intends to tell me something, but I’m leery of drawing conclusions.

It’s starts off as yet another of those once-upon-a-time-in-my-memory-in-the-West stories, then suddenly throws a three-paragraph bit of essay at the reader, then ends with a new vignette from, oh, a couple decades after the first—this story only the slightest bit connected with the first. It left me a little dizzy. And if it weren’t for a genuinely surprising and painful moment in the second story, I might have been left completely confused.

But somehow that moment provided an aesthetic completeness.

I have another book (unread) in my collection by Horne (read it free!) and I may need to read it in hopes it will provide a key to this story.

The trouble I’m having is that this story is anxious to be interpreted and I’m anxious to avoid the easy interpretations. But maybe I’m trying too hard?

Oh please, Internet! Tell me what to think!

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Next up: “Sayso or Sense” by Eileen Gibbons Kump

Stephen Carter’s 2010 essay collection, as you might expect, provides plenty stellar examples of the form, what with the personal essay being The Great Mormon Form (or so I hear) and Stephen Carter being Stephen @#(*&$^ Carter.

Before taking the helm at Sunstone, Carter racked up a few Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Competition notations, had been cited in Best American Spiritual Writing, and scattered his work through the major Mormon literary rags. He’s Stephen Carter, folks!

(Obligatory note: Although I paid for my copy, I still may be biased as Stephen is a friend of mine. Who knows.) (In similar news, see Wm’s earlier review.)

First, as an object (this is not relevant if you’re planning on saving money and buying the ebook). The cover has really grown on me since the book was first released. The type is huge making this 168-page book an even quicker read.

But the words, the words. What about the actual words?

I’m going to begin by focusing on the final essay (which I do not feel badly about as it’s available online) which provides a useful metaphor for the entire book. Frankly, I rather wish it had been first as it provides an intellectual framework—something of a shortcut to understanding the book as a whole. (Then again, perhaps that’s a good enough reason to make it last.)

In essence, as with his aunt May Swenson in the essay”Winter Light” (which, yes, I just spoke of yesterday), Stephen feels pulled in two directions. To quote him quoting Terry Pratchett in another of the book’s essays, stories etch grooves “deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a moutainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper” (118).

The final essay, “Writing as Repentance,” provides a different metaphor for understanding this idea. Rather than an ever-deepening groove, stories are mountains whose massive presence and gravity drag us towards and up. In Stephen’s case, he has two stories threatening to crush him, that of the Correlated Mormon and that of the Virulent antiMormon. Not that Stephen is anxious to join the latter camp or hateful toward the former, but both of those are stories and nothing more. To go back to Pratchett, “stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.” And if we are to work out our own salvations with fear and trembling, we can’t rely on the simplicity of one story or the other—we must write our own stories.

As Stephen writes in “Writing as Repentance,” “In order to really finish any of my essays, I had to forgo the satisfaction of an answer, promised at the top of either mountain. Instead, I had to forge into the canyon, filled though it was with mist and darkness. Because that was the only place not already built. It was the only place I could create myself without the dominance of one mountain or the other” (166-7).

This is a good time to quote Joseph Smith: ”By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

Often we would rather be safe, repeating rote stories rather than making Truth manifest. Stephen instead is plumbing the shadowy depths of the canyon between stories, and I wish him godspeed, with a note of thanks for sending us these postcards from his travels.

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A few notes for the curious:

• Not all the essays are such heady stuff (though, to a diligent reader, even the hilarious story of the cocky missionary who swallows a habanero will deal in contraries), nor do they all stay firmly entrenched in ambiguity. For instance, the penultimate story, “The Calling” (my favorite?), is about the lurking sense of failure that is an inherent part of being a missionary while, at the same time, ending with something that tastes a great deal like a miracle and teaches a lesson many of us would do well to incorporate into our home and visiting teaching.

• Much is written about family here, from the strayed brother to the beloved grandmother.

• Thanks to one essay, Eugene England will now be on my list when people ask which three people, past or present, would I invite to dinner.

• “There is only one way of knowing an essay is finished, and that is when I have wrought something new from the contradictions of my life” (167).

Before I can write about this story, I need to talk about Stephen Carter’s “Winter Light” (in What of the Night?) because as I read “The Week-end” I kept thinking This could have been May Swenson.

Carter’s Aunt May is one of the Twentieth Century’s great poets and she was an expat Utah Mormon living in the wilds of New York, leaving behind family and faith for poetry and pretty girls. “Winter Light” discusses May’s career from the point-of-view of her family. Over the course of the essay, Carter becomes more sympathetic to her plight, but the family in general views her as a lost soul, eternally trapped in a waiting place, separated from the family she loved.

What’s lacking from “Winter Light” (and Carter knows it) is May’s own perspective.

And as I read Marshall’s “The Week-end”, I kept wondering if this is what May would have become had she never left Logan.Marshall I know primarily as the author of The Rummage Sale (not, as it ends up, a novel, but a short story collection), one of those books everyone in Mormon letters eventually hears of but few of us ever read. (Someone should bring out an ebook edition. Mr Marshall, if you’re reading this, I’m interested.) “The Week-end” is part of that seminal collection.

The story is split into two point of views. The first is a third-person look inside Thalia’s head. The second is first-person—a female relation of Thalia’s (also in her mid-forties) who sees Thalia’s macro actions and applies an interpretation similar to those Carter’s family assigned to his Aunt May. In this case, that the long inactive Thalia has, out of grief from her mother’s death, abandoned her small rural Utah home for a hedonistic fling along the California coast.

[Skippable aside: yes, that makes four of four stories so far to prominently feature rural Utah. Something I said in reviewing story one I am utterly bored of. It's still true in theory but, dang it, these are good stories.]

What her trying-not-to-judge relation does not understand is that Thalia, who has spent her adult life caring for her mother, has the longing soul of an artist. She want to paint! To write! Especially to write. Poems, in fact. Perhaps even a novel? Oh, “to open a magazine one day and find her name, in type not too large and maybe not so dark, in some small corner of the page”—it’s a modest dream, but it fills her soul with an ache larger than Ephraim, Utah can hold.

I’ll pause here momentarily to note the italics in that quotation. The third-person in-Thalia’s-head portions of this story are italicized, whereas the first-person portions are staid, straight lines. Not an accident, I’m sure.

Anyway, her dream has a specific goal, “beautiful words [that] had called to her each time she saw them written, a far-away whisper of sea and cypress, luring her on: Carmel-by-the-Sea.” So she takes her meager savings (after a bus ticket and a $14/night Monterey hotel she has $229.37 leftover) and shyly tries to belong to this seductive, artistic, alien, ocean town.

To me, the miraculous success of this story is how it makes me—an ambitious and endlessly-disappointed-with-my-current-success artist—feel for Thalia and her modest goals and dreams. And to cheer for her successes which, in my own life, would count as dismal failures.

Thalia is now too old, in her family’s collective mind, to be anything other than an increasingly eccentric old maid who prefers to live alone in the house her mother left her—

The house, and I’ll end here, is a striking symbol. To her female relation, the house must be brimming with grief, and

the hollow stillness of its rooms . . . suddenly almost uncomfortably and unnecessarily large. Yet Thalia was surprised how the house . . . now seemed different to her for its very smallness and for the uncanny impression of maximum occupancy, not spaciousness, that pervaded the four rooms, pushing at the yellowing papered walls and crowding the dark corners filled with ceramic knickknacks and tinted photos in their dusty cardboard frames. . . . What should have been conspicuously missing from the house now suddenly seemed overwhelmingly present.

Thalia loved her mother. She never regrets losing her life in another’s service. But now that her mother is gone, she is finally free to be Thalia. She has escaped her waiting place. Regardless of what others assume, Thalia has found peace.

She has had her week-end.

And “she’ll always have that to remember. Lord forgive her.“

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Next up: “The People Who Were Not There” by Lewis Horne