If art is, in part at least, the imitation of reality, it’s an imitation that’s largely bounded by and grounded in artistic convention. That’s something I’ve long been aware of from a literary/critical perspective, but writing a novel myself — and then seeing the reaction of different readers to the specific choices I made about where and how to be “realistic” — has borne that truth in on me in a particularly vivid fashion.

No one actually writes scenes, dialogue, storylines, and internal thoughts to match the way things happen in real life. Stream-of-consciousness, that most famous of experiments in literary style, tends to strike readers (in my experience) as self-consciously attention-drawing rather than realistic: yet another way for the writer to get between the reader and the experience. Attempts at realism can, ironically, make readers all the more conscious of the writer’s craft.

And then there’s the fact that what strikes one reader as realistic isn’t the same thing that strikes other readers as realistic. Case in point: the dialogue of my teenage character in No Going Back. I’ve had reviewers comment on the awkwardness of their dialogue as a negative thing. Other readers described the realism of my teenagers as a particular strength. It’s occurred to me that both may be true, since one of the things I was trying to imitate was the awkwardness of teenagers in grappling with serious subjects. They start and stop sentences, they interrupt themselves, they dance around what they’re saying. I’ve wondered if that attempt at realism is part of what irritates some of my readers, and whether a smoother and (to my mind) less “natural” style might have kept them more engaged. It’s hard to know.

Listening to my children talk, I’m struck by how repetitious and bizarre a transcript of their speech would look, lifted verbatim into a story. And then there’s the matter of capturing intonation, tone of voice, gestures and other signals that accompany speech. Which details do you include? Frequently, I wound up cutting pieces of information just because they made a scene or paragraph or sentence go on too long. Less is more.

Thinking about this now, I’m reminded of BYU professor Steve Walker’s insight into the invitational nature of J. R. R. Tolkien’s prose: that by including only a few key details, he invites readers to co-create his characters inside their own minds. It is, as he points out, a rather different approach from the values of the realistic tradition in fiction, where the goal is seen as creating a picture of life that is so detailed and real readers can imaginatively step directly into it.

Extending this thought, the value of an approach like Tolkien’s may lie in its implicit acknowledgment that stories are not independent realities created by the writer and passively experienced by readers, but rather negotiated interactions that take place within the space of the reader’s mind. Of course, there’s a certain irony in applying such an insight to Tolkien, the great proponent of story as sub-created experience and one of the most detailed world-creators in all of fantasy…

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Writing my novel, I was struck by just how little real time is depicted in a typical narrative. Looking at the timeline I created of scenes from the year and a half covered by No Going Back, it’s quite common to see gaps of a week or more during which there’s simply nothing written.

Decisions about which life-details to include serve several masters. One is realism, which I think is essential to feeling sympathy for the characters in a story. We have to believe they are humans like ourselves before we can care about what happens to them.

The other is strategic importance to the story. Events and details that don’t play a part in advancing the story inevitably take time and attention away from that story. Stories (and readers) can take only so much of that before distraction sets in. Just how much varies, depending on the story, the genre, and (most especially) the tastes and mental/information processing habits of the individual reader.

Personally, I’m the sort of reader that rather likes a meandering storyline. I like the time that the hobbits spend in the Old Forest and the house of Tom Bombadil. One of the attractions of story reading, for me, is spending time in worlds and with characters I enjoy.

An author’s judgment in such areas is inevitably suspect. How much detail is needed to bring one’s characters and settings to life? The author can’t possibly know, because for him/her they already exist. On the other hand, as their creator, the writer is probably the last person who will tire of spending time with them.

There’s a fair amount of detail I wrote that didn’t make it into No Going Back. For example, given the age of my characters, it occurred to me at one point that they almost certainly would be getting driving lessons during the course of the novel. I decided this could provide fodder for some entertaining parent-child interaction, and drafted a couple of scenes based on that. And then I went back and took them out, because no matter how I tried to fit them in, they felt like a distraction to me.

It’s likely that I should have done the same thing on a few other occasions. Details about video games and teenage music and the like were (for me) a way of giving a more concrete sense of how my characters filled their lives when they weren’t working on homework. (I actually had included a reference to watching YouTube videos until my editor pointed out that YouTube hadn’t been founded yet at the time of my story. Hurray for Chris!) It’s my impression that some readers like those details, but I’ve had more than one comment on how distracting they can get.

And then there are the details I had originally left out that Chris forced me to put in. Most often, these were stage details, as I think of them: information about where people are physically situated, how they move and where they go while conversations and other interactions are taking place. Thinking about the way I read, it makes sense that I might miss these small details, since I tend to process scenes auditorily rather than visually. With more practice, I hope to gain a clearer sense of just how much of this kind of stuff to include. In the meantime, I’m glad I had a good editor.

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Stories — even nonfiction stories — are different from reality. We all know this, I believe, no matter how much we may allow our vision of reality to affected by the stories we hear and read. As Patsy says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail after they’ve been oohing and ahhing at their first glimpse of Camelot: “It’s only a model.”

The thing I hadn’t truly appreciated until I tried to do it myself was just how arbitrary and unintuitive the choice of details can seem, in trying to tease readers/viewers/listeners into supplying what’s missing to create the internal illusion of reality. Over and over, I found myself deliberating quite basic questions, from whether to accent a bit of conversation with an accompanying eyebrow lift to how much detail to include about a boy’s physical reaction to a hormonal moment. Something that had appeared quite seamless to me from a reader’s perspective was revealed to be the result of considerable craft, at a nuts-and-bolts level. Maybe that’s one of the things they talked about in all those creative writing classes I never took…

The next time I undertake to write a story, hopefully I won’t be quite so clueless about these things going in. In the meantime, I feel that I’ve gained a greater understanding of one of the things that makes narrative writing such a complex and judgment-driven endeavor. I hope it’s made me not only a more wary and alert writer, but a more appreciative reader as well.

This is the third and final entry in this series. The first part of our interview was about Ms Hallstom’s novel-in-stories Bound on Earth. The second was about her editorship of the literary journal Irreantum. This third portion is about the short-story collection, Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, that she edited for Zarahemla Books (review).

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Let’s start with what criteria a story had to meet to even be considered for inclusion. What were the ground rules going in to this anthology?

I went into this project looking for the best stories I could find written by, for, or about Mormons over the last fifteen years or so. (Originally, I’d intended to limit the date range from 2000 to the present, but there were a number of stories published in the late 90s that I felt needed to be included, so I abandoned that idea.) Not only did I want the stories I selected to represent quality literature, but I felt it was important to include stories with recognizably Mormon elements. Most of the stories contain overt references to Mormon culture or theology, and all of the stories, in my opinion, explore Mormon themes. I also wanted the authors in this anthology to have a background in LDS culture and theology–I didn’t consider stories written “about” Mormonism by writers without close personal ties to the religion. And, finally, I wanted to make sure that the anthology’s content wouldn’t disqualify it from being taught in a BYU class. In other words, while I welcomed challenging and thought-provoking stories, I wanted to keep things PG-13.

Obviously, in order to be considered “complete” as an anthology, some authors had to be included no matter what. How did the selection process differ for those authors? I.e., were you more concerned with picking a “typical” Doug Thayer story, or just what you thought was his best?

There were definitely some big names that I knew must be included. In the beginning, I either purchased or borrowed from the library a number of important short story collections: Lewis Horne’s The House of James, Brady Udall’s Letting Loose the Hounds, Mary Clyde’s Survival Rates, Orson Scott Card’s Keeper of Dreams, Darrell Spencer’s Caution: Men in Trees, Paul Rawlins’ No Lie Like Love, Todd Robert Petersen’s Long After Dark, Margaret Blair Young’s Love Chains, Phyllis Barber’s Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination. (I include all these titles because anybody interested in Mormon lit and/or the short story should check them out.)

As I read through each collection, I noted the story or stories that I liked the most and that I felt best fit the vision of Dispensation. Often, the “Mormon-ness” of a story was an important factor as I made decisions. For example, “The 12-Inch Dog” is probably my favorite story from Darrell Spencer’s Caution: Men in Trees, but it’s not particularly Mormon. The story we ended up using, the also excellent “Blood Work,” was a better fit because it dealt head-on with Mormon characters and themes. Orson Scott Card’s story “Christmas at Helaman’s House” was one of the four stories categorized under the heading “Mormon Stories” in his short story collection, and I felt it was important to include a Mormon story from Card in Dispensation. (My favorite Card story from Keeper of Dreams is the dystopian “Elephants of Poznan,” and while it isn’t Mormon fiction, it’s a really cool story, and I was glad to be able to reprint it in the most recent issue of Irreantum.)

I also took into account author preference when dealing with well-known authors, especially when there were two or three stories that I enjoyed equally. Some authors pointed me in the direction of stories I didn’t know existed. Paul Rawlins, for example, had recently published “The Garden” in the literary magazine Image and sent it to me after I approached him about a different story, and I was so happy he did. “The Garden” is one of my favorite stories in the book.

Some stories you originally discovered and published in Irreantum. How did your past history with those stories affect your objectivity?

Well, to be honest, I never felt conflicted about including stories from Irreantum. In fact, only two of the twenty-eight stories—Jack Harrell’s “Calling and Election” and Darin Cozzens’ “Light of The New Day”—were chosen from the many stories I’ve come in contact with as I’ve worked on Irreantum. Both Cozzens and Harrell are important and accomplished enough Mormon short story writers that they would have been included in this anthology even without the Irreantum connection, and both of these stories show them at the top of their game. Both stories won 1st place in the Irreantum fiction contest, also, and I was interested in highlighting stories that have won important contests.

Same question to the nth power regarding your story “Thanksgiving.”

Unlike the Irreantum stories, I was quite conflicted about using one of my own stories in the anthology. Chris Bigelow (Zarahemla’s publisher) and I discussed it, and decided that since “Thanksgiving” had won awards from both the Utah Arts Council and Dialogue magazine it would be an appropriate choice. And for me, personally, I’ve felt my writer-self getting slowly swallowed up by my editor-self over the last couple of years—between Dispensation and Irreantum and Segullah and teaching, I’ve had very little time for my own writing. I didn’t get into this business to become an editor, although I’ve appreciated the editing opportunities that have come my way. But my primary intention has always been to be a writer, and if Chris agreed that “Thanksgiving” should be included, I didn’t want to sacrifice my writer-self to my editor-self yet again.

I noticed that a high percentage of stories are from outsider perspectives — characters who are not LDS or on the outs with that heritage. Which suggests to me that you to some measure agree with the oft-stated maxim that the way to write great LDS literature is to get at it from the outside, not the inside. Comment?

Well, I disagree with this question on a number of levels. First, a “high percentage” of the stories aren’t from outsider perspectives, in my opinion. By my count, in seventeen of the twenty-eight stories, the point-of-view character would describe him or herself as a Mormon. In many of the stories, the point-of-view character might not be Mormon, but his or her interaction with a Mormon is the crux of the story (“Buckeye the Elder,” “Healthy Partners,” etc.). Only four stories are written from the perspective of characters who are “on the outs” with Mormonism (by which you mean, I suppose, that the character makes it known that he or she was once an active Mormon but isn’t anymore).

And I’ve got to say, thumbing through the anthology in order to make an accounting of which point-of-view character is Mormon enough has been a little irritating. LDS writers should be able to write from the point-of-view of all sorts of people, and Mormon stories should be able to include the points-of-view of those with all sorts of Mormon experiences (“inside” or “outside”), without these choices being translated into a sweeping generalization about what kind of literature a Mormon author ought to write. Some of these stories were written by believing Mormons about non-Mormons. Some were written by former Mormons about believing Mormons. And drawing these distinctions, frankly, is giving me a headache. Honestly, the “insider-ness” or “outsider-ness” of each point-of-view character never even occurred to me as I was editing this anthology. I just wanted to include strong fiction. This isn’t to say that I didn’t reject some stories with antagonistic “outsider” characters. I did do that. But not because the narrator was on the outs with Mormonism. It was because the story was too agenda-driven to work as good literature. I rejected stories with an “insider” main character if they were excessively agenda-driven, too.

As far as the “oft-repeated maxim” goes (and I suppose you’re referring to Wallace Stegner’s observation that the “Great Mormon Novel” will be penned by someone who has left the church, then come “part way” back? http://www.motleyvision.org/2009/abandon-all-hope-mormon-lit-cant-be-great/): I wholeheartedly reject that idea. Some of my favorite stories in this anthology were written by believing Mormons, about believing Mormons, so, obviously, it’s possible for an insider to write excellent fiction. If I don’t believe this is possible, what in the world am I doing as a writer and an editor and a teacher operating from within Mormon culture? But this idea has already been debated quite vociferously on AMV, and this interview is already pretty lengthy, so I’ll leave it at that.

Describe briefly, if you can, the gathering process. Where did you look? How many stories did you read? Did you try to balance the number of story types? Were some inclusion decisions made based on how hard or easy permission was to obtain?

At the very beginning of the process, I asked a number of people I trust to recommend writers and stories. I also got some great suggestions from AML members, both via the AML-list and the now-defunct AML forum. From that, I compiled a list and started reading. I got my hands on the previously-mentioned short story collections, and I also read a number of stories published in Mormon magazines and in mainstream literary journals. Once I’d worked through all the recommendations, I simply started reading back issues of Irreantum, Dialogue, and Sunstone, and found some great stories there that I would have otherwise overlooked. It was important to me that this anthology not only showcase well-known writers, but also highlight up-and-coming Mormon writers who are incredibly talented but not (yet) as famous.

I don’t know if I can count the number of stories I read. I just know I read a lot of them. Tons. For about six months, almost all my fiction reading time was dedicated solely to the short stories I was considering for this collection. And, yes, I did try to have some balance: I wanted to be sure to include stories with an international or multicultural perspective; I wanted to include some speculative fiction; I wanted to include both traditional and more experimental fiction-writing methods, and so on. I was also acutely aware that I had more male writers than female writers from which to choose. Although I’d hoped at the outset to have equal representation by both men and women, in the end I found myself with ten stories by women and eighteen by men. Which is to say that, while balance was certainly on my mind, ultimately the quality of each individual story was the most important factor in making my decisions.

As far as permissions are concerned, there were a few stories that were important enough that we were willing to pay for them. Most previous publishers (and authors holding rights) graciously allowed us to reprint the stories without a fee, which was very helpful. We were able to publish all the stories we wanted to publish, which was a relief, since our budget for reprint rights was pretty small.

Did you determine book length first and choose the right number of stories to fit, or did you pick the right stories and see how long it was? If the former, how hard was it to narrow them down?

Initially, I’d planned to choose twenty stories. After my first round of cuts, I had twenty-five. Then a few more must-have stories pushed their way under my nose, and the number increased to twenty-eight, and at that point we had to put a stop to it, mainly in order to keep the price of the book under $20. And even with twenty-eight stories, which is a lot, there were still a number of stories that were difficult to cut.

Finally, to get us back the title of this series, how did you decide what order to arrange the selected stories in?

Some of it was personal preference on my part. I wanted to make sure that my favorite stories, for example, were spaced throughout the anthology, so the reader’s attention would be continuously engaged. What I’ve realized, though, is that with the short story, one person’s taste can be so wildly different from another’s that my favorite stories might be another literature-lover’s least favorite. Stories that I would call home runs have been other people’s “ho hum”s. I should have expected this (in all my years working on the Irreantum fiction contest, for example, never once has there been a story that was a unanimous first place winner among the committee members when we sat down to begin deliberations)—but it’s still surprising to me the range of responses a short story call elicit. I also wanted the arrangement of stories to ensure that similar stories weren’t back-to-back . . . although some stories were similar stylistically but dissimilar thematically, and vice versa. In the end, I simply wanted the anthology to take its readers on a journey to both familiar and unexpected places, to introduce us to both recognizable and surprising characters, and to explore both time-honored and exciting new themes. It’s my hope that Dispensation has accomplished this goal, and that the stories in the book will be read and enjoyed by all sorts of readers.

I’m going to guess that the market for the whole set of stories and poems is probably quite small. But since the thought occurred to me and AMV does have a (never before used) poll function, I thought I’d ask.

Fear is, I’ve come to realize, one of my great personal enemies as a creative writer (along with laziness). Part of this is probably just because of the kind of person I am. I suspect, though, that part of it may be endemic to the writing process.

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Possibly the hardest time for me personally during the writing of my novel (and since) was the time after the manuscript was finished, while I was sending it out and getting feedback from as many people I could entice into looking at it. I remember several days sitting at my computer, incapable of putting in time on my paid work, almost mindless with fear about the kinds of responses I would get. Fortunately, I was able to get past it with several long walks — and prayers, most of which ended with me putting my work, and my pride in it, on the Lord’s altar: accepting that if it turned out that what I had written wasn’t any good, that was still okay because I had tried my best to do something I felt was worthwhile. Ultimately, the only way I was able to achieve peace was through a sense that my effort in writing No Going Back might be an acceptable offering, even if the work itself lacked value or worth.

The whole experience was something of a surprise. I had no idea that I cared so much what my would-be peers in the community of Mormon letters thought about my work. I had no understanding of just how debilitating that fear might be — that I could be tempted to pull my work from consideration by a publisher and readers, even after I had finished it, just to avoid finding out that they might not like it. I didn’t do that, of course — but I can’t help but wonder how much of that was because of how public I had been about my writing of the book, and how embarrassing and essentially impossible it would have been to suddenly pretend it didn’t exist. At one point, I consoled myself with the thought that if everyone hated the book, I could just drop out of the community of Mormon letters and find something else to do with my time: curl up in a ball and hide, essentially. It was good, I thought, that I lived in Wisconsin, not somewhere like Utah where my social life might involve regular in-person interaction with a lot of other Mormon writers and readers — perhaps the first time I’d been glad of that particular fact. Usually, my lack of ability to spent time at Mormon literary events is one of the few things I regret about not living in Utah.

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Back in my graduate school days, I came to a realization that unless you’re in one of the “sexy” fields like queer theory, in order to succeed as a literary scholar, you have to be willing to care more about your own research and writing than anyone else ever will. This presented a substantial challenge to me, since as an externally motivated person, I tend to judge the value of what I do on its value and interest to others and the “ego strokes” I can get from their praise.

Typical advice given to people like me often suggests that we should just somehow choose not to care about what other people think — an act as impossible in my case as flapping my arms and flying to the moon. I’m simply not built that way, and the evidence I see from other people like me is that this is not an area where people typically are capable of change. Yes, it may be somehow better or loftier or more godlike to do what one is doing purely based on internal motivation, but I’m convinced that’s just not an option for some of us.

Including, interestingly, Joseph Smith, based on some of the evidence from his life. Can you imagine Brigham Young ever saying, “If my life has no value to my friends, it has no value to me”? Brigham’s version would have read more like, “If my life has no value to my friends, I need a new set of friends.” But I digress . . .

Fear, it’s sometimes said, is a useful emotion, focusing our attention on potential dangers and ways to prevent them. I’m here to tell you, though, that fear — or the desire for praise — serves little or no useful purpose in writing, unless its value is to point us to some other kind of less risky and more rewarding activity. Which, despite those risks, is not always a good thing, since I daresay there are some things that can only be accomplished by writing books.

I waited the better part of 10 years for someone else to write the first Mormon novel about a gay teenager trying to stay in the Church. No one else volunteered (something I understand a little better now that it’s been published . . . ). Regardless of whether the novel I wrote was worthwhile or not, the idea that someone needed to write a novel of this kind (and many more, hopefully, still to come on this topic) was something I still believe. Now it’s been done. The next one (by someone else) may be — hopefully will be — better. But it won’t be the first, and the reason it won’t be is because I did manage to get past those fears and put something out there.

However, to my dismay, short fiction was not to be found among any of the winners or honorable mentions — we have 3 poems, a personal essay and a short play. Certainly all well-w0rth reading (and it’s interesting how many of the works featured play with scripture in somewhat similar ways to my Speculations series and Theric’s The FOB Bible), but my core literary love is fiction, and so it was a delight to discover a bonus addition to the issue — a set of tales by special edition co-editor James Goldberg that are informed by his interesting mix of ethnic identities.

Title: Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg

Author: James Goldberg

Publication Info: Mormon Artist, Nov. 2009

Submitted by: William Morris

Why?: Wm says: “I like how Goldberg takes these three ethnic elements from his own poly-ethnic background — that is Mormon, Sikh, Jew — as well as certain elements from each of those cultures storytelling traditions and melds them together. It both legitimizes and complicates the concept of Mormon ethnicity, but setting aside all the theory — it’s a fun series of mini-tales to read.

Also: how can I not reward a mixture of humor, folk tale and parable?”

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

A couple of weeks ago, I read a paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Convention at Snowbird, Utah (a rundown of my experience at the AML session will come in a later post that I’ve got halfway worked up; yes, I’ve been lazy—so sue me) and over the weekend I did some revising to incorporate some of the feedback I received and posted it on Reading Until Dawn. “Toward a Mormon Gothic: Stephenie Meyer’s Vampires and a Theology of the Uncanny” takes its place in the blossoming field of Twilight studies beside RUD’s inaugural essay, Theric Jepson’s “Saturday’s Werewolf: Vestiges of the Premortal Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels.” Link over and have a read. That’s what all the cool kids are doing (or so they tell me).

While you’re there, you might also notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to the site design (I’ve tweaked the header) and that I’ve updated the articles. The inconsistent layout was bugging me, so I took down the HTMLs until I can get them to look how I want them to look, reworked my document template slightly, and incorporated the new MLA citation standards into the notes. Hopefully this gives the collection a more consistent and professional feel.

Also: though I’ve published “Toward a Mormon Gothic” on RUD, I’m still open to feedback. So if, while you’re reading, you notice a typo or some such faux pas or notice that I’ve missed something you deem vitally important to the conversation, either email me or comment here. That or work up your own essay and submit it for publication. I promise I won’t complain.

What’s going on?

Anybody enter the Irreantum fiction contest? Sources* tell me that the stories were heavy on the speculative fiction and sex. I’m not quite sure how to take that. How about the Sunstone contests? Anybody else have anything cooking that they can talk about right now**? Anybody have something to say about The Mormon Short Story?

I did not enter the Irreantum contest this year. I worked on several stories, but couldn’t settle on one and simply blew the deadline because nothing came together in time. However, I did produce a short short piece for the Sunstone contest. I also have a story coming out in the fall Dialogue. It’s actually a set of longish short short stories on a common theme, which means I seem to be having the most success with work less than 2k words. This will do nothing to dispel my reputation as the Master of the Slight and Shallow. On the other hand, I’m almost done with the first draft of a story that I already have 5k words written and will probably swell to 6k when all is said and edited. I wish I could tell you more about it, but it may be contest bound next year. I’ve begun to realize that I need to think 6 months to a year out rather than 10-12 weeks.

* Okay, this doesn’t sound as cool, but Chris Bigelow posted something on Facebook about it (without divulging anything he shouldn’t).

** Don’t tell us details if you plan on entering contests with the work — there could be current or future judges lurking.

• 5 short stories of which 2 spoke to me (and is it relief or favoritism or familiarity or something else that it’s Angela Hallstrom’s and S.P. Bailey’s stories), 1 of which is intriguing but left me cold (”I’ll Be a Stranger to You” By Cara Diaconoff), 1 of which was just about getting somewhere but not quite and could use some tweaks and another 800 words or so (Russ Beck’s “Two Things”) and 1 more (”The Memo Box”) that was just a’ight. In fact, the latter 3 were all kind of depressing. Actually, it wasn’t so much that they were depressing as that they didn’t give characters their fully developed existence (which Hallstrom especially does well) blocked as they are by the literary insistence on the image and the broken and the minor*. Or it could just be that I’ve become a reactionary.
• 2 works of creative nonfiction: 1 that I enjoyed — had some lovely detail — but the ending whimpered out and overall Joshua Foster either needed to be more ruthless in his conclusions or warmer and more languorous in his memories (”Long in the Tooth”) and 1 that I didn’t even realize was creative nonfiction (”Mesa”) as it read like a short story, and I suppose that could be construed as powerful, but for all that it’s trying to be haunting I seem to have shrugged it off fairly easily, which, of course, may say horrible things about me or may be that I just wasn’t given enough to really do anything with.
• 14 contributors of whom 6 have MFA or undergraduate creative writing experience, 4 of whom teach at universities, 2 of whom are (or are about to be) lawyers.
• 1 lovely (albeit genteelly abstract) cover (painting by Barbara A. Lyman) [Late night edit -- after looking at the cover while listening to Joy Division, the painting strikes me as much more interesting and much less genteel. It's a good cover.]
• 9 poems only 1 of which grabbed me on the first reading as tackling language and metaphysics deeply enough to be worth rereading — that would be B.W. Jorgensen’s “Beginning to Bodysurf.”
• 1 piece of literary criticism — B.W. Jorgensen’s “Reading about Sex in Mormon Fiction — If We Can Read” — that won’t surprise anyone who has read Jorgensen’s earlier work and starts off a bit shaky and obvious (sorry but quoting from For the Strength of the Youth and pointing out that scripture has some naughty moments seriously misses the point — a pamphlet is not the place to go for discussion of aesthetics and scripture is not literature — any argument for Sex In Mormon Fiction [henceforth know as SIMF] has to argue from literary context) but gets in some good points and analysis in the middle and has some lovely sentences (which Jorgensen always delivers). I think that Laura Craner provides us with some better examples, however. And Theric brings much more sexiness and sensuality and doctrineality to the discussion (and Tyler more poetry but now I’m just playing favorites even if, well, there are Textual Reasons for it).
• 3 works that had enough humor to coax a smile from my reactionary mug — Bailey’s “Outside,” Beck’s “Two Things” and Vanessa Arden Nuckoll’s poem “I’ll Tell You What the Butterfly Represents” plus one amusing Contributor bio (Vanessa’s, of course).
• Zero reviews, zero author interviews, zero industry news, zero anything that taps in to even semi-current conversations (recognizing, of course, that yes, Irreantum is behind and yes, it’s taken on more of a literary journal format, and yes, blogs have soaked up much of the interviews and reviews).
• 3 things that bugged the hell out of me in particular order:
  • A. A table of contents that doesn’t indicate which works are essays, poetry or short stories (this is rectified on the website).
  • B. An editor’s note that says “We accepted [Angela's] story for publication long before she rejoined us as co-editor: we don’t self-publish, which even though you may not have noticed or cared about, is important to me. But you do need to notice her novel, Bound on Earth, of which ‘Faithful’ is an extract.” I beat up on Scott in a review of Irreantum 9.1, so I was going to let this go because now I’m just looking petulant and cranky, but I have to say, no, I don’t care about it. I don’t think it’s something to be proud of. If something is good enough that you want to publish it, who the hell cares if one of your staff wrote it or not — I want it. We’re starving for good work. Withholding it seems like a cruel joke — not to mention the fact that Irreantum should have had the scoop on Bound on Earth, should have debuted any discussion about it. Don’t give me some notion of literary objectivity and respectability that was current for, like two decades sometime in the 20th century. It’s a bloodless policy that ignores the fact that this community is so small and incestuous and needing of talent and passion that the only solution that makes sense is a ruthlessly nice but brutally partisan homerism. Now, of course, the contests are a little different — although since they are judged blind, unless the judges have seen a work before then the only people who shouldn’t be able to enter are the judges themselves.
  • C. This sentence from Jorgensen’s piece: “So then: can we read about sex in the Mormon fiction of Virginia Sorensen, Maurine Whipple, Levi Peterson, Margaret Young, John Bennion, Jack Harrell, Chris Bigelow, or (so I’ve heard) Anita Stansfield.” If one is going to press LDS fiction (of the LDS LDS sort, if ya know what I mean) in to service, to try and pretend that it’s on Your Side then one should have the decency to actually, you know, read it**. ***
• 1 person who will re-up his Irreantum subscription next February and will be looking to submit at least one thing over the next year.

So that’s my tally. What’s yours?

*Not that there’s anything wrong with minor. I am fully committed to acts of minor triumph and failure and havoc. It’s what I do best.

**Of course, I’m a major hypocrite here as I have not followed through on my project to read LDS genre fiction. I either need to buck up and see what Interlibrary Loan can do for me or see if I can pick up some used titles for cheap. Or people could send me their castoffs.

*** [7/16 edit: Wm deleted that hanging Otherwise. I forgot that I had decided that I could just stop there.]

In other Mahonri-related news, Nan Parkinson McCulloch’s AML-List review of his new play “The Fading Flower” was posted just a few hours ago. It’s a very positive review, and I have to say Nan deserves major kudos for her enthusiastic support of Mormon theater. She seems to attend every production and review or at least comment on all of them. “The Fading Flower” runs through June 8. For details and ticket information, visit the New Play Project website.

Congratulations, Mahonri. I only wish I lived closer to Utah or was independently wealthy. Sadly, neither situation seems to be imminent. However, if any of you within the sound of my, urrrr, voice, do live in or will be visiting the Intermountain West in the next week or so, you have no excuse.

Add in work by Tyler and me in the Fall 2007/Spring 2008 Irreantum and a fantastic essay by Eric Thompson in the Spring 2007 Irreantum, and the past year has been fairly fruitful for AMV’s bloggers. And there may be more that I have forgotten (pipe up in the comments). Oh, yeah, Theric presented at Sunstone — a paper that was jumpstarted by Tyler and Laura’s Reading Until Dawn project.

This is not to mention that three current or former Times & Seasons bloggers are represented in the Summer 2009 issue of Dialogue, plus Dallas Robbins and Juvenile Instructor’s Heidi Harris. I think it’s becoming more and more clear that for many of the new(ish) voices in Mormon Studies blogging is not the end itself, but rather a way to develop ideas, connections and communities. And today’s best Mormon Studies scholars may just need to be fluent in a wide variety of genres/platforms of expressing their thinking.