Entrance to the Gilgal Garden

Last week, I visited the Gilgal Garden (749 East 500 South, Salt Lake City) for the first time, and I came away impressed and surprised. I knew quite a bit about the garden before my visit, from articles online and the initial campaign to preserve the garden in 1997. Still, the garden far exceeded my expectations, leaving me awestruck by the audacity of Child’s attempt to literally imprint in stone a personal expression of faith and…

“create a sanctuary or atmosphere in my yard that will shut out fear and keep one’s mind young and alert to the last…”

Thomas Battersby Child, Jr. (1888-1963), the garden’s designer, was a masonry contractor and bishop of Salt Lake City’s Tenth Ward for 19 years (itself an impressive achievement—today bishops usually don’t serve longer than five years). In 1945 he began work on the garden in an attempt “to give physical form to his deep-felt beliefs.” Child put it this way:

If you want to be brought down to earth in your thinking and studying, try to make your thoughts express themselves with your hands.

Captain of the Lord's Host

In addition to working much of the stone himself, Child involved his son-in-law, Bryant Higgs, a skilled welder, and sculptor Maurice Brooks in the project; and along the way, he pioneered the use of the oxyacetylene torch for cutting stone. Child was proud of the fact that he had only brought raw materials to the garden. He scoured the state for stones weighing up to 62 tons, which were then brought to the garden and carved on site.

While this is quite impressive, none of this occurred to me when I walked into the garden — I didn’t read the brochure until after I had seen everything.

The Testimony of Job

Instead, I was first struck by how much of the garden is about text. More than 70 stones in the garden have been engraved with texts: scriptures, poems and hymn texts and other philosophical statements that reflect what Child felt. It seemed to me like the cards, stickers and post-it notes we today put up in offices and on the sides of computer screens—except that in this case the sayings are literally carved in stone.

The Scriptures on the Rock

Later, I was overwhelmed by the scale of the garden and the amount of effort Child put into his project—some 18 years of his life. In addition to the texts carved in stone, Child produced 13 sculptures, the last of which was incomplete, and is, I think, one of the most intriguing in the garden. Called “the Monument to the Priesthood,” it is like much of the garden; at once obvious and obscure. Four books that rest on a rock represent the standard works on the rock of revelation. A carved globe, representing the world, was to rest on  the books, but Child couldn’t finish the globe before he died. Next to the books is an arch, and on the far side of the arch is a tall, two-part spire, representing the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, topped off by a wire sculpture of the Angel Moroni.

The Joseph Smith Sphynx

Gilgal is perhaps best known for the Joseph Smith Sphynx, which includes an illustration of a Temple carved into its front (between the paws and below the face). Child clarified the sculpture’s meaning with a fragment of a well-known poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which he carved in a text stone near the Sphynx:

The Sphynx is drowsy
Her wings are furled
Her ear is heavy
She broods on the world

Who’ll tell me her secret
The ages have kept?
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept

To those who see Gilgal cold, without knowing anything about it, this all might come across as rather strange. Child recognized this possibility, writing:

You don’t have to agree with me. You may think I am a nut, but I hope I have aroused your thinking and curiosity.

What is important in all forms of art, I think, is the meaning that we, the consumers of art, can glean from it. It may be that, given how familiar many of the texts are and how obvious some of the sculpture is, that the meaning found at Gilgal is something we already have elsewhere. But looking beyond the obvious, I think there is more here. There are, for most of us, meanings that are not familiar or that come from repetition. And, most of all, I think there is much meaning in Child’s audacity and perseverance; in his insistence in literally carving in stone his vision of the gospel. May we all have something in our lives that means that much.

Notes

Quotations are from:

• Thompson, Lisa. Gilgal Garden, an historical sculpture garden created by Thomas B. Child, Jr., Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program. Brochure available on site.
• Gilgal: A Circle of Stones. Interactive tour of the Gilgal Garden. Online at: http://extras.sltrib.com/NIP/gilgal/index.htm

Obtaining theatre spaces to perform on, creating posters and ads, looking into liability insurance, organizing the on the ground producers in Utah, obtaining rights to scripts, looking for affordable ad space, sending personal (and probably annoying) fund raising letters to close friends and family, soliciting directors and designers and cast members, trying to sell videos to gain more capital, working the Facebook groups, attaching links… and that’s just on my end. I have producers, directors, playwrights, videographers, web designers and others who have been clocking in a lot of hours to get this group on its feet.Why do I do this?

The timing is pretty awful. I’m going to grad school  this Fall at Arizona State University. I live in Arizona while the shows I’ll be producing are in Utah.  I have a 9 month year old daughter, a 5 year old son with sensory processing disorder who’s starting kindergarten, and a very patient, supportive wife whose patience and support are being taxed, I’m sure. Why do I do this?

Farewell to Eden Trailer on You Tube

Why do I do this? Because it has been my dream to open a religiously and morally focused theatre company since early high school. Because, to paraphrase Eric Samuelsen, every Mormon Shakespeare needs a Mormon Globe. Because I love it. And because I believe not only is it what I want to do, but what I’m supposed to do. Because, if we do it right, I believe with all my heart it can be successful.  And  because we’ve had some wonderful doors opening for us lately which have seemed more than a little providential.

I was looking for some theatre spaces for us to perform in. Our former space which we rented from Provo Theatre Company, which is beautiful but small and limited, is currently up for sale and rental fees were becoming a hardship. So the writing on the wall seemed to indicate that it was time for Zion Theatre Company to find a new home. I approached the Castle Outdoor Theatre in Provo, and if I can find liability insurance, we’ve got a great deal with them for our early Fall shows. But that only filled a temporary need, as we needed somewhere where can perform year round.

Contemplating the issues and obstacles I was facing, I wrote a post over at the Association for Mormon Letters blog. It caught the eye of one Jeffrey Driggs who mentioned in the comments that the the Off Broadway Theatre, which he works for, may possibly be interested in allowing us to use their space when it wasn’t being used with their own season. One thing led to another, I met with some of their lovely management, and voila! If we perform well with our first play with OBT  in November, The Hobbit, then we have a new home for our 2012 season!

But then there is that pesky issue of funding. We already have a lot of the costumes, etc. we need for some of our early shows, but then there is liability insurance we have to come up with for the Castle Theatre, and every show has its costs, especially if we want them to be high quality shows. So, to start out with, we had to come up with a way to raise more funds. I thought about doing a Kickstarter fundraiser, which I still may consider later, but I really wanted to try something that could provide some sort of product to the person giving. Adam Figuiera had made some high quality recordings of my previous ZTC shows (as well as one from Alex Barlow for Fading Flower, which was actually produced by New Play Project, not ZTC), so I zeroed back on the idea of really pushing these DVDs/Blu-rays again. I hope that works, because our videographers really have done some excellent work with them and I want them to find a wide audience anyway.

So I’m going through all of this until my eyes are sore from looking at a computer screen, my fingers are tired from typing, and I’ve racked up a lot more minutes than usual on my cell phone. Why do I do this?

Because it gives me peace. For so long I told myself I needed to build towards my theatre company. I needed to focus on an individual show, or establish a reputation as a writer, or work with another theatrical group. But around the time I got accepted to my MFA program, I started to feel that all of that kind of thinking was in the past. The time for building was now, despite the inconvenience, despite the extra hours, despite the expert juggling. It was a deep, abiding impression that is fueling me even at this moment. This was going to happen, I had to know that. The gears were in place, and now it was time to work, work, work so that when I come back to Utah with my graduate degree in hand, I will come back to an already living, breathing thing.

To me, Zion Theatre Company is more than just a place to perform my plays. It’s definitely not just some vanity project. And I’m certainly not in it for the money, for if that had been in the case I would have gone for a much fatter cow than the arts (especially in this economy!). For me it’s bound up in my covenants, my way to consecrate to God what is inside of me and what I can do with my talents, and help others to do the same. I didn’t choose the name “Zion” idly, for I believe that the theatre has a special power to bring people together and cause a kind of sacred communion.

Brigham Young once said if he were placed on a cannibal island and given the charge of civilizing its inhabitants, the first thing he would construct would be a theater. I understand what he meant by that. For so long there have been those who have harnessed that inherent theatrical power for base or superficial purposes. I want to go back to the element of theatre that was used by the Greeks, that caused them to perform plays for their religious festivals, and integrate it into their worship. I want to go back to the instinct of Joseph Smith to use it as the primary instructional tool in temple worship. I want to go that part of our soul that recognizes that there is something sacred in enacting a story, even a fictional one, but one with deep truths embedded in that fiction.

We’ve all been given the charge to civilize the world and to help lead it to something Celestial, Some One Celestial. My contribution to that effort will be a Theater.

Arnold Friberg’s passing this week is cause to reexamine him. His work has been a victim of backlash lately from the High Minded. (I suspect because of the massive influence his Book of Mormon paintings have had on depictions of the book’s characters, particularly of Lehi’s family. It’s simply understood now that, for instance, Nephi wears leather over one shoulder, Lehi has a long white beard, Laman and Lemuel are physically brutish. His influence has so overwhelmed Book of Mormon art that sometimes people seem to forget that his work is not The One True Depiction.)

Then there’s the fact that he’s Mormon and you know how Mormons think other Mormons can only make crummy art. So for them, here’s some worldly acclaim:

Friberg originated the iconic looks in DeMille’s second Ten Commandments movie and received an Oscar nod for his efforts.

Friberg was commissioned to make his famed Washington portrait for the Bicentenniel, when it hung at Valley Forger.

Friberg was commission by Britain’s royal family to paint Prince Charles in 1978 and the Queen in 1990.

He’s an honorary Mountie.

His original works are expeeeeeeensive.

But no matter who makes the point for me, I cannot doubt that Friberg’s work was consistently iconic and has shaped the way Mormons in particular view ourselves in significant and real ways.

Let’s return to taking him seriously.

[I hope that our readers will excuse me for posting a second time today. I thought that the anniversary deserved a post, and didn't remember the occasion until this afternoon.]

Its not the birth of Mormon literature, which has to be tied to the publication of the Book of Mormon. Other works of literature then followed, including discourses, doctrinal treatises and poetry. But it wasn’t until 1844 that a work of fiction was published.

The first work published was also probably not the first written, because Parley P. Pratt apparently read a work he wrote, The Angel of the Praries, to Joseph Smith and others in Nauvoo in the winter or early spring of 1844, but that work was not published until 1880. He then wrote A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil in the Spring of 1844, while in Boston, and it was published in the New York Herald on Sunday morning, August 25, 1844.

The dialogue is very clever and entertaining, as well as giving an interesting view of how Pratt perceived public perceptions of Mormonism. The final toast that Pratt has Joseph Smith give is alone worth reading the dialogue, if you haven’t yet. And while the dialogue is as didactic or propagandistic as you might expect from a work like this, it is, nonetheless, not a bad beginning for Mormon fictional works. Much worse has been published.

While I think that A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil was Pratt’s most successful work of fiction, he also wrote at least three other works of fiction, including The Angel of the Prairies, and another dialogue and a play, but the latter two remain unpublished. (I am preparing them for publication now).

In celebration of this anniversary, give A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil another read, or read it for the first time if you haven’t already.

Or just give a look at this snippet of the front page of the New York Herald from Sunday morning, August 25, 1844:

1. Clark Goble introducing me to Times & Seasons in late January/early February of 2004.

2. The AML-List crashing in March of 2004 and me not finding out that there was a new version of the list up and running for several weeks.

The odd thing is that I had been aware of blogs since Instapundit first spun out of Slate’s Fray (mainly because I found myself monitoring some of them as part of my work), but it had never occurred to me to start blogging because I wasn’t interested in political or personal blogging and the AML-List met my Mormon Studies needs. The two events above changed all that. (and if you want a laugh, take a look at my initial pretensions. Talk about pretentious.)

If the mood strikes me, I may at some point put together a historical timeline for AMV. But the main thing to know is this: Five years, more than 600 posts from  13 contributors and 1 emeritus blogger plus the contribution of many intelligent, civil commenters, and I still feel like there’s more to say.

By the numbers

Our traffic is not mighty like unto the bigger, more prolific blogs. We get between 7,500 – 9,500 visits a month, which is respectable for a niche blog, I think. Like most seasoned bloggers, I don’t worry much about traffic anymore. It’s all about having a good community (and there’s always room for more — newbies and lurkers who want to join in are always welcome).

Depending on the month 10-15% of that traffic is to two Stephenie Meyer posts — the Q&A (which I might add was the second or third interview with Meyer ever published) and the erotics of abstinence post — and the Postum post.

This is the 604th post in AMV history. I account for roughly 45% of the posts with Kent and Patricia solidly in second and third place behind me. We’ve also racked up more than 6,000 comments, so basically 10 per post.

If you click on the drop down menu over there on the left nav under the heading Archives, you can see how many posts we’ve had per month. As you can see, we’ve really picked up steam in the past three months — finally breaking my record of 22 posts set in the first month of AMV’s existence.

Some thoughts

I’d say that the biggest success of AMV has been the creation of a community of contributors and commenters who enjoy the conversation. In addition, the level of discussion has remained civil and sophisticated. This is rather self-congratulatory, but I want to applaud all of you for keeping this blog vibrant and fun and interesting, but also free of the flame wars that rage across cyberspace. Certainly, there are times when we can get a little echo chamber going on. I don’t know any online community that doesn’t. However, I do think that even though we could do better to include more voices (but more about that later), we have a pretty good range here. Our posts and comments fall within the radical middle that is my primary interest (and which I may attempt to manifesto up at some point). More importantly, the writing is always thoughtful and interesting (and often humorous).  And that goes a long way to keeping me engaged* and willing to put in the time to keep this concern going.

So thanks everybody. (And no resting on our laurels — back to work ya’ll).

* This is not a minor thing. Burn out happens to even the best bloggers. And as I’ve told a few some of my fellow AMVers, the minute this thing isn’t fun anymore, we’ll move on to something else. Now, I don’t see that happening right now. I can’t speak for the others, but I have at least two more years in me. Maybe more.

Ric Estrada passed away the morning of May 1, 2009. I will continue posting the remaining four parts of my six-part series beginning next Wednesday, but I felt it would be more appropriate this week to pause and recognize his contribution in silence.

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-I personally am grateful for the opportunity I had to meet Brother Estrada during this last year of his long and eventful life. From Cuba to New York to Berlin and LA (with myriad stops inbetween), he lived and loved and served and drew.

Below is a partial list of tributes which have appeared since his passing (please feel free to leave links to others in the comments):

• Kevin Melrose
• Mark Evanier
• Travis Pullen
• Alex Segura
• Tom Spurgeon
• Glenn Hauman
• Chad Carter
• Bob H
• Steven Thompson

This got me thinking about ward libraries. I like the concept. And the old ones I have inspected are packed with uncorrelated oddities and treasures. But it seems like they could somehow be more and do more. Any thoughts? And can you imagine a ward library stocked with Mormon literature? (Thanks for the chalk and eraser, Brother Jones. While I’m here, can I put a hold on Angel Falling Softly?)

The theme for this year’s Arts Festival is “The science of art, the art of science.”  I’ve been charting the conjunction of these two disciplines for a while as I believe this is the way LDS artists can leap into the nature writing community and related stewardship activity in good conscience.  The featured visual artist this year was JR Lancaster, “a chemical engineer by training and an artist by desire.”  Experts having various cultural backgrounds and training in a wide variety of fields, including entomology, archaeoastronomy, and ethnomathematics, conducted workshops and offered other presentations exploring subjects like the preservation of ancient artwork and mathematical principles inherent in Native American basket weaving.  A variety of visual artists had wares on display throughout the town.  In fact, the whole village, confined to a narrow strip of real estate along the San Juan River — originally a Mormon settlement, by the way – was decked out with art.

My son and I attended two festival events.  The first was the two-hour writing workshop that Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles presented.  It had a clever title: “Writing What You Don’t Know.” The second event was the evening potluck dinner and open mic.  This post covers the Katharine’s workshop; a second post will cover the reading, which was quite an experience in itself.

Regarding the festival’s theme built around the intersection of art and science, Katharine remarked, “These are not disparate conversations.”  But before she dove into her topic and the workshop activities, she took a moment to remember Leslie and Kitty Norris, who have one time and another been the sun and the moon in the lives of many writers, Mormon and otherwise, for many years.  Leslie was my thesis chair back when.  I wrote an AMV tribute on the one-year anniversary of his death.  Kitty died just this last week.  Her funeral commenced in Orem, Utah during Katharine’s workshop in Bluff.

By way of remembering these two, Katharine read Leslie’s famous poem, “Hudson’s Geese,” which he wrote for Kitty.  Katharine said that because Kitty’s health was at times frail, she and Leslie believed she would die before he did, and that belief lies behind the story Leslie tells in the poem.  Katharine said that Leslie read the report of the two geese somewhere, wrote the poem, then when back to look for the source but couldn’t find it.  Katharine told us that if you google “Hudson’s Geese,” Leslie’s poem is what comes up.

It was a lovely moment of connection for me, sitting in a motel conference room in Bluff, Utah, remembering what Leslie and Kitty Norris brought to my life while preparations for Kitty’s funeral were underway in another part of the state.  It was good for my son, too, though he never met either soul.  But he knows something of Leslie’s influence on me and now has more dots to connect that to.

Katharine launched into her workshop, asking the question, “How do we write into something that we don’t know?”  At the center of each table, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks lay in jumbles.  Before the workshop started, my son and I had begun reading through The Oxford Book of Villains by John Mortimer, a book that attracted my attention as soon as I sat down and that, working upon my subconscious, might even have drawn me to that table.  It’s a clever book and I decided I must get one of my own.  Other books, such as encyclopedias of firearms, saints, and so on, lay heaped before us on the tabletop.

Katharine said that she collects “peculiar dictionaries.”  This fact was indisputable; the evidence lay all around.  Katharine told us to flip through the books and make a list of intriguing new words along with thumbnail definitions.  I had a hard time with this activity because I picked up the firearms encyclopedia.  I know nothing about guns and the book seemed to assume its readers understood basic terms like “service revolver” and “single action,” terms I’ve heard most of my life but out of lack of interest failed to grasp.  I did discover that a certain Dutch-made gun was considered a “handgun of questionable merit” and that a ”touchhole” is the word for that opening in cannons “permitting application of a glowing ember or smoldering timber to ignite gunpowder.”  My son already knew this.  It came as a revelation to me.

Following our listing of words new to us, Katharine told us to jot down five favorite proverbs or popular sayings.  Then we passed our lists to the next table.  We were assigned to write a fifteen-line poem where we used a new word in every line – words selected from lists we passed to each other – plus two proverbs or quotations, and one or more of the party words we’d written up on the board as a group activity earlier on.

The point of the activity was to play with new language because, as Katharine said, poets are obliged to simply love the language they write in.  She explained that she reads science, philosophy, theology, etc. to do that very thing, to see the “ways words strange to [her] explode when put together.”  Rhyme, she said, takes you places that you reach based on sound.  She admonished us to try to write something we wouldn’t expect to write, to give ourselves tools, such as dictionaries, etc., and to try to learn to light up with interest where we find vocabularies that are “charming with each other.”

The next activity I found very distasteful, and that was part of its point.  Katharine asked us to imagine a person we dislike.  I find the concept of imagining a person I dislike meaningless.  First, it makes assumptions about how I think and asks me to pass judgment on someone in a way I just don’t operate by: “Everybody dislikes somebody.  Whom do I dislike? Easy, I dislike X.”  The question of whether I like or dislike someone is irrelevant; it’s what happens between me and another person that I like or dislike, and I take my share of responsibility when matters go wrong.  I can’t focus dislike on another person’s being, only in how matters rise between us, and lacking a real event to consider, the exercise left me cold.

Second, I have a strong reaction against forcibly holding someone beneath the hot lights of artificial and easy moments of judgment, even as a flight of imagination; my thinking simply won’t go that way.  If I had had a choice, I would have opted out of the exercise.  But I understood its purpose – albeit rather bothersome – and engaged in it as a matter of form.

After telling us to write from the POV of the person we dislike, Katharine led us through a series of prompts that ran something like this:

Imagine you are this person doing some task this person commonly performs.
Describe the task.
Begin the next line, “I have always wanted …”
Begin the next line, “I’m happiest when …”
Go back to the task and describe something more about it.
Begin the next line, “I have never wanted …”
Begin the next line, “The thing I really love…”
Begin the next line, “My mother always told me…”
Begin the next line, “I always say…”

And so on.  This was a long exercise and my distaste for it did not diminish.  It felt horribly invasive, like I was imposing a foreign will on someone, and it took me to a dark place where I had to force myself not to destroy via language the privacy of the person I chose to profile – especially since the person didn’t happen to maintain his/her privacy in a healthy manner in the first place.  I’ll never participate in an exercise like this again.

But it did help my son develop sympathy for someone in his life who had caused him distress.  In fact, even though his piece was quite good, he didn’t want to read it aloud, his feelings about the person had changed so dramatically.  He had become sympathetic to his adversary’s plight.  For him, it was a meaningful exploration, a good venture into writing something he didn’t know.  Thus I count the exercise as successful and my aversion a small matter.  We went home satisfied, and as far as I’m concerned, Katharine succeeded in pointing us toward what she meant by her challenge to write what we don’t know.

In thinking about how to introduce my son to the world of writing workshops and writers, I had imagined I should start him off someplace “safe,” like maybe an Association for Mormon Letters conference.  But this festival, I think, got us off to a better start.  The artistic community whose spirit we enjoyed Saturday night welcomed him with gusto and encouraged him to participate in its activities.  It was a wider, more complex environment, culturally and spiritually, than the Mormon one I’ve frequented, and there was a lot going on for us to respond to.  Yet it is able to include Mormons who can contribute to the community celebratory pot, which I would like him to learn to do.  We’ll still go to AML meetings together, but that will be just one of the several banquet tables I hope to sit down to with him as we explore the arts.

Here’s how it all went down:

I had just graduated with a bachelor’s in English from USU and was pregnant with my first baby. I wasn’t going to be “one of those women” who just lets her education go for home and hearth (whatever that means! Thank you liberal/feminist education!) so I joined the ward book club and suggested a truly literary work, Virginia Sorenson’s A Little Lower than the Angels. I had come across it on an online course reading list from BYU. It was a little risky since I hadn’t read it, but, hey, you can trust those BYU professors, right?

Seven or eight of us ladies pooled our money and ordered some copies, everybody chipping in for the shipping and handling. When the paperback copies arrived they were crisp—the pages clapped as I flipped through them the first time—and smelled that papery-inky-gluey-new-book-smell. The cover was an ominous shade of gray with a grainy black and white shot of a woman in a bandanna and it took me a couple minutes to realize she wasn’t one of the characters in the book but the author.

At first sight A Little Lower than the Angels comes across as a standard pioneer novel. Set in the Nauvoo period, it chronicles conversions and baptisms and run-ins with future prophets. What isn’t typical about it is that it is the hallmark novel of the Mormon Lost Generation. (Well, okay, maybe The Giant Joshua is the hallmark novel, but I didn’t like that one.)

I started the book with pencil in hand, ready to mark great lines and follow themes with zeal. I gave that up pretty quickly. You see, the book scared me. The love scenes between Eliza R. Snow (what young, female, Mormon English major doesn’t idolize her?) and Joseph Smith knocked my socks off. Not only did I NOT know they had been married (I idolized her, I didn’t actually study her), but I had a hard time being okay with a plural wife being taken for love and not just commandment. (I now have a more mature view of plural marriage, so please don’t hijack the comments by taking issue with that last statement.)

The other thing that surprised me was that I couldn’t put it down. For as much as it bothered, annoyed, and frightened me, it was a beautiful book. The characters were complicated and asked real questions, questions I had never even thought to think about. The irony was sharp, like lemon juice, and burned a little, but it was brilliant. I found myself mouthing the words as I read because the text demanded attention and care and utterance. I finished the book with a heavy, but invigorated, heart.

The other ladies in my club reacted differently. One woman, a recent convert, asked to borrow my copy and when I mentioned how surprised I had been by its treatment of polygamy she handed it right back. “To be honest,” she said, “Joseph Smith was the hardest part to believe in. And I haven’t come to terms with polygamy. Heavenly Mother I can take, but polygamy, I’m not so sure.” Another woman told me how when she picked up the book she had the distinct impression that she shouldn’t read it. She started anyway. After a couple days and maybe fifty pages, the Spirit came back stronger. She couldn’t deny its direction and she threw the book away. Another lady, Kelly, who later became one of my closest friends, said she enjoyed the book but she couldn’t shake the feeling that one day her kids would come across it on the shelf and it would cause problems for them. She didn’t feel good about keeping it in the house.

The kindest remark the book got at our discussion was from, Krista, the lady who ran the club. As I was leaving and apologizing for scaring everyone off she said, “Laura, it was a risky choice, but it never hurts to take a risk. It was probably good for us. ” If my life were a TV show (and I’m sure you all wish it was) Krista’s words would have been emphasized by music and daring camera angles because that’s how the memory feels. Important. Vivid. Current. Krista’s words are ones that have stayed with me through many reading and writing experiences—although I would change them a little. After all, it does sometimes hurt to take a risk, but it is usually worth it.

Looking back, I can’t speak for the other ladies, but A Little Lower than the Angels was good for me. It crosses a lot of lines and makes a lot of choices I wouldn’t make but it was good for me to see those choices in action. As I think over the other ladies’ experiences—which were as genuine as mine—I can’t help but respect them for being honest, with me and with themselves. This book isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good book.

My friend Kelly later lent me her copy of Sorenson’s memoir Where Nothing is Long Ago and I found it to be just as amazing as A Little Lower than the Angels but nowhere near as difficult. I liked it so much I contemplated stealing the copy I had borrowed. If I could go back to that first book club meeting I would suggest that one instead. You know, sort of work people into Sorenson and her writing. (Somebody please put that book back in print! Even the copies on amazon are selling for $100.)

When I look at my copy of A Little Lower than the Angels, such as it is, squished between a compilation of Dickinson poems and Nelson Mandela’s biography on my overfull bookshelf, it conjures up a host of contradictory feelings. When I pick it up the pages still clap and the smell still lingers because I haven’t ever read it again. While it was good for me, it was a risk that I was only willing to take once.

How about you all, any books like this for you? Have you been blinded by literary ambition and bitten off more than you can chew? How did the experience change you?

This last time we attended, however, something stood out to me which I believe will remain with me for the rest of my life. This epiphany centered around authors Shannon Hale (author of young adult fantasy novels such as Goose Girl, Enna Burning, River of Secrets and the Newberry award winning novel Princess Academy– not to mention my wife’s favorite writer) and Stephenie Meyer (best selling author of the vampire romances, the Twilight series, and also her new sci-fi thiller/romance The Host). It almost seemed as if there was a spotlight on them during the entire conference in my mind. I was intrigued not only by the two women themselves, but by what was happening between them. They were attached at the hip, eating together, constantly chatting up a storm with each other and even breaking the rules a bit and attending all of the same group discussions with each other (people were supposed to be assigned to different groups in each session so that it wouldn’t be cliquey and that we would get to know a wider, inter-disciplinary range of people). It was almost as if they were two Jr. High BFFs (Best Friends Forever, for those who haven’t kept up on pre-teen lingo). I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had gone up to go the restroom, that the other would have raised her hand and asked if she could go too. And this almost claustrophobic closeness in my mind was absolutely, remarkably refreshing. To see these two very accomplished writers, who are established and famous in their respective fields and markets, cling to each other, in my opinion, was like what it would have been to see David and Jonathan form the bands of friendship, instead of rivalry.

To get a better picture to see what I was seeing, I think it’s important to note my observations about both women in this setting:

Shannon Hale was exuberent, an absolute ray of sunshine. Warm, talkative, opinionated (I mean that as the most positive of terms), confident, animated, intelligent, beautiful and really, really, really funny. I mean, she was absolutely hilarious. She was never hesitent to throw in her opinion on a subject, nor was she hesitent to give some one a good natured ribbing. The kind of person who would look you straight in the eye because she was neither afraid that you were superior to her, but neither was she ever looking down on you. You felt like you were on equal ground with her, if not in talent, then as a human being. I was surpised that after one of the chats she took a good deal of time to talk to my wife and I, relative nobodies compared to who else was in the room. Never talked down to us, never seemed impatient to get away. Just a lovely and charming woman, that made my wife’s day– not to mention my own.

If Shannon Hale was the sun, then Stephenie Meyer was the moon. Quiet, polite, slightly hesitent in her speech, kind, shy, with a gentle beauty. Quite the opposite of what one would expect from the woman who knocked off J.K. Rowling from the New York Times best sellers list. She was not only one of the humblest writers I have ever met, but one of the humblest people I have ever met. Period. I had the chance to talk her privately for a few minutes and I discovered what is typical of her kind of personality: talk to them one on one and that’s when they open up. Away from the stares of the public, you positively find them to be what you had only assumed them to be before: a wonderful, good hearted, insightful individual. I asked her about the upcoming film version of Twilight and she was very open with me, talking about the initial fears she had, especially with the first draft of the script (which, I later looked up, had butchered the story and wasn’t a faithful adaptation at all), but how a different script saved the day and she’s quite pleased with the outcome.

It could have been my imagination, but at first the ironic thing about Stephenie Meyer among this group of Mormon artists seemed to be that she was almost… intimidated. Perhaps it was because she felt she was among “Artists,” with a capital A. What I mean by that is that certain artistic personalities can look down on anything that is populist, or, excuse the term, for the “unwashed masses.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, a stereotype, but that’s the sense I got. She seemed to be afraid that she was at a conference full of people who were critical of her work, despite its overwhelming popularity and unabashed fans. Again, this could be me projecting this on her, but whatever the case was, she certainly wasn’t broadcasting her fame, nor using her bragging rights, nor even holding her chin up high. Instead, at the beginning of the conference she seemed almost embarrassed, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. Of course, I don’t believe this particular group thought any less of Stephenie Meyer. If anything, they were feeling the same thing– rather awed to have this very famous personality in their midst. I certainly know that’s how I felt at first.

And then comes Shannon Hale. She literally took Stephenie Meyer by the arm and was instantly her bosom buddy. Not that their friendship hadn’t before this moment, mind you. How Mrs. Hale told it, if I can remember it correctly, she saw the success that Mrs. Meyer was having and said to herself something to the effect of, “She’s going to need a friend.” So she e-mailed her and they became instant friends. And I think Shannon Hale was very perceptive in this. Sure, it’s obvious that fame can be heady and thrilling and tantalizing. But it must be awful lonely, for as soon as some one makes a name for themself, there are going to be jealous individuals who will want to take that name, tear it down and “humble” it beneath their cruel heels.

And this is one of the reasons that I am so impressed with Shannon Hale. Here she was, a Newberry winner, an established, prolific author and a darn fine writer, whose sparse but poetic (almost elemental) prose, and well realized characters seem to spurt fire and wind and water and life from the page. And then comes Stephenie Meyer, a first time writer who admittedly told Time Magazine that, “I don’t think I’m a writer; I think I’m a storyteller. The words aren’t always perfect.” Here was an obscure, Mormon housewife from Arizona who catapulted into fame and fortune, simply because she had a vivid dream about a vampire romance and decided to write it down. It would have been tempting to any writer to say, “Oh, here I have strived for my reputation as a writer, worked very hard to perfect my craft, and here comes a freshman author and woos the world on her first try. Does she really deserve it? Is it really literature? Is she deserving?”

Not so with Shannon Hale. Instead of being a jealous hearted spoil sport who can’t identify with any work that falls out of her narrow definition of “art”– instead this most deserving of women looks at this other very vulnerable woman who has been thrust into a whole new world and she says, “She’s going to need a friend.”

This, I think, is something that deserves attention, quiet and intimate as it may be. Artists can be a contentious, avarice eyed lot, if they feed their insecurities and egos too much. But at this Mormon Artists Retreat, I found that the vast majority, if not the entire congregation of this group of Mormon Artists had something else entirely in their hearts– they truly had let their religion seep in not only their art, but in their relationships as artists. And there was no better example of this kind of love that weekend than Shannon Hale and Stephenie Meyer.