–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.)

Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version
Editors: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 637
Binding: Hardbound in signatures
ISBN13: 978-0-19-529770-6
Price: $35

In II Nephi 29 Nephi pauses in the midst of an apostrophe to future readers who will reject his words to remind them of their debt to the Jews.

4 But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
5 O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people.
6 Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews?

(2 Nephi 29:4 – 6)

Nephi’s connection between hating the Jews and closing the canon is deeply intriguing, especially since Nephi speaks harshly of the Jews, of their refusal to accept his father’s revelations, of their attempts to kill his father, so harshly that he refuses to teach his people “many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations” (II Nephi 25:2).

Perhaps Nephi wrote his words to the gentiles partly to remind himself–and maybe to remind Jacob, who had said the Savior would come to the Jews because he had to die and there was “none other nation on earth [so wicked] that [they] would crucify their God” (2 Nephi 10:3)–to tone down his rhetoric, to remind his people of the Lord’s covenant with the House of Israel, which is one thing Nephi means when he uses the term Jew: “I say Jew, because I mean them from whence I came” (2 Nephi 33:8).

(Taken together with I Nephi 5:14, where Lehi tells the family he has examined the brass plates and learned they are descendants of Joseph, this passage suggests Nephi came from a culture that didn’t distinguish between the tribes. Everyone is called Judah, the largest tribe that came back from Babylon. (Not every member of the 10 tribes was lost. See Philippians 3:5, Romans 11:1, and Acts 13:21). So when Nephi uses the term Jew he means the whole House of of Israel, everyone at Jerusalem.)

Browsing the remainder table at the BYU Bookstore one day I came across a book that helped fill in the picture of how developing and setting boundaries to the Christian canon was related to forgetting who preserved the word of God in the first place. The footnotes and commentary for Willis Barnstone’s translation The New Covenant, Vol I, The Gospels and Apocalypse, read like a guided tour of the rift that developed between Jews who accepted Yeshua as Mashiach and those who didn’t, a tour of how Christians forgot their Jewish roots as Yeshua ha maschiach became Iesous the Christos.

Barnstone is very careful to identify what he calls “the voice of Rome,” passages he believes came from a desire to de-emphasize Rome’s part in Yeshua’s execution. You can see clues of the threat the Romans felt from Yeshua in passages like Loukas 23:12, where Pilate and Herod find a common enemy in Yeshua, “Herod and Pilatus became friends on that same day, though earlier they had been enemies.” Maybe the clues are vestiges of things cut from the text, but Barnstone focuses more on things like the phrase “the Jews,” which along with the Greek _Iesous_ imply that Yeshua was not a Jew.

The Prushim and all the Jews will not eat unless they wash, hand against fist, so keeping the tradition of the elders, and eat nothing from the markets unless they wash. And they keep many other traditions about washing cups and pots and copper cauldrons.
(Markos 7:3)

His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed that Yeshua was the mashiah would be barred from the synagogue.
(Yohanan 9:22)

Or at least the passages distance us from Yeshua’s Jewishness. In the first passage the Jews are _they_, and in the second people to be afraid of. One of Barnstone’s projects with the translation is to restore Yeshua’s Jewish/Aramaic voice by using the Hebrew character and place names rather than Greek transl(iter)ations. That’s a valuable service, maybe as valuable as recovering the poetry. He says at one point that Yeshua as recorded by Mattai is one of the great world poets.

I think he overstates his argument at times. Consider this comment on Yohanan 9:28, the Prushim’s words to the man born blind:

And they reviled him and said, “You are his student, but we are Mosheh’s students.

“A reference to the superiority of Yeshua’s teaching over that of Moses and, by extension, of the New Covenant over the Jewish Bible” (340).

Or his comment on Apocalypse 3:9:

I know the blasphemy
of those who say they are Jews and are not
but come out of a synagogue of Satan.

“The demonization of the Jews in the gospels persists in Apocalypse” (317).

To me the passage is about hypocrisy, just as if you said, “those who say they are Mormons and are not, but do their sealings in the temple of Satan.” But the three words synagogue of Satan are so powerful that perhaps they overshadow the rest of the verse, which may be why the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament address it in their preface, saying the notes propose that the phrase “is not against Jews at all, but is against Gentile followers of Jesus who promote Jewish practices” (xii).

Their note for John 9:28 reads:

This passage sets up a contrast between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of Moses. There is no evidence, however, that Jews referred to themselves as disciples of Moses (178).

Generally, from what I’ve read so far, the commentary in The Jewish Annotated New Testament is milder than Barnstone’s, and perhaps a bit more cautious. I particularly like the editor’s comments about how the commentators contextualize some of the more volatile statements “by showing how they are part of the exaggerated language of debate during the first century” (xi). There are a lot of passages like Yohanan 9:28 where Barnstone attributes an intent to the text that I don’t see there. And that’s the value of Barnstone’s commentary, not in giving us insight into the original intent of the gospel writers, but as a guide to how the early Christians, the people who didn’t think of themselves as Jews, reinterpreted the incidents in Iesous-nee-Yeshua’s life to blame and villify the tradition the early Christians had sprang from, far from.

One of my projects during the next few years will be to trace the passages I think were reinterpreted, and it looks like The Jewish Annotated New Testament will be invaluable in giving a sense of what the text might have meant to those first messianic Jews before or maybe after they were first called Christians at Antioch (see Acts 11:26).

The two books are valuable correctives to each other. Barnstone works a lot with the idea that the texts of the New Covenant were altered to amplify “the voice of Rome.” He seeks to diminish that voice. His work with resonate with Latter-day Saints who want to think about what Joseph Smith might have meant with his comment about corrupt and designing priests altering the scriptures.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament approaches the matter somewhat differently. My oldest son said, “Oh, giving cultural context?” when I mentioned the book to him, but others have given a puzzled or apprehensive look that says, ‘Jews don’t believe in Jesus. Is this a book that challenges our belief in his divinity and miracles?’

One can imagine the editors getting the same kinds of quizzical looks. “Many Jews are unfamiliar with, or even afraid of reading, the New Testament” (xii).

When I introduced the book to my Gospel Doctrine class at the nursing home I told the story of Chaim Potok coming to BYU in the early 1980s. Someone asked him the ritual question, “Have you read the Book of Mormon?” (He had been discussing his concept of the core-to-core culture confrontation, and the Book of Mormon is the core of our culture.)

He said he had a copy but hadn’t read it, because Jews read with a commentary and there wasn’t a commentary to guide his reading. The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament confirm that practice. The next sentence after the one I quoted above says, “Its content and genres are foreign, and they need notes to guide their reading.”

So the book gives Jews the tools to understand the New Testament and Christians the tools to understand the care and scholarship Jews bring to their study of scripture, including maps, charts, sidebar essays, diagrams, tables, glossary, cross references to Talmudic and other sources, index and nearly 200 pages of essays, starting with “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made About Early Judaism,” and including “Paul and Judaism,” “Food and Fellowship,” and “Josephus.”

The editors assure us they are not trying to convert Christians to Judaism, or Jews to Christianity–”It is very possible for the non-Christian to respect a great deal of the (very Jewish) message of much of the New Testament, without worshipping the messenger.”

That word respect is important to the editors: “As professional scholars, the authors of the annotations and essays approach the text with the respect that all religious texts deserve” (xii).

I’ll close with just two insights here. We all realize that John quotes the opening of Genesis in his gospel, but listen to the comment about Matthew’s opening: “Genealogy, Gk ‘geneseos,’ perhaps an allusion to the book of Genesis” (3).

And Luke 2:7 (since I got the book just before Christmas): “_Manger_ feeding trough; the symbolism anticipates the Last Supper (22.19). _Inn_, Luke gives no indication residents rejected the family; there may have been no room for the privacy needed for the birth” (101).

If Barnstone’s translation is the work of a scholar/poet thinking to thank the Jews, to calculate the debt we gentiles owe in gratitude, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler and their editors’ work is thinking to thank the Jews for.

Before we get too deep into “Sayso or Sense” by Eileen Gibbons Kump, allow me to quote from the sixth page?

But that night she had a dream. God was conducting priesthood meeting and Grandpa and Israel and the carpenter were on the front row, hanging on every word. God said when they came to earth, men could have their choice—sayso or sense—but they couldn’t have both because that wouldn’t be fair to the women. He called a vote and Grandpa’s hand shot up for sayso before God had finished speaking. Amy awoke, sure the choice had been unanimous. By daylight she had decided that, God approving, she had no alternative but to leave the men to their folly.

This is by far the shortest story in the book so far and I encourage you to read it now before scrolling down any further.

Eileen Gibbons Kump is the first author we’ve read whose name I don’t think  I recognize. I don’t know anything of her bibliography and I’m curious because this story has a decidedly feminist bent and I wonder if this is a recurring theme or not.

The story succeeded in getting me to want to yell at and possibly strike the pov’s husband and father-in-law (if the story had been any longer than it was, this might have become unbearable). The way her father-in-law takes over the building of the house and, through his superior wisdom, manages to screw everything up, is horribly frustrating, and imagining living the rest of my life in this wrongly made house just because the patriarch knew better  frustrated me plenty.

I was reminded of what Zelophehad’s Daughters call the Chicken Patriarchy and I was left wondering how well this story approximates the 2012 experience of being a Mormon woman. Or, on the other hand, if the notion of maintaining sense when denied sayso is exactly what Chicken Patriarchy is all about.

(I’ll have to see if I can get some of the ZDs over here to comment.)

In the meantime, you’ve read “Sayso and Sense” now. What do you think?

On my post yesterday on this story, I claimed a certain ambivalence re the story’s attempts and affectations. Lee Allred claims to have cracked the lock and opened to story. And, frankly, he makes a compelling case. His argument (complete with diagram) appears below. (The only changes I made were the addition of hyperlinks.)

Tell him what you think.

========================================================

Lewis Horne’s Bimetrical Pinwheel

(Note: I may have an unfair advantage in reading Horne’s story.

Utah’s Uintah Basin was the last area opened for homesteading in the lower 48 states (1905). My grandfather was one of the original homesteaders (arriving in the then remote area by wagon). The senior citizens in the ward I attended in school were original pioneers of the area. There was a small cave on my uncle’s place, about the size of a living room and tall enough for a twelve-year old to stand up straight in that my cousins had dragged several old school desks (from the original one room schoolhouse) into; we played “school” in there often during my summer visits, sitting on those wrought iron and hardwood desks, dipping imaginary quills in the inkholders.

There is little effective difference between what Horne describes in the first half of the story of WWII rural Arizona and the economically backward and isolated Uintah Basin of the 60s/early 70s.)

Horne’s story is an amazing tour de force, not only for the rural Arizona ambience I can readily identify with, but for the superb structure of the piece.

1) THE EPITAPH

Luisa Perkins was quite correct; Thom Gunn’s “My Sad Captains” is very much a key to understanding “The People Who Were Not There.” Horne would have been in his late twenties/early thirties when Gunn relocated from the UK to San Francisco in the 60s and penned Captains. I suspect Gunn (or the poem at least) was a strong influence in Horne’s growth as a writer.

Much of the story reads like a response/enactment of Captains. Except Gunn’s poem puts a widening distance and deepening withdrawal of influence between the dead (those who are no longer here) and the living, while Horne’s treatment is a very Mormon-centric view of the tangled, unbreakable interactive bonds between mortality and (those who are not here) on both sides of the veil (pre-mortal and post-mortal).

Gunn closes “My Sad Captains” with the following stanza:

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

Aside from a brief tweak mentioning the D.C. monuments lighted by hard flame-fed energy, like the stars, Horne’s those who are no longer here are diametric opposites of Gunns.

2) THE STORY STRUCTURE DIAGRAMMED

I’m one of those who plots stories visually, either by storyboarding or abstract diagramming. Reading through Horne’s story gives one a sense that it seems meticulously structured. Diagramming shows a certain amount of genius in Horne’s structure.

The story is perfectly biometrical – the Arizona portion and the Richmond airport/airplane portion are mirror images of each other, flipped.

The Narrator is the center of an ever-expanding pinwheel of the past impinging on the present. The Narrator is connected to the present by Those Who Are Here who are themselves connected to the past (locale and people) by Those Who Are Not Here. The exact opposite of Gunn’s poem (”They remind me, distant now”): in Gunn’s poem, the dead and gone exert less and less influence as the poem progresses; in Horne’s story, the gone exert ever more and more influence.

Horne follows two branches of the pinwheel in each of his two story halves. The Arizona “top half” extends through grandfathers but strongly suggests further links up the chain past them. The Richmond “bottom half” extends through infant children (again suggesting further links). Horne even suggests another pinwheel branch, mentioned, but not examined, in each half: the pre-farm life in the Arizona portion; the Washington monument historical past in the Richmond section. These brief mentions suggest hundreds of more pinwheel branches.

Horne did something amazing, I think. He structured “The People Who Were Not There” as a national market mainstream literary story, which is how it reads on the surface, complete to the Gunn epigram. But at its deeper level it’s a wicked subversive Mormon-worldview direct refutation of what it appears to be. A very ambitious and accomplished story!

In 2010 I read 39 books (yikes! that was not very many!), 12 of which were by Mormon authors. In 2011 I read only 47 books– still short of my “book a week” goal–13 of which were books by Mormon authors. Many of the titles were YA titles because those are the most readily available, but I did manage to buy a few and get my local library to buy a few. Also, I have to say I am a big fan of my ereader and I am excited by the number of LDS/Mormon books available in e-formats. I was not pleased with Deseret Book and difficulty I’ve had with ebooks from their site (why, oh why!, couldn’t they just sell some that are kindle compatible??), but Zarahemla Books has done an awesome job offering a great array of ebooks (see here for Kindle compatible books and here for other eformats). Getting those books for those prices is a steal. Peculiar Pages also does a great job making their anthologies available in eformats. Parables Publishing is even starting to offer some of their titles. Forgive the infomercial tone to this next comment but, seriously, being an avid Mormon reader has never been easier (or cheaper)!

Anyway, on to the rankings:

Books worth buying:
*Believing Christ and Following Christ by Stephen E. Robinson (I read both these devotional books in 2010–did I mention it was a turbulent year?– and was greatly comforted by them. Believing Christ didn’t have the same power it did when I was a teenager [I'm old enough to be hip to the theological fallacies], but Following Christ had a lot of what I needed to hear, especially the chapter that enumerates and blasts Mormon cultural pitfalls.)

*In the Company of Angels by Dave Farland (Read my review here)

*Broken Things to Mend by Jeffrey R. Holland (Elder Holland is an amazing thinker and speaker and, since I was feeling particularly broken for awhile there, this collection of his conference talks was amazing. So worth the money.)

*Standing on the Promises series by Darius Gray and Magaret Blair Young. (I loved these books. Yes they fall prey to some of the oversimplifying necessary in historical fiction, but overall the important stories of early black Mormons is presented in an artistically and emotionally satisfying manner. Also, you can tell there is a lot of research to back up what Gray and Young wrote. And they are now available for the Kindle! Go read them!!)

*Rift by Todd Robert Petersen (This book deserves all the praise and awards it’s gotten. If you haven’t read this, you are seriously missing out! Read my interview with Petersen for more on his books.)

*Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby. (I went to school with a relative of Kirby’s and was interested in checking out his work. Icefall was a great place to start. I bought it for my Kindle and read it in less than two days. I predict Kirby to be a rising star in the YA field.)

*Fire in the Pasture edited by Tyler Chadwick. (I haven’t actually read every poem in this large anthology, but what I have read I love. A truly surprising experience awaits you!)

*Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction edited by Angela Hallstrom. (There were pieces of this book that I LOVED. There were also pieces I didn’t like, which is to be expected from an anthology of this sort, but even the stories I didn’t like were still well-done.)

*What of the Night by Stephen Carter (I had no idea what I was getting into when I bought this one, but I loved it. Excellent writing in a beautiful memoir.)

* Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon Hale (This is an excellent and fun twist on a classic tale.)

*He Restoreth My Soul by Donald L. Hilton (This is a non-fiction book about pornography addiction and its effects on the body and spirit. It’s self-published so it has more than a few editing errors, but it is worth buying and reading because of the information it contains.)

Books worth inter-library loaning:

*The FOB Bible edited by Eric Jepson (Okay, the only reason this book isn’t in the must-own category is because I don’t want it on my shelf for my children to stumble across. There would be waaaaay to many uncomfortable questions. That said, this is an amazing book and I am SO glad I have it on my Kindle because I have actually read several of the stories more than once. So, buy this one, but be aware that some of the content with probably be uncomfortable–not bad, but uncomfortable.)

* The Year of the Boar by Anneke Majors (This one is actually well worth the digital price. Great book. Read my review here!)

* The Flight and the Nest by Carol Lynn Pearson (this book is like the Mormon answer to The Feminine Mystique. Worth reading but not worth buying unless you are very interested in Mormon cultural history.)

*Eternal Companions by Douglas E. Brinley (Someone gave my husband and I this book as a wedding gift. Since we were coming up on our ten year anniversary I thought I’d read it. It’s not bad, but it is a self-help book. It had some good info with only a little bit of the insufferable tone that is the bane of this genre. There were a couple chapters, though, that were really awesome: the one about the way Mormon talk about sex and marriage and the impact that kind of language has on our culture and the chapter about how all relationships follow the creation-fall-atonement pattern.)

*Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale (I liked this one and I was glad I read it, but it didn’t blow my mind enough to make me wish I owned it.)

Books worth reading if someone hands them to you:

*Pillar of Light by Gerald Lund (This first book in The Work and the Glory series failed for me. It’s funny because a friend gave it to me and I read it and then promptly dropped it back on my bedside table where I keep all my to-read books. I picked it up a few months later and couldn’t remember the storyline or the characters names. I concluded I must not have read it, so I read it again realizing about 2/3 of the way through that I had already read it but just didn’t find it worth remembering. Ouch!)

*The Writing on the Wall by Dean Hughes (Much like _Pillar of Light_ this book failed to make an impression on me. I guess this genre just isn’t for me?)

*Isabelle Webb: Legend of the Jewel by Nancy Allen (Not my thing. This book is a fairly good example of mainstream LDS lit. It doesn’t do much for me.)

* Faith of our Fathers: A House Divided by Nancy Campbell. (Another forgettable piece of LDS historical fiction. This was reasonably well-done, but I just felt like the LDS angle was super-imposed on the story and it really bugged me.)

*The Silence of God by Gale Sears (Again, Mormon historical fiction. I just wanted this book to be actual historical fiction–but it’s more of a period romance novel. I wanted there to be more information and facts about the people it was supposed to be based on, but the author basically created them out of whole cloth.)

What books did you read this year? Which would you recommend?

Our first show at the OBT is called Jinn and Other Myths. These three short plays are together by a common thread of mythology, and united by a common multimedia approach:

The mystical Jinn are locked in bottles and their fates are in the hands of a woman named Calypso– but will she consider them too dangerous to release?

Kai has been trapped by the dangerous Snow Queen, and only his childhood friend Gerda can save him… but will Kai want to be saved?

A woman finds herself on a boat, accompanied by a mysterious stranger. Will she be able to accept the new existence put before her, or will her old life be too tempting to give up?

Performances begin at 7 pm. The Off Broadway Theatre is located at 272 South Main Street, Salt Lake City. Tickets are $16 for general audiences, and $12 for students and seniors. Tickets can be purchased at theobt.org or by calling (801)355-4628. Also here’s our 2012 Salt Lake Series at the OBT, for those interested.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

This will probably come as a (not) startling confession, but I am one of those writers. The one who has a million ideas that most likely have merit but is eternally frustrated by her inability to do those ideas justice. Ira Glass, you have offered me some true comfort. I’m glad to know that every writer is one of those writers. And I know that the solution to that problem is work, but I strongly feel that I have taken myself as far as I can go on my own, so what now?

I think in my more naive writing years I believed that editors would see my potential and guide me into that nebulous sweet spot of writerly Shangri-la. But the truth is editors don’t want to do that. Editors are busy people. They are strapped for time and money. Especially in the Mormon market where most of them work and publish not to make a profit (although, I’m sure they dream about it) but out of the goodness of their hearts and their commitment to our cultural heritage.

I think a lot of folks solve this problem with grad school. But since we are all MFAs (remember when Wm blogged about that? Man, that was a rocking discussion.), I wonder if grad school would actually fill that need or if an MFA program would just be more professors ardently trying to make me agree with, accept, and parrot back their worldviews. Because, well, professors are strapped for time and money too–publish or perish, natch.

Another option that occurs to me is a writer’s group, but, while the Boulder area has many writer’s groups fall into one of two categories:”audition only” groups or a bunch of retirees writing their memoirs for their future grandchildren. I’m not knocking either group–obviously they have found what works for them–but I don’t think I have the chops to make it in an audition group at this point (they come across as rather snarky on their website) and I’m not a retiree writing memoirs for grandchildren. For me the writer’s group has proved depressingly elusive.

I imagine that many of my co-bloggers (Wm, Patricia, Th. and Tyler especially), and many of the AMV readers!, are very tolerant of this phase in my writing. You all hold no illusions about my abilities–which I actually find quite freeing–and have been kind in helping me out in small ways. I’ve also had some great eye-opening experiences with editors at Irreantum, Segullah, and Dialogue. But, again, I know how busy you all are and I hate to impose. (And I hate to embarrass myself, but the relationship between fear and my writing process is really the subject for another post entirely! *cue self-loathing*)

So that leads me to what I want to know: How do you push through it? What do you draw on to increase your abilities and finesse your writing? How do you become the writer you dream of being?

I know, I know. I’ve already waxed hyperbolic about this book and recently even. It’s easy to do. Who can question that this book Tyler Chadwick has edited is of enormous cultural significance? It’s astonishing how many excellent poets he found and convinced to participate.

But here’s the thing. Even though I saw most of the emails he received during his marathon efforts, even though I even read some of the poems before the collection was complied (but not many; I didn’t want to influence the editorial decisions unduly), even though the whole book was my idea, I had no idea how good the final product would be.

I have on my nightstand now a galley proof of Fire in the Pasture and I get lost in it every night. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of stellar poems from dozens of poets. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so enraptured with a poetry collection before — it’s not something that happens to me much.

But this collection is not just important. This collection is good to read.

I wish there were a way to show you. Soon we’ll have a free sample for you to download, but I just don’t know how it can compare the with overwhelming pleasures of holding this massive paper tome filled with the best Mormon poetry of the last decade.

I want to apologize for this self-promotional post, but I can’t. I don’t feel bad at all. Believe me when I say you need this book.

]]> http://www.motleyvision.org/2011/fire-in-the-pasture/feed/ 2 http://www.motleyvision.org/2011/zion-theatre-company-presents-_the-opposing-wheel_/ http://www.motleyvision.org/2011/zion-theatre-company-presents-_the-opposing-wheel_/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:45:03 +0000 Mahonri Stewart http://www.motleyvision.org/?p=6053

PRESS RELEASE:

Zion Theatre Company Presents The Opposing Wheel

Zion Theatre Company will be presenting national award winning playwright Mahonri Stewart’s new play The Opposing Wheel on September 2, 3, 5, 9 and 10 at 8pm, at the Castle Outdoor Amphitheatre, 1300 East Center Street (near Seven Peaks, above the State Hospital).

The Opposing Wheel is a play where the modern meets the medieval, as 21^st century adventurers encounter a woman named Magdalena Devonshire trapped in a castle by an ancient enchantment. As the story progresses, they encounter devils, enchantresses, and figures of legend. The play is a funny, romantic, and redemptive fantasy—a romp through myth, miracle and magic. Playwright Stewart said that the influences that inspired the play were numerous, “There’s the obvious classical influences in a play dealing with these kinds of legends—Arthurian mythology, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry, pre-Raphaelite art. But then there are other inspirations I’ve incorporated, like C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and even really modern things like the recent run of Doctor Who on BBC. And like nearly all my plays, there’s a strong spiritual subtext.”

The director of the play Heather Jones was surprised at first by the seemingly conflicting elements that were matched together in the  play, “It’s what would happen if Dr. Who, Indiana Jones, and Captain Malcolm Reynolds got together to tell a tale. I’m going to be honest – the first time I read this script I thought, ‘What is Mahonri thinking?’ A beautiful pagan locked in a tower, a returned missionary, an odd looking Brit with a cup, [characters reminiscent of] ‘Screwtape’ and ‘Wormwood’, a very persuasive feminist, and a treasure hunt. But nothing really turns out the way you expect. It’s pretty difficult to figure out who the real heroes are because everyone has goodness and everyone has flaws. It’s a whole new reality that isn’t so hard to believe if you allow yourself to consider all the possibilities. And even if you don’t, it’s still an amusing and touching, modern fairy tale.”

The actors within the play mentioned how much they enjoy the characters in the play. Jyllian Petrie, who plays Magdalena “Maggie” Devonshire said, “I really enjoy playing Maggie, she’s not just your everyday, ordinary, female, romantic lead. She’s strong, spunky, fun, and adventurous, she also doesn’t just sit back and watch a fight, she’s ready to jump in and protect the ones she loves. Her character has so much depth to her, she has so much courage for what she’s been through.  She’s ready to break free from her loneliness, see the world, and fall in love.”

One of the themes that crops up throughout the play deals with the sometimes tense relationship between men and women. Modern ideas like feminism come in direct conflict with medieval ideas like chivalry. Morgan le Fey, perhaps the character who is the strongest proponent of women’s issues in the play, is played by Jamie Denison. Denison had this to say about Stewart’s handling of women’s issues and female characters, “Something I love about this show is the fact that the writer has made all the women so strong, there is not one weak woman in the whole show, even the small parts are so well done. It is something that is missing from the theatre world today and I’m happy that Stewart has made it a point to make such strong women characters in all of his shows.”

Tickets for the show are $12 for general public and $10 for students, educators, seniors, and veterans. Tickets can be purchased or reserved at www.ziontheatrecompany.com, or bought at the door.

My husband and I recently celebrated our tenth anniversary by going on a Big Date. We drove the hour and a half to the Denver temple and then went out to dinner. It was nice (and disorienting to be away from our kids for five whole hours!). And do you know what made it even nicer? Surprisingly, a trip into Deseret Book for a little Mormon kitsch. What we ended up buying was like, well, a godsend. See, we’ve been working on teaching our kids about tithing, saving, and spending and other money matters. I can vividly remember a black, white, and gold three part cardboard bank to hold the three different kinds of money. I used that thing until I was 16 and old enough for a bank account. When we started teaching our kids I tried making them a bank out of cardboard. Then I tried to make one out of plastic containers. Then I tried plastic, cardboard, and duct tape. At one point there were even very small mason jars involved. That was when I realized I was trying to reinvent the wheel.

I feel the need to stop here and mention that I have mixed feelings toward Deseret Book. There have been times I have walked in and found exactly what I looked for and been extremely grateful for the products they provide. (”I am a Child of God” stickers = awesome. As do the cheap scripture marking kits for kids.) Then there are other times where all I can do is cringe because of the mixed messages. (True story: one particularly difficult day I made the decision to take my children to the temple grounds in an effort to feel the Spirit and try to renew my connection with the Lord. It was a little chilly so the kiddos and I stopped at Deseret Book for a Lion House cinnamon roll. The kids spent the whole time in DB in front of a TV that was playing Disney’s Aladdin–you know the part where Jasmine is in the extra skanky red outfit and Jafar is a giant snake trying to kill her? It was that part. Um, Disney, Freud called, he wants to thank you. . . Suffice it to say, DB did a fair amount that day to distract from the spiritual experience I was aiming for.) But lately, as a Primary and Cub Scout leader, I’ve found myself checking out their website to find out what kind of fun stuff is available for the kiddos. I’m often surprised by how many things I like.

Anyway, on our anniversary, I found the tithing banks. Not the exact ones from my childhood but 3 or 4 different kinds that suited each of my different kids. My husband and I were both surprised and grateful. That product would make things so much easier! The banks even came with little lock and keys, which my kids played with endlessly–until they lost them.

The other thing we found? An “Our Family Rules” wall hanging. When I picked it up my husband asked if it had been personalized for our family. The answer was no; someone just knows what it’s like to have more than one or two kids and put those feelings into words.

The piece de resistance? A parenting book! I’m a sucker for parenting books and read quite a lot of them, but my main complaint is that the techniques are almost always aimed at families with one or two children. The techniques worked great until I had more kids than hands. Since then I’ve been looking for some more practical advice. Enter Marilee Boyack’s The Parenting Breakthrough. Not all the ideas have worked for my family, but some of them have made a real difference and I recommend this book to a lot of people.

Now, I do have quibbles with each of these pieces. The stereotypes on the tithing banks bother me a bit. (What? Girls can only earn money by babysitting and they all want to be ballerinas? And why are they all blond? And boys can only mow lawns??) The style of the wall hanging is a little more Stampin’ Up!/country chic than I usually go for. And Merilee Boyack’s tone is the epitome of that strange Relief Society rhetoric that is both self-defeating and self-aggrandizing. But overall each of these items filled a need in my family. (When my kids are laying into each other I point to the rules and remind them, “A little forgiveness goes a long way!” ‘Nough said. And, even if I don’t like her tone, when it comes to figuring out who sits where at the dinner table without arguing Boyack’s method is seamless.) And it’s a good thing.

So, the long and the short of it is this: I own Mormon kitsch. And I’m not sorry.

How about you? What cheesy Mormon products work for your family? Which ones do you own and proudly display? Which ones are cringeworthy?