And They Were Not Ashamed is the “new’ Mormon sex book because it was published more recently than the one that was floating around when I got married. The one people were giving out as wedding gifts when my DH and I celebrated our nuptials was by Stephen E. Lamb and Douglas E. Brinely. (Tangential question: Why do strangers give newlyweds books about sex? Really, why? Are you so afraid my parents never brought it up that you feel compelled to help out? I just don’t get that.) We received not one but two copies of the hard, silver-jacketed tome with the open-yet-frozen-in-their-separation lilies and I read it–out of curiosity and because all my unmarried friends wanted to know what was in it. Although it was full of useful information, I was disappointed to find that it was pretty much the opposite of its subject matter: cold, clinical, boring. This was how people who believe sex is a gift from God talk about it?

And They Were Not Ashamed was originally published in March of 2004 and went into a second printing in November of that same year. From what I understand it is now in its fifth printing and word of mouth keeps this book moving. You can even get it as an audio book. (Um, awkward?) My own sister called me and told me she was reading it and sending it to me so we could talk about. The last book she did that with? Khaled Hosseini’s The Kiterunner.

So why is this book a big deal? Four words: The Good Girl Syndrome or “the deeply internalized feelings and attitudes that rigidly emphasize only the negatives associated with sexuality” (2). Brotherson hits all the usual discussion points like the commonality of sexual dissatisfaction, physiology lessons, and relationship tips, but before all that she details the fairly common, and perhaps mainly LDS, “Good Girl” mindset: Sex is bad. No matter what. In any circumstance. Except for maybe procreation. And it is up to the girls to keep men in check. (Because all women are meant to stay as innocent as girls while boys turn into men and do whatever they want.) Brotherson’s entire book, even the title in its reference to Adam and Eve, argues passionately against those false and debilitating ideas.

I can see where Brotherson is coming from. I was raised by two well-meaning LDS parents who wanted to teach their kids to CTR about “intimacy.” My mother, a nurse and prenatal educator, took me to class with her so I had plenty of technical information on intercourse and its consequences. My Young Women leaders gave the yearly lesson on the pretzel versus the chocolate (see also: the licked cupcake). My dad taught family home evening lessons on chastity so many times he developed a pamphlet that he handed out to any teenager who walked in the house. The message was the same everywhere I looked: It’s bad. It’s dangerous. And whatever it was it wasn’t sex-y. Only dirty and low people talked about it like that. In fact, my friends and I preferred to spell it out rather than say it. And even then we couldn’t own the word. We spelled it s-e-c-k-s.

One rocky adolescence later, I went to college and a visiting professor asked me to explain May Swenson’s “Bleeding” and why straight people think it’s about sex. My newly-wed brain fritzed. I blushed. I coughed. I hemmed. I hawed. And I punted the question off on my forty-something, non-LDS motherly group partner. While I worked on recovering my breath I realized something: If I was going to survive as a writer, as an artist, I needed to figure out how to talk about sex in an upfront way. The example set by that specific professor seemed too disrespectful to me, as did many of the approaches my fellow students took. I myself probably crossed a couple lines while figuring out how to reconcile the “worldly” way of sex and the gospel way. Confronting the beast that is human sexuality was difficult for this Good Girl but I did it. The looks I get at Relief Society book club discussions tell me that many other women haven’t that yet. I probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t forced to.

Keeping this in mind, how sex is handled in an LDS/Mormon work of art can make or break it. Think about how Mormons handle movies. Violence? The most orthodox might turn away but most don’t even flinch. Sex? Mormons walk out of the theater or turn off the TV. It’s similar for books. If it’s violent, well, that’s part of life. If it’s dirty, well, it’s trash.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily knocking this approach. I think it’s important to draw lines and boundaries and say there are places we are not willing to go. I think it’s important to respect where other people draw their lines. But I also think it’s important to understand why we are drawing those lines where we are drawing them. Are we drawing them based on true principles or culturally-filtered emotional responses to those principles?

Take, as one example, Heather Moore’s . Moore makes several interpretative changes to the Abinadi story, the biggest of which is that Abinadi is a young man deeply in love. The object of his affection: Raquel, the daughter of one of King Noah’s priests. Moore works hard to make Raquel a likable character that LDS readers will identify with. She is beautiful, smart, kind, spunky; cut out of the same mold as the female protagonists in books by Rachel Anne Nunes and Anita Stansfield.

Raquel’s big character-developing moment comes when her father is forced to offer her up to be one of King Noah’s concubines. Raquel, in all her spunky splendor, fights her way out of Noah’s lustful clutches and into Abinadi’s righteous, loving arms, thereby putting everyone she loves (her family, a young scout named Ben, and Abinadi’s own mother) in mortal danger. It is this moment that makes her a heroine.

Raquel, in many ways, is the stereotypical Good Girl. (She worries incessantly about the fact that Noah kissed her before she fought back and she and Abinadi don’t kiss until their wedding day.) The death of everyone she loves and her own death are a small price to pay for her sexual purity. Similar story lines exist in Dean Hughes’ Children of the Promise series and Gerald Lund’s Kingdom and the Crown series. What a young woman is willing to sacrifice for her virtue is emblematic of her righteousness.

Raquel’s foil is the also beautiful but already defiled Maia. Maia is the newest of King Noah’s wives and has dutifully submitted to marriage to a most despicable man to save her family and herself. Maia suffers physical abuse and risks her life to save Raquel but is not a heroine until she escapes the castle–again, at her own peril–and admits her true love for the newly repented Alma. Moore has stated that the sequel to Abinadi will be a book about Alma, so the jury is still out on Maia’s character. How she will fare as a licked cupcake remains to be seen. But one message is clear: the true test of a girl’s worth is in how much she is willing to sacrifice for her virtue. No other factor weighs as heavily–not even sacrificing herself for her family’s safety.

Does this sound like doctrine? It’s not something I’ve ever read in scripture or heard over the pulpit. There are, however, plenty of sources that point to the opposite. Good girls can enjoy sex. (For the doctrinal validity of that statement read And They Were Not Ashamed. Brotherson has all sorts of sources.) Victims of sexual abuse can find healing and don’t need to sacrifice everything they hold dear to get it. Virtue is important, but for a lot of reasons that are bigger and more complicated than pamphlets or cupcakes or morality tales. What would happen if our art represented those things instead of tired, polarizing oppositions?

The Good Girl Syndrome is heavily embedded in our culture, it’s nearly institutionalized on a ward level, and seems to be a real sticking point with people who have left the Church. (I’m not linking to anyone because I don’t want to throw readers into a hornet’s nest. But if you really want to know just google “licked cupcake.”) So-called ex-mo’s abhor the emotional and sexual frustration it causes. On the flip side, conservative Mormon culture seems to take a lot of comfort from the clear lines the Good Girl mindset draws.

The arts, naturally, are where those extremes collide and duke it out. I firmly believe the Good Girl syndrome is one reason why Twilight was so successful (and provocative) among Mormon women. Those books manage to affirm both the expression, and enjoyment, of female sexuality and the importance of preserving a girl’s virtue. Maybe it’s also part of the reason why LDS romances are such a big part of the market. All those Good Girls are looking for something to guide them from their no man’s land to the sexual reciprocity God meant for couples to have.

Impressed that the best place to start something is usually (though not always) the beginning, I linked to “Volume 01, Number 1, Spring 1966,” then to “Contents.” Having embraced Eugene and his piercing insights and rhetoric after finding “Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects” on the Mormon Literature Database a few months earlier, I was especially drawn to his short essay, “The Possibility of Dialogue,” and to his poem, “The Firegiver.” Deciding it best to begin at the end this time, I’d linked to the poem, read it, and laughed, first off, at the interplay it illustrates between a curious and gifted child and the all-knowing, merciful, and just Parent, Muse, and Mentor he seeks to please; then at how perfectly his language captured (and still captures) the subtle tugs and pulls of my own nascent intellectual discipleship.

From line one in this psalm, Eugene leaves no doubt as to whom he’s speaking and why: “God,” he says, “forgive my pen its trespass, / And I forgive thee the sweet burning / That drives it on through thy dominion.” Approaching his Creator through this playfully candid revision of Christ’s statement that “if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matt. 6:14), he highlights not just the often transgressive efforts we exert in our yearning for an eternal Parent’s approval, but the desire we all feel compelled towards at times to faithfully bargain with God while following the path of duty, talent, and love into the depths of consecration. Abraham exercised this entitlement when he negotiated with Jehovah for the sake of any saints left in Sodom, as did Jacob when he wrestled God’s messenger for a blessing and was afterwards renamed Israel because, in the messenger’s words, “as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Gen. 32:28). Jacob’s strength and persistence thus became the ecclesiastical and political might of Israel, God’s covenant nation.

Likewise, when Mahonri Moriancumer approached God with the “sixteen small stones[,] […] white and clear” (Ether 3:1), that he’d crafted from a rock, he acknowledged at once his weakness and God’s power while very specifically and persuasively laying his case as to why these stones were needed for the Jaredites’ journey across the sea. Then there’s Joseph Smith who, after several dark months in Liberty Jail, recapitulated his desperate pleas for grace in a direct and influential prayer for God’s power to be extended in favor of his afflicted saints. And finally we have Christ, the Great Mediator who begged for the weight of our collective burdens to be lifted from his soul before ultimately submitting his will to the Father’s, earning himself the power and the right to save this round of Creation from the demands of justice. Only through his submission and his determined pleading in our behalf is it even possible for us to come to Elohim with our desires in hand.

Elsewhere Eugene borrows from this prophetic legacy when he relates how he, as the president of a sprawling branch of Saints, had laid his hands on his family’s unresponsive Chevrolet and, in his words, while “explaining to the Lord that I was about his work, that my branch needed me, and I needed some extraordinary help to get there,” blessed that it would perform so he could, too. Drawing from these experiences when he’d been able to petition God for help in the seemingly minute details of mortality (why should God, after all, really care about a dying Chevy?), he concludes that such opportunities—the times when our needs can only be met by a miracle—“come often, and the Lord’s response forms a bright thread in the texture of gospel living.” Eugene turns this thread through his poetry and prose as a subtle witness that God can be found in the details of a life and that, even without “fully understand[ing] why or how” God does what he does, as we “continue to ask” and then “acknowledge the Lord’s hand in all things,” he rewards our question with an increased measure of faith and a greater understanding of his infinite character and the intimate touch of his love.

He conceives this petitioner’s heritage further in “The Firegiver” with his obvious allusion to Prometheus, that crafty Greek titan who took fire from Zeus’ hollow reed to share with the mortals. Though he doomed himself to eternal punishment with this defiant act of compassion, his agency ultimately saved humankind from destruction at the gods’ hands, giving them, by Aeschylus’ account, a “measureless resource” of life and inspiration, the infinitely (re)generative muse “of all arts,” a mediatory presence through and with which they might discern and embrace the wonder of their created and creative universe and beyond.

Reading thus, I can’t help but connect Prometheus and his gift with the cherubim given a flaming sword and commissioned “to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24). Wielding an instrument representative of the purifying, illuminating, and separating power of God’s Word, these sentinels guard the tree against the filthiness of sin; they protect those who would approach the tree in ignorance or willful disregard of the rules governing such a celestial road lest these should partake of the fruit and stay forever cursed by sin; and they maintain the path for those ready with “the key words, the signs and tokens” (Journal of Discourses 2:31) required for admittance into the fullness of God’s glory, teaching and testing such individuals before allowing them to advance to the throne of Deity. However tenuous this association and however opposite its characters might seem—Prometheus challenged the gods by offering their power to humanity while the cherubim retain the tool and power given them by God as they act under His direction—each culturally distinct fire-bearer gives more than just heat and illumination to their patrons. They transmit, sustain, and protect the glory of the heavens in and through the living conduit of language, as typified by the pen, which, in this case, is not mightier than but analogous with the sword.

Such a correlation suggests that the guardians and conveyors of God’s holiness are not just the divinely-placed cherubs, but ultimately all those given charge over the word and the Word, either through the laying on of hands or through the incessant and undeniable call of vocation: the prophets and seers, priests and teachers, poets and critics, storytellers and storymakers, soothsayers and truthsayers of Zion. Affiliated thus with the Holy Order of God, either through an official setting apart or an act of self ordination, these wordsmiths essentially come to us “in a manner that thereby [we] […] might know in what manner to look […] to [the] […] Son for redemption” (Alma 13:2). In other words, their mediatory deeds function to one degree or another as types for the Atonement and presence of Christ, ultimately serving to draw people from the comfort of established ideas into new psychological, philosophical, and spiritual trajectories and marrying Self to Other (especially to God) through the mind- and soul-expanding acts of language.

Through his poetic entreaty and elsewhere in his writings on Mormon culture and theology, Eugene assumes this role of prophet and creator, mediator and seer, uniting elements from his literary and religious traditions in ways that illuminate the saving principles of a life lived “to serve […] [God] wittily, in the tangle” of one’s mind and that breathe life into the Mormon scholar’s struggle to engage the gospel with both heart and mind, to be faithful to both God and their intellectual facility. Eugene once described this intellectual gift as something that comes

from the Lord [and] that makes you delight in ideas, alive to the life that goes on in your mind as well as outside it, that makes you question set forms and conventional wisdom to see if they really are truth or only habit, whether they endure because right or merely because of fear or sloth; […] the gift […] that makes you curious about why as well as how, anxious to serve him by being creative as well as obedient.

In “The Firegiver” he acknowledges this divinely-ordained burden, recognizing that, as a self-ordained artist endowed with a keen intellect, an affinity for words, and an insatiable drive to explore and understand the range of God’s “dominion” in his personal quest for enduring knowledge, he has the obligation and the opportunity to develop and employ his talents in service to others and knows that God is bound, as an omniscient and eternally just Being and the ultimate Source of the artist’s passion, to hold him to as well as to help him carry that yoke. Firm in this awareness, he can confidently ask God to “Indulge the hand that reaches into flame,” exercising faith that the Creator will somehow gratify and make a place for the mind (of which the pen is merely an instrument of expression) that probes the creative yet potentially destructive “burning” of the soul even as it moves to synthesize “shapes of love, […] [God’s] face, or being / itself […] in its [avaricious] question.”

From what I’m able to know of Eugene through our limited textual interaction, I’m convinced he understood that such risk—both to reach and to ask—is necessary as the fully-engaged disciple seeks to explore and express the depths of their unique and independent selfhood and, in so doing, to commune with God, the Eternal Self whose agency propagates and grooms to potential other eternal selves. Through this risk, the artist and the man seems to have weighed and counterweighed the essential paradoxes of existence against his own being: of love—its sources, shapes, and possibilities; of life, as lived in a community and in the marrow of one’s soul; of the breadth and depth of God’s character and his relation to his universe, especially with us personally and as comes through his institutionalized Priesthood. Moving to prove these contraries in the deeply personal and at times mischievous dialogue that inhabits and informs his work (including “The Firegiver”) and the tragic depths of his (for us) too short venture through mortality, he prompts us to read God, his kingdom, and his saints through the lens of reasoned faith. He moves us to progress into that dialogue with our deepest selves and with God that will ultimately lead us through the principles and ordinances of his gospel into at-one-ment with him and into the fullness of our being as potential heirs to Eternal life, a dynamic condition, as Joseph Smith taught, that we “have got to learn […] the same as all Gods have done before [us] […], namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation.”

And so, compelled in part by a passion for language and some prodding from those who’ve come before me (like Eugene), I move from one small fire to another, hoping not to get burned. And if I do, hoping that God will “suffer my searching” because I’m doing it in my stumbling effort to become more like him. And what Parent can deny such adoration?

(This is an ever-so-slightly revised version of this.)

Title: Abraham’s Purgatory

Author: B. G. Christensen

Publication Info: June 2009, The FOB Bible

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Theric writes: “.

Though I’m adding this story from Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible last, it is, in my opinion, the best entry for the SSF sweepstakes. This story has been published in other forms elsewhere before and has always engendered debate. It’s not a long read, but it challenges the reader and requires us to take sides. Highly recommended for SSF.”

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

So I hear tell that BYU is starting an MFA in Creative Writing. My only real wonderment is why it took so long. It’s a trendy program to have and BYU, one would think, should have a vested interest in flooding the earth with good writers. This is self-evident.

Furthermore, I am hopeful that this will result in writers being treated with the same slavish love and devotion that lawyers and MBAs receive. I’m wondering if the economic crisis and Tim Flanigan might be making them rethink their institutional preference for those professions and start giving writers a shot. Surely this is the underlying message behind the new MFA program: Perhaps artists aren’t that dangerous after all. (Comparatively.)

Given this likelihood, I expect that we will see BYU’s famous networking flip into overdrive in order to give studying and graduating writers the same sort of advantages that studying and graduating lawyers and MBAs have long recieved.

For instance, adapting slightly from the Marriott School’s internship rules, we should look forward to these kinds of policies for MFA interns:

The [Card] School Internship Office provides academic credit for [writing] internships that meet the following requirements:

1. The internship must be a good [writing-]related work experience;
2. The intern must be given [writing] projects that require higher level [creative] skills;
3. Interns must have an [editor] supervisor to train, mentor, and evaluate them;
4. Interns must [write] at least 45 hours for every credit hour they are taking, i.e., 90 work hours for two credit hours, 135 work hours for three credit hours.

I’m getting pretty excited now, actually. Just as the Marriott School is getting highly ranked and having great luck selling their gazillions of MBA candidates, the MFA program should be able to place its much fewer students quite easily in novel-writing positions. And upon graduation, I imagine they can match Marriott’s numbers as well (note that I couldn’t find these numbers for MBAs, so I’m substituting MAccs):

So 97% of BYU MFAs with novel contracts at graduation and 99% within three months. With an average advance on royalties of–let’s be realistic–$50,000 even. Not bad at all. Must be all those internships paying off.

But let’s stop travelling down this road now, pleasant as the view may be, and admit that the real reason to get an MFA is to teach in an MFA program. As far as internships go, no problem, have them teach 218R, but will BYU be able to match those MAcc numbers with the teaching goal in mind?

Now, BYU is my alma mater and I love it dearly. But when I get my BYU Magazine in the mail, there is always part of me that remembers poor little Thundergraduate visiting the English department’s advisory office to figure out the appropriate courses to take in order that he might be prepared for grad school and being told instead to take woodshop or that basic auto care class that’s so very useful. So when I peruse the articles about all the wonderful stuff BYU’s undergrads are doing these days, I can never quite believe that the Great Byucky Dream is for people like me and not just for budding lawyers and salarymen and chemists and broadcasters and German majors (Sophie is awesome).

But all the same. I would love for BYU’s MFA program to do what MFA programs are supposed to do, and to do it well.

Just . . . what is that again?

(Note: One thing I am NOT worried about is whether or not BYU MFAs will be able to follow their muses without getting shot down by the suits. I suppose there will be the occasional candidate who really really wants that to happen but come on. They wouldn’t be starting the program with the goal to excommunicate budding Evensons before they get dangerous. Be serious.)

Within the Mormon context of The Fob Bible, the (pro)creative movement of these “opposite equal” spheres further implies the eternal (pro)creative influence of both male and female Deities over the universe. For if we have a Father in Heaven and if, as Eliza R. Snow reminds us, “truth is reason, [then] truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a Mother there” and that she’s doing more than merely keeping House. Rather, as Nelson’s variation on this theme suggests, she, as represented in the creative power of the moon (which here “lift[s] land” from the earth’s watery void, “set[s] the rain in silver sheets / upon the ocean’s stormy streets,” and places “birds in flight” and fish in the sea) and as the feminine coeval with God the Father, is an active participant in the eternal, reiterative round of creation, a circling “dance” that is more productive of all that is “good,” beautiful, and holy than many of us may care to—or even, at present, can—imagine.

* * * *

Re: The Fob Family Bible: The Final Four Fobnesses and Conclusion

But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try to imagine what such a relationship might look like or to consider the extent of its influence in/on our existence, especially when it comes to our own (pro)creative companionships, which, if we believe what Joseph Smith taught, are simply mortal reflections of the “sociality” of the exalted, those beings “coupled with eternal glory.”²⁵ I take “coupled” here to mean at least three things: one, exalted beings are inextricably linked to the glory of God, whose name is “Eternal”;²⁶ two, exalted beings are paired as eternal husband and wife within the highest “order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]”;²⁷ and three, such glory and order, such Eternal union, necessarily includes acts of sexual communion, which are not meant solely as the means to propagate the race of the Gods—as “a continuation of the [pair’s] seeds”²⁸—though that is, of course, a necessary function of the coupling. Rather, such an eternally-interdependent union of opposites deifies the “procreant urge” to create such that it continues, deepens, and tempers our inherently human passions, making them as Eternal as God, whose well of emotion runs deep as eternity, as is evident in the breadth and depth of emotions he expresses throughout the scriptures, including anger, anguish, sadness, happiness, joy, and a fullness of love. I’m convinced that such divine love encompasses, is even heavily informed by, God’s (pro)creative power; as Nephi testifies, even though he doesn’t “know the meaning of all things,” he knows “that [God] loveth his children”²⁹—the fruits of his eternally procreative body.

And though this matter of eternal intercourse, of the Eros of the Gods, is essentially, as Brigham Young taught, “a hard matter [for us] to reach” because “it is without beginning of days and end of years” and so, ultimately, beyond the limits of mortal comprehension, we can, as Brother Brigham continues, “tell some things with regard to it”—namely that “it lays the foundation for worlds, for angels, and for the Gods; for intelligent beings to be crowned with glory, immortality, and eternal lives. In fact it is the thread which runs from the beginning to the end of the holy Gospel of Salvation […]; it is from eternity to eternity.”³⁰ This thread thus not only links the procreative pair to one another and to God in the bonds of Eternal matrimony, it further binds them to the Gospel of Christ and to the expansive range of God’s creation. Hence my belief that Eros is in effect the catalyzing force in the universe. It draws together and renews bodies in a sacramental bond that nourishes the soul. Such eternal eroticism—as a deep expression of eternal love mirrored in our own sexual coupling—thus nourishes us and our relationships, leading to the “continuation of […] lives”³¹ because it encourages fully empathic connections to other bodies in ways that move us beyond our flesh into service to another’s corporeal desires and that drive us to (pro)create, to leave our personal mark on the universe, a tendency each Fob Bible contributor acknowledges (though not always explicitly in sexual terms and never with disrespect) in their communal efforts to re-imagine familiar scriptural worlds.

Samantha Larsen Hastings loosely interprets this dance and speaks to the power and virtue of eternal womanhood through her revision of the “Song of Deborah” (her sole poem), a lyric witness of Deborah’s influence as “prophetess,” judge,³², and “mother in Israel.”³³ Hastings’ greatest achievement in this poem isn’t that she drastically re-creates Deborah’s words and Deborah’s world, for what she offers is simply a compressed and reworked version of the twice-told Biblical tale; yet in this retelling—and here is where the achievement resides—she focuses on the female agency at work in this story of “a woman’s” “victory”³⁴ as she acts to great effect in a historically patriarchal role. Indeed, not only is Deborah one of just a handful of female prophets mentioned in the scriptures³⁵ and the only female judge of pre-monarchic Israel; and not only was her story likely told/compiled by a male scribe; but, as a poet and “mother of,” not simply in, Israel³⁶—characteristics highlighted in Hastings feminist re-appropriation of the Biblical text and in her metered interpretation of Deborah’s song—she is thoroughly enrapt in the (pro)creative dance of the universe.

The language and imagery of the poem point to her active participation with God, the Father of Israel, in renewing this people and their home. Hastings’ “Song” begins with the scriptural invocation, “Awake, awake, Deborah; awake, awake, utter a song,”³⁷ calling for the mother to call her child Israel from “twenty years” of “captive captivity”³⁸ at the hands of “the king of Canaan.”³⁹ As “mother of Israel,”⁴⁰ she’s thus marked here as a mediatory influence between heaven and Earth, Earth and heaven. This comes through especially as we consider the geographic backdrop of the poem, signaled by its editorial epigraph: “And Deborah [….] dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Beth-el in mount Ephraim.”⁴¹ Standing atop a hill—the meeting place of heaven and Earth—beneath the “palm tree”—her typical seat of judgment and a place variously symbolic of peace, plenty, victory, and the fruitful union of the sexes (a towering trunk supporting expansive, flowery vegetation and fruit)—she “prophesies and lauds,”⁴² sings and prays “[f]or the children of Israel.”⁴³ Such prophecies and lauding as the prophetess offers are rhetorical efforts symbolic here of her divinely-ordained power and influence and thus of her fruitful union with God, a bond that ultimately turns Israel away from their “new [Canaanite] gods”⁴⁴ and toward the true and living God whose power over the earth, characterized in the song by “drop[ping] heavens” and “melt[ing] mountains,”⁴⁵ is invoked by a woman of great faith and calculated “to lead the children of Israel down” to humility, “down to the gates”⁴⁶ of deliverance from physical bonds and redemption through Jehovah.

In her moving elegiac poem, “Weary” (one of her six verse offerings), Sarah E. Jenkins highlights another, less than pleasant aspect of the woman’s (pro)creative relationship with God: childbirth and the toll it can take on the mother’s mind. Speaking with language that sneaks back on itself and shifts meaning in the movement, the poet explores an experience like Leah’s, the “hated” wife of Jacob whose womb was opened by the Lord such that she conceived four sons in rapid succession. I can only imagine (if that) what this does to a woman’s cognition, especially when she’s already under pressure to please a husband who likes her “beautiful sister”⁴⁷—his favored wife—that much more, but after watching my wife adjust to the needs of our first newborn daughter some years ago, I’m convinced that Jenkins captures the weariness well. And though my wife’s passage into motherhood wasn’t tainted by a husband whose attention was diverted elsewhere, there were times, say, after middle of the night feedings or nights of little to no sleep, when her words followed the circling rhetorical path the poet follows here:

I counted them as they
came—sons and daughters
who didn’t count.

I counted their limbs, perfect
limbs, like their father’s—
nothing so imperfect.

I found him perfect, my one
week of us, my one weak
husband.⁴⁸

Such sorrow, “greatly multipl[ied]”⁴⁹ at and because of conception and condensed here in the poet’s language; such physical, cognitive, and rhetorical labor as “Weary” represents is, I’m convinced, the (pro)creative heritage of the Fall, a re-creative act that essentially revised our premortal relationship with ourselves, one another, and with God, providing the means by which spirit could connect with flesh and language to the mind and body as never would have been possible had Adam and Eve remained in their unproductive sphere and, by so doing, bound humanity in a perpetually unembodied existence.

Ryan McIlvain also engages the (pro)creative work of the marriage relationship in his sole anthologized poem, “Genesis,” which ultimately suggests that sex is for more than each partner’s pleasure and for propagation of the species. Learning to properly direct the sex drive, as the poet implies, is also an important part of identity formation. Speaking as Adam and within the context of Adam and Eve as lovers, the poet begins,

She formed beneath me

on a blanket

on the wet ground pushing

its wetness through.⁵⁰

This imagery intimates the wetness of a womb in which twinned beings—Gods in embryo—wait for rebirth as fully-realized, exalted souls, each forming to maturity in the presence of the other. Such growth is nurtured, the poet further suggests, by the couple’s interdependent engagement with the flesh and with the intellectual, physical, and spiritual rhythms of embodiment, illustrated here in the relationship between the couple’s lovemaking and the poems they read to one another in the name of communion, each “taking […] turns on the makeshift bed, / turning the stars on / line by line.”⁵¹ These concluding lines speak to the promise God made to Abraham that, because of the prophet’s faith, his seed would be multiplied “as the stars of heaven.”⁵² In this context where poems both inspire and are byproducts of the process of meeting the soul’s needs, the poet’s seed could be both physical and lyrical offspring, both flesh and blood and rhetorical bodies that expand and progress through earth and heaven line upon inherited line.

Will Bishop captures the thrill—and the anxiety—of embarking on such a (pro)creative journey in “When I Do Go on My Honeymoon,” one of his two anthologized poems. He begins by engaging a paradox experienced by unsuspecting virgins when they sexually “collide atop the marriage bed,” a realization that, even though they may intuitively understand the holiness of sex (as the poet understands it here, at least intellectually), there’s more to making married love than turning “‘No! No!’ into ‘Go! Go!’” and oiling “the mechanics of procreation.”⁵³ Beyond knowing that God ordained sex for our pleasure and for the peopling of the earth; beyond the semantic conversion I mention and the understanding that Tab A goes into Slot B, this entails an interdependent willingness to embrace the fear of vulnerability. Bishop engages this paradox with wonderfully spare lines that mirror the sparseness of emotional vulnerability: “Afraid / but not afraid / to let her touch me,” he says, “we’ll undress / slowly like / passing the sacrament.”⁵⁴ His reference here to passing, not simply partaking of, the emblems of the Lord’s Supper suggests, first, that the pair is acting with the sanction of God and, second, that each party’s movements are deliberate, meant to prepare the other for the moment of consummation. Such an unselfish and careful approach (literally one full of care) to another’s body, even if unconscious, underscores the holiness of the act of marriage. Indeed, it emphasizes the very nature of the body as a gift from God, as part and parcel of the soul, which, in terms of the LDS cosmology, is the union of “body and spirit.”⁵⁵ And, as Bishop reminds us in his closing lines, such a union is a beautiful, pleasurable, ennobling thing: “when I see her body, / bare and beautiful / and not ashamed,” he concludes, “I’ll kiss her mouth as if / she were the only woman / who ever existed.”⁵⁶ I’m certain such affection will be returned many-fold.

As, I’m convinced, will any open-minded reading of The Fob Bible, which was beautifully designed by Elizabeth Beeton and whose texts are punctuated by re-appropriated illustrations by Paul Gustav Doré, whose work not only adds another voice and layers more history into the book itself, but also tells a revisionary, nonsensical story of its own when combined with captions taken from each Fob Bible text (as Theric points out here). My only complaints about the book are that, one, of the fifty-six contributions, well over half (forty) come from just two contributors, and although there’s considerable variety in the work of these two writers, I’d like to hear more from the other members of The Fob Collective; and two (this is perhaps somewhat nit-picky), the font-size is somewhat uneven throughout the book. While the bulk of the text is set in a standard font (Galliard)—save “Ezra’s Inbox” and “Balaam’s Sin,” which are set in Calibri and Courier New (respectively) to reflect each genre’s formal differences—and a standard size, many of the poems are set in either (what appears to be) a significantly smaller or slightly larger font-size. I’m unsure whether this was a choice on the designer’s, editors’, or publisher’s parts or whether it was just an oversight and is the result of an over-hasty drive to publication; whatever the case, it only distracted slightly from the revisionary work of the text, though greater attention to standardization may not have detracted from that work and from the professionalism of the book at all.

Now a final word (though I’m sure it won’t be the last): This collaborative effort between emerging Mormon writers of various stripes and between this collective and B10Mediaworx and their Peculiar Pages imprint represents, I think, a significant achievement in Mormon letters. By banding together and taking an alternative route to publication than those offered to mainstream Mormon authors and as provided through emerging electronic media, they not only enhance the revisionary, (pro)creative intention of The Fob Bible, but they provide an example for Mormon writers to come. Indeed, if groups of artists can couple themselves to God, to their craft, to Mormon culture, to one another, and to their audience with the passion and integrity exhibited here, line by line they may just lead us, “one of a city, […] two of a family,”⁵⁷ toward that personal and cultural revision we call Zion. Or at the very least, they might just help us see ourselves, our culture, our God, and our potential to create and thus to influence the world in “exciting new ways.”

And I, for one, am perfectly fine with that.

* * * *

Footnotes:

25. D&C 130:2; italics mine.

26. Moses 7:35.

27. D&C 131:2.

28. D&C 132:19.

29. 1 Ne. 11:17.

30. Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, ed. John A. Widstoe (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954) 195.

31. D&C 132:22.

32. Judges 4:4.

33. Judges 5:7.

34. Samantha Larsen Hastings, “Song of Deborah,” The Fob Bible line 20.

35. “Prophetess,” Topical Guide.

36. Hastings line 3; italics mine.

37. 1; see also Judges 5:12.

38. Hastings line 2.

39. 4.

40. 3.

41. Judges 4:4-5.

42. Hastings line 5.

43. 6.

44. 6.

45. 11-2.

46. 24.

47. Sarah E. Jenkins, “Weary,” The Fob Bible line 15.

48. 1-9.

49. Gen. 3:16.

50. Ryan McIlvain, “Genesis,” The Fob Bible lines 1-4.

51. 19-21.

52. Gen. 22:17.

53. Anonymous, “When Virgins Collide,” Sunstone Blog 29 Sept. 2008, 18 June 2009 http://sunstoneblog.com/2008/09/29/when-virgins-collide/.

54. Will Bishop, “When I Do Go on My Honeymoon,” The Fob Bible lines 1-6.

55. D&C 88:15.

56. Bishop lines 7-12.

57. Jer. 3:14.

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.

I used to not have a lot of respect for writers who had trouble remembering the details of their story and keeping them consistent. I mean, I noticed. Shouldn’t it be easier for them? It was their story, after all.

If only it were that simple…

There is, it turns out, a very good reason why writers have a hard time keeping track of the details in their stories. Readers have it easy. They only have one story to keep straight in their head — the story that the writer actually published. Writers, on the other hand, have their heads crowded with all the versions of the story that might have been, roads taken and not taken and all the possible paths from a to b — along with those versions of the story where b wasn’t the destination at all, and where they wound up at endpoint φ instead.

#####

I’ve noticed what seems to be a mental split personality between the part of the writer’s brain that generates a story and the part that writes the story. The latter is a reporter — but much more than that. It’s also the part of the writer’s brain that maintains expectations based on audience awareness, genre conventions, models of good storytelling, and all the other elements external to the story that contribute to what the writer Wants To Accomplish.

Better yet, it strikes me that we might consider a threepart division into the artist’s id (the story-generating part), ego (the reporting/writing part), and superego (the external expectations and ultimate purposes part). I like that idea, so I think I’ll use it for the rest of this post. Probably.

But back to the point I was trying to make…

Unfortunately, the reporter/writer part of the writer’s brain (the ego) can’t simply build a story to order out of the expectations of the superego. Instead, the superego must place an order with the id — the story-generating part of the writer’s brain — and that’s where the trouble starts.

#####

From what I’ve read, heard, and experienced, writers typically begin a story with some kind of idea or image in view: a situation or scene or conflict involving some particular characters. Over time, the initial impetus grows and connects with other ideas, and eventually it becomes a plot.

Along the way, the characters and the story itself develop their own internal logic. Writers talk about knowing a story has taken on a life of its own when the characters start talking back to them, or when things start happening that the writer didn’t consciously anticipate. Both of those, I submit, are manifestations of the writer’s id doing its job.

Each story incorporates a multitude of probability arcs, as I like to think of them: ways that characters are likely to act, based on our perceptions about the nature of people; ways timelines are likely to unfold, based on our sense of how quickly events and situations can change; outcomes that are likely to result from specific causes, based on our notions of causality in the real world.

Each of these arcs must follow a path that doesn’t strain our notions of probability too much. And all of them — each probability arc for each character, timeline, and set of connected events — must work simultaneously in order for the story as a whole to work. The fact that they all inhabit the same story framework further complicates matters, since changes to one arc typically require changes to others as well.

It reminds me a bit of Bézier curves, which I was introduced to as a feature in an in-house paint program I had to document many years ago. The artists who used the program attempted many times to explain to me what a Bézier curve was. I never really did figure it out, except that if you specified certain points and various other parameters, the computer would automatically generate a curve for you that went through the points — but if you changed one of the points or one of the other parameters, you could get an entirely different curve, in ways that I couldn’t possibly predict. It was very cool.

My point is that even a minor change in one of the fixed points of a probability arc can radically change other parts of the story. This is one of the reasons why story revisions can be such a tricky thing.

#####

Sometimes the story that’s delivered by the id varies in some way from the story the superego wants to write.

Sf&f writer C. J. Cherryh talked once about a scene where one of her characters balked at what he had to do for the sake of her plot. “I’m not stupid enough to go in there!” he told her. “Oh, yes, you are,” she said, and generated a squadron of pursuing security forces to make sure that he did.

The point of Cherryh’s story was that it’s the author’s job to boss the characters, not vice versa. I find it noteworthy, though, that she didn’t simply overrule or ignore the sense she’d developed for what her character would and wouldn’t do in specific circumstances. Instead, she massaged the plot to make the needed event happen without violating character plausibility.

The ideal relationship between the id and superego, I’m convinced, isn’t for either side to be giving orders. Rather, there should be a dialogue between them (mediated, presumably, by the poor ego, which may be part of why writers are so generally known for having ego problems).

Case in point. One of the problems several early readers of my novel pointed out was that the story starts fairly slow. (This remains true, to some extent.) However, suggestions on introducing additional “interim” conflicts to catch the reader’s attention kept feeling false to the story I was trying to tell.

And then someone suggested that my main character’s best friend was accepting the fact that his best friend was gay far too easily. Thinking about it from a perspective of character probability, I realized this was in fact true. And suddenly the solution to one problem became the solution to the other problem as well, as the best friend’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to hide just how freaked out he was by his friend being gay became an additional source of rising tension in the story — without introducing an extra plotline that just didn’t belong there.

Working with the writer’s id often requires a process of self-interrogation. Back when I was trying to work out the plotlines for the second half of my novel, I ran into a thorny problem of just why my bishop (whom I had characterized as a convert in his teens) hadn’t served a mission — and why his father-in-law, a former bishop himself and role model, hadn’t pushed him to do it. I spent quite a bit of time working out a chronology of my bishop’s youth — stuff that mostly didn’t get into my novel. I also spent several hours talking at my brother-in-law (one of my best sounding-boards) about my bishop and the chronology I’d developed for him, just to see whether it made sense when I heard myself talking about it — and to see whether it worked for someone else.

#####

Which leads me, I suppose, to my closing point.

We sometimes hear about people whose stories spring fullgrown out of nowhere, like Athena from the head of Zeus. I’m skeptical about such things. For me at least, plots work better after they’ve undergone serious work — after I’ve worked and stretched and cursed (flip! fetch!) about the parts that don’t work so well, and with great effort made myself consider and try out alternative possibilities.

On the other hand, I also don’t believe stories can be composed based on market analysis, generic expectations, artistic values, or other external sources. At the most, those can guide the elements you chop up and put into the compost heap for your id to consider — the starting-points and raw materials for stories.

And then it comes to life, and the infinite possibilities of untold story make way for the possibilities of the story as it might and could be, and eventually — after long interaction (or maybe pugilism) between id, ego, and superego in the realms of probability — to the story as it finally becomes.

Title: The Secret Life of Earl Johnson

Author: Eric Nielson

Publication Info: Blogger of Jared Blog, 2008

Submitted by: Eric Nielson

Why?: Eric writes: “A Mormon version of Walter Mitty.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for.  The link is for the first in a series of five, just replace the roman numeral in the end of the link to get to the others.  If self promotion is bad form I apologize.”

Wm: Please note that Eric was kind enough to update the posts so you can now navigate between each piece in the series easily. And as he now knows, a little self-promotion is just fine.

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I noticed this tendency towards the topical recently because of news stories about the recent opening in Los Angeles of Carol Lynn Pearson’s play Facing East, in which an LDS couple struggles with the suicide of their excommunicated gay son. [I've read reviews in both the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times.] Other LDS plays I’ve seen produced outside of Utah also kind of fall into this category; for example, Julie Jensen’s play Two Headed was produced here in New York City nearly a decade ago.

While I can’t say that this is a clear trend in any way. There are certainly LDS plays that are topical and yet still only get performed in those same few venues. It also may be that the playwright’s residence outside of Utah is a factor somehow–Pearson lives in California and Jensen in Las Vegas (if I recall correctly).

It is also easy to see why some LDS authors shy away from topical subjects. The most dependable audience for LDS-themed plays has to be in Utah, but it is easy to see why much of that audience might dislike topical works because they often challenge conventional ways of thinking about their subject. On the other hand, without that challenge to convention, it is difficult to attract the interest of theaters outside of Utah, who are faced with tens of thousands of possible scripts to perform.

I’m sure this isn’t the only factor that LDS playwrights face in writing plays. Familiarity with the subject has to be an important factor — for example, Pearson is intimately familiar with the issues of homosexuality in Facing East, since her late husband was gay and died of AIDS, her daughter is divorced from a gay man, and she has friends that have struggled with being gay in the Church, such as her friend and early collaborator, Trevor Southey. Likewise, Jensen’s background is in southern Utah, where Two Headed is set.

Still, with the inherent difficulty of getting LDS plays performed, and the benefit that I, at least, see in getting a non-LDS audience for LDS works, it sure seems like topical subjects may present an easier road to getting works before a national audience. And such plays don’t necessarily turn off LDS audiences, if done right. Gideon Burton, on his blog, recently reviewed Melissa Leilani Larson’s play Little Happy Secrets (produced for the New Play Project), which also deals with homosexuality, suggesting that it “is an unqualified success.” [I understand that Mahonri will cover it here also.]

I hate to suggest what anyone should write about, so I guess I’m just throwing out some food for thought. What do you think?

Tonight the Living Scriptures salesman showed up at our door. His car’s GPS had every member of our ward plugged into it and after visiting the Coes, it told him to drive to our house next. He was a nice guy, a BYU student, getting married at the end of the summer. I was able to offer him some good advice for his fiancee about getting a California teaching credential. So even though we didn’t buy anything and scored a free DVD, I still think he came out better.

The main thrust of his sales technique was to assume that we already wanted his product and it was only a question of how quickly we could afford to buy them. The problem is that I’ve seen many of these videos and although “Nephi and the Brass Plates” and “The Conversion of Alma the Younger” are quite good, the rest of the ones I’ve seen range from the okay to the terrible.

But I’m a snob. And so is my wife. Talking about the clip he showed us (from the free DVD) led her to describe their depiction of the Savior as noted in the title of this post.

But even more wrong than a bug-eyed blue-eyed Jesus is, in my opinion, using the Church’s records to sell your crap. Excuse me. To sell your spiritually minded child-pleasing art. According the the Church’s website, “Information on this page [taken from my ward's membership list] is for Church use only and is not to be used for any commercial, business, or political purpose.” Like selling cartoons, one would imagine, even if they are inspired by sacred writ.

Kent Larsen wrote about this recently, tangentially, and I said I found it unethical. I did get one amen, but then the conversation veered off wildly and excitingly in another direction.

But I want to know how the people feel.

Using Church records to sell product. Yea or nay?

1. The Conversion of Jeff Williams by Doug Thayer. I loved this book so much that I *almost* wish I were a man so that I could get it for Father’s Day. I haven’t always been Thayer’s biggest fan and the narrator, Jeff Williams, a laid-back California surfer teen who tends to be self-involved and see everyone else at a distance, was hard for me to read at first. But as his return to Provo and his relationship with his sickly, pre-mission cousin changed his worldview Thayer wielded that point of view like a scalpel. Slowly, bit by bit, Jeff’s voice fumbles and falters and changes until, by the end of the book, he is new. He is still himself (short, choppy sentences; monosyllabic dialogue interspersed between Hamelt-esque inner monologues) but he is changed. Stronger. Wiser. Much more of man than a boy. This bildungsroman is probably the best homage to the young LDS male experience to date.

2. Angel of the Danube by Alan Rex Mitchell. If Jeff Williams is the best homage to young LDS males, then Angel of the Danube is the ultimate in missionary novels. With a distinct narrative voice, Angel presents the missionary experience with humor, gratitude, frustration, and depth. Because the characters in the book want to be faithful and are unable to take themselves too seriously it ends up being a little more light-hearted than Fires of the Mind but no less thought-provoking. This book represents some of the best of Mormon fiction.

3. Benediction by Neal Chandler is another humorous title. I’ve mentioned it before as a good example of humor in Mormon Fiction and I think it’s worth mentioning again. If your dad is the kind of guy who could never bring himself to sell Amway or try to use the commitment pattern on business associates then this is the book for him. (Warning: This book also contains some sex-type material-mostly the funny kind and never raunchy or dirty, but it might make conservative readers blush. I’ll admit that I did!)

Also, don’t forget our AMV t-shirts. They are always a classy option. The people around him might not get the joke but you’re dad will know he’s part of an elite group of bookworms!

You might end up paying a little extra for the shipping but any of these books (or shirts!) is waaaay better than the usual. (Photo credit)