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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They eat the yearling lamb and are filled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s short. Check it out.

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!

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

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

But somehow that moment provided an aesthetic completeness.

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

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

Oh please, Internet! Tell me what to think!

= = = = =

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She has had her week-end.

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

= = = = =

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

Since I’ve been something of a negative nelly in this series so far, displaying a rich panoply of bad attitudes and an unpleasant irritability, I feel obliged, before saying anything about my previous experiences with Thayer’s work, that this story was a stunning read. And I mean that more literally than is usually intended in literary reviews. I sit here typing, feeling stunned.

Now that you know I like the story, I should admit that my expectations were not very high. I bought Hooligan, shortly after it was released, started reading it shortly thereafter, and in three-plus years, I doubt I’ve made it fifty pages. And other Thayer stories I’ve read, I’ve generally appreciated without really liking. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s boys learning about life. Woo hoo.

“Opening Day” is also a coming-of-age story; it’s also about a boy—a newly minted man, rather—learning about life.

He’s just returned from his mission (to post-World War II Germany) and thinks that he’s learned what he needed to learn. He has the general scope of his future planned out. One thing he knows for certain, having spent two years in the shadow of death (and the spectre of a possible tour in Vietnam looming over him), is that his boyhood spent killing animals is over. He can never hunt again.

Yet he planned his mission such that he would return just in time for deer season. And now he is out in the woods on opening day with his father and a gun and deer all around.

The visceral details of the entire hunting process—how to shoot, where to cut, what blood stains remain—lead to a powerful understanding of how much this process defined his life as a boy. And so how, when all his father ever wanted to do was share hunting with his son, will he be able to finally tell his father what he couldn’t tell him in a letter or during the ride home from the airport? How will he make the break?

The haunting suspense (will he kill or won’t he?) will feel familiar to anyone who has broken a habit and then found themselves in a situation that demands relapse. But the violence of this particular habit (and the way Thayer finds spiritual under- and overtones to the violence) and it’s connection to fatherly love and familial tradition makes it not just another Thing I Used to Do but an absolute matter of life and death, both spiritually and physically.

To get personal for a moment, my mother’s family is all hunters. When my father married in, he tried to go out with the in-laws and kill things, but it never took. And so my cousins would head out the wilderness while I never did. I wasn’t jealous (at all), but hunting held a mystery that was as attractive as it was awful. Reading Fair Chase (an ethics books for hunters) a couple years ago, I came as close to wanting to be a hunter as perhaps I ever will. Certainly it helped me develop an empathy for the hunting drive, while leaving me with my skepticism of those who find joy in the actual killing.

I believe Thayer has balanced my needs as well as the needs of a reader with hunting experience, while wrapping his protagonist’s first/last opening day in large Mormon questions. And then the story ends (which ending I will not state here but be warned: people will say whatever they like in the comments) and I was left stunned.

No tidy answers. If anything, a new layer of questions. And yet an utterly moving and satisfying conclusion. Enough to wash away any petty complaints I had. But not enough to wash away the complexities of this our fallen world.

I am impressed.

Next up: Donald R. Marshall

Like Virginia Sorensen, Maureen Whipple is one who, as Eugene England says in this volume’s dedication to them, “taught us how.” And, like Virginia Sorensen, I’ve never read her. I know her reputation—or, more accurately, I know the towering reputation of The Joshua Tree, a book many people whose taste I respect admire greatly. Of course, there was also the Mormon backlash against this nationally published novel. In the words of Emma Ray McKay, ”I am so disgusted with the author of ‘The Giant Joshua’ that I can scarcely contain myself.”

With Sister McKay’s words often the first thing I think of when I think of Maureen Whipple (or Virginia Sorensen for that matter, since I often conflate them), I was expecting “They Did Go Forth” to be a fairly edgy work, pushing the boundaries. And it was through that lens that I interpreted Tildy Elizabeth’s early actions in the story. She’s trying to read the Book of Mormon while sitting with her sick—practically comatose—child. Couple that with the flashbacks of the hardships she and her faithful husband had been though at the seeming whims of Brigham Young and I found myself reading a story about how Tildy had lost her faith after feeling rejected of God; she was now and had long been oppressed by men in the faith including Brigham Young, her husband and the best available quack.

The doctor is an interesting case. Although doctor Priddy Meeks’s medicine is obviously bad to a twentieth-century reader, Tildy does not appear to doubt his expertise—indeed, she seems to believe he’s the best doctor between Orderville and Salt Lake City.

How much of my described reading so far can be ascribed to my expectations and how much is actually in the text is a question I open to your judgment. However, it quickly becomes clear that what Tildy has lost faith in is her own power to save her child, her faith in a doctor’s power to save her child, her faith in any earthly means for her child to be saved including normal workaday prayers. Instead, she’s relying on divine intervention. Specifically, a visit from the Three Nephites. She just needs to finish reading the passage about the Three Nephites, if only the interruptions would end (Priddy even took the book from her and slipped it under her daughter’s pillow in hopes it might scare off witches).

After he was gone, Tildy retrieved the book. It would soon be curfew-time. She hadn’t much longer. “And … he spake unto his disciples, one by one, saying unto them: What is it that ye desire of me, after that I am gone to the Father?” This was in South America when Jesus appeared to the Nephites there after he had completed his career in Judea and had arisen from the Holy Sepulchre. Nine of the Twelve answered him: “We desire that after we have lived unto the age of man, that … we may speedily come unto thee in thy kingdom.” But three were silent. “And … he turned himself unto the three, and said unto them, … Behold, I know your thoughts, and ye have desired … that ye might bring the souls of men unto me, while the world shall stand,” and because of this, “Ye shall not have pain while ye shall dwell in the flesh, neither sorrow save it be for the sins of the world.” And the Three Nephites “were changed from this body of flesh into an immortal state, that they could behold the things of God [and] did go forth upon the face of the land.”

At this moment she receives a visit from a mysterious stranger who heals her child.

The tale is reminiscent of the very similar (and equally wonderful) story “Christina” in Angela Hallstom’s Bound on Earth (originally published as “Unbroken” in Irreantum). But Whipple is not satisfied with a simple miraculous healing and instead adds another miracle to the story which I won’t mention here.

Without getting into a closer analysis, “They Did Go Forth” appears to be a faith-promoting story. Without any particular sweetness and with plenty of detours, but, yes, ultimately affirming.

When the 2321st word (of a 3128-word story) finally reveal’s Tildy’s last names—even though it is spoken by an ancient disciple of Christ who has come in response to her faith—I was uncertain whether to interpret “Stalworthy” as him calling her “still worthy” or hinting her worthiness had stalled. By keeping Tildy’s course, uneducated, lower-class, English accent from us until the final paragraphs, Whipple turns one final corner, leaving us standing, realizing how foreign and strange these long-ago people are. To force us to recognize Tildy’s alienness just as we had come to see her as the subject of  a Sunday School story is the final bit of excellence.

The questions the story seems to be asking is this:

Sure you idolize these faithful pioneers of long ago. But are you anything like them?

.

Next up: Douglas Thayer.

.

I’ve just read How to Read Literature Like a Professor and I’m pleased enough with it that I’m figuring out how to implement it into my classes. In essence, it’s all the stuff English majors should know by the end of their sophomore year of college—how to read a text to find patterns like journeys and season, what might meaneth the rainbow, or why, to be fully literate, one must know some Bible, some Greek myth, some Shakespeare. In other words, great stuff for the demographic I teach.

The final chapter contains Katherine Mansfield’s lovely short story “The Garden Party” along with analysis from college students, followed by some from the professor himself. I read the story while walking to school and did not spend much time analyzing it myself before reading others’ responses to the story. I had noticed some patterns etc and figured I had a pretty solid grasp on the story. Then it was pointed out to me that it is a Garden of Eden story and I immediately felt hugely embarrassed. As an Eden junkie, how did I miss this? Reading while walking is no excuse.

It’s in that spirit of contrition that I will now discuss Sorensen’s tale (read online).My first sin is that, instead of the story, I was thinking about the introduction’s revelation that this story premiered in The New Yorker (but in 1955—not 1953). And so I have images of Mr Thurber and Ms Jackson and Mr White and Ms Parker and all my favorite old-timey New Yorker writers and here comes one more reminiscent story of rural Utah. And, I don’t know if you’ve heard my whine about this before, but I’m kind of tired of reminiscent stories of rural Utah.

[BREAKING NEWS: Just now, I realized why this story of irrigation ditches and murder was so familiar to me---I'd heard a very similar story once in General Conference. From David E. Sorensen. He's just twenty years younger than Virginia and I need your help: are they related? Could both stories share the same real-life source? Note that the stories have some significant differences but that only one claims to be nonfiction.]

Anyway. As that parenthetical suggests, the story is about a murder committed over an irrigation squabble. The narrator is someone who lives far away and for whom her erstwhile community is now  far away in more than just physical distance.

She is no longer surrounded my hard-working men with white beards and Scandinavian accents (who are now mostly dead anyway); she seems, in fact, to have no connection left other than the clippings her mother sends her from Mormon newspapers. She finds it somewhat difficult to dive back into the past, having to repeat the phrase “the Tolsen trouble” a few times before she can finally relay the story. Then, at the end of the story, she reveals that, out of her family’s respect for the man involved, she had never before told this tale. The story bookends, in other words, within a code of silence.

The story is well written but I did not particularly enjoy it. As a specimen of its type, it is good. But I did  not read it like a professor. I don’t doubt that it’s craft is even better than I realized, trying, as I was, to get through yet another reminiscent rural-Utah story instead of taking more seriously my first reading of an important Mormon author. Of this I am, of course, suitably ashamed. Though not enough to reread yet another reminiscent rural-Utah story to see what I’ve missed. I trust you will forgive me.

As the first story read in this project, this is not my most stellar bit of criticism. On the other hand, I must admit that even though I’m no great fan, I am glad to have read one of the earlier and better versions of a tale type so successful that it’s become a seeming inevitability. And, in all honesty, rural Utah is one of the important story types Mormon culture has to tell. (Sorry that I’m bored with them.)

I go forward with the intention to engage more deeply! Join me!

Next up: Maurine Whipple.

(to see previous posts in this series, try the Bright Angels & Familiars tag)

I recently was given a copy of Bright Angels & Familiars, a short-fiction collection edited by Eugene England (Signature Books, 1992). I rather wish someone had given me this book in high school. Who knows? Maybe I would have read it and who knows where I would be now!

Fascinatingly, this volume was published seven (seven!) years before his famous essay “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left!” which decried two recent books of short fiction, one from Signature (1998), one from Deseret Book (1994), that, in his opinion, were more about spreading (im)piety than being good, ethetical and esthetical fiction. Oh, how disappointed he was in this turn in our letters.

For me, as the publisher of collections that, in my opinion, are of high ethical and esthetical value (The Fob Bible, Out of the Mount, Fire in the Pasture, Monsters & Mormons), I’m reading England’s collection with the desire to learn from our history —  a history I am, alas, much too ignorant of. I’ve enjoyed England’s introduction and have read the first story (by none other than Virginia Sorensen). This post serves as an announcement that I will be blogging my reading of Bright Angels & Familiars here at AMV, one story at a time. The posts will be short and I have decided to avoid requiring myself to discuss any particular aspect of the tales (eg, their Mormonness, their ethics, what they teach about the history of MoLit, etc); instead I wish to respond honestly and see where this reading takes me.

Expect my first post, on Sorensen’s story, soon. Then they will appear irregularly as I fit stories into my rather hectic reading schedule.

See you soon.

ps: follow along at home — Signature has kindly made this volume available online