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.

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?

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Next up: Douglas Thayer.

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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

For those AMV readers who haven’t followed your career as it has unfolded over the past several years (and documented on the AML-List), could you briefly explain your journey into creative non-fiction?

I had been working as a news reporter for a few years and having the time of my life, but my wife and I could tell that it was not going to pay the bills. So we made the decision to give our careers a much needed boost by earning MFAs.

I know. Not the smartest way to boost one’s career. But we were young.

So we moved to Alaska with our two young children to go to UAF’s creative writing program. I went in to learn fiction, but the thing that was taking up most of the space between my ears at the time was my relationship with Mormonism. I found myself writing to understand that relationship, going into my past and teasing out the experiences that had brought me to this point.

My first attempts weren’t very good, and my essays turned out to be undisciplined and wandering. Fortunately, my studies in fiction had started to teach me how a story works. Once I learned to use those mechanisms, the essays began to take on a constructive shape and people started to like them. I got rejection letters with handwritten notes attached. And one day, Dialogue decided to print something I had written. Dialogue has always had good taste.

I can’t entirely tell from the Zarahemla Books description — are the essays in What of the Night? focused mainly on Mormonism, and mainly personal rather than topical? What’s the scope of this collection?

The essays document my journey through Mormonism. For much of my life, I had this idea that, being born in the Church, I had been born at the Tree of Life. I felt sorry for the poor schmucks who had to follow the iron rod through the dark swamps of Lehi’s dream in order to find the truth. My life, as I saw it, was not a journey but an orbit. I just had to endure to the end at the tree, resisting the temptations of the Great and Spacious Building, waiting under the branches until I died and went to heaven.

I started to realize in college that, just like the next schmuck, I had to take my own journey. I sometimes say that I had to leave the Tree of Life in order to seek the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—and that required forging into the dark swamps. The book’s cover very much captures that idea.

So you’ll see me getting my first glimpse of the difficulties of my spiritual journey as a Cub Scout, and then heading full force into the tensions of religion and spirituality as a missionary and then as a father. At the end, I try to bring the elements of all the essays together to create—not a stopping place, but the staging area for the next journey.

Anyone writing personal essays that come of the Mormon experience has to account, at least somewhat, for the looming presence of Eugene England — not only as a writer of the form, but also as a theorist. As a critic who claims a special place for the personal essay in Mormon letters. What’s your take on England, his work, his discussion of the personal essay, and your own work and theorizing?

I worked as Gene’s administrative assistant for the last year of his life—an experience I write about in the book—and yes, he influenced me deeply. By far the most important idea he gave me is the overarching importance of giving every side its due. His essays are often uncomfortable to read because he goes very deliberately to places in Mormonism and in his own life and prejudices that are tense and volatile. But he does so not to expose corruption or trumpet the cause of righteousness, but to gain the wisdom that comes from dwelling in the tension of spiritual and religious difficulties.

I’ve taken a different narrative path than he has, though. My essays are very story-based, almost never heading into argument or analysis, as Gene’s do. That’s just my style. Stories are good soil, adding to the richness of person’s moral imagination, enabling more complex thoughts to grow.

I think Gene had a point about the personal essay being a genre especially adapted to Mormon expression. There’s a pragmatic strain in us that makes us value “truth” over novelty. If it really happened, it’s more important because a real person is attached to it, and real people have real souls. We all see ourselves as being the main character in a long story, beginning in the pre-mortal life and—in fact—never ending. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Eternity hangs on our choices. I don’t think that personal essay has a corner on important Mormon literature, but I understand its power. After all, I found my voice as a writer when I went into my own life.

I like the cover. Who created it and what was the thinking that went in to it?

The cover art was painted by Anna Waschke, an artist I was friends with in Alaska. I’ve used her work in many of my projects, such as on the covers of issues 150 and 155 of Sunstone. Another of her paintings also serves as inside art for the book. This cover image comes from a series of “portraits” she made, none of which had anything to do with my essays. I think the image encapsulates the basic tension of the book: the head versus the heart in matters of religion. How those tensions inevitably bring us to dark, chaotic places, but how a strange beauty can arise from that chaos. Interestingly, Anna is an atheist and not into religion, but everything she paints resonates with me on a deeply spiritual level.

Okay I have to ask this, and to be honest this may just be me projecting my own fears, but: you’ve written a fair amount over the years about writing and craft and even championed some specific approaches to thinking about writing. Does putting yourself out there in such a, well, collected way, bring with it any anxiety at all? Like you are a poster boy for an approach and have to live up to it? If so, how do you deal with it?

Well, you have to understand where I’m coming from. Before I started my study of fiction, I was a terrible storyteller. Despite all my reading and my English degree, I could not write a story to save my life. I’m kind of like my son who has Asperger’s syndrome: he had to learn to read emotions by making a study of the human face. He doesn’t possess the mental tools most of us have that allow us to read emotion innately. That’s me with stories: I had to learn the mechanisms that run a story, because otherwise I’d never be able to write. You people who have a natural ability to tell stories, I honor you and would like to throw a maltov cocktail through your window.

My dad, who is a computer scientist and an inventor, tells me that once he understands a program or a system, he can picture it as a working schema in his mind and manipulate it to see how it works, and how to improve it. The same thing now happens to me with stories. I can read a novel or watch a movie and all the pieces of the story will come together in my head. I can see how each part affects the others. I can see what would happen if parts were manipulated. It’s like having a Terminator brain.

This was such an exciting discovery, and I worked so long to gain it, that I wanted to share it around just in case I could save some other people some trouble. But I did a terrible job. Perhaps one or two people will benefit from anything I’ve written. But for the most part, I think the little manifestos I sent into cyberspace were mostly me working out the system that serves me so well.

I do use a set of storytelling principles when I write. It’s impossible not to, they’re hardwired into my brain now. They take the anxiety out of writing and open up creative space. I know my work will stand up the way an architect knows that a building he designed won’t fall. Someone may not like my style or my content or whatever, but I can always demonstrate the soundness of my structures.

Related to the previous question: you are a reader, writer, editor, managing editor, blogger and critic. How do you balance all those roles and where do they help and hinder each other?

It’s true that I’ve done a lot less writing since I became an editor. I find that a great deal of my creative energy goes into bringing out the best in an article or essay. But I get a lot of satisfaction from editing, so I don’t feel cheated at all. I do wish that I had more time to read stuff I don’t have to edit. The New Yorker helps with that. I sometimes get a little teary at how good the writing in that magazine is and how I didn’t have to do one bit of work to get it that way.

What specific works of media/art — Mormon or otherwise — have you consumed recently that you totally dig and would recommend, especially to a radical middle reader/viewer/listener?

It’s either because I’m lame, or because I read soooo much on a day-to-day basis, but my main source of entertainment is movies and television. I’ve become a devotee of the Sopranos, which, in my universe, is far and away the best television show of all time and an epic work of art. I don’t know if I could recommend it to the radical Mormon middle, since every episode would be rated R. But if you want to see what happens when masters of storytelling are given a camera and a budget, watch this show. I always feel more solid after watching an episode.

What’s next for you as a writer? Any projects you can reveal to us at this time? What’s getting you charged up to get to work at this point in time?

I should probably feel silly about this, but I’m not going to. I’m writing comic books, and I’ve never had so much fun in my life. Toward the beginning of my tenure at Sunstone, I put together an issue on Mormonism and Asia and thought, “Hey, I should get some Mormon manga in there, just for kicks.” So I wrote up the arm-hacking story of Ammon, storyboarded it, and sent it to my illustrator, Jett Atwood (who, I must say, did a bang-up job). The response was so positive that I decided to make the Book of Mormon comic a regular staple at Sunstone. (The stories recently won the coveted “Book of Mormon Retranslation Prize” from Salt Lake City Weekly. The competition was fierce!)

The thing that has satisfied me the most about this project is that Book of Mormon characters are finally starting to be interesting to me. My whole life, I’ve been pretty bored by the Book of Mormon. It’s just so danged didactic—every character is a walking sermon. Writing these stories has forced me to dig deep and find out what would motivate these characters to act in the ways they do, and I’ve found some very compelling characters that have really grown on me. When I scripted the martyrdom of Abinadi, I just about broke down and cried.

Sunstone subscribers can follow these stories from issue to issue (we’ve worked our way through Zeniff and Noah, and now we’re heading into Alma). But next year, we’ll likely release a collection of the comics to bookstores, or maybe on an iPhone app. I’m also working with Jett on a graphic novel about Abish, which should be out next year. I’m also working on editing The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer vol. 2, using material from the Sugar Beet, and the special comics issue of Sunstone, which will rock. Hard.

Thanks Stephen!

For the launch, I’ve decided to highlight Eugene England’s response to Orson Scott Card’s novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus ( Amazon ) because it captures well, I think, a specific, fascinating moment in both of these great men of Mormon letters’ careers.

Title: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Orson Scott Card

Author: Eugene England

Publication Info: Mormon Literature Database; text of a paper presented at Life, the Universe, & Everything XV: An Annual Symposium on the Impact of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Provo, Utah, February 28, 1997

Submitted by: Wm Morris

Why?: Wm says, “What fascinates me about this paper is that it represents an attempt by England to convince himself that OSC is back in his corner (so-to-speak). It is as much about the socio-cultural politics of Mormonism as it is about the novel Pastwatch.”

Participate:

Fill out the Critic’s Corner form

Read all the Critic’s Corner posts so far

Look for part two sometime Thursday.

* * * *

Beyond Prescription? Problematizing Mormon Identity and the Future of Mormon Literary Studies

[T]he multiplicity of religious and irreligious practices engaged in [...] by those who lay claim to the nominations “Mormon” and “post-Mormon,” much less “Jack Mormon,” [...] boggles the mind.

-Bryan Waterman

Confluences

These past several months I’ve been wrestling with myself, with the Heavens, trying to gain some hold for my intellectual desires and work in a broader conceptual universe. This struggle has really just been an extension and intensification (due to the academic path I’ve been negotiating recently) of my continuing quest to find what Wayne Booth might call “a plausible harmony” between “my many selves.” Among others, the believing Mormon, who seeks greater communion with God by trying to live by His laws as voiced by His prophets and to serve with faith in what he considers God’s church (no matter the institution’s flaws); the husband, who has obligated himself through what he considers unbreakable promises to honor his bride, her potential as a human being, their combined potential as wife and husband, and the fruits of their eternal marriage; and the poet, teacher, and literary scholar who is compelled by the incessant prodding of vocation to share his rhetorical gifts with the world—you know, the whole don’t-hide-your-light-under-a-bushel deal.

My continued challenge is learning to balance these passions, to engage with each in an honest, quality, pleasing, even—ideally—transformative experience for the parties involved. In short, I yearn to make a positive difference in the world (though I admit the intangibility and the potential “O, that I were an angel” discontent of that desire), to create a space in which I can identify with and influence others, in which I can allow their voices, their stories, their selves, to gather, to mingle, to develop, to expand into and revise the stories I came from.

I stole that last phrase—the stories I came from—from James Goldberg’s recent Mormon Artist interview with Nicole Wilkes. When asked how he came up with a name for the protagonist who wanders through the amalgam of mythologies he’s gathered in “Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg,” Goldberg cites his unique ethnic heritage—his many selves—as inspiration. Says he,

When I decided to write a story in which I was free to use the stories I came from, I came up with the name “Teancum Singh Rosenberg.” It was almost a joke at first: I’m going to create this guy with a first name so Book of Mormon I’ve never actually met anyone with it, the middle name all Sikh men take, and a sort of stereotypical Eastern European Jewish last name.

So Teancum Singh Rosenberg, as his creator, stands at the confluence of at least four overlapping cultural traditions: Mormon, Indian, European, and Jewish. He thus represents a multi-faceted identity constructed from the rhetorical material of Goldberg’s multi-faceted self.

My appropriation of Goldberg’s language seeks to borrow something of this pluralism, even as I subtly—perhaps somewhat radically—recontextualize his phrase, revising its intended meaning in order to suit my own rhetorical need, which at present is twofold: 1) to initiate a critical narrative knit around my many selves and our experience with the varieties of Mormon narrative art; and 2) to problematize the notion of a coherent and prescribed Mormon cultural identity, an assumption around which many Mormon critics have constructed their theoretical paradigms and critiques and upon which much of Mormonism’s critical energy continues to be spent (see the litany of links in my note as a small sample).

Reading through the Stories I Came From: A Critical Autobiography

A number of years ago when I happened upon the Mormon literaturstreit of the 1990’s and began considering the possibilities of and for a Mormon literature and criticism, I started to frame my own theoretical paradigm around what I thought were the essential matters at stake in the world of Mormon letters: the teachings, rites, and ordinances of the Restored Gospel. I think I titled or sub-titled my attempt “The Rites of Mormon Criticism” because it was centered (if I remember correctly) around the sequence of rituals required for entrance into the Heavenly City. The effort was born of my imagined position as the next great Mormon literary critic and, looking back, I see it was meant to suggest that for a critic to rightly judge Mormon literature and for a writer to truthfully create Mormon literature, s/he needs to have been initiated into the literary ministry through the proper gospel rites. Only when dressed in the billowing robes of this priesthood should they be qualified to write by, for, and about the Mormon experience.

I abandoned that effort soon thereafter 1) because I didn’t know where I was going with it, probably because I was still wet behind the ears when it comes to having engaged much—if any—Mormon lit beyond the scriptures and Mormon devotional texts; and 2) because it never quite sat right with me. I see now that one reason for my uneasiness was the exclusivity of the framework: not only does it deny the varieties of Mormon cultural experience that exist outside of Church Headquarters (even those, admittedly, that exist within church headquarters), it also betrays a bias toward a masculine worldview, especially because those invested with priesthood authority and the stewardship to judge in institutionalized Mormonism are men and the framework parallels that investment. Another reason I think I never got on board with myself was because I couldn’t be satisfied critically with such a culturally exclusive, boys’ club mentality. And though I probably couldn’t have articulated this reasoning then, I can trace the roots of my present theoretical narrative to that (inter)textual experience with Richard Cracroft, Bruce Jorgenson, and Gideon Burton.

At around this same time, I met Dialogue, Irreantum, and AMV, each of whom introduced me to writers and critics whose ideas have had a significant impact on the development of my own theories of language and literature. Among others:

Eugene England, father of my intellectual engagement with Mormon culture, whose short poem, “The Firegiver” (which I’ve explored elsewhere), and short essay, “The Possibility of Dialogue,” invited me into the rhetorical space and potential of intra- and inter-cultural discourse—of the possibility that I could profitably “speak with sensitivity to [another’s personal] framework or ability to hear and speak in order to communicate for each other’s welfare, not to justify or exalt [myself] at [their] expense” and that I could “truly listen to other[s], respecting our essential” kinship as part of God’s family “and the courage of those who try to speak, however they may differ from [me] in professional standing or religious belief or moral vision.”

Patricia Karamesines, whose award-winning essay, “The Rhetoric of Stealing God,” persuaded me, not just into AMV’s fold of regular readers, but into the power and authority of responsible and sustainable language use—into rhetoric that “questions itself as thoroughly as it questions Other, and when it finds itself lacking, it takes upon itself the responsibility to find the next best thing, the revelatory metaphor, the liberating paradox, the ever-expanding symbol, thereby crossing boundaries established by less productive, less creative, less pro-active, and less kind words.”

William Morris, whose “In Memoriam: Laraine Wilkins” justified my decision to study literature over sociology:

Wilkins [...] articulated an inclusive, diverse, unabashedly literary view of Mormon letters. To quote from a recent e-mail: “I’m interested in seeing more dialogue happen—*dialogue* in order to have some groundwork for Mormon culture to enjoy more respect, or at least better understanding, from the outside community. Such dialogue requires both insiders and outsiders. I’d like to see AML do more of this. I think literature has great—perhaps even better—potential than history (though history is where most work is being done) or sociology to achieve this. Literature, although an expression of cultural identity in many respects, ultimately addresses individual experience…”

And whose continued insistence that Mormon literary criticism should focus on specific examples from Mormon narrative art has kept me from circling (too far) into theoretical abstraction as I engage the growing body of Mormon letters and try to find my niche in the field of contemporary literature.

And Laura Craner, whose titillatingly short post “If You Can ‘Queer’ a Book Can You ‘Mormon’ a Book?” poses a question (about what it might mean to read as a Mormon) and a correlation (between gender/sexuality studies and Mormon studies—my main research interests) that, eventually, led me to Bryan Waterman and new ways of considering Mormon literature as an expression of diverse cultural and personal identities and experiences.

And what might those new ways be? Tune in Thursday as I lean heavily on Waterman (specifically this article he published in Dialogue 30.1 (1997)) and some others to take up the problem(atizing) of Mormon identity and what that might mean for Mormon literary criticism.

Now, radical is generally not the most welcome term among American Mormons. It smacks to much of the Left and/or of the political fringe. This is why it’s important to confine the term the radical middle to Mormon arts and culture and emphasize that there is room for artists, critics and readers with a multitude of political leanings (assuming, of course, that their politics isn’t the sole thing driving their artistic activity). Indeed, I think by pairing radical and middle and applying it to Mormon arts, England and anyone else who invokes the term is reinscribing its’ meaning, appropriating the adjective for our own use and changing it in the process. I’m a fan of such appropriation by an ethnic group/sub-culture. But what do we really mean by radical and how does it play out in Mormon arts and culture? The short answers are: nobody has really said much, and it doesn’t really. So unlike with the middle where I was able to explore it in depth in a descriptive way, I’m going to have to get speculative and prescriptive with the radical. But first…

Radical history and doctrine

Whatever our position in American society now (that is the tenuous semi-mainstreamed stability achieved through the embrace of the meritocracy and of alliance with conservative politics [allowing, of course, for the few liberals and crunchy cons and libertarians]), it must not be forgotten that we have radical roots. From the restorationist claims of Joseph Smith to the communitarian projects of Brigham Young, and, yes, the scandalousness of polygamy — whether you believe all that to be a concatenation of American (not forgetting the European streams of thought behind them) influences (with a touch of native genius) or the opening of the heavens and streaming of restored truths, the radical, as in the challenge to the status quo, roots of Mormonism run deep. And are the wellspring of latter-day Mormon art.

So radical, in fact, that our literal and/or spiritual forefathers and mothers were cast out from society, pushed from their city on a hill, the city they had in their American spirit had raised out of a swamp, pushed to the edge of the map to leave a trail of graves until they reached their refuge in the desert, their State of Deseret, which was then (before the people could truly become an ethnies) reabsorbed in to the body politic (and economic, which is what fundamentally it’s almost always about). Yes, I know that this is a florid way of putting it and that there was a complex web of motives behind the mobs and that the Saints were not without fault either. But the point is: radical (perhaps even free radicals — and perhaps that was part of the problem). Although the way of life and even prevailing attitudes of most Mormons has now become thoroughly middle class suburban America, and even with the institutionalizing and the correlating, the doctrines and history of Mormonism challenged and sometimes still challenges the status quo. Which means that invoking of the radical in radical middle kinda actual means something and can be claimed a native part of Mormon identity. In fact, in linguistics, radical refers to the root form of a word, and indeed the origins of the word are in a Latin word meaning “having roots.” Roots we have. The radical in the radical middle is a reminder of that.

But yes, of course, much of what we mean by radical is the desire for change, reform and even for pushing to the extreme or to the limits.

Radical forms/modes

When used in connection to the creation and reception of art, then, radical suggests experimentation with forms and modes and genres. It means not settling for the current dominant ways of narrative expression. Or playing with them in such a way to critique or undermine or reconfigure them in a way that resonates with the radical middle audience.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that one blindly follows the avant-garde. Indeed, the avant-garde per se has been thoroughly co-opted by and entrenched with the elite and even more its modes of expression are quickly adopted and deployed the marketers, the cool hunters and brand managers. I mentioned the blog Hilobrow in my section on the middlebrow in the second post in this series. That blog celebrates both the avant-garde and the pop (from Bjork to Britney Spears). It seems to me that’s a peculiarly good way of playing the strengths and weaknesses of those two schools of art off of each other. On the other hand, I’m not calling for the repudiation of the middlebrow. Indeed, I think that it’s clear that certain Mormon values and ways of life are reactionary (although again, let’s not forget our radical roots and become thoroughly bourgeois). Of course, once you get post-post-modern, the reactionary may very well be the avant-garde. I could keep going but at some point it just ends up a circle (one eternal round?) so let me end with this: the radical middle should beg, borrow and steal from (and infect) everybody and be open to every form, mode and genre. We can’t afford to be snooty about anything, to turn away any idea (while, of course, demanding craftsmanship).

Radical energy/authenticity

Pairing radical with middle is, as I mention above, an attempt to bring energy to the middle. So often the energy is on the poles. This is a problem any movement haves, the energized are often those on the extreme. There is a danger to radical energy. Thus when finding the energy in the radical, we should find simply movement and activity and passion — not zeal and rabidness.

Another danger of the radical is, the danger of inauthenticity, of radical as vogue, as fashion. See for example radical chic. If you are going to, for example, challenge the status quo with the forms of your art then it has to happen out of genuine passion, out of authenticity, rather than as a pose. Now one man’s pose, is another’s whole life. And in this day and age authenticity is almost a false concept, a pose in and of itself (c.f. The Believer) . I say almost. One of the advantages of Mormonism is we have some touchstones to keep us real (our history, our doctrine, our audiences). We also have commandments about charity and humility and consecration. Realistically, not every move made by the radical middle is going to appear authentic to every member of the middle or the right or the left or what have you. But the beauty of discipleship is that it requires energy and authenticity, and I would argue, it also requires a deep engagement with change (which is why we can’t ignore the radical forms/modes piece of the radical).

Radical organization/authoring

Movements are always organizing. In some cases (in all cases, really), the organization becomes an impediment to the work. Mormonism has a history of radical organization. And I’m not just talking about the attempts at instituting the United Order. I think that the grand failures there often blinds us to all the other very successful cooperative efforts by Mormons. And not just economic activity (ZCMI, Zion’s Bank) — from Brigham Young’s sending members on art missions to Susa Gates Young and the Young Woman’s Journal, the early history of Mormon narrative art is one of cooperative effort and literary cliques.

In general, the activity of Mormon narrative art tends to follow models found elsewhere (from regional literary journals to indie filmmaking to Christian bookstores and publishers) with varying levels of success. I think that’s fine in terms of creating a certain base level of competency. I also think that there’s room for experimentation with more radical attempts at organization and even types of authoring. How do you accomplish something truly radical middle if your modes of production are not only not cutting edge, but generally behind everybody else? Whether its avant garde or retrograde, I think this is an area where’s there room for some experimentation. I may be completely wrong here. But the unique properties of Mormonism holds out some tantalizing possibilities. One of my first posts to the AML-List many years ago was on the possibility for collaborative writing, and this is an area I’ve continued to explore here at AMV. I don’t have any brilliant solutions, but I do want to keep this as an open topic for discussion.

One other comment here: it may seem flip of me to go off on radical organization, when many of the main radical middle entities are struggling just to reach sustainability. But that’s exactly why this is an important component of the radical middle. Indeed, it seems to me that what’s most healthy in the radical middle right now is a network of individuals who believe in the cause. What is most needed is ways of maximizing the energies and collaborations and output of this network and fostering the development of new voices and talent and incorporating them in to the web of radical middle efforts. I’ve told several of my co-bloggers this, but I will kill off the AMV brand (but not the archives — don’t fear in that regard) if we reach a point where it’s just no fun or not worthwhile anymore and/or there’s a project or projects that fill the same space AMV does, but better. Which is simply to say: it’s about the people and what they create and about the optimal use of resources. It’s not about the sales or the number of unique hits or the media mentions or the awards or the literary respectability. Which is not to say that any of those things are bad, per se. I’m still going to submit to the Irreantum fiction contest and talk about the Whitney Awards here at AMV, etc. etc. But for the middle to truly be radical, it needs to resist inertia and chasing after fleeting approbations.

Radical critique/engagement

As I mention above, the radical challenges the status quo. As Eugene England models in the essay that brought this series of posts about, it engages with and critiques the poles. Theoretically, by virtue of its position in the middle, the radical middle should be well-equipped able to provide informed, radical — as in reformist/energetic/thoroughgoing — criticism of all the surrounding discourses. But it can’t really do so without engagement with those discourses, without some knowledge of them. Otherwise it’s the lazy, inflated rhetoric, the tired tropes and stereotypes that Mormons of all stripes know so well.

In addition, I firmly believe that the radical middle is strongly positioned to not only do what England does and point out the danger on the left and the right of Mormon culture, but also to provide unique, trenchant criticism of American culture (and others as well).

The radical middle

The devil is always in the details (and as England reminds us that B.H. Roberts kicked off Mormon literature with the fact that the Devil must be given his due), and no blog post can accurately capture all the issues and activities and creative works involved in the radical middle, faithful realism, broadly appropriate wing of Mormon art. I also don’t intend for this series of posts to be the only or final word on the radical middle. I do hope, however, that some of you have found this exercise helpful. Again: this is no manifesto. I reserve the right to change my opinion and even distance myself from the term. But for now, I think if any label represents what I am trying to do and what I value in Mormon art, this is it. This radical middle.

Between the poles

If we take our cues from England’s essay “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left!,” the middle is the place between two poles of Mormon narrative art. In most specific terms, it is the works that fall between the two 1990s Mormon short story anthologies Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life (Bookcraft) and In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions (Signature). It is represented by the works England selected for his own, earlier anthology Bright Angels & Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories (Signature). Now England does make some larger philosophical claims for what this middle is, in particular linking it to the idea of ethical fiction, but in terms of defining the middle, well, the middle is in between these two poles — between the right and the left.

However, England does remind us that being between these two poles doesn’t mean simply sitting there between them. Rather, there is an ideological power that comes with taking both of those poles on. Early on in the essay, he cites a phrase from Joseph Smith — “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest” — and then goes on to explain that:

By “prove” he did not mean to provide a final proof of one or the other contrary, but to test, to try out, to examine both alternatives, or all, in the light of each other; he meant that truth is not found in extremes, in choosing one polar opposite over another, but in seeing what emerges from careful, tolerant study of the dialectic between the two. Ethical fiction brings the great contraries into juxtaposition and moves us to new visions of truth greater than any of the poles. [end block quote]

Agreed. But whether those new visions happen or not (and sometimes they do and when they do, it is quite lovely), the middle remains between, and that between-ness brings with it a whole host of complicating circumstances.

Not the center

One of those circumstances is that, for all its between-ness, when it comes to Mormon narrative art, the middle is not the center. It is not the locus of institutional attention and support from either native LDS sources or from the major national supporters of narrative art (for example, neither Deseret Book, BYU nor the LDS Church proper have done much to support “broadly appropriate” works; attempts made to publish such works with national publishers have mostly failed). Nor is it a center of much economic activity or even of cultural awareness. LDS genre fiction and populist national market works by LDS authors (Stephenie Meyer and Orson Scott Card) hold that ground.

Now, of course, the middle is not without its own resources, and it often claims works from the centers of power for its own, although such appropriations are not always without controversy — both from those in the middle and those without (c.f. Meyer, in particular). And there may be times when the centers may throw a few bones to the middle, and some in the middle may have some hopes of gaining institutional support and power, but as with most radical middle movements, any attempt to infiltrate, infect or co-opt centers of power/activity is bound to have limited success or in turn be co-opted. This is particularly true when it comes to the LDS/Mormon world because of the unique position of Mormon art in relation to LDS ideologies. We are awash in the “shockingly appropriate” and the “completely appropriate” and the “broadly appropriate” is ignored because there is more at stake than simply literary positions. Mormon art is bound up in the whole struggle between the supporters and detractors (both provincial and national) of the LDS Church; no wonder that such a struggle has produced an abundance of didactic work. And, of course, Mormon art is complicated further by the fact that many of the radical middle are active in these other centers. This is the strength and weakness of Mormon artists, that their institutional allegiances aren’t confined to their own little literary or artistic school/movement.

Certainly, the great hope of the middle is that it will produce some work which crosses over, which hits one of the centers with such power and craft that it is widely embraced, perhaps even winning new converts to the middle and thus becoming its own center of power. I have no idea whether such a thing is possible when it comes to Mormon narrative art. And I certainly don’t mean to diminish the centers of activity that are currently operating in the middle. I’m part of all that. But in defining the middle, it’s important to recognize that there are centers of power who are at best mildly supportive, for the most part impassive, and at the worst hostile to the middle.

Encompasses as much as possible

But even as it is not a center, the middle in Mormon narrative art has traditionally sought to encompass as much as possible. Radical middle authors have written for and worked for LDS Church publications and have published with Signature Books. During Chris Bigelow’s tenure, Irreantum published news and reviews of LDS genre fiction and even interviews with and stories by LDS fiction authors, and the AML-List has always been willing to run reviews of such works. The recent inclusion Anette Lyon and Rachel Ann Nunes in the new AML blog is another nod in the direction of LDS fiction. And, of course, many of those in the middle have been willingly to consume (if not entirely embrace) work by such “shockingly appropriate” artists as Brian Evenson, Neil LaBute and Matthew Barney (which, of course, is met with suspicion by those in the “completely appropriate” school).

But casting a wide net is not without controversy and a major feature of the middle has been vigorous debate about exactly how much to encompass — the Mormon literarturstreit of the ’90s, which can be found in the Jorgensen, Cracroft and Burton essays on the Mormon Literature Website, being a good example (as well as countless conversations on the AML-List). And Irreantum, the AML Awards, and A Motley Vision all tend to focus the large majority of their attention on works that fall solidly in the middle.

But when forced to draw boundaries, even when such boundaries are contested, the middle tends to encompass as much as possible. For more on this, see my AMV post LDS fiction; Mormon fiction (part two), which includes an extended metaphor that I think captures well the uneasy yet broad way in which the middle tries to take a broad approach.

May or may not be middlebrow (but pretty much is)

The middle may or may not be middlebrow. For the most part, it is totally middlebrow and classically middlebrow authors (such as Jane Austen) and works are quite popular among American Mormons generally and the radical middle, in particular. In addition, I think that at this point in American literary history, literary realism is totally middlebrow and Mormon faithful realism very much so. For all that there may be a bit of radicality to the use of some Mormon materials in how the faithful realism plays out in some stories, for the most part, Irreantum publishes middlebrow work, and with its turn to journal status a few years ago, and continued attempts at literary respectability, I think it’s safe to say that the middlebrow is the dominant strain of Mormon narrative art in the middle. The emphasis on “broadly appropriate” is also a mark of the middlebrow. And in fact the one recent middle work that has had the most success in receiving attention across several strata of Mormon readers is Angela Hallstrom’s Bound on Earth, which is as about as middlebrow as you can get (whereas the un-middlebrow Angel Falling Softly had some problems in the market).

Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I have thrown out the term middlebrow pride in the past. But there is a danger to focusing too much on the middlebrow, especially if we are serious about this radical middle term. One immediate one is that it has traditionally meant that radical middle players have ignored the LDS genre fiction market  and as a result have lost potential participants and power (the Whitneys, the LDStorymakers Writers Conference — although again the inclusion mentioned above in AML blog is a good sign)

More on all this in the next post, which focuses on the radical. For now, let me quote from the tag line of the blog Hilobrow: “Middlebrow is not the solution.” I don’t know if it is or not, but I do know that anything that calls itself the radical middle is going to need to account for the hilobrow in some way.

The middle as ethical and esthetic

Because his use of the term radical middle comes at the very end of the essay, England doesn’t really provide much direction on what he means by middle and radical, but the analysis of stories that leads up to the conclusion bring in two concepts that I think illustrate what he means by the middle — creative work in the middle is ethical and esthetic; whereas work that’s not in the middle is unethical and un- or even anti-esthetic. For example, he write that ethical teachings are “reinforced powerfully by ethical fiction, both through honest and thorough examination, of difference and the gaps in our thought structures and institutions that reveal our efforts to suppress it and also in visions of new and healing possibilities” (page 15). He then late links esthetics to activity of ethical authors and identifies an esthetics that creates stories that “have characters who seem independent from their authors, capable of making decisions the authors would disapprove of and still love them” (page 18).

Certainly there can be disagreement on what is ethical and aesthetic, but based on my experience the middle takes a similar view and has a similar concern with ethics and aesthetics that England outlines in his essay. In particular, the appeal to these two concepts, which goes back to Horace and the idea that narrative art should both delight and instruct, seems a particularly middle stance between the purely didactic and the purely aesthetic.

The middle as middle

I end this post with the idea of the middle as, well, middle. There are definitely advantages in being able to situate and negotiate between two poles — in absorbing ideas, works, authors, tricks from both sides. The middle can be (but isn’t automatically so) a place from which engagement can happen with everything that defines itself as LDS/Mormon art/culture. In addition, because the middle often takes a rather ecumenical role, it is often better equipped to create space for sub-groups to form and experiment. Since the middle is squishy, there’s less chance that a voice will be squelched if it doesn’t conform to the often rigid expectations of those on the poles.

But the middle can also feel hemmed in, squeezed, always pushing to defend its space. And, as any middle child knows, even worse — it can also feel lonely and ignored. This is why the idea of being not just the middle, but the radical middle seems so attractive, and that’s what awaits in the next post.

It all starts with Eugene England

As far as I know, the first use of the term radical middle in relation to Mormon narrative art is in Eugene England’s Dialogue essay/review “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction,” which was published in Fall 1999.

In the essay, England challenges two anthologies of short Mormon fiction that had been published in the late ’90s (and, of course, champions his own anthology that had been published in the early ’90s). On page 30 he laments the fact Doug Thayer was not included in either the “right” or “left” anthology even though in England’s opinion his work would be a comfortable fit with both. He writes: “We are suffering, I fear, from a version of the old logical fallacy of the excluded middle, ripping Mormon literature apart to the remarkably similar extremes of right-wing and left-wing piety and cultural correctness and mutual exclusion.” Further down the page he adds: “…too many writers in what might be called the radical middle, who have no simplistic pro-Mormon or anti-Mormon agenda, but try to practice their craft with careful esthetic* skill and ethical insight, can’t seem to get themselves published to a Mormon audience. It’s a shame. I might even say, if I were an extremist, it’s a damn shame.”

An appropriation of a political term

I think it’s clear that England’s use of the term is meant to bring its political meaning in to the realm of Mormon letters — his use of right-wing and left-wing in the essay reinforces this. I don’t know if he further developed what he meant by using this term, although I think the essay itself as well as much of the rest of his oeuvre wonderfully illustrate (more or less) what it means to be in the middle in a radical way when it comes to Mormonism. I believe he also had radical center/radical middle political leanings as well. The radical middle (see the link to the Wikipedia in the previous sentence for a quick summary) has an interesting history in U.S. politics. It’s not necessarily something I subscribe to (although the term is squishy enough that it probably captures some of my admittedly waffling political beliefs), but I think that it’s important to understand not so much what it means, or what policies and political philosophies it encompasses, as why it is specifically deployed in order to understand it’s appeal to Eugene England and his descendants in Mormon letters.

Ross Perot’s Reform Party (at least its early years) and 1996 presidential run is an example of an eruption of the radical middle in to mainstream electoral politics. This is not to say that Ross Perot’s presidential platform equates the radical center in U.S. politics. It can be a difficult thing to define — see for example this list of political thinkers grappling with the idea of centrism/radical center/radical middle. But at its core is a sense of being in between, but in a way that’s energetic.

The radical middle, then, is most often an expression of frustration with two dominant parties/ways/philosophies. It is reactive (which brings with it the weaknesses of reactivity); it is amorphous; it is rather self-conscious and self-important. It is in flux and changes in relation to the two parties that it reacts against. It is always in danger of crystallizing its own orthodoxies and pieties. It is an often uneasy mix of populism and elitism and self-righteousness. It is accused of being wishy-washy and over-optimistic and idealistic by the left- and right-wing. It is anti-authoritarian and anti-Utopian.

All this may or may not transfer over when used in relation to the field of Mormon letters, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the political roots of the term. And as a sidenote, a sector of British Islam uses the term — see The Radical Middle Way — to articulate a fascinating form of modern-day cultural, theological and intellectual form of moderate Islam. The adjectives used on the page I link to — revolutionary, dynamic, proactive, relevant, young, open, creative, positive, inclusive — show, I think, the appeal of this way of defining a movement (we’ll get more in to this with my next two posts).

Irreantum and appropriateness

I can’t find any use of the term “radical middle” since England’s essay until the AMVers took it up, but I do want to point out another attempt to articulate that middle way that has been influential. When Chris Bigelow and Benson Parkinson first launched Irreantum in 2001, Parkinson posted an essay to the AML Website that he had previously written for the AML-List back in 1997 (which predates England’s radical middle essay). Titled the “Three Kinds of Appropriateness,” it briefly defines the qualities of over-safe, didactic fiction and angry, anti-institutional Church and pushing-the-content-envelope fiction (and labels them respectively as “completely appropriate” and “shockingly appropriate”) and charts a course between those two that without much exception defines fairly well the course that Irreantum (Ben is a co-founder of the magazine and influenced its original tone and parameters) has taken over its history as well as radical middle publishers like Zarahemla Books and Parables Publishing. It also influences the approach we take here at A Motley Vision and works that navigate it well are those that are most celebrated here (and by the Association for Mormon Letters). There are, of course, exceptions, but anything that gets too didactic (on either side of the spectrum) and that either elides reality too much or on the other hand gets too explicit or touches certain taboos (e.g. offensive stuff about the temple or general authorities) tends to be spurned or simply ignored.

As with any ideological space there are fluctuations in the boundaries over time and differences in opinion among individuals, but, generally, when it comes to the world of Mormon letters this middle way — which Ben Parkinson terms the the broadly appropriate — has been the aim of those working to legitimize Mormon narrative art.

The radical middle at present

I can’t speak for why Boyd chose to invoke the term radical middle in his post kicking off the new AML blog, but it also has had some currency here at AMV, and while I think it’s somewhat obvious why that’s the case, I’m going to explore the middle and the radical of the radical middle in the next two posts in the hopes that forcing me to articulate it and you all to discuss it will further the concept. More tomorrow.

* I’m not sure why England prefers esthetic over aesthetic.