Title: Pride of Lions

Author: Eugene Woodbury

Publication Info: The New Era, 1993

Submitted by: Eugene

Why?: Eugene says: When an editor at The New Era correctly recognized the homage to Christian Slater (Pump up the Volume, Heathers), I restrained myself from quipping, “Oh, so you watch R-rated movies too?”

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As Motley Vision’s newest Official Contributor, I feel an obligation to have my first post explain something of my experience within and attitude towards the Mormon arts.

Several months ago, I plotted out a post called “Hero’s Journey of the Mormon Artist” which I had intended to submit to William. I’m glad I never finished it however as further reflection has suggested to me that I was implying that that my proposed version of the hero’s journey was a necessary part of being a good Mormon artist. As if being an Orson Scott Card or a Dean Hughes is more admirable than being a Heather Moore or an Anita Stansfield (no sexism intended). And so I continued refining the idea and now I feel that it is not Mormon artists who are on a hero’s journey, but the Mormon arts entire. I will not be going into all seventeen stages of the monomyth, but I will deal with the three major groupings and hit on the secondary levels when they seem helpful.

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We call upon all members, those in the arts and those seeking to appreciate the message of good art, to expand their vision of what can be done. If we are going to fill the world with goodness and truth, then we must be worthy to receive inspiration so we can bless the lives of our Heavenly Father’s children.

Title: A Picture of My Father as a Young Man

Author: Eugene Woodbury

Publication Info: Popcorn Popping, Sept. 2006 [Wow -- was it really that long ago?]

Submitted by: Eugene Woodbury

Why?: Eugene writes:

“This story is based on a true incident, the Schenectady/Glenville (New York) ward chapel burning down.”

Wm adds: What I liked about this story when we accepted it for publication was how it brings together the issue of children with much older parents (often the result of second marriages) and on how some generations of Mormons, those who were around when congregations paid for and built their own chapels, have a different relationship to their ward buildings than younger generations. In particular, it fits in to my own Mormon lit hobby of desiring more stories that deal with the issues that arose/arise out of the post-WWII Mormon diaspora.

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It was written as a response to an essay by Stephen Carter and Stephen and Eugene did their duo-presentation at a Sunstone Symposium and the AML writing conference back in 2007.

Eugene (summarizing Stephen) begins with:

We propose that narrative fiction constructed in a Mormon context and for Mormon audiences often strays from conventional storytelling in several ways. Principal among these is the negation or diminution of the “second act.” These stories skip from the first act (the set up) to the third act (the reassuring resolution), leaving out the struggle in between.

This is dead on. Of course, the problem is that the Mormon fiction that gets to the second act sometimes don’t manage to get to the third act — but that’s a different discussion.

There is a lot of good stuff in the essay. But I want to focus on one aspect in particular. The authors quote Julian Gough, who notes that modern literary fiction values the tragic over the comic — which leads to dull, dreary, pseudo-suffering serious fiction.

The remedy to this is fools — specifically holy fools. Those who say the unsayable or even unthinkable, who wrestle and dispute with God. As the Eugene notes, comedy comes from incongruity:

…laughter is a reaction to incongruity. A tragic fact is a settled fact; humor is up in the air. The human comedy is a Hail Mary pass thrown into the end zone. A religious philosophy that acknowledges only settled facts on the ground can never be funny. Or compellingly dramatic.

And here’s the thing: if you really look closely at Mormonism a) there are a lot of unsettled facts and b) at the same time it’s good ground from which to observe the incongruities found in other philosophies, worldviews and ways of life.

And I think Eugene has explained a bit the enduring appeal of Angel of the Danube for me. Barry Monroe is very much a holy fool — and not just because of his California dude accent. The best moments in the book are both comic and spiritual, where Barry experiences both the incongruities in life and touches something of the divine. And even as the ending lapses into old romantic formulas, there is a sense that he has earned it. The second act isn’t missing. He has struggled and the end only happens by grace.

The hallmark of good criticism is that it cause you to look at texts in a new way. By that measure, “Pelagius and the fools” is successful criticism. And a very important step in the development Mormon lit crit.

Corrected author information 1.29.09 based on comments from Eugene Woodbury below. ~Wm

In melding the vampire genre with Mormon literary fiction, Eugene Woodbury has created a hybrid that is startling, fresh, insightful and heartbreaking. When I first heard of this audacious project, I was both skeptical and excited. What’s remarkable about Angel Falling Softly isn’t just that Eugene does something new with vampire tropes (that in this case also involve the worlds of bio-tech and high finance) or that he provides a complex, touching portrait of a Mormon mother desperately trying to save her terminally ill child. It’s that he weaves these elements together with well-deployed literary (often Biblical) allusions and quotations that add substance to the questions raised about belief, redemption, desire, sin and death. The novel is insistently literary while being solidly genre-based. Sounds pretty cool, right? And yet what most amazed me is that he pulls it all off without violating the supernatural and metaphysical boundaries of
Mormonism or of the vampire genre. Which is not to say that the story is believable — it’s fantasy — but rather that by enforcing (and pushing against) these boundaries, he plays the two worlds against each other in way that maximizes reading pleasure and says something new about the Mormon experience

Angel Falling Softly is available from Zarahemla Books. Also be sure to check out Eugene Woodbury’s Web site.

Content Warning: AMV draws readers from a fairly wide spectrum of the Mormon audience. Thus, I think it’s only fair to warn that Angel Falling Softly contains a couple of scenes of foreplayish but not at all sexy vampire seductions (that end in feedings  — not sex) and one scene of marital sex that is sort of graphic but more with metaphorical than descriptive terms. None of the scenes are gratuitous — meaning they add to the story and the development of characters and the consequences of the story would be lessened without them. Nor are they particularly arousing. And really, parts of the Bible are much more sexy than what’s found in the novel.

Here is the description of the novel from Eugene and Zarahemla Books:

Over the past six months, Rachel Forsythe’s perfect life has descended from the ideal to the tragic. The younger of her two daughters is dying of cancer. Despite her standing as the wife of a respected
Mormon bishop, neither God nor medical science has blessed her with a cure.

Or has He?

Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has come to Utah to finalize the takeover of a Salt Lake City-based medical technology company. Bored with her downtown hotel accommodations, she rents a house in the Sandy suburbs.

And then the welcome wagon shows up. Her neighbors perceive her to be a beautiful, intelligent, and daunting young woman. But Rachel senses something about Milada that leads her in a completely different—and very dangerous—direction.

Rachel’s suspicions are right: Milada is homo lamia. A vampire. Fallen. And possibly the only person in the world who can save Rachel’s daughter.

As Rachel uncovers Milada’s secrets, she becomes convinced that, as Milton writes, “all this good of evil shall produce.” As the two women push against every moral boundary in order to protect their families,
the price of redemption will prove higher than either of them could have possibly imagined.

A Mormon middlebrow-literary, domestic drama, mystery, vampire novel. And one that quotes Milton. If that sounds interesting to you, check out Eugene’s other work. This is exactly the kind of thing one expects from him. Or to put it another way — the novel description didn’t cause me to raise my eyebrows because it had Eugene’s name attached to it. I look forward to reading it.

Here is how he describes the novel:

The Path of Dreams is a romantic fantasy arising out of the traditional Japanese practice of the arranged marriage. The matchmakers in this case are an Osaka samurai academic and a Scottish Mormon polygamist. The union these two 19th century raconteurs plot for their great-great grandchildren is one their descendants never could have anticipated, for this o-miai exists only on “the path of dreams.”

Although they have never met before, a seemingly chance encounter leaves Elaine Chieko Packard and Connor McKenzie haunted by passionate dreams they cannot control. They determine to resolve the growing tension between the moral strictures of their religion and their own overpowering emotions by eloping, a decision that triggers an entirely unexpected series of events.

In the days and months that follow, they find themselves reliving — in dreams and reality — many of the same conflicts their parents and grandparents once did. They come to realize that their lives cannot move forward until they have attended to the unsettled obligations of the past. As the prophet Malachi commanded, they must “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”

I was curious about the revisions and the modes of distribution he was offering, and Eugene was kind enough to answer my questions:

Why did you decide to revise The Path of Dreams?

Aside from fixing typos and the like, the decision was largely triggered by a comment on the AML list about typesetting. Namely, the cluttered layout and lack of white space that haunts too many micro-published products. So I did some research about typesetting and came up with a few rules of thumb (such as leading = base font + 4 points).

As things turned out, before starting on the editing process, I had already put in a lot of hours redesigning the cover and had set the spine at 296 pages. So I adjusted the margins and leading to where professional opinion seemed to dictate (though the margins should be a tenth of an inch wider), and began to cut.

It sounds pretty arbitrary, but once I got into it, I was surprised at how much deserved to go. What started as a utilitarian exercise turned into a big literary improvement.

Without spoiling the plot for those who haven’t read the novel, can you describe the nature of some of your revisions?

A criticism of the novel by Stephen Carter, which I consider quite valid, is that I resolve the major conflict first, the secondary conflict second, and the tertiary conflict last, which results in the plot taking a more episodic-type jaunt through the last third of the book.

I do firmly resolve the themes I begin with, but they could have easily gotten lost in the tangents and parentheticals and authorial musings. So I determined to eliminate everything that didn’t specifically address those themes.

I ended up cutting the original manuscript by 25 percent. But I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody rereading the book had a hard time telling what was missing. Although it still isn’t “regulation McKee” in terms of overall structure, the underlying story shines through a lot stronger than it did before.

You are offering The Path of Dreams in three forms–online in HTML and in a downloadable PDF for free and then in paperback form through print-on-demand publisher Lulu (for $12.95). Why all three formats?

I created the website originally to post my samizdat translations of The Twelve Kingdoms, a fantasy series by Fuyumi Ono. So I had all the tools to convert Word files to HTML and post them in a serial novel format. The great advantage of a website is that it’s updatable in real time. And it’s easier to read a few paragraphs or a few chapters than download the full PDF.

But if you want a downloadable, portable format, PDF is the standard. And when you’re working with print-on-demand publishers, you have to generate a PDF anyway.

My reason for posting them for free comes down to something Tim O’Reilly said: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine) and Cory Doctorow have been harping on this lately. I spend a high proportion of my life online, but I still prefer reading books printed on paper. Most of the books I own are titles or authors I previously read for free–at the library–or bought based on recommendations from people whose opinions I trust.

A big obstacle in the POD/small publishing business is the high price point, even wholesale. I figure somebody who reads my book online but doesn’t buy it probably wouldn’t have bought the book in the first place (true about a lot of music piracy as well, I think). This way, at least the book gets read.

Established writers like Cory Doctorow don’t seem to be hurt by making their books available as free downloads.

I love that on your Web site you also make available bonus material–a glossary of terms, an annotated map of the BYU campus, a brief essay on the Komachi poem that gave title to the novel (and a comparison with Songs of Solomon). All great stuff. What are your thoughts on the types of things authors, in particular authors who write Mormon literature, should be doing online to add value to their work and entice readers?

In The Path of Dreams I am dealing with two “foreign” cultures: Japanese culture and Utah/BYU/Mormon culture. I’d been creating glossaries for The Twelve Kingdoms explaining Japanese and Chinese culture, and this was the same idea. Though I wrote The Path of Dreams primarily as “home literature,” I didn’t want non-Mormons who stumbled across it to get totally lost.

I’ve been lucky to make a living the past couple of years working in a market (Japanese genre fiction) that is almost as tiny and niche as Mormon fiction. What keeps it going (in fits and starts) are fans linking blogs together, talking up stuff they like and explaining why they like it, posting reviews, translating unlicensed anime, books, and manga.

This attracts new fans — who might not have even known a certain genre existed — and lowers barriers to entry. People are more willing to fork out money because they know what they’re getting. I’ve purchased a lot of books and watched a lot of anime based on what I’ve found through these informal networks that combine personal enthusiasm with individual expertise.

I’m hoping that AML could serve as the hub or clearing house for a loosely-knit federation like this, a sort of Publishers Weekly for small Mormon publishers and authors.

Thanks, Eugene!

NOTE: I’d also encourage AMV readers to poke around the rest of Eugene’s Web site. There’s some real interesting stuff there, including the full text of his autobiographical missionary memoir novel Tokyo South.