A quick look at the Whitney Awards
By now, I’m sure all of AMV’s readers have seen the announcement of this year’s finalists for the Whitney Awards. Congratulations to AMV’s Jonathan Langford for being selected as a finalist in the General Fiction category. He is also eligible for the best novel by a new author award. [...]
Several months ago Theric asked me to define the radical middle — this term that I and others at AMV have been throwing around. More recently, Association for Mormon Letters President Boyd Petersen invoked the same phrase in his inaugural post on The Dawning of a Brighter Day. I’m hesitant to write manifestos or get [...]
What are some of the major developments in Mormon literature over the past 20 years? Being under the painfully pleasant necessity of writing a short article (500-1000 words) during the next week on Mormon literature for a forthcoming reference work, this is something I’ve had occasion to ponder. I have an excellent source for [...]
I wasn’t going to do another round up post so soon, but three big pieces of news broke over the weekend (and in to yesterday — which was still my weekend because me and the family went to the Minnesota State Fair) that deserve a mention:
1. The winners of the Irreantum Fiction Contest and the [...]
Because it’s summer, and we are all feeling a little lazy and languid. And because there’s already been a bunch of talk about short stories this week (apologies to non-Irreantum subscribers who don’t get to get in on the action — of course, there is a remedy for that). And because there’s simply a lot [...]
Here is a sweetly cranky seriously-so-reader-response-oriented tallied initial review of the fall 2008 edition of Irreantum, which arrived in the mail two days ago:
Nothing Forgettable Here: The Human Meaning of Irreantum’s Recent Poetry
I.
In their introduction to the poetry section of A Believing People (found online here), Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert comment that “much [early] Mormon poetry,” like “most of the popular poetry written during that era [the nineteenth century],” is “derivative and didactic” and thus “regrettably forgettable.” [...]
After looking back at some of the embarrassing language I use in my review of Irreantum 9.2/10.1 — words like “trinket” and “cul-de-sacs of meaning” — it occurs to me that I should just get all these failed metaphors of the failure of Mormon letters out of my system now so I won’t plaque you [...]