The contrast between these two paintings and the Edenic mythos their marriage evoked struck me as a tension that might work well in a poem. So I set out to lyrically critique the one in terms of the other (I’ll let you decide which one is which) and to extrapolate connections between images that are removed from one another by over five centuries.

As always, comments are welcome.

* * * *

No Botticelli, This—

No ginger virgin, hands modest to sex and breast,
flesh fallow, fecund as sky gone to seed in the sea:
her father’s cerulean stones sickled into primordium,
become pit to her emanant pith. No escort ashore
on the zephyr’s hymned gestures toward Paradise,
wafted with rose hips come like souls wanting skin.
No velvet robes ready to sop up her mythology, to
keep her from burning her first day at the beach.

Just this Eve and her Adam, curling down currents
of dawn like leaves slipped from the knowledge tree,
flesh converging to vessel the easterly sighed down-
canyon when God realized they’d grown restless
waiting for his newly charged cherubim to doze,
drop their swords, spill the tokens and signs
of his mystery as they dreamed. So the pair
streaked through asphodel fields instead, emerged
from under cover fig leaves into the blush of blossom
against bodies gnawing, gnawing at the edges of sky.

Title: Your Luck Is About To Change

Poet:Susan Elizabeth Howe

Publication Info: Poetry, December 2002

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: Tyler says: “For this line: ‘marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan.’ Oh, and for the dinosaur nativity. (Read it. You’ll see.)”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

PURPOSE

As Terryl Givens documents in The Viper on the Hearth, from Zane Grey to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mormons served as stock villains in the early days of genre fiction (both pre-pulp and pulp heyday). We propose to recast, reclaim and simply mess with that tradition by making Mormon characters, settings and ideas the protagonists of genre-oriented stories to appear in an anthology simply titled Monsters & Mormons. This is, then, a project of cultural reappropriation. But even more than that, we just want us all to have fun with the concept.

SUBMISSIONS

Fiction from 5 words up to 17,500 (novelette length)

Poetry from 3 lines up to 120

Plays and Dramatic Monologues of One Act

Illustration and Photography suitable for display on a standard book page

Graphic Novel (grayscale) of 1 to 20 pages (submit 2-4 completed pages + full script)

Text should be submitted in .rtf or .doc format (No WordPerfect or .docx please — any word processor you use should be able to output in Rich Text Format [.rtf]). Images should be submitted as a .jpg or .png file (make sure you have a high-res file available should we accept the work).

Submit to: monsters@motleyvision.org.

Include in the body of the e-mail: your full name; the title of the work/works submitted; and, if available, a link to a blog, website, online resume/works published page — anything that will provide some context to your work. Pseudonyms are discouraged, but we’ll allow for special circumstances — please include that consideration in your e-mail if you would like it.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Content: Should be broadly-appropriate. In the tradition of modern Mormon mores, greater graphic-ness will be allowed to violence than sexuality although, in general, the boundaries of the original pulp fictions should be the goal. We will make some allowances depending on the genre and the particular story (for example, a bit more grit in urban fantasy). The use of humor, irony, camp and satire is highly encouraged; however, all such uses should show a love for both Mormonism and genre fiction. Plain old mocking is boring.

Mormons: Conceptually, any story that invokes an aspect of Mormonism that can create some recognizable way in for a Mormon reader is cool with us. Yes, you can be clever about it, but we also want straight-up interpretations of the theme e.g. flesh-and-blood Mormons encountering flesh-and-blood/ichor/electronics/whatever monsters. Although preference will be given to Latter-day Saints, we are willing to consider works that feature “Mormons” or “Saints” of any dispensation of mankind, including those in a Book of Mormon setting. Stories that don’t feature Mormon characters or settings, but show a strong, interesting, fairly apparent connection to the Mormon world view will also be considered. In addition, we don’t want writers to worry too much about the metaphysical implications of mixing Mormons and monsters. You don’t need to have doctrinal reasons behind the existence of the monsters nor do you need to offer up stereotypically Mormon solutions to the problems the monsters pose (although such won’t be disallowed unless they’re too flaky or lame). Finally, we’re not automatically saying no don’t do it (because there’s always an exception if the story is right), but too many Cain or Satan-and-his-host-spirit-possession stories will make us very picky and possibly a bit cranky.

Monsters: We are happy for this to be rather broadly interpreted. Monsters need not be purely non-human life forms. Human monsters, supernatural monsters, technological monsters and psychological monsters are all allowed. That said, we highly encourage engagement with the classical monster tropes: werewolves, mummies, vampires (but see warning below), swamp monsters, multi-tentacled cosmic beings of supreme terror, Jack the Ripper, chupacabras, automatons, sentient simians, aliens, etc.

Vampire Warning: Yes, we will accept stories about Mormons and vampires. If you are going to write such a story, though, you should have read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy and Eugene Woodbury’s Angel Falling Softly and be able to bring something new to the trope. Also note that we’ll likely give more leeway to illustrations/photography featuring vampires.

Genres: Horror, science fiction, mystery, suspense, action/adventure, thriller, romance and their sub-genres (especially: steam punk, cyberpunk, urban fantasy, post-apocalyptic sci-fi and alternate history). High fantasy is out — there has to be something that ties metaphysically or realistically in to the world of Mormonism. Hybridization of genres is very much encouraged. Elements borrowed from literary fiction are totally cool with us, but we aren’t going to dismiss standard interpretations of the classic styles and genres. In fact, we totally want to pulp it up.

Models: H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Robert Howard, Raymond Chandler, Dashell Hammett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, etc.

PUBLISHING DETAILS

Copyright: First right of print and electronic (including downloadable e-books) publication; reprinting of previously published stories that the author holds the rights to will be considered (please include the piece’s publication history). First-time rights to be held exclusively for six months after publication. Publications rights to be held in perpetuity but not exclusivity. Should the publisher desire to reprint the stories in a subsequent anthology, author has right of refusal.

Sales and Incentives: Philosophically, we want the proceeds from the sales to go to the contributors as a reward for their hard work. At minimum, all contributors will receive a free print and e-book version of the anthology. We have no idea what kind of sales we’re going to get so what we are planning is a system that rewards contributors if we hit certain profit levels with the anthology and sales of related merchandise. More details to follow.

Timeline:

Please note that all dates are approximate and subject to change, but we’re trying to be generous here both to authors and to give us enough time to get things done in order to hit our publication deadline.

April 15, 2010: Submissions open

July 31 at the earliest, Oct. 1 at the latest: Announce early admits (we’re going to accept some work on a rolling basis — if we have some very strong pieces that come in early, we’re going to accept them and publicly announce them).

October 1, 2010: Submissions close

October 31, 2010: Final answers on submissions; public announcement of admittances so far; requests for rewrites e-mailed out to potential contributors; and a public call for entries with specific attributes to fill gaps in the anthology.

January 31, 2011: Deadline for any rewrites and any gap-filler entries. Announcement of which of those make it into the anthology will be posted as soon as Theric and William can get through them.

February – September 2011: Editing and production

October 1, 2011: Publication!

I’m going to guess that the market for the whole set of stories and poems is probably quite small. But since the thought occurred to me and AMV does have a (never before used) poll function, I thought I’d ask.

Title: Moses and Aron

Poet: Will Bishop

Publication Info: 2009, The Fob Bible, published by Peculiar Pages

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

If Will and I weren’t both Mormon, I don’t suppose I could give this poem as heavily a Mormon reading as I do. To me, this is the Mormon Moses and the Mormon Aaron. It will be fun to discuss why.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

After finishing part 3 with a reading of Timothy Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”—a reading based in and flowing from a nodal model of Mormon culture—I fully intended to move into an extended exploration of Waterman’s suggestions for Mormon criticism: 1) read with an eye toward the plurality of modern identity, focusing particularly on the tensions this multiplicity creates within the text and between the text and the culture it springs from (which opens the way to engage Terryl Givens’ critical taxonomy from People of Paradox) and 2), “[i]nformed by cultural studies/new literary historicism methodologies, [...] place [...] [Mormon literature] in conversation with a number of other contemporary texts to examine ways [...] [this literature] help[s] explain Mormon—and [...] [any other aspect of cultural identity]—experience at a certain historical moment.”

But my intentions have changed, partially because of several Twitter-sations I’ve been involved in lately with MoJo (@MoriahJovan), Theric (@thmazing), and William (@motleyvision) about Mormon lit. In fact, Saturday I came to this realization (in a series of Tweets): after wondering how the Mormon literary community has “been having the same critical conversation for 30 years,” I pursued the thought that part of this may stem from the relative invisibility of the community’s non-prescriptive critical cache—that is, the offline venues through which Mormon literary criticism has developed/been presented and published. Dialogue, Irreantum, and Sunstone contain some of this work, but I sense I’m missing something because I don’t have access to the thirty years worth of proceedings from the AML annual meeting.

As a corollary to this epiphany, I realized that, for some reason, much of the online conversation about Mormon lit centers on drawing boundaries for the enterprise rather than on discussing specific works in a critical way. And, more importantly, that I need to spend more time exploring specific works of Mormon lit. So with this in mind, I’m springboarding into that renewed commitment today by (re)posting a short reading I offered on my own blog of Emma Lou Thayne’s poem, “The Rose Jar,” a text ripe with the tensions of memory and community and that I’ve read against another text of similar ripeness.

And with that: on we go.

* * * *

Disturbing the dust on a bowl on rose leaves…

-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” line 17.

In the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” the poet muses on the interconnections and “unredeemab[ility]” of time (line 5): “What might have been,” he says, “is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in the world of speculation” (6-8), the business of imagination and memory. He opens the door to this possibility when he hears

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. (11-5)

The poet’s job, then, this implies, is to pursue the footfalls of memory into places we’ve never been. “But to what purpose,” he asks, does “[d]isturbing the dust on a[n imagined] bowl of rose-leaves” serve (16-7)? Why pursue these “echoes / [that i]nhabit the garden[?] Shall we [indeed] follow” them “through the […] gate” of meaning; “[i]nto our first world, shall we follow / The deception of the thrush?” (17-8, 20-2). And yet the voyage into and through deception, he suggests, is the end “which is always present” (48). So perhaps, though the past is ultimately “unredeemable,” we can redeem ourselves, our identities, as the poet’s efforts suggest, in the myriad possible passageways of and rhetorical passages written by memory.

Emma Lou Thayne takes this poetic cue in “The Rose Jar” wherein she quite literally (if we can take her at her word) disturbs the dust in her grandma’s jar of rose petals, stirring up the fragrance of rose and memory as she runs her fingers and her mind over the intricate surface of the “four inch cloisonne [jar] on pointed golden legs / fat as a Buddha tummy” (lines 9-10). Finding this jar in the “cedar drawer” of her “Grandma’s standing metal trunk” (1-2), she enters the intersection of several memories, some her own, some others’. The cedar musk reminds her of “some Arabian tale read by Father / in the hall between bedrooms to say goodnight” (5-6); the rose petals call forth “five generations of fragile crinkles” in lives “once supple, fresh,” but now only “fragile” memories (7-8); the jar itself inspires visions of “centuries of Chinese hav[ing] their way” in an intricate culture, their “careful hands [...] pluck[ing] each [intricate] piece in place” (18-9); and the fragrance of it all, of this “holy mash,” becomes “tiny gusts / of history waft[ing]” community rituals—”the gatherings of births, graduations, / weddings, funerals, celebrations”—”into decades collecting / but never filling [the jar] to the top,” instead infusing the space of life, of memory with the “subtle, still surprising breath of God” (20-7).

And that, I think, is one reason we disturb the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves: because doing so draws us together in bonds of imagination, kinship, and shared memory, such that, like Adam and Eve, we are infused with the breath of God and so become living souls, living communities.

And that, I think, is one thing poets and poetry, critics and criticism are for.

Discuss at your leisure.

Liberating Paradox(i)es: Nodes, Networks, and Timothy Liu’s “Tree”

I recognize I may be preaching to the choir here (in the radical middle) by advocating such a pluralist view of Mormon culture—one, I should confess, that I hope can encourage more space in the Mormon critical community for the whole spectrum of Mormon identities and literatures, to the end:

a) of fostering critical dialogue that transcends, while leaving room for, prescriptive polemic; that moves beyond, while acknowledging the potential validity of, readings that justify (or not) the virtue, praiseworthiness, etc., of texts that push the Mormon moral envelope; and because such (con)textual expansion exposes critics/readers to varying forms of literary greatness and goodness of character, beyond the Mormon letters almost singular obsession with turning to the historio-cultural singularities of Shakespeare and Milton as the standards against which to judge whether or not our literary community has arrived (will we ever overcome this Mormonized anxiety of influence?);

and b) of legitimizing Mormon letters for engagement in a broader conceptual field. This echoes Michael Austin’s move to promote the academic study of Mormon letters by encouraging LDS critics to turn their professional training toward constructing the stories of Mormonism—as a dynamic religio-cultural system that now extends well beyond the Jell-O-belt—such that, ideally, these narratives can be heard and engaged on their own (Mormon) terms, beyond the (prescriptive) parlance of the Mormon market. As Austin claims, “If enough [Mormon critics] do this, and do it well, Mormonism and Mormon literature stand to become increasingly legitimate areas of inquiry in [the literary critic’s] profession”—as has happened, say, with the academic study of Mormon history and social institutions in the fields of history and sociology.

I also recognize that this pluralist view imposes degrees of distance between Mormonism as a divinely-sanctioned worldwide religious institution—hailed by members as “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth“—and Mormonism as a closed yet increasingly diverse unofficial cultural system developed and elaborated through certain habits of mind (as influenced by Mormon theology and its institutionalized interpretation and transmission, as well as through its interaction with modern secular thought and mainstream/popular culture) and the “manifestations and permutations [of these habits] across a spectrum of artistic media,” ethnic multiplicities (especially as the religion goes global), and social practices/networks (Givens xiii). Of course, these dual aspects of Mormonism are necessarily bound up in, even made vital by, the other. The culture coexists with and incorporates, perhaps at times revises and subverts, the theology, church practices, and general religious understanding (as, for example, when Mormon folk doctrines mingle with and exaggerate official church teachings—like the popularized revision of foreordination and eternal companionship sanctioned and disseminated, especially, by Added Upon and Saturday’s Warrior). And the boundaries of the religion and the markers of church membership (as church activity, obedience to the principles and ordinances of the gospel, holding an up-to-date temple recommend, the wearing of garments, publicly sustaining church leaders, etc.) are often overlaid as the boundaries and markers of Mormon culture.

Yet, though these systems are inextricably linked—the culture (sometimes dogmatically) infused with and judged against religious tenets and the religion using and, at times, cutting across cultural channels in order to proselytize its message to the world—neither their boundaries nor their structures nor their functions exactly coincide (nor, I think, should they). And neither are they wholly distinct from the “non-Mormon” cultural traditions with which they inevitably interact. Rather they seem to exist in interconnected topologies of networks and nodes enmeshed in the social, rhetorical, and spiritual space of mortality, sometimes sharing points of connection, sometimes running parallel or intersecting processes, sometimes divergent ones, and sometimes working beneath, within, or over the cultural noise of other traditions, though always in the movement, ideally, to expand and ratify—to make efficacious—human experience and being-in-the-world.*

But what might this subtle though dynamic and interconnected difference between Mormonism as a religion and Mormonism as a culture mean for Mormon literary studies? How might the rhetorical paradoxy, the cognitive dissonance, that can come of keeping in mind these similar though separate structures translate into a paradigm for reading Mormon literature and culture and (potentially) for critiquing other cultural/theoretical paradigms? Indeed, how might this pluralist perspective prompt critics to ask different questions (as the ones Waterman asks) about the nature of Mormon identity/ies, culture, and literatures and their relation to and appropriation of other traditions? And even beyond that, how might adding these questions to the Mormon critical vocabulary and to the general American critical vocabulary add to an understanding of and the possibilities for critiquing/theorizing about literature in general?

Re-enter Waterman, who turns to Timothy Liu—gay, Asian-American, Mormon, poet (among other things)—as a test case for his own pluralist critical paradoxy, which can be summarized thus: “whatever ‘Mormon’ identity might mean for a particular author or text, that identity will coexist and possibly be in conflict or competition with any number of other identifications.” These alliterative terms—coexist, conflict, and competition—jibe with the network topology dynamics I gloss over above, highlighting the richly multiple (inter)temporalities of human (Mormon) identity: coextant, sometimes conflicting nodes of personal identification that network into a larger node—an individual’s selfhood—that in turn serves as a point of connection in larger network topologies (e.g., socio-cultural structures like communities, religions, gender, class, race, etc.).

As Waterman continues, “To address Liu’s texts as ‘Mormon’” through this many-selves paradigm “requires us to refuse the idea” that Mormon cultural identity is essential and, therefore, the dominant factor in every Mormon’s every personal experience; “in doing so,” Waterman says, “we recall [Liu's] eligibility for ‘other’ identity categories—an approach that could be taken with any literature we are tempted to discuss as ‘Mormon.’” By using any of these multiple nodes of identification—”Mormon” or “gay,” for instance—as a “point of departure” for discussing Liu’s poetry “rather than as a totalizing identity” for the poet, Waterman offers the possibility of “view[ing] Liu’s subjective Mormonism as a point on a spectrum”—or in my present model, as a node within interconnected network topologies—that would also include the full range of Mormon literatures and criticisms, from those adhering to thirteenth article of faith literary theories to those (like Waterman) allowing for a broader range of Mormon literary identities. In this view, Liu’s Mormonism is just one node of his personal topology in a cultural field that extends around the (neo-)orthodox faithful and the post-Mormon—and everything in between—and that overlaps and connects with multiple cultural traditions.

Waterman concludes that viewing Liu’s poetry as part of such dynamic cultural space “is, perhaps, the only practical way of approaching [it],” simply because to deny such multiplicity is to subsume the writer’s agency in rigid (hence, unreal, simplistic, and impractical) representations of human identity.

As an example of the “benefit[s]” “[b]oth ‘Mormon’ and larger American audiences” might take “from [the ...] added angle[s] of explication” available when reading through such a “practical” pluralist lens, Waterman offers the double-voice (“gay” and “deeply religious”) of Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”:

I do not want to die. Not for love.

Nor a vision of that tree I cannot 

recollect, shining in the darkness 

with cherubim and a flaming sword. 

All my life that still small voice 

of God coiled up inside my body. 

The lopped-off branch that guilt is

is not death. Nor life. But the lust

that flowers at the end of it.

Waterman’s reading of the poem is instructive of how Mormon critics might approach the task of interpretation sans prescriptive moralizing and while keeping in mind the multiplicities of modern (Mormon) identity: “A number of signifiers here resonate with a Mormon audience: God’s ’still small voice’” “a favorite Primary phrase” with considerable cache in the Church’s pedagogical culture; “the ‘vision of that tree’ protected by ‘cherubim and a flaming sword,’ meaning the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden,” though Liu’s language recalls a) the prominent visions of Mormon history, specifically Lehi’s dream, and b) the role this Tree and the cherubim charged to protect it play in the LDS endowment ritual, which, in Brigham Young’s well-known words, is “to receive all those ordinances in the House of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels [before the Tree of Life], being able to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell.”

That the poet rejects the merit of such institutionally mediated spirituality is suggested by the poem’s negatives (four nots, two nors) and in the image of the “lopped-off branch,” which, Waterman observes, not only “brings to mind New Testament imagery, but also the allegory of the olive tree in Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon.” Here the poet seems to engage Zenos’ figuration of the House of Israel in terms of the allegorical pruning/dissemination process: healthy and diseased branches (lineages) are cut off of the main tree (parent lineage) and scattered throughout the vineyard (racial/ethnic diaspora) where they’re grafted into other trees in order to preserve the branches’ potential to bear fruit (inter-ethnic assimilation to the end of salvation). Yet Liu asserts a revision of this schema in his “recollect[ion]” (which, he admits, is really a failure to recollect—or at least to recollect properly, i.e., in a way sanctioned by the residual Mormonism he engages again and again in his work): even though he has “lop[ped]” himself off from the religion’s hierarchical network of eternal-life-granting rituals by openly acknowledging and pursuing his “lust,” he now stands in a shadow of that Tree, neither dead nor fully alive without the communion wrought through some degree of fellowship with the network and “love” that Tree represents, holding the corporeality “guilt[y]” for the break—his phallic “branch,” his homosexuality—as a witness of the validity of his experiential multiplicity and of a continued virility borne of the “lust / that flowers” in somatic associations, tensions, and realities through mortality’s “end.”

Waterman points out that “the tension between the two voices” competing for our attention here—the gay voice and the Mormon voice—”accounts for [the poem's] vitality”; that is, as each identity brushes against and overlaps the other, the text becomes increasingly and fruitfully complex, an intricate layering of tones and metaphors that would be incomplete without due consideration of Liu’s multiplicity, including—perhaps in this case, especially—his Mormon identity and experience.

———–

*While a visual of this model would work well here to explain my explanation, that may have to come in a later post (though not necessarily one in this series) once I’ve had time to frame/revise the theory a bit more.

———–

Next week in part 4—more liberating paradox(i)es.

My Favorite Work: Neil Aitken’s poem “Traveling through the Prairies, I think of My Father’s Voice”

The One I’ve Been Thinking About: Lisa Torcasso Downing’s short story “Clothing Esther”

Prose I Most Admire: there’s some very good writers here, but the one that really got me in the flow of the language is Joshua Foster’s essay “God Damned the Land But Lifted the People; Or, A Redemption in Three Levitations”

Best Use Of Humor: To be honest a bit disappointing overall, but this sentence from Lynda Mackey Wilson’s essay “We Who Owe Everything to a Name” cracked me up — (talking about a book about she received from her agnostic parents called The Origins of Life) “There were dramatic pictures of lightning flashing over moody ammonia seas.” (152)

Favorite Sentences/Lines: I’m going to pick two. From Aitken’s poem — “…Here, the wind sounds the same/ blown from any direction, full of dust, pollen, the deep toll of church bells/ rung for mass, weddings, deaths. …” (1)

And from Lance Larsen’s essay “A Feeling in Your Head”  (which is about him as a young boy with an uncle fighting in Vietnam and the fragile hope for his return) — “On winter Sundays, we entered the church for sacrament and sermons in afternoon light, then exited in darkness, as if our praying brought on the gloom, our singing caused it to lick at the chapel windows, our amens led it to press down on the station wagon my father maneuvered through the streets like an elegant hearse.” (115)

Also: some good poems have been submitted so far, but we’re light on work from the Dialogue, Sunstone and Ensign archives. If anybody is in the mood to go digging for hidden treasures, I’d much appreciate it.

Title: Tornado Weather; Memorial Day, May 1954; and MEADOWLARK

Poet: Michael R. Collings

Publication Info: Maverick Magazine, July 10, 2004

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

Collings is one of my favorite Mormon poets and these are the only three I know of online. Any one could be fun to discuss.”

Participate:

All Payday Poetry posts so far

Click here to fill out the Payday Poetry form

Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Here’s a link to the kick off post with a list of possible sources

Of course, one problem that arises from the general nature-human disconnect is that of faltering literacy.  Lacking their own spirituality-nature approach, some readers of scripture find the outdoorsy contexts and nature-hued saturation levels of many scriptural stories and passages mysterious and obscure, or maybe quaint and thick, rather like how the King James version of the Bible loses some students of scripture with its Shakespearean-era rhetorical density.

Wilderness Interface Zone is nothing if not interested in promoting literacy, especially nature-literacy.  So to honor and enjoy scripture’s endearing and enduring traditional affinities with nature and to  encourage folks to throw themselves into experience with nature–even just parks, with trees, grass, ducks, and space to fly kites–to improve their scriptural literacy, we’re running Poems of Biblical Proportions Week.  WIZ is soliciting poetry (or even poetic creative nonfiction) based in both scripture and nature.  Mp3s of music combining  nature and scriptural themes are also of interest.  Your work need not be based in the Bible only.  It may reference any scriptural source, such as the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, etc.

To submit a poem, creative non-fiction essay, mp3, or other poetry-like venture containing both scriptural and natural wavelengths, see our guidelines here.