And in the interest of full disclosure, Peculiar Pages is not only the imprint that will be publishing Monsters & Mormons, but it also asked me to provide a blurb for the anthology. Which I was initially nervous about, but happily did after reading the manuscript. Here it is:

With these 19 plays, the New Play Project ably makes its claim as one of the most ambitious and vibrant going concerns in the world of LDS culture to all of us mission-field Mormons who have only heard rumors and testimonies. Out of the Mount delivers comedy and tragedy and social commentary, allegory, politics and healthy doses of armchair philosophy and theology in plays that mainly focus on (as most good plays do) relationships that unfold via crackling dialogue. Whether it’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane applying for a marriage license or Adam and Eve feeling their way towards some sort of post-fall rapprochement or young couples falling in and out of love, these playwrights are writing for these latter-days, even when there’s nothing particularly LDS about their characters and settings. That said, what I love most about this anthology is that we get—especially with the fantastic concluding trio of “Gaia,” “Prodigal Son” and “Little Happy Secrets”—works that artfully and poignantly explore key aspects of the grand drama that is the Mormon experience.

You can buy Out of the Mount here; but you should also check out Theric’s series of posts on the anthology (including excerpts from some of the plays) over at the Peculiar Pages blog.

Though this post is by it’s very nature heavily self-indulgent, I am going to try to spin it as more altruistic than it is.

Altruism #1: Katya’s Mormon Arts Wikia is exploding. BYU’s Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database is still an excellent resource and in many respects superior, but, for instance, Katya’s wiki offers scads more plays. And I don’t know how the discussion has been going, but I’ve been able to make additions and improvements to Mormon Arts Wikia without cutting my hair first. And it’s not Wikipedia–not only can you work on your own article, you are encouraged to. And once you fix it up, it’s fixed up. (Can you tell I’m a wikivangelist?) So go do some work on this handy resource that I used in writing up this post.

Altruism #2: I’m using this post to point you in the direction of some Mormon writers you might not know or have never read. There’s some dead people here. There some just-barely-not-teenagers-anymore on here.

Altruism #3: If this post inspires you to buy The Fob Bible, the proceeds go to LDS Humanitarian Services and help make me a famous commodity, righteous endeavors both.

Looping the Loop, with Theric

.

My “How Long Till Two Times” deals with the confusion of Adam and Eve after leaving the Garden, much like

Davey Morrison’s “Adam and Eve,” but both these works agree with

“Genesis” by Danny Nelson that mortality was totally worth whatever bad results accompanied. That’s a particularly Mormon idea stated most clearly by Eve in

The Book of Moses that we have through Joseph Smith. He was good friends with

Parley P. Pratt whose autobiography (at least the first half) is one of the great Mormon books.

Doug Thayer recently got into the autobiography game too with his Hooligan, for which he got a serious ribbing from

Patrick Madden in the essay “The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things.” That essay spends some time talking about dictionaries, something

Orson Scott Card once wrote one of. Saintspeak, it’s called. Not to be confused with

Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary, though I’m sure one could make a sexist joke if one were so inclined. You know what kind of people I’m talking about. Anyway, one of that book’s authors shares a name with

David O. McKay, whose smokin’ hot correspondence with his wife was published as Heart Petals, which is about as cheesy a title as

The Heart Has Forever by Kerry Lynn Blair, who helped found the Whitney Awards. At the last Whitney’s, the winner for best novel was

Sandra Grey’s Traitor, which is about a European citizen resisting the Nazis. Only hers is set in France and

Michael O. Tunnell’s Brothers in Valor was set in Germany.

Dean Hughes’s Children of the Promise series also featured heroic WWII-era German Mormons, but probably most European Mormons in Mormon lit are emigrating converts, such as in

Nephi Anderson’s classic Added Upon, which also played in big ways with the preexistence  much like

Rachel Nunes’s In Your Place which was her first-written (but not first-published) novel. Another first-written-but-not-published-novel-writing novelist is

Betsy Brannon Green, making Hearts in Hiding her first published work.

Matthew Greene (no relation) had a play, “Variations on a Breakup“, premiere last year. And speaking of breakups,

The Nephiad is Michael Collings’s epic poem on the breakup of Laban’s head from his body. Epics. That reminds me of

Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy, which is an old-timey sort of thing I suppose, like

Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy only totally different. And now, because  we’re Mormons and thus we love hints of a vaguely chiastic structure, let’s make the obvious connection from her fairy tale back to one by

Danny Nelson–let’s say “The Giantess and the Shiverbird,” and from there to

Davey Morrison’s cleverly named “A Fairy Tale” and from there back to

me. Because I’ve also written things that end in death. for instance, “The Oracle.”

Now. My challenge for you. In the comments, break my loop open and work in yourself or someone you love. Or someone you think is totally overrated. That’s okay too.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Convention at Snowbird, Utah (a rundown of my experience at the AML session will come in a later post that I’ve got halfway worked up; yes, I’ve been lazy—so sue me) and over the weekend I did some revising to incorporate some of the feedback I received and posted it on Reading Until Dawn. “Toward a Mormon Gothic: Stephenie Meyer’s Vampires and a Theology of the Uncanny” takes its place in the blossoming field of Twilight studies beside RUD’s inaugural essay, Theric Jepson’s “Saturday’s Werewolf: Vestiges of the Premortal Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels.” Link over and have a read. That’s what all the cool kids are doing (or so they tell me).

While you’re there, you might also notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to the site design (I’ve tweaked the header) and that I’ve updated the articles. The inconsistent layout was bugging me, so I took down the HTMLs until I can get them to look how I want them to look, reworked my document template slightly, and incorporated the new MLA citation standards into the notes. Hopefully this gives the collection a more consistent and professional feel.

Also: though I’ve published “Toward a Mormon Gothic” on RUD, I’m still open to feedback. So if, while you’re reading, you notice a typo or some such faux pas or notice that I’ve missed something you deem vitally important to the conversation, either email me or comment here. That or work up your own essay and submit it for publication. I promise I won’t complain.

To Build a Fence

a public service message from

The Institute for Marital Concerns

Brigham Young Chapter

As all you RM gospel scholars know, Brigham Young once said:

I will give each of the young men in Israel, who have arrived at an age to marry, a mission to go straightway and get married to a good sister, fence a city lot, lay out a garden and orchard and make a home.  This is the mission that I give to all young men in Israel.

This presents us with a distinct problem, if we 1) do not want to get married, 2) don’t want to get married, or 3) would really rather not get married.  If this sounds like you, then rest assured that we at the IMC are here to help you get out of what, at first glance, seems like a direct commandment from a prophet of God to get married.

Living in the post-Clinton era as we do, we have the right to demand strict word definitions and to nit-pick on how they fit together.  Being exactly the sort of “Young Man in Israel” that Brigham Young was speaking both to and about, it is necessary to build excuses for ourselves.  But a bad excuse is self-damnation and really good excuses are hard to come by in this dispensation of the fullness of times, so in order to stall for time, we need to demand some definitions while we strive to understand the “deeper” meaning of this prophetic utterance.

To the neophyte, defining “straightway” may seem our best starting point, but like any bomb, picking the wrong wire (or in this case, word) can make the whole thing go off in your face.  Be warned:  “Straightway” is such a potent word that it may, in fact, actually be impossible to completely disarm.  In cases like this, where the obvious is not the ideal, it is wise to open the abstract mind, allowing fresh, clean and clear thoughts to fall in from above like so many bird droppings.  In the case of this phrase (“go straightway and get married”), the best place to start is probably “get.”  To those unfamiliar with the fine art of advanced word refinement, or clarification, “get” may not seem so great, but as every wise word clarificator knows, “get” is the word clarificator’s best friend.  For one thing, it is of that rare tribe of word that is safe to look up in the dictionary!  Dozens upon dozens of wildly disparate definitions for the choosing!  “Get” can make a sentence mean anything you please!  “Go straightway and succeed in coming or going married!”  “Go straightway and achieve as a result of military activity married!”  “Go straightway and be subjected to married!”  (Oops, bad example . . . .)

But before we get too happy about discovering “get” just where it could have best been found, let’s look at a larger portion of Brother Brigham’s sticky speech:

I will give each of the young men in Israel, who have arrived at an age to marry, a mission to go straightway and get married to a good sister, fence a city lot, lay out a garden and orchard and make a home.

All right, clarificators, here we go!  First of all, why do we need to refine this statement?  Because it is presenting us with a mission—or, in other words, it’s handing out (heaven help us) responsibility; and if there is one thing we don’t need (or at least want), it’s responsibility!  Brigham couldn’t have meant for us to have moreresponsibility!  We’ve had enough of that!  We’re RMs! Are you with me?  ARE YOU WITH ME?!?!

BUT WAIT—who is he giving this mission to?

. . . each of the young men in Israel, who have arrived at an age to marry . . .

Ah ha!  There’s an out right there!  Who’s to say what “an age to marry” is?  Or whether we have “arrived” at such an age?  I don’t know, but I’m sure that doesn’t include me!

But that’s too easy, and not completely satisfactory.  Here’s why: I can’t go around saying “I haven’t ‘arrived at an age to marry’ yet” all of my life.  Also, unless I can point to what I am doing to obey President Young rather than my reasons (however valid) for not obeying him, then the focus will remain on what I’m not doing and no amount of pious explication is likely to save me from the judgmental frowns of others.  So let’s look once again at this quote of Brother Brigham’s, and this time, let’s pay Close Attention to the commas:

[The mission is] to go straightway and get married to a good sister, fence a city lot, lay out a garden and orchard and make a home.

It doesn’t take a prophet to realize that President Young has offered us young men in Israel who’ve arrived at an age to marry three options:

1  Go straightway and get married to a good sister

2  Fence a city lot

3  Lay out a garden and orchard and make a home

The first option is what we kinda wanna avoid and the third is an awful lot of hard work.  Therefore, the only option I can see left for us (short of apostasy) is to fence a city lot.  If we can get oh, say, six thousand of us young men in Israel together some Saturday afternoon, we should be able to fence a city lot in no time!  And then we can go home knowing we have been faithful in following the commands of the prophets!  A major plus of this plan is that we will be able to carry around a Polaroid of our fenced city lot—our pride and joy—to show anyone who may ask us why the only ring we’re wearing is our well-worn CTR.

“You see, Brother XYZ,” we might say, “while you were off getting married to a good sister, I did the thing most wouldn’t.  I built a fence.”  That should shut them up.

And hey!  It almost sounds heroic!

Tonight the Living Scriptures salesman showed up at our door. His car’s GPS had every member of our ward plugged into it and after visiting the Coes, it told him to drive to our house next. He was a nice guy, a BYU student, getting married at the end of the summer. I was able to offer him some good advice for his fiancee about getting a California teaching credential. So even though we didn’t buy anything and scored a free DVD, I still think he came out better.

The main thrust of his sales technique was to assume that we already wanted his product and it was only a question of how quickly we could afford to buy them. The problem is that I’ve seen many of these videos and although “Nephi and the Brass Plates” and “The Conversion of Alma the Younger” are quite good, the rest of the ones I’ve seen range from the okay to the terrible.

But I’m a snob. And so is my wife. Talking about the clip he showed us (from the free DVD) led her to describe their depiction of the Savior as noted in the title of this post.

But even more wrong than a bug-eyed blue-eyed Jesus is, in my opinion, using the Church’s records to sell your crap. Excuse me. To sell your spiritually minded child-pleasing art. According the the Church’s website, “Information on this page [taken from my ward's membership list] is for Church use only and is not to be used for any commercial, business, or political purpose.” Like selling cartoons, one would imagine, even if they are inspired by sacred writ.

Kent Larsen wrote about this recently, tangentially, and I said I found it unethical. I did get one amen, but then the conversation veered off wildly and excitingly in another direction.

But I want to know how the people feel.

Using Church records to sell product. Yea or nay?

Part I appears today and I’ll post part II next week.

* * * *

Re: The Fob Family Bible, Part I: Introduction and The First Four Fobnesses

I’ve got two family Bibles on my bookshelf: one nearly brand-new two-volume set from Bookcraft/Deseret Book—The Old and New Testaments for Latter-day Saint Families (Salt Lake City, 2005 and 1998 respectively); and one unwieldy, second-hand volume from Crusade Bible Publishers, Inc. (Nashville, 1980s)—The Holy Bible Family Altar Edition. These were intended, I believe, as coffee table volumes, books meant to be points of gathering, conversation, and communion between family members, their communities, and their God. Such creation of communal understanding is enhanced, the editors of all three volumes imply, with the editorial apparatus—the study helps—built into each text: among other things, the glossaries, the book and chapter introductions, the topic headings, the colored words that highlight important aspects of the text, and the footnotes that include cross references and scriptural commentary. According to the editors of the scriptures for Latter-day Saint Families series, these helps are “designed especially” to “help [… us] read, understand, and think about [… the scriptures] in exciting new ways”¹—ways that will lead us, presumably, to become as God is, the central and defining focus of LDS theology.

The Fob Bible, an anthology of stories, poems, closet drama, and email correspondence, positions itself within this general tradition of enhanced, altar-type, family Bibles, though with a significant revisionary difference: instead of constructing a new apparatus intended to direct our study of the scriptures in specific, predetermined ways or offering a new translation of a text that has already been translated repeatedly, the contributors to The Fob Bible have re-imagined well-worn Old Testament stories, revisiting Eden and its surrounds, the Deluge, the final moments of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac’s ascent to Moriah’s pinnacle, the relationship between Isaac and Esau and Esau and Jacob, Joseph’s—then Moses’—journey into Egypt, Balaam’s bond with his ass, Samson, Solomon, Rehoboam, Naaman, Ezra, Job, Jeremiah, Daniel, and, of course, Jonah and the giant fish.

These postmodern visitations reshape each historically privileged narrative and narrative voice from the perspective of the less-privileged story, the unheard voice, offering new characters—or familiar characters recast in new molds—the opportunity to speak and, in the process, to influence the world “in exciting new ways.” For instance, Danny Nelson gives voice to Job’s wife, a woman unnamed in the canon whose scriptural screen time amounts to one line of dialogue² and two obscure references,³ three slight appearances from which she is sometimes judged to be “bitter, angry, and wrong.”⁴ Yet, Nelson gives the woman a name, “Hadasa,”⁵ the whole cast of human emotions, and a book of her own, a space in which she (or Nelson’s version thereof) can flesh out her poignant account of Job’s tale, which is, in the end, their story and deserves to be told in her voice, too.

This revisionary proclivity is one of the book’s defining features and, I believe, one of its greatest strengths. Indeed, each contributor exhibits the tendency to some degree; they are Mormon, after all, and writers to boot. And in their collective creative engagement with Mormonism, a Christian religious heritage founded on a restorationist theology, they’re ultimately encouraged, by Church doctrine and historical practice, “to reexamine fundamental assertions of their culture.”⁶ This reexamination includes the processes involved in the canonization and interpretation of scripture, historio-cultural practices that Joseph Smith essentially challenged from the beginning with his expansive view of God’s word and his witness of our need, as individuals and human communities questing to make something of ourselves, for continued interaction with God’s eternal being and will.

Not that The Fob Bible qualifies as Scripture in the strictest sense of the Word. Scriptural, indeed, but little more. Even the subtitled claim that this is “A Quotidian Book of Scripture Containing, But Not Limited To, the Juiciest Portions of the Old Testament” seems meant more as a nod in the revisionary direction of the text than as any assertion of the book’s alleged canonical authority. In other words, whereas the other family Bibles on my bookshelf, as in Mormon culture generally, take as their editorial province a strict adherence to and commentary on the language and meaning of the King James Version (the KJV is, after all, accepted as the “standard” or “official” LDS Bible), this “Quotidian Book of Scripture” is more concerned with finding transcendence in the acts of everyday language. As such, its province is narrative and any authority it exerts over the reader is purely rhetorical, flowing from the influence of storytellers practicing their craft with passion and integrity.

And my, what stories this “meeting of misfits,”⁷ this writing group turned producers of a literary anthology can tell. What follows is a brief rundown of what each of the eight writers has laid down on the rhetorical altar.

Friends of Ben (FOB) namesake and co-founder Ben Christensen (attributed as B. G. Christensen) gives us one of the most poignant stories of the collection with “Abraham’s Purgatory,” one of his three prose offerings, though the other two aren’t one narrative whit behind. Here Christensen plays variations on the theme of Abraham’s sacrifice. He begins on the well-worn path of Abraham and Isaac’s ascent up the mount, then, with this shocking line, “He lay the knife against the boy’s neck and cut,”⁸, he veers into a circling descent through the thorny undergrowth of Abraham’s consciousness as his repeated journeys to the mount—eighth, ninth, tenth—end with the same result: a son dead at his father’s hand. And we see the prophet come unhinged:

“Father,” Isaac began on the eleventh day, but Abraham shushed him.

“No questions, boy.”

*

Please, Lord, don’t make me do this.

*

I beg of you, release me from this hell.

*

Please, not again.

*

Abraham had lost track of how many times he’d relived this day. It felt like months, perhaps a year. He was not sure which he dreaded more—waking up the next morning to kill Isaac again, or waking up the next morning to find his son was truly gone.⁹

As this Groundhog Day from hell unfolds and we, with the prophet, lose track of “how many times he’d relived this day,” we’re compelled to watch through the disconnected narrative as he falls again and again onto the soul-piercing yet very human wonder over why he had to kill his promised son, why he had to give up his hope for posterity as infinite as the desert sands, until, in the end, he finally finds reprieve from his burning madness as he lowers the sacrifice-stained knife from the thicketed ram and makes his way home, the nightmare ended, Isaac at his side.

Beside Christensen on the FOB family tree, we have Eric W Jepson, FOB co-founder and lead editor of the Bible, who adds the greatest formal variety to the anthology. Partnered with his Thmazing alter-ego Theric (a very postmodern pairing), he presents fourteen total narratives: five public service messages (each under the heading “How to Get Over It”), four short stories (one co-written with Danny Nelson), two poems, one closet drama, one extended email correspondence between multiple historical characters, and one bar song (at least that’s what it claims to be). While this jack of the narrative trade knows his way around each form, the most revisionary of his efforts (aside from his companionship with Theric) is “Ezra’s Inbox,” a list of the electronic messages Ezra, priest and scribe of ancient Israel, may have received if email had been available circa 450 BC (or so). The central premise underlying this interaction isn’t simply whether or not prophets, priests, and scribes can or should use email in their work, even where it is available; no, matters of prophetic Internet usage are peripheral to the real narrative work going on here. More broadly, Jepson seems to be exploring, among other things, the relationship between medium and message—in this case, for example, what the narrative limits of new media are and, more specifically, how new media/email might be used to serve the expansive interpersonal and leadership needs of a religious organization confronted with institutional flux from within and international political flux from without.

The correspondence centers on the ever-developing relationship between Israel’s post-Babylonian-exile leaders Ezra (though we only hear his voice as it’s echoed through replies to his messages), Zechariah, Nehemiah, Jeshua, and Haggai as they converse, among other things, regarding how to deal with Israel’s worldliness, the rebuilding of the temple, and military/political leaders vying to take control of the temple and Jerusalem for themselves. The messages begin with this short update:

From: zechariah@jew.judah.prs

To: ezra@temple.judah.prs, nehemiah@governor.judah.prs

Subject: New Prophet

The Lord has seen fit to send a second prophet to support us in telling the people of Israel to repent and to rebuild the city walls and the temple. I’m quite glad. I’ve been running short on metaphors.

I gave him your addresses. I’m sure he’ll be contacting you soon. I think you’ll like him.

Z¹⁰

In this brief interaction between men called to keep God’s people from reverting to the world, we’re offered a glimpse into a fraternal camaraderie borne of struggle and priesthood fellowship shared across time and space and through a rhetorical medium that arrives almost as soon as it’s sent, opening conduits for dialogue and personal and institutional development in yet-to-be-fully-explored ways.

Such revisionary exploration continues in the three selections from A. Arwen Taylor—two lyric poems and a retelling of Jonah’s fish tale. While her re-vision of Jonah is human and humorous and touching, the place where she most pressed me beyond myself was in her poems. Her lyric is crisp and pointed, her poetic engagement with words a means of “linguistic worship”¹¹) centered on the conjugation and communion of bodies through rituals of the tongue, as she expresses in “Lingua Doctrinae”: Speaking to an unnamed “you” (a lover? the reader? God?) upon whom “light unfolds [in] a dusty yellow ray,”¹², she discusses their conjugal acts of language, witnessing that they “resurrect the third declension, bring / the plural genitive alive,”¹³, renewing the complexities of linguistic inflection and possession in the plural pronouns “we” and “our” as, in the poet’s words, “we” “conjugate the Mass, and sing / our hallelujas” and “pater nosters,” paying “pronoun penance / for our poor grade in repentance / for our reprobate translation of this sentence.”¹⁴ Such trouble as the poet’s punning and rhetorical uses of ritual may make is, at once, as these lines suggest, the source of the poet’s need to repent and the means of that redemption. Through the “locution of [… this poetic] system” of worship,¹⁵ a very Arnoldian proposition, she thus explores the relationship between languages, doctrines, individuals, the sexes, human and the divine, in ways that highlight the subversively redemptive possibilities of humanity’s communal acts. And by so doing, the poet presses her readers to consider that language is something more than garments for our ideas, more than mere marks on the page, or more than a series of vibrations that pass through the aural cavity, even as seemingly meaningless as these garments, these marks, these vibrations can sometimes seem.

Danny Nelson presses readers in a similar, though distinctive, way with each of his twenty-seven offerings (the most of any contributor), including twenty-three poems of various stripes and four short stories (one co-written with Eric Jepson). As a poet of considerable range and talent—he works deftly in poetic forms from light verse to the free-verse dramatic monologue—Nelson’s influence within the anthology is clear, illustrated in the placement of his poem “Creation” as the Bible’s opening text. Although this position is likely a result of the editors’ efforts to mirror Old Testament chronology (“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”¹⁶), it also serves as a frame for the “procreant urge of creation”¹⁷—a phrase straight out of Whitman—as it runs through The Fob Bible as a whole. Indeed, in Nelson’s poem, as in Whitman and the FOB anthology, we find this “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world” advancing “opposite equals” “out of the dimness”¹⁸ of matter unorganized into bodies and relationships eternally on the verge of being (or greater manifestations thereof). Nelson captures this paired advancement in “Creation” with his depiction of the (pro)creative union of the sun and the moon, an interaction representative of the male and female aspects of Nature working together to craft a new sphere from the fabric of the universe.

Within the Mormon context of The Fob Bible, the (pro)creative movement of these “opposite equal” spheres further implies the eternal (pro)creative influence of both male and female Deities over the universe. For if we have a Father in Heaven and if, as Eliza R. Snow reminds us, “truth is reason, [then] truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a Mother there”¹⁹ and that she’s doing more than merely keeping House. Rather, as Nelson’s variation on this theme suggests, she, as represented in the creative power of the moon (which here “lift[s] land”²⁰ from the earth’s watery void, “set[s] the rain in silver sheets / upon the ocean’s stormy streets,”²¹ and places “birds in flight” and fish in the sea²²) and as the feminine coeval with God the Father, is an active participant in the eternal, reiterative round of creation, a circling “dance”²³ that is more productive of all that is “good,”²⁴ beautiful, and holy than many of us may care to—or even, at present, can—imagine.

(Next week: Part II, The Final Four Fobnesses and Conclusion)

* * * *

Footnotes:

1. Thomas R. Valletta, et al, The Old Testament for Latter-day Saint Families (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005) ix.

2. Job 2:9.

3. 19:17, 31:10.

4. “Job’s Wife: Bitter, Angry, and Wrong,” Mom of 9’s Place 19 Feb. 2007, 10 May 2009, http://www.momof9splace.com/jobswife.html.

5. “The Book of Job’s Wife,” The Fob Bible (El Cerrito, CA: Peculiar Pages, 2009) 161.

6. Eric W Jepson, et al, The Fob Bible ii.

7. ii.

8. “Abraham’s Purgatory,” The Fob Bible 46.

9. 48.

10. “Ezra’s Inbox,” The Fob Bible 131.

11. “Lingua Doctrinae,” The Fob Bible line 9.

12. 4.

13. 7-8.

14. 7, 9-12

15. 31.

16. Gen. 1:1.

17. The Fob Bible i.

18. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 3:7-9.

19. Eliza R. Snow, “O, My Father,” Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985) 292.

20. Danny Nelson, “Creation,” The Fob Bible line 8.

21. 11-2.

22. 21, 24.

23. 29.

24. 30.

Title: The Widower (link is to PDF download)

Author: Eric W. Jepson

Publication Info: Dialogue Wireless, 2007/Dialogue, Summer 2009

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: “Um, I wrote it?” Yes, he did. I like the part about the second-wife -to-be dressing up as Amelia Bedilia. I’m  a little confused about his kids, though. I’m also jealous because he covers similar ground to what I’m trying to do with my novella, although it’s actually pretty different.

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Add in work by Tyler and me in the Fall 2007/Spring 2008 Irreantum and a fantastic essay by Eric Thompson in the Spring 2007 Irreantum, and the past year has been fairly fruitful for AMV’s bloggers. And there may be more that I have forgotten (pipe up in the comments). Oh, yeah, Theric presented at Sunstone — a paper that was jumpstarted by Tyler and Laura’s Reading Until Dawn project.

This is not to mention that three current or former Times & Seasons bloggers are represented in the Summer 2009 issue of Dialogue, plus Dallas Robbins and Juvenile Instructor’s Heidi Harris. I think it’s becoming more and more clear that for many of the new(ish) voices in Mormon Studies blogging is not the end itself, but rather a way to develop ideas, connections and communities. And today’s best Mormon Studies scholars may just need to be fluent in a wide variety of genres/platforms of expressing their thinking.

A guest post on you and your wife and your creative processes (and even how family impacts them). How do you find time to write? What helps you write? Where do your creative processes and ambitions collide/feed off of/interact with/entangle with your wife’s creative processes and ambitions? (and this even if your output her output of work isn’t huge — certainly family dampens things).

I think he asked because I had approached him about us, my wife and I, possibly doing a comics story for Popcorn Popping. We hadn’t started working on it yet, but I thought PP might be a venue for such a work, if the work tasted Mormon enough. William then had the grim responsibility to tell me PP had been shut down (two days later, the announcement appeared on the site).

Everyone has a list of someday-I-wills and one Lynsey and I share is creating a graphic novel together. But as William hinted in his suggested topic, things like family (to say nothing of desperate poverty) have prevented some of our more ambitious planned projects.

But you can’t take a born visualist and a born fictionist and not expect them to create something. You can’t stick them together and expect that. And so create we do. Lynsey has made the most amazing birth announcements. We do complex and beautiful postal art for our family newsletter, the LDotFMotNY. Lynsey is our ward’s bulletin specialist and, under her creative direction, those have ranged from gorgeous covers using photographs from the early days of the Berkeley Ward to the oh-so-witty speaker bios I’m writing for inclusion now. We have outlets, even if we’re not yet accomplishing the great things we intend to.

Because, let’s be frank, having kids makes it hard.

Yes, yes, yes. That’s an excuse and only an excuse and I admit it readily. Anthony Trollope wrote from 5am to 8am every morning before he went off and invented the modern mailbox. What makes my excuse any good?

Nothing, frankly.

Yes, it is true that I have a novel I’m trying to sell; I’ve edited an anthology that’s coming out June 1; I’m working on some other anthology projects and critical editions; I have two novel-length projects I hope to finish before the new school year starts; I’m doing some editing for other people’s projects that are coming out in the next year or two; I blog—- So I am working on thing, I am I am.

But these meager accomplishments come with a large dose of guilt. Because while I’m scraping minutes to get things done, I’m preventing my wife from similarly scraping. Her charity in letting me string words together has the direct result of minimizing her own time spent creating. It makes me feel unpleasantly patriarchal.

What I’m getting at is that we Jepsons still need to find a better balance.

As part of my pursuit of a fair balance, I am beginning a series of interviews with Mormon husband/wife artist pairs. I have an excellent one lined up for our first entry and am working on arranging more. (If you have suggestions or can help me contact artsy couples who have found success, please let me know so I can start tracking them down.)

My father-in-law says that being an engineer is godlike because it is creation and God is a Creator. This aligns with my thinking. Granted, after this life ends we will have a lot of physics to catch up on, but Lynsey and I, wife and husband, are creators. A husband and wife creating, together. What could be more Mormon than that?

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.