The AML gave the best novel award to Rift by Todd Robert Petersen. (Amazon)

The Whitney voters gave the best novel award to In the Company of Angels by David Farland. (Amazon)

That’s a pretty good year, and if those awards inspired just 10 people each to pick up one of those novels and read them, I’d be quite pleased. They are both thorougly Mormon; they are both thoroughly LDS; they are both challenging and affirming; they are both very well written; they are both by writers who deserve to be remembered decades from now (and awards like this always help with that kind of cultural memory). Well done, brothers and sisters. The bottom line is ya’ll came through in the categories that (in my opinion) matter the most. I’m not going to gripe or quibble about the rest. There’s always next year for that.

This is the third and final entry in this series. The first part of our interview was about Ms Hallstom’s novel-in-stories Bound on Earth. The second was about her editorship of the literary journal Irreantum. This third portion is about the short-story collection, Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, that she edited for Zarahemla Books (review).

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Let’s start with what criteria a story had to meet to even be considered for inclusion. What were the ground rules going in to this anthology?

I went into this project looking for the best stories I could find written by, for, or about Mormons over the last fifteen years or so. (Originally, I’d intended to limit the date range from 2000 to the present, but there were a number of stories published in the late 90s that I felt needed to be included, so I abandoned that idea.) Not only did I want the stories I selected to represent quality literature, but I felt it was important to include stories with recognizably Mormon elements. Most of the stories contain overt references to Mormon culture or theology, and all of the stories, in my opinion, explore Mormon themes. I also wanted the authors in this anthology to have a background in LDS culture and theology–I didn’t consider stories written “about” Mormonism by writers without close personal ties to the religion. And, finally, I wanted to make sure that the anthology’s content wouldn’t disqualify it from being taught in a BYU class. In other words, while I welcomed challenging and thought-provoking stories, I wanted to keep things PG-13.

Obviously, in order to be considered “complete” as an anthology, some authors had to be included no matter what. How did the selection process differ for those authors? I.e., were you more concerned with picking a “typical” Doug Thayer story, or just what you thought was his best?

There were definitely some big names that I knew must be included. In the beginning, I either purchased or borrowed from the library a number of important short story collections: Lewis Horne’s The House of James, Brady Udall’s Letting Loose the Hounds, Mary Clyde’s Survival Rates, Orson Scott Card’s Keeper of Dreams, Darrell Spencer’s Caution: Men in Trees, Paul Rawlins’ No Lie Like Love, Todd Robert Petersen’s Long After Dark, Margaret Blair Young’s Love Chains, Phyllis Barber’s Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination. (I include all these titles because anybody interested in Mormon lit and/or the short story should check them out.)

As I read through each collection, I noted the story or stories that I liked the most and that I felt best fit the vision of Dispensation. Often, the “Mormon-ness” of a story was an important factor as I made decisions. For example, “The 12-Inch Dog” is probably my favorite story from Darrell Spencer’s Caution: Men in Trees, but it’s not particularly Mormon. The story we ended up using, the also excellent “Blood Work,” was a better fit because it dealt head-on with Mormon characters and themes. Orson Scott Card’s story “Christmas at Helaman’s House” was one of the four stories categorized under the heading “Mormon Stories” in his short story collection, and I felt it was important to include a Mormon story from Card in Dispensation. (My favorite Card story from Keeper of Dreams is the dystopian “Elephants of Poznan,” and while it isn’t Mormon fiction, it’s a really cool story, and I was glad to be able to reprint it in the most recent issue of Irreantum.)

I also took into account author preference when dealing with well-known authors, especially when there were two or three stories that I enjoyed equally. Some authors pointed me in the direction of stories I didn’t know existed. Paul Rawlins, for example, had recently published “The Garden” in the literary magazine Image and sent it to me after I approached him about a different story, and I was so happy he did. “The Garden” is one of my favorite stories in the book.

Some stories you originally discovered and published in Irreantum. How did your past history with those stories affect your objectivity?

Well, to be honest, I never felt conflicted about including stories from Irreantum. In fact, only two of the twenty-eight stories—Jack Harrell’s “Calling and Election” and Darin Cozzens’ “Light of The New Day”—were chosen from the many stories I’ve come in contact with as I’ve worked on Irreantum. Both Cozzens and Harrell are important and accomplished enough Mormon short story writers that they would have been included in this anthology even without the Irreantum connection, and both of these stories show them at the top of their game. Both stories won 1st place in the Irreantum fiction contest, also, and I was interested in highlighting stories that have won important contests.

Same question to the nth power regarding your story “Thanksgiving.”

Unlike the Irreantum stories, I was quite conflicted about using one of my own stories in the anthology. Chris Bigelow (Zarahemla’s publisher) and I discussed it, and decided that since “Thanksgiving” had won awards from both the Utah Arts Council and Dialogue magazine it would be an appropriate choice. And for me, personally, I’ve felt my writer-self getting slowly swallowed up by my editor-self over the last couple of years—between Dispensation and Irreantum and Segullah and teaching, I’ve had very little time for my own writing. I didn’t get into this business to become an editor, although I’ve appreciated the editing opportunities that have come my way. But my primary intention has always been to be a writer, and if Chris agreed that “Thanksgiving” should be included, I didn’t want to sacrifice my writer-self to my editor-self yet again.

I noticed that a high percentage of stories are from outsider perspectives — characters who are not LDS or on the outs with that heritage. Which suggests to me that you to some measure agree with the oft-stated maxim that the way to write great LDS literature is to get at it from the outside, not the inside. Comment?

Well, I disagree with this question on a number of levels. First, a “high percentage” of the stories aren’t from outsider perspectives, in my opinion. By my count, in seventeen of the twenty-eight stories, the point-of-view character would describe him or herself as a Mormon. In many of the stories, the point-of-view character might not be Mormon, but his or her interaction with a Mormon is the crux of the story (“Buckeye the Elder,” “Healthy Partners,” etc.). Only four stories are written from the perspective of characters who are “on the outs” with Mormonism (by which you mean, I suppose, that the character makes it known that he or she was once an active Mormon but isn’t anymore).

And I’ve got to say, thumbing through the anthology in order to make an accounting of which point-of-view character is Mormon enough has been a little irritating. LDS writers should be able to write from the point-of-view of all sorts of people, and Mormon stories should be able to include the points-of-view of those with all sorts of Mormon experiences (“inside” or “outside”), without these choices being translated into a sweeping generalization about what kind of literature a Mormon author ought to write. Some of these stories were written by believing Mormons about non-Mormons. Some were written by former Mormons about believing Mormons. And drawing these distinctions, frankly, is giving me a headache. Honestly, the “insider-ness” or “outsider-ness” of each point-of-view character never even occurred to me as I was editing this anthology. I just wanted to include strong fiction. This isn’t to say that I didn’t reject some stories with antagonistic “outsider” characters. I did do that. But not because the narrator was on the outs with Mormonism. It was because the story was too agenda-driven to work as good literature. I rejected stories with an “insider” main character if they were excessively agenda-driven, too.

As far as the “oft-repeated maxim” goes (and I suppose you’re referring to Wallace Stegner’s observation that the “Great Mormon Novel” will be penned by someone who has left the church, then come “part way” back? http://www.motleyvision.org/2009/abandon-all-hope-mormon-lit-cant-be-great/): I wholeheartedly reject that idea. Some of my favorite stories in this anthology were written by believing Mormons, about believing Mormons, so, obviously, it’s possible for an insider to write excellent fiction. If I don’t believe this is possible, what in the world am I doing as a writer and an editor and a teacher operating from within Mormon culture? But this idea has already been debated quite vociferously on AMV, and this interview is already pretty lengthy, so I’ll leave it at that.

Describe briefly, if you can, the gathering process. Where did you look? How many stories did you read? Did you try to balance the number of story types? Were some inclusion decisions made based on how hard or easy permission was to obtain?

At the very beginning of the process, I asked a number of people I trust to recommend writers and stories. I also got some great suggestions from AML members, both via the AML-list and the now-defunct AML forum. From that, I compiled a list and started reading. I got my hands on the previously-mentioned short story collections, and I also read a number of stories published in Mormon magazines and in mainstream literary journals. Once I’d worked through all the recommendations, I simply started reading back issues of Irreantum, Dialogue, and Sunstone, and found some great stories there that I would have otherwise overlooked. It was important to me that this anthology not only showcase well-known writers, but also highlight up-and-coming Mormon writers who are incredibly talented but not (yet) as famous.

I don’t know if I can count the number of stories I read. I just know I read a lot of them. Tons. For about six months, almost all my fiction reading time was dedicated solely to the short stories I was considering for this collection. And, yes, I did try to have some balance: I wanted to be sure to include stories with an international or multicultural perspective; I wanted to include some speculative fiction; I wanted to include both traditional and more experimental fiction-writing methods, and so on. I was also acutely aware that I had more male writers than female writers from which to choose. Although I’d hoped at the outset to have equal representation by both men and women, in the end I found myself with ten stories by women and eighteen by men. Which is to say that, while balance was certainly on my mind, ultimately the quality of each individual story was the most important factor in making my decisions.

As far as permissions are concerned, there were a few stories that were important enough that we were willing to pay for them. Most previous publishers (and authors holding rights) graciously allowed us to reprint the stories without a fee, which was very helpful. We were able to publish all the stories we wanted to publish, which was a relief, since our budget for reprint rights was pretty small.

Did you determine book length first and choose the right number of stories to fit, or did you pick the right stories and see how long it was? If the former, how hard was it to narrow them down?

Initially, I’d planned to choose twenty stories. After my first round of cuts, I had twenty-five. Then a few more must-have stories pushed their way under my nose, and the number increased to twenty-eight, and at that point we had to put a stop to it, mainly in order to keep the price of the book under $20. And even with twenty-eight stories, which is a lot, there were still a number of stories that were difficult to cut.

Finally, to get us back the title of this series, how did you decide what order to arrange the selected stories in?

Some of it was personal preference on my part. I wanted to make sure that my favorite stories, for example, were spaced throughout the anthology, so the reader’s attention would be continuously engaged. What I’ve realized, though, is that with the short story, one person’s taste can be so wildly different from another’s that my favorite stories might be another literature-lover’s least favorite. Stories that I would call home runs have been other people’s “ho hum”s. I should have expected this (in all my years working on the Irreantum fiction contest, for example, never once has there been a story that was a unanimous first place winner among the committee members when we sat down to begin deliberations)—but it’s still surprising to me the range of responses a short story call elicit. I also wanted the arrangement of stories to ensure that similar stories weren’t back-to-back . . . although some stories were similar stylistically but dissimilar thematically, and vice versa. In the end, I simply wanted the anthology to take its readers on a journey to both familiar and unexpected places, to introduce us to both recognizable and surprising characters, and to explore both time-honored and exciting new themes. It’s my hope that Dispensation has accomplished this goal, and that the stories in the book will be read and enjoyed by all sorts of readers.

I’ve been thinking about Todd Robert Petersen’s novella “Family History” (from his short story collecton Long After Dark) for the past couple of weeks. Part of the reason is that his novel Rift was recently published, but it’s also because I wanted to kick of Weekend (Re)Visitor with something that I could read in a day, but wasn’t a short story.  There’s also that I didn’t write much about it when I reviewed the collection back in 2007.

Here’s my one sentence assessment after the re-read: it’s more audacious, worse speculative fiction, and both more complicated and close to home literature than I had remembered. It also remains, as far as I know, the first and most direct Mormon fiction response to the events of Sept. 11. And I like it very much for all of those qualities while at the same time I’m not sure how well I could defend it strictly on the grounds of modern American literary criticism. It is a wonderful Mormon hybrid that would be much less of interest to non-Mormon readers than the stories in the collection (all of which would not seem out of place in a literary journal — and indeed some of them were printed in literary journals, although mainly in Mormon ones).

“Family History” is technically slight alternate history (in its first two sections, which take place in this decade) combined with semi-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. Post 9-11, a smooth-talking salesman and the daughter of an action movie director hook up in Vegas. What is meant to be a weekend fling turns in to something more. They marry. A few years later a terrorist scenario taken straight from one of the director’s action movies occurs. He disappears. The couple tracks him down. The wife is pregnant. The director meets a pair of Mormon missionaries. These first two sections are told in the voices of the parents recording these two major moments in their lives and movements in their relationship. Fast forward many years. The director, his wife and their daughter and son-in-law have joined the church. The son of this couple is now a grown man. His father is dying of cancer and very concerned that this story (about Vegas and the aftermath) could still surface. He has struggled his whole life to write his life history, destroying it several times because he is ashamed of his pre-Mormon life and obsessed with repentence and memory.

It’s a good story even though the speculative, the future elements are slight and rather au courant (peak oil makes an appearance, Elder Bednar is president of the LDS Church, etc.). Although I also think that the speculative elements performance a needed service — it allows Petersen to make his points about family history (and by extension fiction) without getting tangled up in history and realism, and in doing so make a nod at speculative fiction, that other major stream in Mormon fiction that allows speculation and exploration of Mormon thought and worldview

In fact, it’s a fascinating apologetic for faithful realism (see paragraph 44). As the son’s mother tells him near the end (and after she herself has died in a terrorist attack in China where she had been serving a mission):

“I want you to put your father’s story into your project without any apologies and without any censoring. My story is a mess, but after you fix the spelling and everything, please try to leave it like you found it. Our story — your father’s and mine — will mean nothing if you don’t tell it all. Please don’t hide our repentence from your children. I don’t know how long you will have to live on earth before the Savior coms, but it might be a while, and it will be a very dangerous time for people’s souls. I want my family, at least, to know that it is possible to make it through this world. These stories don’t get told in our church, David. We want stories of success without having to hear about the struggles of sin.” (163)

Yes, it’s a self-serving apologia for Petersen — for his approach to fiction. But “Family History” is also one of the best examples of the sweet spot that can be created for Mormon readers of Mormon middle fiction and a model for writers seeking to work that same vein.

Such are my thoughts on this re-visiting.

For Peter Peterson and Marlow Imlay,
two of the last great American barbers

The dedication in Todd Robert Petersen’s Rift is not merely incidental. The barbershop is a significant symbol in the book. Ah, barbershops. Okay. Before we move on, you’ll have to allow for a personal digression:

I’ve only been to a true, honest-to-goodness barbershop once. It’s just down the street from my house and it’s far more expensive than the cheap back-alley haircuts I usually get and it is a purely man’s world–a foreign country I call Mansmansylvania–littered with copies of National Geographic and racing and fishing mags and Playboys and it also has Phil who gave me the best damn haircut of my life (to use the manly vernacular).

But I’m a kid from suburbia and the stink of testosterone is something we washed off our bodies before mother or pretty girl in the next row could notice because she was more impressed by my postmodern plays than grease under my fingernails (not that grease under my fingernails has ever been a common occurrence).

Now, any decent masculist can quote stats about the disadvantages boys face in the modern world (our advantage starts ending at conception)–and anyone conscious knows schools were designed for girls–and, arguably, the whole point of churches is to domesticate men and make them into creatures women want to have around.

But at least we Mormons have a lay ministry, right? At least we have home teaching! At least we have more to do than show up for an hour a week, sit next to our wives and hush our children!

But even better than home teaching, the men of Rift have Stucki’s barbershop. A barbershop, filled with men, watching The Magnificent Seven and ribbing each other about getting old, then switching the channel to a violent nature documentary–all on a tv they inherited from a polygamist who couldn’t cowboy up to one of his wives and admit that he bought this tv for himself, woman, and dammit he was going to watch it. (Though one gets the sense that the polygamist isn’t even man enough to to break out the manly vernacular when needed; he’s lost himself in a world of women.)

The hero of this novel is Jens Thorsen, who first made an appearance in Petersen’s short story “Thorsen’s Angle” which, of all the stories in Petersen’s collection Long After Dark, meets William Morris’s praise that Petersen is a “Mormon author who seems to be aware of and grappled with and absorbed some of the lessons of his precursors”–notably, in this case, Douglas Thayer and Levi Peterson–and Jens Thorsen represents the uncorrelated ideal of the Mormon male.

Mormon male heroes include manly men like Joseph Smith who could pull two men up at once and take bone surgery without anesthetic, Captain Moroni who would soon as kill you as let you join the wrong political party, Brigham Young who founded a desert empire and wore a wicked beard, Ammon who cut off arms to teach the gospel, and Joseph F. Smith who said, I’m a Mormon, Yes siree; dyed in the wool, true blue, through and through so shoot me.

But what is the Mormon male asked to do in 2009? Visit a couple mostly active families and teach the 16-17-year-olds about chastity and maybe can some wheat once a year. And we’re willing to do even less.

Where are our men?

Behold, Jens Thorsen. Newly retired, he spends his days caring for widows and saving strangers from rising streams and fixing his truck. He’s unrefined, wears a bolo tie and is feuding with his bishop, but Jens Thorsen is, by Christian math, a great man, for isn’t the greatest the servant of all?

He’s also skilled at avoiding the praise of men for his good works. In fact, it’s unclear through most of the book if he himself is aware the he is doing good. His lack of false humility can be interpreted as pride while his actual pride walks about unveiled. His wife is irritated at his priorities and his grown children are embarrassed by his turkey story.

But if you take away the moments when he is actively engaged in doing good, you have a lost old man with no clear purpose and nothing to do.

Which brings up back to the barbershop.

Look at Stucki’s hands:

Stucki unrolled his bundle and draped the towel around Karl’s neck. He undid the razor and set it on the coffee table and took out the mug and brush. After waggling the brush a few times in the lather, he held out the brush and saw that his hand was trembling slightly. He steadied himself, then lathered Karl’s face. Once the brush made contact with Karl’s skin, the termors disappeared. Thorsen noticed and looked away.

…

Stucki picked up the razor and stropped it lightly on his sleeve. He watched his hand tremble in the air and then turned the blade flat and pressed it against Karl’s face. As soon as he did, the trembling ceased, and Stucki began taking off the lather in direct, masterful strokes. (226-227)

Stucki has Parkinson’s. Most people don’t know it yet though he has taken a chunk out of one face, but generally speaking, Stucki’s hands work fine when they work.

When they have nothing to do, they shake.

Is it a coincidence that the Latin for hand is man? Men, like hands, needs tasks to be whole.

These old men hang out in the barbershop and they chat and laugh but they are retired and they’ve not much to do.

Until.

Until one day a girl arrives who needs their help. Stucki gives her a job in Mansmansylvania but it takes Thorsen, who lets her wash his hair (to plenty of joking, I assure you), to open the way. And soon, while the men seem to be losing their masculinity to shampoos and manicures, in fact, they are rising to the occasion, and saving this damsel-in-distress.

(At this point, I should throw out a spoiler warning.)

SPOILER WARNING

And now that you have been warned, on we go.

Towards the end of the novel, Rift takes its greatest break from credulity as the town splits along male/female lines over the barbershop’s damsel-in-distress. The women want her out, but the stronger men, the men who have found new masculine meaning through their service to her, rise to defend her and break from their womenfolk.

I mention this scene for a couple reasons. First, it emphasizes the need for a strong masculine identity that Petersen seems to be campaigning for, but also he undermines his campaign–the men’s rebellion against their feminized society is immediately shot down by God himself (although not in person, I hasten to clarify).

I could easily keep going on this theme for another few thousand words (I have pages of notes and quotes just waiting to flesh out this theme), but I’m writing a review, not a dissertation, and I’ve already spoilered enough.

My point is that this book is about a rift in our culture. Not between men and women necessarily, but between the feminized version of men that we see in our culture today and the type of men who, like Thorsen, can run a backhoe and slop pigs and shoot crows out of the sky and sacrifice his reputation to help a girl no one respects.

The modern Mormon male may wear a tie instead of buckskins to work, but Rift argues that he better still have a bit of Porter Rockwell inside him, who can shoot a goodfornothing one day and cut off his sacred hair for a bald female friend the next.

But it also argues that the only man in an entire town who regularly lives up to that standard is an aging old geezer with not many years to live, and his friends who rise up exactly once. The younger local men include the bishop who’s daughter the damsel-in-distress is (shouldn’t he be doing something?), Pearson( the only boy among the many who left town to ever came back) (and who promptly screws up the hometeaching), and a father who’s lost his own son to prison and doesn’t know what to do.

So where will the next generation of Mormon males come from? Who will bear that standard?

Rift has its flaws (the war between men and women knocked me out of my suspended disbelief for a while), but most of its characters are rich and deep, moving the book well past metaphor. Thorsen isn’t just a symbol of a lost ideal. He is a human being.

The question the book poses is simple: Do we value Jens Thorsen?

And while of course we value Thorsen–we spend the entire book eavesdropping on his mind, so of course we know his value–do we value the gruff old men in our own communities whose minds we cannot see inside?

And if we don’t, is it because we no longer want Mormon males who pull sticks and chop arms and stand up strong when a gun’s to their chest?

Rift asks a question. How will we answer it?

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Disclaimer: This review is based on a gratis copy of Rift sent to me by Zarahemla Books, its publisher, which publisher once wasted a year of my life and dozens if not hundreds of hours of labor spent repolishing a manuscript under their editorial guidance only to one day receive a poorly spelled email telling me, essentially, to sit on a sharp stick. It’s my hope that a) the free book and b) the screwing over did not in any way affect my ability to fairly discuss Zarahemla’s newest release by Todd Robert Petersen, whom I have long describes as one of America’s best short story writers.

Title: Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Author: Todd Robert Petersen

Publication Info: Dialogue, Summer 2003

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Theric writes: “.

I think Petersen is the best short story writer we have at the moment. This particular story is often mentioned to me by others as being their favorite.”

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

*Full disclosure: this is going to sound like bragging, but I do think it’s best to disclose any conflicts of interest. So here it is: I read a draft of Rift and commented on it. I have not read the final version of the novel. Also: I very much enjoyed the version I read even though I was initially put off by the idea that Todd was writing a rural Utah novel when I specifically applauded him for the international flavor of his short stories in Long After Dark.

While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive you can read my interview with Todd Robert Petersen. It’ll ease the ache. I promise. You might not agree with everything Petersen says, but you’ll be glad you took the time to think about it.

Oh, and he has a new book coming out!

Laura Craner: When the vision for Long After Dark was born?

Todd Robert Petersen: I was studying with Brian Evenson at Oklahoma State University, which is where he went after leaving BYU. I went up to see him in his office and said, “Hey, man. I just hit a trifecta in the Sunstone contest.” He was pleased. He kind of laughed. He said, “You should do a whole book of those Mormon stories and I’d write an introduction for it if you want.” Seriously, before that moment, I hadn’t thought about a project like this at all. I was only mildly aware that there was something that could be called Mormon literature. I wasn’t trying to write it, I was just trying to explore religious themes in my writing because I was a religious person and I was interested in the struggles and conflicts that religious people have. What I was doing was pretty much the weirdest thing going on in my workshops. Creative writing programs are a pretty secular environment. So, I was working on the premise that if I could make a religious story play in a graduate creative writing workshop it would probably avoid some of the pitfalls of “religious writing.”

LC: What made you write such a Mormon book?

TRP: I asked myself that question a lot, especially after pretty much all of the presses that do Mormon stuff said they couldn’t do the book, and I tried everybody, including Deseret. Everyone who responded to the book said they liked the writing but they either didn’t do short stories or the content wasn’t right for their readers. I had an early response from Cedar Fort, but that turned into more of a author subsidy deal, so I passed. After that I stuck the collection away and tried to forget about it. In the meantime, a lot of the stories had been published on their own in venues like Dialogue, Irreantum, and so forth. A couple appeared in national university-based literary journals, but I couldn’t get anyone interested in the stories as a book.

Chris Bigelow’s Zarahemla Books changed all that. He was looking to publish Mormon stuff with a bit of an edge. He’d read many of the short stories as they’d been published in the literary magazines. It was a perfect fit, really. Because of his publishing model (he does short printing runs digitally as opposed to offset print runs, which have to be bigger to make the set up costs worth it. I think this kind of printing model is a really big deal, especially for small publishers who want to get less corporate kinds of material out there.), the book can sell slow and steady and stay viable.

LC: One of the surprising things about Long After Dark is how atypical most of the Mormons in it are (i.e. Luis, the Argentinian in “Now and at the Hour of Our Death”, and John, the Rwandan, in “Quietly”).

TRP: I’m not sure what a typical Mormon is. I joined the Church in Oregon and lived outside of Utah for a really long time before moving to Cedar City and experiencing an abundance of Mormons. I think I used to know, or that I used to have some idea what that was, but the more I meet people, especially as I serve in Church callings, the less I seem to know. This new guy in our ward looks like a typical Mormon in his Sunday clothes, but the other day as he was reaching for some napkins at a ward barbecue, I noticed a red and black skull tattoo on his right bicep. I loved it as much as the tattoo of the young women’s medallion my friend Liz has on her shoulder. This guy cries about the 4th of July and started his answer to a question in priesthood with the phrase, “When I was getting out of jail and staying at my mom’s house…” So, looks can be deceiving. I am almost always surprised by people.

Typicality is all a matter of perspective. The idea of typical or stereotypical is interesting because it makes me automatically start thinking about people who don’t fit the category. Isn’t that how we define categories anyway? We are what we aren’t.

LC: Where did the inspiration for those “atypical” characters come from? Were they based on real people?

TRP: I don’t believe in acts of pure imagination as creation out of nothing, like the Big Bang. I’m always watching people and taking notes. I have this catalogue in my notebooks of bits and pieces stashed, waiting for the right situation. My wife sews, and she does the same thing with fabric. She has all these bins and piles of material she’s saved and reclaimed from old clothes. For her, part (maybe even most) of the joy of a sewing project is going through all that fabric, making selections. Many of my characters are amalgamations of people I run across or know. I try to make sure they I mix them up pretty well to avoid that problem you get in Woody Allen movies, where someone gets furious because they are in your story and they don’t like what you’ve done to them. . . Writers are larcenous. I feel bad about that sometimes. It might make us bad friends.

LC: What kind of response have you gotten from readers?

TRP: It seems like people are most disturbed by the sex in the novella, “Family History.” I tried pretty hard to play that the way Alfred Hitchcock might have done. The sex is all there, but it’s not in there. I hope that distinction makes sense. That first section is also supposed to represent the telestial world. That’s why I have the stars, moon, and sun marking each section. The telestial world is supposed to be full of chaos, enmity, and trouble. Still the sex bugs people a little, even non-Mormons. A colleague of mine took umbrage with the term “monkey sex,” which I use. She thought I was being a little hard on the simians. So, you can’t please everybody, and that’s okay. Art is (or can be) good practice for learning how to deal with the troubles of this world.

LC: Has that response changed at all over the last couple of years?

TRP: Response, generally, has been really good. Salt Lake City Weekly gave the book an ARTYS Award, which is great. I love getting props for a book of Mormon stories from a publication that also runs gay and bi-sexual personal ads. Reviews have been really strong, too. I was pleasantly surprised, as was Chris Bigelow. The coolest thing that happened was that my neighbor Sue came over after reading the book. She wanted to talk about it. She’s in her 70s and said that the stories made her think of the people in her family with troubles of their own. I think I like that kind of thing, you know a variation of the Holden Cauldfield line where he says a good book makes you wish you could call up the writer. I think it was cool that my neighbor just came over. I really liked that, and I wish it would happen more often.

LC: What can you tell me about your upcoming novel, Rift?

TRP: It’s been a long project for me. I started it in the fall of 2001, when I first got to Utah. I took the main character, Jens Thorsen, from a few short stories I’d written about this crotchety old Mormon guy—he appears in the opening story in Long After Dark. I wrote two more and figured that I wasn’t done with this guy, or that he wasn’t done with me. I took a few trips from Cedar to Sanpete County, where the book is set, and the place really captivated me. My wife has a lot of family there, in Manti and Spring City. It seems like a place frozen in time, which captured my imagination.

I took the basic idea for the novel from an 1869 Harriet Beecher Stowe local color piece by called “The Village Do-Nothing.” It’s about a guy who seems to just putter around, but he’s really looking after his neighbors in a small village in the Northeast. His wife and a lot of people in town think he is neglectful and a bit disrespectful, and it causes all kinds of tension. I felt like this fit the context of small towns anywhere, but especially in an isolated, tight-knit, church-based community like the ones in Sanpete County.

Rift is about a retired highway contractor who is trying to fill up the days by keeping this crazy home teaching route, one that he has assigned to himself. There’s an old lady who thinks her husband is coming back from the other side to see her, a family whose son is incarcerated for some antics with a gun, the Jewish doctor and his wife, an inactive man dying of emphysema. He’s also nursing an old feud with the bishop, who’s wayward daughter returns at the beginning of the novel. There’s also some shady land dealings, a barber shop, and dash of Lysistrada.

I’m pretty excited to have it finished and out. I’ve worked on it on and off (mostly on) for a really long time. I’m anxious to move on to some other projects that have been sitting on blocks in the garage. It comes out some time this fall. It’s getting ready for printing right now.

LC: Your writing, especially in Long After Dark, really walks the line between gritty and gratuitous in its visceral details and subject matter. (Skinny dipping! Murder! Wild sex!) Does that make it harder to find a publisher?

TRP: You can get skinny dipping, murder, and wild sex out of story of David, can’t you? I think it’s not a problem of content but context. The world is full of these kinds of things, and I think writers have to deal with the world. Since I teach at a state university in Utah with a high percentage of Mormon students, I find myself in a really strange position. Students seem to expect that literature is going to be free of subject matter drawn from the world we live in. I make sure we always have a discussion of the important distinction between representing something and advocating for it. I try to make sure that I don’t advocate for murder in my fiction but rather show its effects, or its causes. I might advocate for skinny dipping, though, it is a truly joyous experience.

For me the problem in Mormon writing is that Mormons as a group are so disinclined towards conflict. This perspective makes most fiction impossible. But look again at the scriptures–they are full of visceral details and conflict and bad choices. In fact, I often point out to my students and in Gospel Doctrine class that the standard works lack happy endings. I mean, have you read Revelation? It makes me think of what would happen if Sauron slit Frodo’s throat and took the ring for himself. In the Book of Mormon, Moroni wanders the countryside dodging blood thirsty marauders like some character out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Joseph Smith is murdered at the end of the Doctrine and Covenants. The one thing I have taken from the scriptures is that the good guys are going to blow it and the bad guy is going to win, for now, at least.

What I tried to do was write a book with real stuff from the real world in it, then I tried to match it with some sense that somewhere down the line everything is going to be okay, maybe not now, but someday. That feels more like the world I live in. In a perfect world where nothing goes really wrong, we wouldn’t need Jesus, and I’m not sure I want to write about a world that doesn’t need saving.

Todd Robert Petersen lives in Cedar City and teaches creative writing and visual studies in the English Department at Southern Utah University. He studied film in college and has a master’s degree (Northern Arizona University) and PhD in Creative Writing and Critical Theory (Oklahoma State University). His second book, Rift, won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award and will be published by Zarahemla books in the fall of 2009.

By essential I don’t mean the most literary or the most Mormon or the most well-known or even the most influential. Rather I mean that if they were to disappear, they would leave the most gaping holes in the field.

Here, then, are my nominations for the essential Mormon-themed short story collections*.

Under the Cottonwoods and Other Mormon Stories by Douglas H. Thayer for outlining the basics of Mormon literary realism and exploring the after-effects of the pioneer era on mid-20th century Mormons.

Nothing very important, and other stories by Bela Petsco for dealing frankly and poetically with the male Mormon mission experience.

Benediction, a Book of Stories by Neal Chandler for mixing biting humor and (actually laugh out loud funny) satire with a keen portrait of post-assimilation, post-Reagan, late 20th century Utah Mormonism.

Long After Dark by Todd Robert Petersen for broadening the palette of Mormon literary realism (and specifically by making it more international) and for writing a novella that keenly explores the dangers, realities and weirdness of Mormons relationship to story.

Readers well-versed in the field will notice several omissions. Feel free to point out the error of my ways in the comments (Breeding Leah and Other Stories is certainly one major omission). And to be sure there are some works missing in my own reading that could change my opinion above. For example, I haven’t yet read Mary Clyde’s Survival Rates. And collections by Darrell Spencer and Levi Petersen are missing (I did seriously consider Canyons of Grace but ranked it below the above four even though I think that as a literary achievement it equals or even surpasses those I selected). And I definitely see a major need for a place for a collection of stories that better represent the experience of Mormon women.

And, of course, the major elephants in the room are the short story anthologies — each with a slightly different ideological slant — that were published in the ’90s: Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life, In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions,  Bright Angels and Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories and Washed By a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction From the Corridor (speculative fiction). They are very much worth reading, but they are not essential. In fact, before you read those, it’d probably be more interesting and enjoyable to read the short stories published in Dialogue, Irreantum and Sunstone. You’ll get a better range of voices, styles, themes, settings and approaches that way.

Which leads me to the following thought:

There are quite a few excellent yet somewhat forgotten short stories available for free online in the archives of Dialogue and Sunstone (although sadly not Irreantum) and in various and sundry other corners of the Internet. What do you, dear readers and co-bloggers, think of doing a Short Story Friday series where I post a link to a short story that one of you had dug out of the archives or the near or far recesses of the Web, and we read it, and those who are so inclined can comment on it? And we’ll run it until we get sick of it.

I have some thoughts about how we could handle this with the minimum of work and fuss for all of us. And if we do it, I’ll have a list of all the places to check. If you are up for it, speak out in the comments section below (and if you already have a story in mind, call dibs on it) or e-mail me at (my first name)@motleyvision.org.

One of the things that sometimes frustrates me about the discussion of Mormon art is that it too often bats about the same quotes, themes, tropes, canards, problems and speculations without any real engagements with texts and works. There is real work being done and a substantial body of work that has already been accomplished (and can be found for free). What say we dig in to it?

* Disclosure: please note that the links to specific works in this post do go to Amazon.com and if you end up purchasing the title, a portion of the sale (four percent, to be exact) will go to support AMV’s hosting costs. Which considering that most of these titles are used and don’t cost much, won’t be a whole lot so if you want to round out your shopping cart with other purchases during the same session, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.