Category: Academia

ICFA 45 Debrief: Notes from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

I’ve recently returned from the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Since I’m an introvert and have to push myself to network, I set a goal before the conference to talk to three new people each day and have at least one interesting conversation. Well, that goal was absolutely an underestimate of how much fun I had talking to all these wonderful scholars and creatives. It was an absolute dream to attend. When you want to study fantasy and science fiction, there are a lot of people in English departments who won’t take you seriously. Being in a place where everyone else is also interested in what speculative fiction has to say was so refreshing.

My presentation was part of a panel of two papers on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was a fascinating panel in that my co-presenter and I came to exactly opposite conclusions about whether the novel supported or denied the idea of Escape into the fantastic, as theorized by Tolkien. John Pennington (whose work on George McDonald I’m going to have to look into when I finally get around to reading Phantasties) framed the novel as rejecting the premise of a secondary world in favor of a world that is deeply intertwined with, and even formed from, the primary world. He also cited a lot of postsecular theorists in his discussion, which gave me a whole different way to understand the book that I’m going to need to spend some time working on.

My paper, “‘The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable’: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic,” took an opposite tack. I looked at the relationship of the protagonist to the artistic and symbolic world he lived in as representative of our relationship with speculative fiction, coming to the conclusion that the book demonstrates how Tolkien’s idea of constructive Escape functions. I tied in the public reaction to the book when it was published in the early pandemic as well as my own experiences using media to cope with 2020.

I was blown away by the discussion which brought up ideas that could spark at least 3-4 other papers about the novel. (Edited collection on Piranesi, anyone?) It was an honor to be in a panel with such an intelligent audience. I felt like I finally experienced the purpose of an academic conference: getting feedback on your ideas from people who really care about the subject.

David G Hartwell Award co-winners, Liz Busby and Sasha Bailyn

I guess the people running the conference also liked my paper, because at the closing banquet, I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, along with Sasha Bailyn, whose interesting publication Inglenook Lit combines creative nonfiction and speculative fiction which blows my mind. I’m really honored by this award; it gives me real validation and encouragement for my crazy desire to spend the rest of my career focused on speculative fiction.

Below are some comments and notes on my favorite papers and panels that I attended. (There were so many good panels that I didn’t get a chance to attend as well!)

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On the Pressure to Read the Best Books

One of the many things that gives me imposter syndrome as a humanities graduate student is the fact that I don’t like so many of the classic literary works that I’m supposed to be studying. During my undergraduate years, I was often in the awkward position of loving reading and hating most of the books I had to read for class. Part of this was that I tend to enjoy speculative fiction books and, at the time, very few professors taught speculative fiction books as part of their courses. I did love my Shakespeare class and a few of the novels I read grew on me through the process of discussion. But by and large, the books I remember most from that time period were the ones that I read on my own or with the CS Lewis society on campus.

In the years since, I’ve often felt the obligation to embark on projects to read the “great works,” however you end up defining that. I’m particularly enamored of the format set up in Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind of following a rotating, four-year schedule of reading books by period: ancient, classical/medieval, early modern, and modern. (The beautiful systematic approach appeals to me, plus it doesn’t hurt that it aligns well with the church’s Come Follow Me scripture study rotation.) My most recent attempt at this was following the Hardcore Literature Book Club on YouTube, which had me reading both War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov in the same year, which I’m not sure I can recommend for anyone looking to get enjoyment out of literature.

beige pages book open
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The issue with most “read the classics” approaches is that they tend to be based on reputation, with subsequent pressure to say that we enjoyed them even when we blatantly didn’t. My father-in-law had a habit of saying whenever one of his kids didn’t enjoy a canonical work that “the classics aren’t on trial,” with the implication being that you, or at least your character as a cultured person, is; that your worth as a person, or at least as a reader, is determined by matters of taste. Or rather by denying that this is a matter of taste at all.

On the one hand, I see the value of consuming books that we don’t necessarily like or immediately jive with. It can help us avoid the slump towards books that we “use” to indulge in favorite tropes. We all know someone who reads what seems to be the same romance novel over and over. By challenging us with something that we experience for the first time and have to work at. By doing so, we can expand our tastes: I didn’t used to appreciate edamame or hummus, but with repeated exposure, they are now some of my favorite foods.

And some books have been undeniably important to the world conversation. Part of my motivation for doing the double-Russian last spring was that I didn’t feel I could rightly be commenting on issues of belief in literature if I hadn’t at least been exposed to The Bros K. It’s such a formative work on the subject for our collective understanding. The canon is not as set as we think it is, but also, certain books are important for a reason. Sometimes we have to reach beyond our personal tastes to acknowledge this.

But sometimes the pressure to like a book that’s been proclaimed a classic can actually squash our ability to have a real conversation about it. I often felt this way as an undergraduate, hesitant to say that I found Victorian classics like Dickens and Hardy to be wordy and boring, because I worried about how it would reflect on my own character (and how it might damage my relationship with a professor who controlled my grade).

One thing that has liberated me at least somewhat from this perspective was reading about C.S. Lewis’s dislike of TS Eliot–not just personal dislike or professional envy, but saying that what he wrote was bad poetry (which would have been heresy in several of my classes). But from Lewis’s perspective, Eliot was simply a contemporary, not a major shaper of modernism that I met him as. Seeing this literary giant as a human person whose work was not universally praised gave me permission to realize that I could both recognize something as important and stand by the idea that I didn’t like it.

A book’s spot in the canon is not a mark of merit per se but a mark of engagement with the current issues in our public consciousness. As Daniel Coleman wrote in In Bed with the Word, books “stay alive because they are not hermetically sealed, closed off against new engagements, appropriations, and interpretations. … We play the texts we read into life” (84). Too often, students (myself included) approach the books they read in school with this “hermetically sealed” mindset, that we are here to measure ourselves against something which is externally judged to be worthy. But this attitude tends to result in a dead-on-arrival engagement with literature, kills the real connection (or lack thereof) we might have with the text. For me to really enjoy the works that previous generations have deemed to be great, I have to be free to engage with them as something living and real, something that represents the inner thoughts or imagination of a living person, who I may or may not get along with. Strangely, by giving myself the option to hate the classics, I find myself more likely to enjoy them.

What I Read: Aug 2023

August was a back-to-school month for our family. We arrived back from the church history mega-road trip with only ten days to spare until school started for the kids. Once the dust settled from that, it was time for me to get ready to head back to school as well. This time, I get to be on both sides of the proverbial podium as I’m teaching first-year writing while starting my graduate school classes.

back to school flatlay
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It’s going to be a challenge to keep my personal writing projects going while also managing school writing. My goal is to save at least 15 minutes in the morning to work on a personal project, but even that may get thrown out the window as we get further into the semester. But perhaps that doesn’t matter since I also want to polish up my academic writing skills–that’s the whole reason I’m in the program. Perhaps the right mindset is to just consider myself as shifting genres for a while, and maybe focus on flash fiction and flash essays for a while.

In other positive news, my piece for Exponent II fall issue was accepted! The issue was themed around ordinary things, and my essay “Turning the Corner” is about being sick at the holidays, something that happens far too often when you have kids. We’ve finished the editing process, and the issue launch party will be October 5th at 6 pm MT. Anyone can sign up to attend and listen to the authors read and talk about their work. I also proposed a half-scholarly half-creative nonfiction piece for Wayfare which was accepted, so I’m busily typing away at that.

Over on Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we started our Barbenheimer miniseries with an episode about Oppenheimer. I am in the midst of editing the Barbie episode which should come out tomorrow. What a good summer for movies, right?

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A Reading List of Mormons and Aliens

This morning I had the great privilege to read my paper “One Great Whole: An Exploration of the Alien as the Self in Mormon Science Fiction” as part of the Association for Mormon Letters 2023 conference. You can watch a recording of the whole panel on YouTube, and you definitely should because my co-presenters Paul Williams and Jesse Christensen brought some great thoughts about Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Brazilian missionary novels respectively.

I meant to get this annotated reading list up before the panel, but better after than never. So, here are some interesting readings to consider about Mormons and aliens, divided into fiction and nonfiction and listed in the order discussed in the paper:

mosaic alien on wall
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Five Stages to Acceptance of the Brandon Sanderson Wired Article

This article also appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog

1.

Someone tagged me on Discord–“Calling Liz Busby!”–with a link to a profile of Brandon Sanderson on WIRED.

The tagline got me really excited: “He’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.” Yes! Yes, they are!

Studying the humanities can be very lonely, especially when your passion involves the intersection of a genre typically looked down on by the academy and a religion looked down on by both the religious right and the secular left. Reading through the article, my only thought was, “This is great! Someone else recognized that Brandon Sanderson’s work is influenced by Mormonism. And look at that great quote from Brandon. I’m totally using that in a future paper!”

I posted on Twitter that I was disappointed that they hadn’t consulted my work for the article, but overall, I was pretty happy with it.

2.

Then I started chatting with Mormon lit friends about the article. Most of us were excited for Brandon to be getting this recognition and even that someone in the mainstream media had almost recognized that Mormon lit is actually *a thing.*

Then the little doubts started dripping in. “Isn’t it weird that he insults Brandon’s writing to his face?” Yes, but even Brandon admits he’s not a flowery writer. We aren’t here for the prose, and acknowledging that is fair. “What’s with the author’s elitist attitude towards pretty much every restaurant in Utah?” I guess understandable. I myself miss Seattle’s Asian food after moving back here. “Are those side-long insults Brandon’s family and friends?” “Or towards the fans at Dragonsteel 2022 when he claims to read predominantly science fiction and fantasy?” “Is this author attempting to do a ‘why do people love these books so much’ article and just forgetting to actually include the upswing?”

I open the article again and as I reread it, and suddenly it’s everywhere. The snide reference to Dragonsteel employees as “people/Mormons,” the putdowns of Brandon as “unquotable” and “boring” seemingly because he’s a family man without a dark past or drama of any kind, calling his writing group lame because they eat apple crisp instead of drinking cocktails.

Have I just read an anti-Mormon article and had the whole thing go over my head?

3.

The rage across LDS author Twitter spreads quickly. Many of them are friends of Brandon, personally slighted in the article by name (or omission) or by association. Even those who don’t read or like Brandon’s work are baffled that a mainstream publication would put out such a poorly written article. The craft is frankly bad, not to mention the outright rudeness of insulting someone who lets you stay in their home and eat dinner with their children. It drips of coastal elite-ism, something that both Mormons and fantasy fans are familiar with wiping off their faces.

And there’s even more anger in the Sanderson fandom sites. I feel vindicated as the messages of wrath pour into the 17th Shard Discord. I compulsively watch YouTube takedowns of the article to assure myself that I am justified. Though most of them focus on the disrespect of Brandon’s person life, his success writing commercially successful books, and the speculative fiction community writ large, most of them also find the side-eye comments about Mormonism to be weird and inappropriate.

Most of this anger is put back under wraps after Brandon’s response to the article is posted. I vicariously pat all Mormons on the back for taking the high road and get a few chuckles out of the Reddit comments, thinking I’ll move on with my life.

4.

Then another pattern.

Jessica Day George sums it up beautifully: “Hot take: You can denigrate a poorly written article about a Mormon author without adding that you hate the Mormon church and all Mormons.” I am reminded again of the comment made to McKay Coppins, now ubiquitous in these kinds of discussions: “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

I think back to the YouTube takedowns and how they were careful to say that it’s okay to criticize Mormon doctrine because, who wouldn’t disagree with those crazy people? A recent Pew survey shows that Mormons are the most universally disliked religion in America, and the only one that also likes all other religious groups. Sometimes being Mormon feels like you’re that one nice kid in middle school who just can’t seem to make a friend. The one who probably reads large fantasy novels during lunch to hide that he has no one to talk to.

Now I consider Brandon’s carefully worded response in a new light: is he just continuing the long tradition of Mormons taking it on the nose and then smiling and thanking them for the publicity? Taking out an ad encouraging people to “read the book” after they’ve watched a play that treats your whole religion as a joke? Some people comment that they wish he had taken the opportunity to at least say, “Hey, this wasn’t cool.”

5.

At this point, I start noticing a pattern in the posts on Twitter: “Man, I wish there was an interesting article about the connection between Mormons and science fiction/fantasy, but this ain’t it.”

Something snaps inside me and I decide to start spamming posts: We’re here! Mormons have been writing about this for a while, and it might do you some good to read what we’ve already said before jumping into the conversation as if you invented it. In fact, there’s an AML conference coming up to discuss Mormon genre fiction in about a month. Watch it on YouTube! Check out these essays! Please listen!

Sometimes it feels like screaming into the void, but at least I can still hear the echoes and know that I was there.