Category: Author’s Notes

Irreantum Genre Issue: Editor’s Comments

I intended to post this after I finished releasing these comments on social media, but graduate school got the best of me. Nonetheless, they deserve a permanent home here, so apologies for the un-timely post.

Irreantum’s genre issue is alive in the world! I have been absolutely dying to share this issue with you all for months. These stories absolutely prove that combining Mormonism with genre elements doesn’t have to be gimmicky or silly; speculative fiction (and other genres, though most of these works have a supernatural slant) can lead to profound thoughts about our culture, about our beliefs, about human nature, and about the universe. Here are my thoughts as a co-editor of the issue on the stories contained therein. I’m going in reverse order of the table of contents just to make sure the ending pieces don’t get forgotten.

Could Brandon Sanderson Have Saved the Nephites? – Obviously, as someone who also writes criticism about Mormonism in Brandon Sanderson’s work, I feel really excited about this piece. Nick Fredrick is a very careful and reflective scholar; his analysis of the parables in The Way of Kings left me thinking about both Stormlight and The Book of Mormon in ways that I hadn’t before. After I listened to him read this piece at LTUE last year, I knew it needed to be published, and I’m so pleased that we were able to include it in this issue.

The Year the Graveyard Flooded – Emily Feuz Jensen’s piece straddles the line between realism and magical realism in the best ways. Are the people of the town just interpreting events in faith-promoting ways or is something really happening? Either way, this story features classic LDS themes of turning the hearts to the fathers in a lyrical, contemplative package.

The Incident at Burning Bush Ranch – I love the way Shayla Frandsen wields the tropes of the “found footage” genre in a written package. The ambiguities and corrections feel authentically folkloresque, and the story she tells plays off of an important but less-explored aspect of LDS culture, girls’ camp. This was one of the first submissions for this issue that I fell in love with.

Welded – I’ll admit to being intimidated by poetry, but I love what Makoto Hunter has done by mashing together poetry and historical research. I learned a lot about the history of polygamy from the footnotes and a lot about the human heart from the stanzas. Hopefully you’ll enjoy unraveling exactly what the author is implying as much as I did.

An Opportunity – This story is unique because Jeanna Mason Stay tells it from an outsider perspective; her protagonist is both outside the LDS community and outside her family’s special heritage. But there’s something undeniably Mormon about the magic system she presents and the wrestle the protagonist has with her past and her future. In an age of strained family relationships, this story will touch your heart and stay with you for a long time.

7 Devils – Declan Hyde gives this issue some classic demonic possession. I love the LDS twists on the lore, but the ending is what made my heart race in the best horror way. I recommend reading this one with the lights on and in a highly-populated area (or the inverse, if you like being scared).

The Archaemaji – This story is a Heavenly Mother story, but perhaps not like the ones you’ve read before. While it’s set in a secondary world, it makes commentary on an issue that’s important in contemporary LDS writing. D. C. Wynters’s ending struck as unique among the Mormon literature that longs for the divine feminine, and it’s one that couldn’t have been achieved without the unique fantasy set-up of the story.

Unidentified Faith-affirming Object – Gregory Brooks’s irreverent mash-up made me laugh out loud from the first line: “A column of light, gradually descending like a tractor beam.” Mormon readers might think they can tell exactly where this poem is going to go, but the scope quickly grows wider than you might anticipate. The radical recontextualization of everything you know will feel familiar and, dare I say, alien at the same time.

An interview with Sandy Petersen – I haven’t listened to the full interview yet, but I’m excited to learn about an aspect of LDS involvement in the nerd-space that I’ve previously only heard about. Sandy Peterson created The Call of Cthulu, an influential RPG game based on Lovecraftian mythos. His story is an important part of the history of Mormon speculative fiction. Thanks to D. J. Butler for conducting this interview.

Remember the Blood – When I first read Nate Givens’s story, it gave me strong early Orson Scott Card vibes. Partly this is because of the horror/dread aspect of this story’s lore. Part is the young male protagonist, both cocky and naive. And part is the unique blend of Mormon and Mesoamerican folklore, strongly reminiscent of Pastwatch or “America” from Folk of the Fringe. For me, the ending hits the perfect blending of fantasy and theology for a surprising-but-inevitable resolution that stuck with me.

The Case of the Missing Sacrament Bread – Katherine Cowley sets up a humorous mystery with the form of a ward history, a genre which perhaps only those who have to write them know about. I know none of the Relief Society histories I’ve written were half so interesting as this. You’ll recognize many characters from your local ward in her send-up of the quotidian aspects of LDS culture.

It’s About the People Under You – The concept of this one made me laugh out loud when I was reading through the slush pile, and I knew we needed it for the issue. Willow Dawn Becker satirizes so many aspects of Utah Mormon culture with the protagonist’s gradual downward spiral.

This is What Happened in Trígonus – Alejandro Seta’s work, presented in both English and the original Spanish, examines a familiar scripture story from a different frame of reference, you might say. I was so happy to see this submission right after finishing my analysis of how Mormons write about aliens as it fits right into the pattern of expanding the gospel story beyond a single planet. Gabriel González’s lyrical translation reflects the ethereal and dreamlike nature of the story.

The Double-Snatcher – I’ll admit that when I first started reading W. O. Hemsath’s story, I was skeptical as I’m not much of a consumer of talking animal stories. But when I realized what she was doing, I zipped right through to the heartbreaking ending. Maybe you’ll catch on more quickly than I did, but either way, I know you’ll enjoy this clever story that takes on an issue I never before considered.

You Are Beautiful, Dead, Whole – Chanel Earl’s story/poem takes fairy tale tropes and scripture stories, places them in a blender, and pushes “puree.” The result is a smooth refreshment composed of the real and the fictional, all of it with a special mythopoeic feel. Makes me excited to see what she comes up with for the upcoming folklore-themed issue of Irreantum she’s helping to edit.

The Haunted – I’ve saved another of my favorites for last (or first, if you’re reading the right way round). Mathilda Zeller’s story of a teen girl with a strained relationship with the church and with the ghosts who haunt her is a real achievement in Mormon speculative fiction. Her characters manage to be very real about their relationships to the institutional church while also dealing with a very unreal problem. I laughed, cried, and learned to love Moroni Alvarez and our unnamed protagonist, and I hope you do as well.

The genre issue, along with the rest of Irreantum, is freely available on the internet. That being said, if you feel you got some value out of this issue, please support the writers by joining the Irreantum Patreon. It only charges when a new issue is released; I believe the donations for this issue will be collected November 1st. The Patreon money goes straight to paying the authors who worked so hard to bring you these unique stories that might not have been published in a mainstream press. Plus by becoming a patron, you’ll get early access to Irreantum’s next issue. There are currently three themed issues accepting submissions, one on folklore and one on the restoration. I’m sure you’re gonna want to see what comes next!

Author’s Note – Reclaiming the Desert

Read “Reclaiming the Desert” in the fiction section of Wayfare. Mild spoilers ahead!

This story started off like many of my stories do, in response to a prompt: a short fiction magazine was looking for pieces for a solar punk collection. In case you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t!), solar punk is a new-ish genre of speculative fiction that focuses on an optimistic future where humanity has harnessed technology along with traditional techniques to create a future where the planet is brought into a sustainable balance. When I was casting about for an idea to fill this prompt, I turned to the news story that was happening around me: Utah’s 20-year-long megadrought. In 2022 we were finally confronting the impending doom that the drying of the Great Salt Lake would bring upon the Salt Lake Valley, especially the risk of toxic chemicals from the lakebed being dispersed into the air. I combined these two elements by researching what sustainable, high-tech living might look like in the desert.

scenic view of desert landscape against dramatic sky
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

There are a lot of really wild ideas out there! A TED Talk by Magnus Larsson on turning dunes into architecture inspired the structure of the train station where Martea waits for her sister. This real-life waffle gardening technique inspired her desert-friendly garden. The neighborhood park swale is also based on a real-life technique. And Martea’s explanation about why they rely on cattle in the desert is drawn from Allan Savory’s TED Talk about how herds of cattle can combat desertification. All this being said, I’m not an expert on sustainable desert living or on Utah’s ecology and there was only so much learning time I could put in for a short story, so I’m sure I’ve gotten some things wrong. Please go gentle on a poor fiction author.

Over the course of my research, I was struck by how different it looked to live sustainably in the desert than in other environments portrayed in typical solar punk stories. The things that work in a more temperate area don’t make sense in Utah’s unique climate, yet there’s so much that’s still possible. This reminded me of the misunderstandings between Mormons and nonmembers. Both ways of life can work well in their own way, but there’s a tendency from both sides to condemn the other because they don’t understand why they do things differently.

In the story, I posit that a highly-organized community like the Latter-day Saint community is well-positioned to enact ecological change in the west because the division of water in a dry climate requires sacrifices that aren’t naturally going to happen without outside intervention by some kind of authority. (Witness the way the federal government had to step in and impose top-down reforms after Western states were unable to make the numbers add up for sharing decreased water from the Colorado River.) Most solar punk stories favor a more anarchic or libertarian form of government where there’s so much abundance that everyone can basically just do whatever they want. (Though of course, those decisions never seem to lead to overconsumption, which might be too optimistic . . . .) From there, I decided the main conflict of the story would be from an outsider visiting New Zion and trying to understand a system that was counter-intuitive to their vision of the world.

Often, Mormon lit stories are from Mormon families looking at the one who left or the one who left looking back in their Mormon community. I decided to flip these roles a bit by having the Mormon be the one who left her family and feels misunderstood. Initially I thought Martea’s whole family would be coming to visit her, but that ended up being too many characters for the size of the story, so I reduced it to just her sister.

The theme of reconciliation without conversion is one that feels very important to me right now. Every day, it seems, I hear stories of people cutting each other out of their lives because they don’t agree on politics or religion. But we need each other. We all need love and support and community, and trying to build those only with people who agree on everything is unnecessarily limiting. If we can’t bridge the divide over these issues with our closest family and friends, what chance does the world have to do the same? The key is not to convince others that we are right, but to learn to live together and love each other even while we live and believe in different ways.

The short fiction magazine I’d written the story for didn’t end up taking it. I’m so thankful that Jeanine Bee, Wayfare’s fiction editor, reached out to me for this story, and for the effort that she and the whole Wayfare editorial team put into helping me revise this story into the best possible version of itself. I hope it inspires you to make sustainable changes in your life and to reach out to those who may see things differently than you do.

Author’s Note: Self Portrait in Cookies

Read “Self Portrait in Cookies” in issue 17 of the Young Ravens Literary Review.

This essay started, as many of my recent essays have, as an attempt to have something to submit to the BYU Studies Essay Contest (not linked because the BYU Studies site has been down for months; I hope they fix it soon!) on January 31st. It’s one of the few places that pays really well for LDS themed writing so I always try to enter, plus deadlines are a good motivator for me to finish things. Obviously, I didn’t win the contest, but when I was ready to start sending this piece around to other places, the Young Ravens Literary Review had just announced their special issue on womanhood. I knew instantly that this piece was a natural fit. Happily, the editors agreed!

cover of issue 17 of Young Ravens Literary Review featuring a woman's face made of many colors

This essay is an example of the odd thing about creative nonfiction where you have to figure out how to draw the line between faithfully representing reality and making something that flows well in a literary sense. In this case, I fudged the timeline a bit which may not be apparent in the essay. The second to last incident in the essay, the Christmas baking “competition,” occurred after the last event in the essay, the conversation with my sisters-in-law about meal planning. (I ended up trying meal kits after that conversation and it turned out to be a disaster: missed deliveries and not enough food for a family of six right in the middle of trying to move. Yet another way in which this essay is fudged. I am still struggling in ambivalence about the value of homemade cooking versus simpler options, while the essay is a bit more definitive in its ending.)

I had initially ended with the Christmas baking story, but it felt wrong to me to leave the reader with a commentary about my attitude towards my mother’s attitude towards cooking, so I brought that earlier experience around to the end. It’s uncomfortable enough writing what could be construed as negative comments about my mom. Writing about conflicts with living people is a constant ethical balance for an essayist. I don’t want to exploit the people closest to me or villainize them in public. But on the other hand, the biggest source of conflict in most people’s lives comes from their family, so if you want to write about your reality as a human, it’s almost inevitable that they will be dragged into it. I hope this essay strikes the right balance in portraying my family as unique humans and yet offering them grace for their foibles (as well as for myself).

I did still make several types of cookies for Christmas this year. But I tried to let go of my perfectionism a bit. I let my kids have more say in picking the cookies we tried, though I still vetoed chocolate chip cookies as “not special enough,” and tried to make it more about the experience of spending time with my kids than about showing off to anyone. I confess that sharing this essay with the world makes me feel very vulnerable. I still battle my own issues with the cultural standards of Mormon womanhood, both resisting and trying to fulfill its pull. (This piece also calls back to an essay I wrote as part of my BYU Honors thesis called “Being Mary” after the awkward sister in Pride and Prejudice. You’ll have to check that one out from the HBLL to read it as it was never published elsewhere.) But writing pieces like this is part of the wrestle with my role in the world and my own individuality. I hope that this exploration of the tangle of emotions surrounding baking, motherhood, and virtue is helpful to others along their own journeys.

Writing the Ordinary Saint’s Guide to Under the Banner of Heaven

Earlier this year, I heard that a TV series adaptation of Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer was coming to Hulu. The book title sounded familiar: I knew it was about Mormons, but I had never read it. I reached out to a couple Twitter friends to ask if the book was worth reading and if I should watch the show. After a couple conversations, I learned that Krakauer’s book was a flashpoint: though the book is generally scorned by historians, it’s been one of the top sellers in Amazon’s Mormonism category since it released in 2003. (In fact, the top 8 books as of this writing are all polygamy exposes of one stripe or another; #9 is the inimitable Rough Stone Rolling, so there’s that.)

A #Mormoninthe80s Twitter campaign I started because of the “pioneer dress gambit” in ep 1

I ended up volunteering to write reviews of each episode for Public Square Magazine. As I am not a historian (either of the Lafferty murders or of Mormon history as portrayed in the series), the perspective I decided to take was of a writer, and particularly a writer of Mormon fiction and nonfiction. (You can read an explanation of this perspective in the introduction to the series.) Again, as I’m not a member of the fundamentalist community, I tried to generally set aside the show’s portrayal of those parts of our tradition. But I do consider myself an expert on the mainstream LDS church, especially of the “Utah Mormon” variety, having grown up only a few miles down the highway from where the murders took place, though admittedly a few years later. My coverage resulted in me taking part in an interview with the LA Times about Mormon reactions to the show.

You can hear more of my overall thoughts tomorrow when the Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree episode on the series releases. (Subscribe so you don’t miss it!) But in general, I was really disappointed with the show. There is definitely a need for Mormon literature and film which isn’t one of the two extremes (faith-promoting perfection or anger-filled exposes). If this show had been more like Murder Among the Mormons, Educated, or Brigham City, there could have been more interesting discussions to be had about power dynamics in the church and the limitations of revelation. As McKay Coppins wrote in his piece in the Atlantic today, the show isn’t there for a complex conversation; it’s there “to serve a stereotype, to exoticize a people and flatten their faith tradition.” It’s a thesis driven show, not a conversation starter; and the thesis is one that every religious person in the world should be offended by, even if they don’t particularly like Mormons.

You can see all my episode-by-episode reviews on this page, or skip around to the episode you are most interested in:
Ep 1 “When God Was Love” & Ep 2 “Rightful Place”
Ep 3 “Surrender”
Ep 4 “Church and State”
Ep 5 “One Mighty and Strong”
Ep 6 “Revelation”
Ep 7 “Blood Atonement”

Author’s Note: The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange

Read “The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange” on the Mormon Lit Blitz blog. And if you’re reading this before November 13th, don’t forget to vote for your top four!

This story originated from a phrase in When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller. A character says that some of her “leftover anger” spilled over onto someone who didn’t deserve it. I thought this phrase was very apt: sometimes emotions leftover from other encounters spill over into our interactions with innocent bystanders. The phrase also gave me the hilarious image of people boxing up their leftover emotions to store in the fridge for later.

lunch table
Photo by Kaboompics .com on Pexels.com

During a discussion in a writing class, I connected that image with the idiom of “eating your feelings” and the scriptural idea of “mourning with those that mourn,” and this story was born. I have never participated in a leftovers exchange, but I have been a part of many potlucks, taste tests, cooking demos, and recipe exchanges, so this felt like something a Relief Society might do.

For non-LDS readers: a ward is a congregation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Relief Society is the church’s women’s organization. Food is a central part of most cultures and Mormons are no exception. It’s not a church activity without a spread of tasty calories, and bringing meals to each other is one of the most basic ways that we show that we care. See this fabulous book on Utah food culture for more stories and examples of LDS/Mormon foodways.

I see the lack of empathy for others as a huge problem both within the church and in the world generally. I was recently in a meeting where several Relief Society sisters expressed how they didn’t feel that they fit in and that no one understood their problems. But secretly everyone feels this way, at least part of the time. How much easier it would be if we could transfer the experience of our hearts to each other! If we understood one another that deeply, we would be more understanding of each other’s faults and foibles. Bearing one another’s burdens is in fact what Christ has called us to do; it is, I believe, the main purpose of practicing religion as part of a church, rather than as individuals.

I hope you enjoy the story and that it inspires you to find a way to share in someone else’s leftover feelings and make the world a more peaceful place.