Category: What I Read

What I Read: April 2023

April started off pretty poorly with a vacation to southern Utah during which we were supposed to explore Zion National Park, which ended up getting derailed by car trouble and sick kids. But at least our AirBnB had a pool, so that was a plus for the kids who could enjoy it. The month got much better as things went on. My husband and I ran in the Tulip 5K at Thanksgiving Point, and I cut 3 minutes off of my 5K time from this Thanksgiving! I’m still slower than molasses. I have never been fast, and all my hard work over many years was wiped out by back surgery in 2018 followed swiftly by a pandemic. But it’s nice to see that I can actually still improve, even if my training was frequently derailed by Utah’s massive snow totals.

Not many tulips at this year’s 5K due to cold

This month was the Association for Mormon Letters Conference on genre fiction in Mormon literature, and I had an absolute blast. My presentation on aliens in LDS science fiction was well received, and I also picked up a lot of wisdom from the other presentations. You can watch my presentation among the others on the AML YouTube channel, and check out my Mormons and Aliens reading list.

Writing my AML paper took up most of my writing time this month, so I’m looking forward to being more free to pursue some new projects during the summer. One of my major projects will be consolidating the debris from my various note-taking software iterations (Evernote, OneNote, Zotero) into my current solution, Obsidian. I think it had a lot of advantages over my previous solutions, particularly that it can sync with Readwise (which I use for collecting reading highlights) and Zotero (which I use for citations) and allows you to link to pages wiki-style, including ones you haven’t created yet. I hope to get ahead of some of my graduate studies by reviewing and processing in relevant information from last spring’s fairy tale class and other things I’ve read over the years. I’ve been filling up my registration cart at BYU, and fall semester looks to be both exciting and a truckload of work.

Over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we put out two episodes this month, both discussions of recent movies. Our episode on Where the Crawdads Sing discusses the novel in the context of teaching teenagers about dating violence and the novel/film’s context in the #metoo era. And we had a rollicking good time discussing Latter-day Saints’ obsession with Dungeons and Dragons on our episode about D&D Honor Among Thieves.

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What I Read: March 2023

It certainly felt like “always winter and never Easter” around here this month. Not only did Utah get continually dumped on with snow (breaking all time records), but it was another tough month of sickness around here with one of my kids missing two weeks of school with a fever topping out at 106. I finished running the school read-a-thon (yay books!), so at least my PTA commitments are finally wrapped up. I’m trying to look positively on them as I won’t have time to participate as much in my kids’ classrooms next year but man, I am really burned out on volunteer service right now.

flower sprout from the ice covered ground
Photo by Artem Meletov on Pexels.com

One of the main reasons I wanted to move back to Utah was to have greater access to Mormon studies events, which tend to concentrate here for obvious reasons. This month, I attended a really interesting talk at the University of Utah by Ben Spackman about the history of evolution in the Church. I’m always interested in the interaction between science and religion. I minored in chemistry (the best science) at BYU and remember receiving some form of the packet on the Church position on evolution that was discussed in this talk. Ben has a recording and notes up on his website, and I highly recommend looking through it. Lots of the situations he described have application for the anti-science movements of today, which, while not sweeping through the Church, are definitely present in most wards today.

My biggest writing news this month is that my essay “Knit Together” received second place in the 2022 BYU Studies Essay Contest! Such an honor as many of my creative nonfiction heroes have also won this contest (and the prize money certainly doesn’t hurt either). I really love this essay, and I’m glad that someone else did as well. I’m excited to share it with you when it’s eventually published in BYU Studies.

On the podcast side, we put out three episodes in March on the two recent Pinocchio remakes, the scifi film Arrival, and the best-picture nominee The Whale. We also received a write-up in the April issue of The Season, the online arts journal hosted by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. I highly recommend checking out the good work they are doing to highlight LDS creators in all aspects of the arts.

In other news, the program for the Association for Mormon Letters conference is up. I’ll be presenting at 9 am MT on Saturday; you can watch live on YouTube all three days. I’m particularly interested in the two Friday evening sessions with papers on some LDS genres I’m less familiar with like interaction fiction and FAQ as a genre, and the panel of LDS speeches (I wrote and presented a paper about LDS rhetoric during my undergrad). Lots of fascinating thoughts to be had!

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What I Read: February 2023

a person holding a book
Photo by Philipp Aleev on Pexels.com

It’s been snowing like crazy here in Utah. The kids even got a snow day, which was unheard of when I grew up here but seems much more common now with remote learning tools. My father-in-law has been keeping track and says he’s shoveled his driveway 20 times this year. It’s definitely been cramping my running style. I know how to run in the drizzly rain of Seattle, but I still haven’t quite braced myself for running 6 miles in the snow.

This month I attended LTUE 41 in Provo. My goal was to attend some classes about plot and structure to help me improve my ability to finish stories (still a struggle!). I also wanted to network with potential guests for Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, which I definitely succeeded at. There was a presentation on “Faith and Film” with a bunch of LDS film people who I’m hoping to follow up with. I also met up with my online writing group, which was formed after the conference last year (Hi, Paper Wizards! You are awesome!) and had lunch with a great group of writers from the Latter-day Saint Authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy group on Facebook.

But the highlight for me was finally getting to hear Nick Fredrick’s presentation “Could Brandon Sanderson Have Saved the Nephites?” (I was so mad that I couldn’t make it up to the Book of Mormon Studies Association conference when he first presented it.) I didn’t realize the title was playing off of a 1994 presentation by Carol Lynn Pearson called “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites?” so now I’ve got homework to do. I loved how the paper combined the academic, the theological, and the personal into one cohesive package. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d love to write someday. Fingers crossed, but I think we’re going to publish it in the genre fiction issue of Irreantum, so you’ll all get to read it!

February was very poor on the writing front. Only hit 2668/8000 words. Probably due to the shortness of the month, LTUE, and other responsibilities getting in the way. Oh well, time to get back to work in March. I’ve got a new short story I’m working on codenamed “Terraforming Project.” Also my proposal for the Association for Mormon Letters conference was accepted, so now I get to write my paper on how Mormons write about aliens. The conference will be streamed free online, so jump in if you’re interested. I’m excited to see what other fun presentations on Mormonism and genre fiction were selected.

In publishing news, my Solar Punk Utah story has found a home! I’ll be sure to post a link here when the story is published. We published two killer episodes on Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree this month. Episode 21 is a crossover with Radical Civility discussing the “Hated in the Nation” episode of Black Mirror and how social media makes us worse human beings. We also released an episode discussing The Chosen from an LDS perspective, including the whole “I am the law” controversy.

And the biggest news of all, which I just got this morning: my application was accepted to BYU’s English MA program, so I’ll be going back to school this fall! It’s going to be a major lifestyle adjustment, but I’m excited to put some more work into my academic side.

And now, on to the book reviews!

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What I Read: January 2023

January was full throttle around here. My kids are finally getting back into the after-school activities that we hadn’t really been doing since the pandemic, so I feel like mom-Uber most evenings. And I’ve been working on my last PTA obligation of the year, the school read-a-thon. I’m keeping it pretty low-key, but it’s still going to be a lot of work. It’s all for the kids, right?

pink rose flower on blue hardbound books
Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

I nearly hit my word count goal this month, 7242/8000, despite starting a week late due to recovery from the holidays. A lot of those words went into a new personal essay that that the muses dumped into my head right before the BYU Studies contest deadline. I think it turned out really well and my beta readers had good things to say about it. It’s already been submitted to the contest, so wish me luck! I’ve also been working on a fairy tale codenamed “Cats with Footnotes,” though the footnote aspect has yet to appear, so it may just end up being “Cats.” The idea was to write a fairy tale with some elements from my childhood and then have semi-fictional footnotes explaining some of the background. I liked fiction with footnotes (such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and the idea of combining speculative fiction with creative nonfiction was intriguing, so we’ll see if it turns out. I’ve committed to my writing group to get a draft to them by next week.

In February I’m heading Life, the Universe, and Everything in Provo. I’m especially excited to hear “Could The Way of Kings have saved the Nephites?” by Nick Fredrick. Always happy for more literary engagement with Brandon Sanderson! I’m also going to focus on marketing the podcast and taking some classes about plotting, which is my weakness as a fiction writer. If you’re coming to LTUE this year, drop a comment below or send me an email and let’s do lunch!

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What I Read: December 2022 & 2023 Reading Projects

I hope your holidays were much more calm and bright than mine. I don’t think we had a single day of the winter break where someone wasn’t sick, including major bouts of vomiting. There was also a good amount of family drama and about a week of rain. Oh well. Such are the holidays.

I hit about half of my word count goal in December, 4500/8000, but as I had forgotten to account for Christmas break, I consider this basically a win. I finished my short story “Memory” and sent it in to Writers of the Future two whole weeks early. They sent out a few emails saying that not a lot of people had entered this quarter, and I feel like this story is my best one yet, so I’m crossing my fingers for it. I’m also still working on my “Landscapes of Faith” essay which is currently wandering every-which-way with no particular purpose.

christmas cookies on white ceramic bowl
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

In publication news, on the last day of 2022, my essay “Self Portrait in Cookies” came out in Young Ravens Literary Review, issue 17, on the topic of womanhood. Hopefully later this month, I’ll write a little author’s note about this essay, but in general, it explores the relationship between baking and womanhood. Bon appetit!

And over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a Christmas special about adaptations of A Christmas Carol as well as our final episode of season one, discussing The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

For January, I’m lining up my ducks in a row to get my application for graduate school completed and still working on my proposal for the 2023 AML Conference. I’m thinking something on Mormons and aliens right now. The deadline for the Irreantum genre issue I’m co-editing is also coming up (Feb 1st!). I look forward to reading all of the interesting submissions, so make sure to get yours in.

2023 Reading Projects

four pile of books on top of brown wooden surface
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’m starting some new reading projects for 2023. I enjoyed the idea of my 5×5 Challenge last year and made some good progress on most of it. But I think I need more structure so as not to put off the books I want to read in favor of the shiny new things I see. This year, I have two major reading projects (three, if you count the year of Sanderson–6 new works by Brandon this year!). First, I’m joining up with the Hardcore Literature Book Club on Patreon to dig into some classics, partly to prepare my brain for grad school and partly because I ran some stats on my Goodreads data and found that the majority of my lifetime of reading is things published in the last 20 years or so. That’s something I hope the HLBC 2023 reading list will correct. (I will probably drop off once/if I go back to school in the fall.)

I’m also planning a personal study of the Inklings in 2023. I’ve got a schedule of approximately a book a month, starting with a history of the group, then working through a fiction and non-fiction book each by Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers (who isn’t technically an Inkling, I know, but I keep hearing so much about her that I figured I might as well include her). Interspersed with these are some of CS Lewis’s works of literary criticism, which are some of the few of his books I haven’t read. If you’re interested in following along, here’s the reading list, though I reserve the right to adapt as needed.

Now on to the book reviews!

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