What does it mean to be a Latter-day Saint rock star?
This week, an acquaintance I met at ICFA emailed me a question:
As a Mormon fantasy scholar, what do you think of Brandon Sanderson? I mean, I love him and I’m teaching The Emperor’s Soul in my fantasy fiction class next year, but as a local boy made good, I’m just kinda curious about whether he has, like … Elvis Presley status within LDS circles.
Gotta love the B-Money persona
Obviously, this was a very dangerous question thing to do and resulted in me typing a three-paragraph email instead of making breakfast for my kids. But this question has been rolling around in my head for a few days now, so I figured I would try to put my thoughts together into a more cohesive format for your perusal.
Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree won the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Podcast Award! Check out our favorite episodes, and watch for new episodes resuming in August.
We’ve been a bit off the radar because Carl broke his knee and also moved his family to Utah, but this award has given us some steam to get back on the horse. Look for more new episodes to come starting in the second half of August. In fact, if you’re in the Provo area on August 9th, we’re going to be attending the BYU library’s screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and recording a short episode about it. We’d love to say hello and get your thoughts on the film!
In recognition of the award, I thought I would put together a post with some of our best episodes as a place to get started with the podcast. I meant to get this up right after the awards, but summer happens. Anyway, we highly recommend each of these episodes. You don’t have to watch the film before listening to the episode, as long as you don’t mind spoilers. In fact, I think it could be useful to listen to the episode first as a way of enhancing your watching experience.
Summer has begun! Although I love being back in school (I’m one of those weirdos), there’s definitely something to be said for summer. I’ve had a lot more control over what research I want to work on, though never enough time with kids at home. In May, I also got to participate in a workshop of youth print culture at the Church History Library, which opened up my eyes to a lot of interesting resources from past eras. I love this “Bookish Corner for Bookish Girls” column from an early Church magazine and the title of this musical made me laugh.
At the end of May and into June, we went on an extended family trip to Disneyland, which was fun and exhausting. Then I made a quick turnaround to attend the Mormon History Association conference the next weekend. I’m still not sure whether this will get a separate summary post, but I am pleased to report there were at least three panels relevant to speculative fiction, which was an improvement from the last time I attended. My panel was nice and full and people asked very thoughtful questions. I came away from MHA with at least two new research projects to complete, so I consider that a win.
at MHA in Kirtland
On the writing front, “Through the Wardrobe,” my piece for Wayfare Magazine on the Chronicles of Narnia and the LDS temple experience, is now available for free on their Substack. I’ve been getting a lot of great reactions to it, which makes me really happy since I worried it was too esoteric for anyone else to be interested in. I’ve also finished my paper on YA dystopias written by LDS authors, which I’ll be presenting next weekend at the AML Conference. I’m really excited about all of the other panels and presentations. The whole conference will stream live on the AML YouTube channel, so come learn about the history of Mormon writing for children and young adults.
Due to my co-host breaking his knee and moving to Utah, Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree has been on a bit of a hiatus, but we did release an episode on Dune at the end of May. Also, just last week, the Association for Mormon Letters announced we were a finalist for this year’s podcast award. The other finalists are also amazing, so I don’t know if we stand much chance of winning, but it’s an honor to be listed with them.
Kingdom as a fantasy novel, Biblical allusions, and religion as a universal need
Does this poster scream YA fantasy trilogy, or is it just me?
My husband and I spent the last few weeks catching up on the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise so that we could go see Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes for date night. I admit that after binge-watching Dawn, Rise, and War, I was worried about what I was going to get with Kingdom. Dawn starts out as an old-fashioned science fiction tale, where man’s hubris in controlling nature leads to his downfall. Rise follows the plot beats of a post-apocalyptic tragedy in the vein of The Walking Dead, where no one can be trusted, and everything eventually goes as bad as it is possible for it to go. Glimmers of hope appear, but they are just as quickly snatched away. With War, the story gets even more depressing. It’s a combination of a war film with a revenge tale, but without any of the enjoyment of cleverness that makes revenge so fun. The overall tone is one of desperation, and the only possible solution to the protagonists’ problems is the complete annihilation of humanity. With the trailers for Kingdom seeming to hint at humanity having become the cattle predicted by War, I worried I had just signed myself up to sit through another depression-fest.
Imagine my surprise when the first scenes of Kingdom followed a completely different story pattern: that of the YA fantasy novel.
**spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes throughout**
I thought that it would get easier to keep up with blogging when the semester ended, but I guess things just keep on piling on. I finished up two really good papers–one on teaching students with dysgraphia in first-year writing and another using C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves as a lens to interpret Fatima Mirza’s novel A Place for Us–and all of my grading, and promptly collapsed.
Then I got back up again and promptly made up for my lack of mom-hours during the semester by chaperoning my daughter’s field trip the zoo and running all the last-minute errands for various school projects. My husband and I also ran a 5K at our local tulip festival with my teenagers, who we’ve been forcing to run all year. I don’t think they enjoyed it as much as I did.
In writing news this month, my short story “Birthright” was published as part of an anthology called Tales of Mystery: Dead for a Spell. The collection features detective stories with a fantasy twist, while the companion volume, Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death, is science-fiction themed. My story features a reluctant detective forced to take a case from a dangerous magical family. If you pay attention to the biblical allusions in the story, you may get a hint as to whodunit. I feel honored to be included in the collection along with some other really wonderful writers (including one who wrote one of the books reviewed below).
I had hoped to do more creative writing during the summer, but looks like academia has other ideas. I’m currently working on a paper about memory in dystopian novels by LDS authors for the Association for Mormon Letters conference in July. And in April, my podcast co-host Carl Cranney and I received a conditional acceptance for a paper on The Mandalorian and religious clothing for a possible edited collection, so now I am being forced to rewatch the show for research purposes. Oh, the hard life of the speculative fiction literary critic. 🙂
Speaking of the podcast, this month’s release is a short conversation about The Most Reluctant Convert, a film about C.S. Lewis’s conversion based on his memoir Surprised by Joy. I can’t believe it took me 42 episodes to get a legitimate Lewis episode into the podcast. The film is very short and really faithful to the book. Highly recommend for Lewis fans.
And now onto book reviews, of which 4/5 are rereads. It’s interesting (to me, at least) to see how my perspective on a book has changed over time. I hope the reevaluations you see below are an indication that I’m growing over time.
