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.

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!

Continue reading “What I Read: December 2022 & 2023 Reading Projects”

What I Read: November 2022

Taken after the 5K, as I never smile while running

A lower intensity reading month. I finished wrapping up my dad’s campaign for Salt Lake County Auditor. He didn’t win but did manage to get over 40% of the vote as a third-party candidate which is impressive. I also ran my traditional Thanksgiving 5K, shaving about :20 seconds off my most recent time even though the course was full of hills.

I managed to finally smash my word count goal this month, writing 6240/4000 words. Most of this was on a new short story which has the codename of “Robot Nanny” but I think will probably be called “Memory” or “Memories.” I can’t decide about the plural, but the story turned out great. I’m sending it in to Writers of the Future this quarter.

What does it say about us as parents that this is the pose we automatically went for?

Part of November was spent attending Dragonsteel Con 2022 to celebrate the release of The Lost Metal with my family. Bonus that I got to record a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about the echoes of Mormonism in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. The recording turned out super well and was released on Thanksgiving. We also released an episode on Howl’s Moving Castle with author William Morris (whose new short story collection is reviewed below). We also have a very fun Christmas special talking about A Christmas Carol, why it’s so popular, and lightning reviewing several adaptations.

Live podcast recording at Dragonsteel

I also spent time this month learning to use Descript for podcast editing, and after some wrestling, I got it to work with our Zencastr recordings. I’m hoping to make some quick video tutorials on our process so that others don’t have to struggle as much as I did. I think it’s really going to boost editing efficiency on the podcast, which has been my biggest complaint about the process.

For December, I’m polishing up the “Robot Nanny” story and starting a new creative nonfiction piece whose codename is “Landscapes of Faith,” comparing and contrasting the landscape and church experience in Seattle and Utah. I’m also brainstorming ideas to submit for the Association for Mormon Letter’s virtual conference this spring. The theme is genre fiction, so I obviously have to be there! We’re also wrapping up season one of PCAT with an episode on Rings of Power.

Continue reading “What I Read: November 2022”

How to Keep Writing: My Process for Short Stories in Late 2022

Conor Hilton recently asked on the Association for Mormon Letters Discord server about people’s process for writing short stories, specifically with the goal of having a regular process for producing work. My reply got a little long, so I thought I’d expand it further and turn it into a blog post.

leaves hang on rope
Photo by Designecologist on Pexels.com

I am still struggling to get back into a regular creative rhythm. Part of that is me getting too excited about all the different opportunities open to me and accidentally turning all my writing time into time confetti. But part of it is also that I am a baby fiction writer. In college, I developed a pretty good process for creating creative nonfiction on the regular (implementing that now is one of the aforementioned time-confetti creators) but developing fiction is a whole different animal.

With that caveat, for my last two short stories, my process has been something like this:

Continue reading “How to Keep Writing: My Process for Short Stories in Late 2022”

What I Read: October 2022

If I told you that I was sewing Halloween costumes at 9 pm on October 30th, you’d get a good picture of the kind of month I had. Lots of work on my dad’s campaign and getting the Reflections contest up and running, plus all the craziness of Halloween with four kids. All of it good work, but lots of time away from the writing I’d like to be doing.

Word count for October fell short again (3770/4000) but not surprising. I missed about a week of time attending the LDSPMA Conference. I learned a lot at the conference (I focused this time on podcasting rather than writing) and met some great people who I hope to work with in the future.

white and black skull figurine on brown wooden table
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

This month’s writing was mostly focused on academic projects. I finished a book review of Into the Headwinds which is going to be published by Dialogue. But the more exciting piece was finishing my statement of intent to apply for the English MA program at BYU. I’ve got everything all rounded up, just waiting on letters of recommendation. I did begin a new short story at the end of the month called “Memories” focusing on a robot nanny. First draft has already gotten some good feedback from my writing group this week, though lots of changes to make of course. I’m really enthusiastic about the prospects for this story.

Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree released two episodes last month, one on Top Gun Maverick (I didn’t think we’d get so many moral lessons out of a summer blockbuster!) and a Halloween special on Midnight Mass.

During November, I’m going to continue polishing “Memories” and start a creative nonfiction piece about the culture shock of moving from Utah to Seattle and back again. If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, you can catch me tonight at 7 pm MT at the launch party for the Mormon Lit Blitz’s second anthology. I’ll be reading “The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange,” and just basking in all the other really interesting authors who’ll be there. Next week, I’m attending Dragonsteel 2022 for the release of The Lost Metal. At the con, I’ll be recording a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about Mormonism in the Mistborn series, which is something I’ve always planning to write about. Come and listen in if you’re at Dragonsteel! Due to all this busy-ness, I won’t be attempting NaNo this month, but I’m already eye-ing Camp Nano in April for a return to longform writing.

Continue reading “What I Read: October 2022”