Graduate school has begun in earnest, and man, I’m sliding back into school like a fish into water. It’s so refreshing to be around people who are deep thinkers, great writers, and prolific readers all day long. Grad school is a blast! (Remind me of that in December when the paper deadlines hit.)
This weekend (Oct 13 & 14) I’ll be at the Latter-day Saints and Media Studies Symposium presenting my analysis of the portrayal of LDS characters in The Expanse and Stranger Things. Tickets are $30 for two days of interesting research about the interaction between the media and the church and its members. If you’re in the Las Vegas area, I’d love to say hello!
A short essay/fiction/something I wrote made the finalist list for the 12th Mormon Lit Blitz! The Lit Blitz will be starting on October 23rd with my piece being released on November 2nd. I’m also involved behind the scenes this time as I’ll be putting together a podcast version of the Lit Blitz to make it even easier to follow along and vote.
Over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we finished our Barbenheimer miniseries by talking about Barbie. I know there’s been a lot of LDS coverage of the film, but I think our discussion added a perspective that wasn’t as prevalent. I also really enjoyed our discussion of season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. If you’re not already watching it, I highly recommend using your free trial of Paramount+ to do so (maybe over the holidays?).
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.
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?
July has been a good break month. My kids have gone to several fun camps, we’ve celebrated some holidays and family gatherings, and I’ve taken time to rest and recharge (and read lots of nonfiction, apparently, as you’ll see from my reviews below). Near the end of July, we took off on the big trip of the summer which I like to call the Church History Mega Road Trip. We drove from Utah to New York and back, over 5000 miles in total. It was my first time visiting Palmyra and Kirtland, and my kids’ first time at any of the sights. We’re back now and were thrown straight into back-to-school prep, so I’m glad I got in some restful days early.
As for writing, I did finish one short piece of creative nonfiction that I sent in to Exponent II for their fall issue. I also sent in a couple of class proposals to some local writing conferences. In general, I’ve been less productive than I wish I had been, but I’m trying to accept that I have the opposite cycle from many writers: where most people have less work in the summer, as a mom I actually have more work in the summer than during the school year. It’s always difficult to be happy in the season that you’re in, but I’m trying.
Summer has been a mix of lazy days with massive productivity. At home, I’ve been letting myself indulge in hours of Tears of the Kingdom gameplay with my kids and also reading the first Harry Potter book aloud to my two youngest ones (their first time!). We’ve also been teaching my daughter how to ride a bike: both exhilarating and heartbreaking knowing that she’s the last one! On the weeks that my older kids are going to camps at BYU, I have spent the whole day on campus, practicing for the fall and putting my head down to get through edits while my husband watches the younger ones at home. I’m also prepping for our big family road trip for the summer–we’re driving all the way to New York on a self-guided church history tour, so there’s a lot of planning to be done if we’re to survive with our relationships intact. I hope you’re all finding time to relax and staying cool in the heat!
The biggest writing news from June was the publication of “Reclaiming the Desert” at Wayfare Magazine. They paired my story with amazing artwork of the Utah landscape by Brekke Sjoblom. Her geometric landscapes really fit the futuristic yet natural solar punk feeling I was going for. I’m thinking I have to buy one of her works for my wall now. Anyway, the story is free to read, and once you’re finished, you can take a look at my author’s note to find out about some of the real-world science behind the setting.
I was also invited to present my paper on Mormons writing about aliens to the Mormon Transhumanist Association at their June gathering. (Reading list from the paper here.) Turns out, the MTA has a lot of speculative fiction fans, which in hindsight should have been obvious. They had some great discussion points for me to consider which will influence my future work on the history of LDS speculative fiction.
And if you’re reading this when it’s posted, we’re at the beginning of week two of the “Around the World in Mormon Literature” contest by the Mormon Lit Lab. I’m on the Lit Lab board and it’s been exciting and exhausting to see all the work that goes into producing a multi-language contest. Please read along with me and vote for your favorites! (Not to bias you, but I’m loving the invented folklore of “The Five Angels of Eden” by Claudio Oliveria.)
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!
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.
