Tag: CS Lewis

What I Read: Sept 2023

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.)

bundle of books on a library
Photo by Guilherme Rossi on Pexels.com

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?).

Onward to book reviews!

Continue reading “What I Read: Sept 2023”

Latent Mormonism or Explicit Representation in Speculative Fiction: Some Thoughts

A slightly updated version of this post appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog

When I was reading a new compilation of CS Lewis’s ideas in On Writing (and Writers), I was particularly struck by this quote (originally from an essay found in God in the Dock, I believe) as it might apply to the Latter-day Saint writer:

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.

In the surrounding text, Lewis claims that it’s much less beneficial to write works of apologetics than it is to write books on other subjects with a definitively Christian worldview. Ignoring the fact that this statement is exactly the opposite of what CS Lewis did in his own writing practice (both in nonfiction and fiction), I wondered whether I buy the argument.

photo of solar system
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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.

Continue reading “What I Read: April 2023”

25 Questions Asked Upon Returning to Academic Writing After 13 Years

  1. What was the name of that awesome program I used to use to manage my research? Ah, there it is.
  2. Wait, now, what was that database that all the literary papers are in? EBSCO? No, JSTOR, that’s it.
  3. Woah, there are three whole journals basically devoted to CS Lewis? (Only a bit of an exaggeration.)
  4. Research is so fun! Why didn’t I go to grad school?
  5. Now how do I get access to these papers without membership in a university library? Oh, wow, this is way easier than it was in 2008.
  6. Why is the only academic thing I can find on Brandon Sanderson an undergraduate thesis? And I can’t access it. Oh well.
  7. Hmm, on reading these papers, none of this actually seems to be useful. Am I missing something?
  8. Should I buy these academic books on fantasy? What am I saying? Yes. The answer to buying books is always yes.
  9. How do I know when to stop researching and just starting writing? Maybe now?
  10. Uh, I don’t know how to start this. I guess, what better place to start than the middle?
  11. Actually, I need more sources to write this part. What if we move on to this later part?
  12. Now, how do I cite scripture in MLA?
  13. Writing is so awesome! Who’s the best writer ever?
  14. Why did I think starting in the middle was a good idea? Now I have two disconnected pieces.
  15. Why is this so hard? I remember being good at this once upon a time.
  16. Why do the Kindle versions of all the other books in this series have page numbers but this one doesn’t? I really don’t like having to cite chapter numbers for only this volume.
  17. What’s a better way to say “In this paper, I will show . . .”?
  18. Wait, do you italicize series titles in MLA?
  19. Is it ethical to just pull this quote from someone else’s paper and quote it as if I actually looked it up myself? Probably not. I’ll just buy the book. Mostly likely will use it again anyway.
  20. Who on my friend list do I trust to help me fix this paper?
  21. Am I a jerky friend for not asking sooner? It’s due in three days . . . .
  22. Oh my gosh, my friend is a genius. Why didn’t I see that?
  23. Should I save this paragraph somewhere before cutting it?
  24. Are there any more asterisks I haven’t replaced yet? Oh, there’s one.
  25. Okay, am I ready for this? Submit!