Tag: fantasy

What I Read: July 2023

Family snapshot outside the Kirtland temple

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.

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What I Read: May 2023

School officially ended and summer officially begins! We had a successful camping and kayaking trip at Deer Creek Reservoir to kick off the summer. The lake is so much fuller than it was last year. The rocks I remembered being halfway up the beach were almost completely underwater! A testament to Utah’s insane water year.

Kid-sized kayaks are amazing
Playing Phase 10 is an important part of our family camping culture

Some really good writing news this month: I sold a story! “Birthright” will appear in an anthology of speculative fiction detective stories by Inklings Press! This story features a very costly magic system that twists the relationships in a family to the breaking point. I’m sure it will be a while before the anthology will be available, but I’ll keep you up to date on it. I also turned in my edits on “Reclaiming the Desert” to Wayfare, so hopefully you’ll see that one sooner.

On the other side of the writing desk, I’ve finished the developmental edits for my portion of Irreantum‘s genre fiction issue. I should be diving into copy edits soon. The stories we received for the issue are truly amazing and only getting better with every draft. I’m excited to share them with you.

For Mother’s Day, we released an episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree about the portrayal of Mothers in the Media. Our other episode was one of my kids’ favorites for me to prep for, an episode of the Australian sensation that is Bluey.

This month was a bit light on the reading with all the end of school activities, but I’m hoping to get back on track with the summer months before grad school takes over my reading list in the fall. That is, if I don’t spend all my spare time exploring Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom. I cannot believe they made a game this good with a reused map. Every minute of the seven year wait was worth it.

Book reviews after the jump!

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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.

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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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