You know how sometimes past-you makes plans that sound fun, but present-you ends up resenting those plans? Yeah, that was May for me. May was the month of conferences, all of which I wanted to attend individually, but maybe not all within the same 30 days. Ah well, I’m sure future-me will look back and be happy we did it, even if it made May pretty insane.
On May 9-10, I attended Storymakers, a local conference mostly for fiction writers. I’ve never been able to justify paying for a ticket before as fiction is mostly a side hobby for me, but when my friend from Seattle told me that her book was a finalist for the Whitney Awards, I decided this was my year. The Storymakers atmosphere is every bit as fun and friendly as I had heard, and we had a great time. I met up with several of my favorite Mormon lit friends and generally stuffed my brain full of writing advice. I tried to focus mainly on panels about editing, publishing, and marketing, since I have a project I’m working on that involves these things. (Watch this space…)
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The next weekend was the Faith and Knowledge Conference at the University of Utah. Lots of great advice given about finding employment in Mormon studies-related circles as well as the relationship between faith and scholarship. It was nice to be in a space where we could talk about our various perspectives on these things openly without worrying about judgement or providing context.
I had a bye week to celebrate the end of school with my kids and then we promptly took off for a family vacation in Ephraim, UT, which was also the location of the AML-MSH joint conference the next weekend. Since AML has only done virtual conferences since the pandemic, it was amazing to see so many of these people whose writing I’ve read in person. Also exciting to have a whole two tracks with lots and lots of Mormon literature scholarship, instead of just a few crumbs. Michael Austin’s keynote was a call to action to further scholarship on lesser-known authors, which some of us are already scheming to answer.
Of course, I still had one more conference to go at this point, but I’ll leave the summary of MHA for my June reading post.
If reading about all these conferences has you ready to jump in on the action (and you live in Utah), you have a chance tomorrow night! I’ll be speaking on a panel about faith and imagine at the Compass gallery on Center Street in Provo on Wednesday, June 18th at 7 pm. More details here. Come say hi and maybe we’ll grab Rockwell Ice Cream’s new Brandon Sanderlanche flavor afterwards.
Now on to the book reviews! You’ll notice that I’m loading up on a lot of the Hugo nominees below. That’s a trend that will probably continue for a few months, though after reading so many brand-new books in a row, I do have an impulse to follow CS Lewis’s advice and grab a few old books as a palate cleanser.
Continue reading “What I Read: May 2025”