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.
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!
Continue reading “What I Read: March 2023”