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?).
This story started off like many of my stories do, in response to a prompt: a short fiction magazine was looking for pieces for a solar punk collection. In case you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t!), solar punk is a new-ish genre of speculative fiction that focuses on an optimistic future where humanity has harnessed technology along with traditional techniques to create a future where the planet is brought into a sustainable balance. When I was casting about for an idea to fill this prompt, I turned to the news story that was happening around me: Utah’s 20-year-long megadrought. In 2022 we were finally confronting the impending doom that the drying of the Great Salt Lake would bring upon the Salt Lake Valley, especially the risk of toxic chemicals from the lakebed being dispersed into the air. I combined these two elements by researching what sustainable, high-tech living might look like in the desert.
Over the course of my research, I was struck by how different it looked to live sustainably in the desert than in other environments portrayed in typical solar punk stories. The things that work in a more temperate area don’t make sense in Utah’s unique climate, yet there’s so much that’s still possible. This reminded me of the misunderstandings between Mormons and nonmembers. Both ways of life can work well in their own way, but there’s a tendency from both sides to condemn the other because they don’t understand why they do things differently.
In the story, I posit that a highly-organized community like the Latter-day Saint community is well-positioned to enact ecological change in the west because the division of water in a dry climate requires sacrifices that aren’t naturally going to happen without outside intervention by some kind of authority. (Witness the way the federal government had to step in and impose top-down reforms after Western states were unable to make the numbers add up for sharing decreased water from the Colorado River.) Most solar punk stories favor a more anarchic or libertarian form of government where there’s so much abundance that everyone can basically just do whatever they want. (Though of course, those decisions never seem to lead to overconsumption, which might be too optimistic . . . .) From there, I decided the main conflict of the story would be from an outsider visiting New Zion and trying to understand a system that was counter-intuitive to their vision of the world.
Often, Mormon lit stories are from Mormon families looking at the one who left or the one who left looking back in their Mormon community. I decided to flip these roles a bit by having the Mormon be the one who left her family and feels misunderstood. Initially I thought Martea’s whole family would be coming to visit her, but that ended up being too many characters for the size of the story, so I reduced it to just her sister.
The theme of reconciliation without conversion is one that feels very important to me right now. Every day, it seems, I hear stories of people cutting each other out of their lives because they don’t agree on politics or religion. But we need each other. We all need love and support and community, and trying to build those only with people who agree on everything is unnecessarily limiting. If we can’t bridge the divide over these issues with our closest family and friends, what chance does the world have to do the same? The key is not to convince others that we are right, but to learn to live together and love each other even while we live and believe in different ways.
The short fiction magazine I’d written the story for didn’t end up taking it. I’m so thankful that Jeanine Bee, Wayfare’s fiction editor, reached out to me for this story, and for the effort that she and the whole Wayfare editorial team put into helping me revise this story into the best possible version of itself. I hope it inspires you to make sustainable changes in your life and to reach out to those who may see things differently than you do.
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.
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.
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.
This morning I had the great privilege to read my paper “One Great Whole: An Exploration of the Alien as the Self in Mormon Science Fiction” as part of the Association for Mormon Letters 2023 conference. You can watch a recording of the whole panel on YouTube, and you definitely should because my co-presenters Paul Williams and Jesse Christensen brought some great thoughts about Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Brazilian missionary novels respectively.
I meant to get this annotated reading list up before the panel, but better after than never. So, here are some interesting readings to consider about Mormons and aliens, divided into fiction and nonfiction and listed in the order discussed in the paper:
