Hello. After our traditional February thaw, Minnesota is back to being cold and snowy.

I've spent much of the month fretting about my local friends, neighbors, and coworkers and also working on the science fiction novella I mentioned in my last newsletter that's about grief and Mormon aesthetics and public art. I'm about five thousand words away from completing the first draft, which means it'll end up about 32,000 words, which is a good length. I tend to underwrite so that may expand to 36k in the revision. Or maybe I end up making it leaner this time and get it down to 30k or even 28. That would possibly be even better or at least it would be more in line with how one is supposed to go about this thing of writing longer works.

I won't say the writing is going well because who knows how good it actually is. But I'm accomplishing much of what I'd hoped for while I'm also being surprised by some of where the novella has gone in its later chapters, which is pretty much ideal for a first draft.

I've also completed final line edits on a little more than half of The Courtship of Elder Cannon. I hope to have more news on it soon.

The current opportunity for Mormon writers of some ambition

I've been glancing at some of the essays in Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature and realizing that quite a few of them are reprints, and I've already written about several of them. So I don't intend to make a big project of that volume, but instead I'll react to any of them I find worth reacting to as I have the time and interest.

Indeed, I'm going to take a crack at one in this month's newsletter because I want to use it as a jumping off point to reformulate my thoughts on what it means to be a currently working Mormon writer who wants to be both very Mormon and somewhat ambitious in their writing.

Karl Keller's "On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature" was originally published in Western Humanities Review 9 (the Winter 1954-55 issue). It's a quite harsh condemnation of Mormon culture, or rather of the ability of LDS folks to create a Mormon culture, combined with a little bit of hope or wish for the better, and one that has been repeated in various formulations over the decades since.

Keller comes out swinging: "One of the mysteries of literary life in America is why Mormons have contributed so little to it. To make mention of a Mormon literature is to make a joke." (13)

He then rehearses a list of what labels as unconvincing reasons given as to why this is the case:

• too busy pioneering
• too busy caring for others
• prioritize the spiritual over the aesthetic
• uneducated (albeit literate)
• lacking a press, public, critical experience (and thus critical standards)

He then says that the "real reason is that we have consistently denied to ourselves a literatures" (13) and that like "many other religious groups" we lack a robust literature because of:

• our puritanism
• our paranoia
• our apocalypticism (14)

and "in our puritanic-paranoid-apocalyptic fundamentalism we have become reactionaries against literature rather than lovers of it" (17).

Strong stuff. Harsh. Not wrong, but also beholden to a particular notion of literature that I think we should let go of.

Now, Keller admits that literature can be a bit dangerous to the soul (although also soul-expanding) and in the last few paragraphs of his essay, he outlines what he thinks Mormon literature is capable of. It's a lovely vision, although one not all that different from what others have articulated with his these being primarily that "a great work of Mormon literature will be like all great works of literature" in that it will affirm existence, lead to an encounter with an other that transforms the reader, that it will cause the reader to wrestle with their own belief and rebuild it (21-22). That it will be—and these are my words, not his—a well-built expression of humanism.

Mormon literature has developed considerably, most of that sparked by events almost 15 years after Keller wrote this essay (including the founding of Dialogue). But it also really hasn't the body of work of writing that features Mormon characters or settings is still quite small and persistently provincial (even or especially when it's trying to deny its' own provinciality).

I don't strenuously disagree with Keller's critiques of Mormon culture even if I have some caveats and quibbles nor with his solution when it comes to the broad strokes, but I also think that while it's important to have such touch points in the discussion of Mormon literature, they do little to help actual working Mormon artists and critics, let alone build a Mormon audience. They also typically ignore the material and societal conditions required to support the creation, distribution, and consumption of art. And they assume that great Mormon art will be something they and others with excellent taste, including, I presume, the larger U.S. and world culture will recognize. That great Mormon literature can become like great Jewish or Catholic literature: a category that if not canonical is at least acknowledged.

However, that is and probably never will be possible. The mold for Mormon literature can't/won't be the same as traditions who got there earlier and have a longer history to draw upon. This is partly due to aspects not so much inherent to Mormonism itself but to the socio-historical circumstances of Mormonism and partly due to the changes in the broader cultural and socio-economic environments in which art is created.

Simply put: the cultural economy is now actually the attention economy and it is a wreck (and the fact that that's what we call it now is symptomatic of the problems inherent to it).

And to put it bluntly: Mormons have proven over the past few decades that they are as, or even more, vulnerable to dominant cultural, political, and technological currents as the rest of society. Perhaps vulnerable is the wrong term: apt to choosing to succumb to or go along with?

This means that to hope for a large Mormon audience to come around and embrace Mormon art, especially Mormon art that doesn't cater to broader cultural and political identities, is to spend energy on something that will likely never happen or if it does will happen in such a surprising way that there's little point trying to cause it to occur using conventional means.

This isn't surprising. Our own scriptures prove over and over again that even those who truly believe still often either mix that belief with the prevailing winds of their time or shape it in ways affected by those strong winds.

We can't escape the times we live in.

It's also not something to despair over. There are pockets of interesting Mormon culture happening everywhere. And the lack of a true center for it limits material resources and access to audience, but also liberates artists from the slim hope of wide acclaim and the imprimatur of respectability.

The current opportunity for Mormon writers is that there is so much that has been lost or weakened, so much that is seeking to distract or control, so many fingers of the powerful being pressed on the traditional scales of culture that we really are free to do whatever we can do with the little time and resources we can muster.

But this opportunity requires ambition.

If the art you're consuming and creating is too set within your cultural, political, or generic inclinations or if it lacks ambition of genre, form, tone, thematics, etc., then you're not really taking advantage of the opportunity.

Which is fine.

There's nothing wrong with solace, with entertainment, perhaps even with a bit of distraction.

But I do think that Mormon writers (and artists working in other media) have been too content to take popular genres/expressions of genres and pour Mormonism in to them, leading to works that are mediocre for their genre but have a bit of Mormonism mixed in (to be clear: I'm guilty of this). Or what I see as even worse: take them and pour into them work that doesn't actually have any Mormonism in it but is more acceptable to Mormon "standards." Or what is less worse: use the things that Mormons are good at to find acclaim with a broader audience and leave your Mormon audience with thematic crumbs and occasional easter eggs.

I have no illusions about "a great work of Mormon literature" because the era of great-ness is over (and was largely manufactured when it existed).

But given the current state of culture and life and the world, I'd love it if all of us would dig deeper into Mormon history, culture, worldview, and scripture and mesh that with ambitions for and knowledge of genres and forms and artistic innovations and combine the two to create tools for wielding against power and dominion. And when I say against, I always, of course, mean around, underneath, amidst, away from, within. Thorns in every side and under every foot, including our own.

Make something new.

Make something that has craft and shows you've spent time learning the genres you're messing with, the forms you've studied, but also give us a strong dose of, a strange alchemy of wrestling with Mormon thought. Liberatory not in some cliched leftist way, but in the way that Joseph Smith's vision for humanity was and is.

And here's where I think Keller is most right. He writes, "We have ... always denied to Joseph Smith status as a writer. In our hagiography, we learn to love the word of God but not the words of Joseph Smith" (13-14).

Yep (although I'd also argue we maybe don't learn to love the word of God so much as learn to be comfortable with our platitudes about the word of God, but that's a different rant).

And when I say Joseph Smith. I don't just mean him. I mean any Latter-day Saint who has written or who writes with passion and ambition about and deep interest in and concern for Smith's vision, his worldview.

Basically I want for Mormon writers (and artists) what I want for my church and my local congregation and my family and especially my self and for as much of the world as possible: to take the Restoration seriously.

These are serious times, troubled times.

What else should we be doing?

See you in April!