Dark Watch collection turns ten + No Going Back
Hello! This newsletter is coming out a week later than normal because May 16 will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of my first story collection Dark Watch and other Mormon-American stories, and I wanted to run a sale in May to mark the occasion.
And so: the ebook is now $2.99 and the new-ish print edition is $9.99 through May 31. Here are the purchase links:
Print Version | Ebook Versions: Kindle | Kobo | Nook | Apple Books
I have some thoughts below on the Dark Watch collection, and I also spend some time on Jonathan Langford's No Going Back.
ALSO: On AMV I continued my Mormon aesthetics series with a look at The structure of Chase Westfall’s “Toward a Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art”, the last essay in Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader.
On Jonathan Langford's novel No Going Back
Spring is a strange time for me. It's my busiest time at the college I work at. On the one hand, it is nice to leave winter behind, but spring also seems to arrive sooner than I'd prefer (I like winter), but at the same time here in MN, it arrives in fits and starts, which can be disorientation. It brings with it seasonal allergies (which I have every season, but usually the worst in spring).
And, for me, it also often brings with it a low-grade melancholia. There are many reasons for that. One of them is because it's when Jonathan Langford passed away.
I miss Jonathan. It's been eight years since he died. It feels both shorter and longer than that.
Jonathan was well known and well-connected in the world of Mormon literature. He had a hand in many projects, both publicly and behind the scenes, including providing feedback on a decent amount of the Mormon fiction and creative nonfiction published in the 21st century. What he doesn't have, however, is a large corpus of his own fictional work.
As far as I know, it's only No Going Back, which was published by Zarahemla Books in 2009.
No Going Back is an oddity—it felt both ahead of and behind the times when it was published, and it feels the same now. Its' approach to its' subject matter pleases almost no one, and yet few works of Mormon fiction are as brave (in various directions) or as timely as it was (and remains).
This is because No Going Back is a young adult novel about a young Mormon man named Paul who comes to terms (somewhat) with his growing awareness that he is attracted to men and trying to figure out what that means for his relationship with his family, with his church, and with society at large.
Here's how Jonathan describes it:
"A gay teenage Mormon growing up in western Oregon in 2003. His straight best friend. Their parents. A typical LDS ward, a high-school club about tolerance for gays, and a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment to the state constitution. In No Going Back, these elements combine in a coming-of-age story about faithfulness and friendship, temptation and redemption, tough choices and conflicting loyalties."
As should be obvious, it's a narrative that is walking quite the tightrope. Some readers dismiss this approach entirely. But as my sister Katherine notes in her AMV review of No Going Back:
"Jonathan doesn’t gloss over the difficult, emotionally dissonant position Paul is in. He doesn’t pretend like it’s a struggle that has easy answers. He doesn’t vilify the students in the Gay Straight Alliance at Paul’s school, and neither does he portray the youth in Paul’s ward as being saintly (both communities in Jonathan’s novel end up causing Paul a lot of grief). But Jonathan also respects Paul by not pretending that his struggle can’t on some level be resolved in a way that brings internal peace. He presents Paul with the option of finding joy in keeping his covenants with God. To even say that that’s a possibility is a pretty unpopular statement to make in modern mainstream American culture. To say that that’s an option but also show how uniquely difficult and messy that looks when practically applied is not a very popular thing to do in Mormon culture."
Looking back at the novel, at that review and others, and thinking about where we're at now, I'm going to not only agree with Katherine that novel is brave, but also that No Going Back is a rebuke that has fallen on deaf ears. The question it leaves open—what young gay members of the LDS Church should do if they wish to remain connected to the Church and, more importantly, what the Church and its' leadership and members and former members and society as a whole should do—is one that the novel refuses to answer entirely (this refusal is the main reason some readers give it a bad review). But I don't think that refusal is a fault of the novel: rather it's the point of it—it's is a challenge to the world, a challenge to create a place for the Paul's of the world, a place that may seem impossible to create, but, tragically, we (as individuals, as a Church, as society) have not only mostly refused to create, but have also made worse since the novel was published in 2009.
I don't know if you should read it. Many readers find it uncomfortable. Heck, there are aspects to it that I find uncomfortable.
But there's really nothing quite like it in Mormon literature.
It's only one of the many important legacies Jonathan left us (and much too soon), but it's a remarkable one.
On the ten year anniversary of Dark Watch and other Mormon-American stories
My first book-length work was published on May 16, 2015. I use the passive voice there, but I published it myself (as I do and will continue to do with much [but not all] of my Mormon fiction and criticism).
It represents almost all of my early career creative writing (a couple of stories and the Speculations series are all that's missing). In some ways it's underdeveloped as a collection; in some ways, it captures everything about my later output.
As Scott Hales noted in his review:
"Like no other recent work of Mormon literature ... Dark Watch foregrounds and engages questions about Mormon assimilation to force readers to reflect on the consequences—both positive and negative—of Mormonism’s slow retreat from peculiarity."
That continues to be a major focus, the primary theme, of my writing: the major development being since then also attempting to reinforce and broaden and mess with the peculiarity.
Here are a few thoughts I had when looking back on the collection:
- I sure wish I'd started writing fiction sooner. I'm happy at how things have gone with my fiction writing, and starting sooner would likely have led to work that I'd, perhaps, be somewhat embarrassed about now. But it would have also lead to experience and seasoning that can't be replaced and is better to gain earlier rather than later.
- The leap from the "realist" fiction set of stores to the "near future science fiction" stories—from "Ride Home" to "PAIH"—now seems both naive and absolutely spot on.
- To read me at all is to be a Mormon literature hipster, but the "Lost Icons" enthusiasts are the hipsters of the hipsters (Jonathan Langford was among this number, actually).
- The cover is the best I could do at the time. I've thought about changing it, but I don't want to let go of it. I like the way it shows the switch from the stories set in the past to those set in the future (did you know that "Ride Home" was originally set in the future if you go by the cover? When I updated the ebook edition and added the print edition, it was flipped over to the past).
- Speaking of the update editions: it's fitting that I talk about Jonathan above because the bulk of the updating done for the new edition was to fix stuff that he'd noticed while reading it and sent me notes on. With only a couple of exceptions, I made the fixes he pointed out.
- I've mentioned before that "Warning" and "Runaway" are semi-autobiographical. "Request" is not semi-autobiographical, but the core idea—and older Mormon man meets a nurse who is a gay man who was raised LDS and is estranged from his father—is based on an experience my grandfather had.
- I almost dropped "Elusieve" from the collection. But I'm glad I kept it in. While I'm not saying I have been consistent with my Mormon near future SF, if you want to read some of the stories in this collection and some in The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories as all being part of the same continuity, "Elusieve" becomes an important step in that timeline. I'm not suggesting you do read things in that way. I have intentionally not been super consistent. But I also haven't shied away from cutting corners on world building by riffing off aspects of other stories I've created (moving backward and forward in the future those stories conjure). "Dark Watch" is the fountainhead of all that (mess of) work.
- On reflection: the collection is more experimental but also more faithful realist than how it sits in my head given the ground I've covered since then.
I think that's it. If you have anything you're curious about, feel free to reply to this email with questions.
I will be back in late June.
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