Mormon literaturstreit overview + new flash fiction
Hello.
In April, I was sick for most of the month, but did manage to post about the Mormon literaturstreit, released another piece of drone music (A Basin of Petals [it’s much less harsh than the previous one]), and decided to take what was a sort of Mormon SF Künstlerroman in short story form that I had written about half of and turn it into a novella.
For this newsletter, I have a brief update for you on the Mormon Literaturstreit and then, I’ve decided to share with you my Mormon Lit Blitz submission (which was not selected as semifinalst).
I’m not upset I didn’t make the cut. I took a risk with this one and am not sure I pulled it off. It’s too shallow to be profound; not biting enough to be satire; too pointed and obvious to be amusing; and while my fiction often exists in this space between sincerity, sentimentality, and satire (and intentionally so), I’m not sure this one quite lands.
But I’m glad I wrote it.
It comes out of my frustration with how U.S. Mormon masculinity is defined (and often portrayed), which, tbh, is an appendage to my frustration with how masculinity is defined and often portrayed in U.S. culture generally. I’ve included it beneath the Mormon Literaturstreit section if you’d like to read.
And I’d love to know if it strikes a chord with any of you—or where it falls flat.
Mormon Literaturestreit series kicks off
I published the first post in the series over on A Motley Vision: Mormon Literaturstreit: A Brief Introduction
You already saw some of this material in the March newsletter, and because it’s the intro post, there’s nothing to quote from yet, so for here in the newsletter, I want to share two things.
An abbreviated version of the timeline of the Mormon Literaturstreit:
Spring 1990: BYU English Professor Richard Cracroft reviews Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems
January 1991: BYU Professor Bruce Jorgensen responds to the review with his AML address: To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say
1993: Cracroft responds to Jorgensen’s AML presidential address with his own AML presidential address: Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature
1994: Gideon Burton responds to everything so far with his AML paper: Should We Ask, “Is This Mormon Literature?”: Towards a Mormon Criticism
1994: Michael Austin does the same with his RMLA paper: The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time
And then the last paragraph of the post here because I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I wrote it:
Part of the value of the Mormon Literaturstreit, then, is the fact that it took place as a formal debate over just a handful of years, conducted via conference proceedings and journal articles. It is a sustained conversation, which matters because it leads to forms of argument that don’t happen without the context of a “streit”.
I suspect this will become a running theme for the series, but I’m a bit haunted by the idea of the 21st century so far in Mormon literary studies not having a Literaturstreit. Not because I want more drama. Nor do I think we need something that’s actually streit-ish, but because it feels like so much of what gets published happens in isolation. And that partly may be just a change in interests, scholarship, and people’s relationship to Mormon literary studies in relation to the LDS Church (and BYU). But I wonder if part of it is also because of the weakening of AML’s reach and activity post-ejection from BYU*, and also the even more strengthened dominance of an emphasis on history and/or theology/sociology/politics (and the intermingling of the three) in Mormon Studies.
*I’m thinking particularly in relation to Mormon literary criticism—through Irreantum it actually got stronger in publishing actual literary works.
I don’t know.
Some of my favorite writing on Mormon literature has been published since the turn of the 21st century. But I’m not sure how much of an ongoing lit-crit conversation about it there is.
Flash Fiction: My reply to the ward council asking what we do about Brother Harris
[submitted to the March 2024 Mormon Lit Blitz]
What do we do about Brother Harris?
I don’t know. What do you do about someone who makes a living covering wounded pop chanteuses like Fiona Apple, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Billie Eilish, and Mormonism’s prophet not honored in her own country IdaQ?
How are any of us equipped to do something about the kind of guy who writes sentences like: “If the divine feminine is capable of erupting through the glossy sheen of popular music—and I believe it is—then surely it contains within it not only the healing sounds of IdaQ’s husky mezzo-soprano winding around gentle but stirring synthpop chords floating above a jaded disco beat, but also shards of quavering rage such as those found in the bridge to her recent single ‘Lady Elect,’ which are less a plea or an accusation than the guttural cry of some prehistoric raptor”?
Someone who—even though he steadfastly attends our ward, claiming that to attend the singles ward is the closest Mormonism gets to the Catholic vision of purgatory—somehow ends up dating but never marrying the most attractive, creative, free-thinking female single adult over thirty (or, more recently, forty) in the stake for two to three years until she invariably goes inactive or leaves the Valley for Pasadena or Portland or NYC or Utah.
Someone who regularly moisturizes and wears foundation and sometimes eye liner but who is not gay (and even if he were—what does that change?), who is very much on the left of the Kinsey scale in that I know for a fact that while he can appreciate the attractiveness of a Brad Pitt or an Oscar Isaac, he has no idea why those who like men find Ryan Gosling so appealing let alone a Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.
Someone who, when he is not traveling, shows up fifteen minutes early to every sacrament meeting, ward activity, temple trip, and service opportunity, overdressed but always willing to pay a hefty dry cleaning bill if the situation requires it, which it often does since he also always stays after to help clean up.
Someone whose scriptures are a riot of brightly penciled color coding and scribbled cross-references such that whenever asked to give a talk or teach a lesson last minute he is able to pull words out from the swathes of hot pink, chartreuse, orchid, and turquoise that never fail to be coherent, uplifting, on topic, and always within the time allotted.
Someone who grew a modest inheritance from his maternal grandmother into a tidy nest egg via uncannily timed entertainment and tech company stock investing (an achievement he chalks up to the gift of prophecy) and then draws on those funds every year to put together holiday gift baskets for every widow, widower, and single person over the age of sixty in the ward, leaving them puzzled at the cryo-therapy eye serum, but appreciative of the exquisite shortbread, petit fours, and homemade caramels not to mention the French milled soaps redolent of rose, verbena, or lavender.
Someone who extricated my daughter when she found herself at a party turning into the kind of party she didn’t want to be at without ruining her social standing at all—not that that’s of primary importance, but it certainly helped her avoid any subsequent online bullying which surely would have come her way if I’d been the one to do it—by pretending to be her agent and then introducing her to an actual agent, which led her to decide that no, she didn’t actually want to go to USC or NYU, thus boosting BYU’s class profile and considerably easing her mother’s mind (and mine —even if part of me still wished she’d chosen a non-Church school).
Someone who is on such good terms with his ex-wife, who still lives within our ward boundaries but had her name removed years ago, an act that means everyone—including some of her family—sided and continues to side with him, a fact that hurts him deeply, but he isn’t quite sure how to change, that they spend every Thanksgiving Day together in Palm Springs.
You know, everyone says thank goodness there were no children, but as hard as divorce is on kids wouldn’t the presence of children help Justin—I’m going to call him Justin now; it’s what he insists I call him when we meet up once a month for lunch, a practice we have continued even now that I’m his ministering brother rather than his home teacher—by counteracting the chaotic energies present in his professional life with a more raw, more unpredictable, more innocent chaos, a chaos that no calling can replicate—not even Scoutmaster (if that were still a calling we could give him)?
Hmmmmm.
Honestly, now that I’ve written the above, I guess I do agree that Justin could use a little shaking up. Not that I’m worried about him in the way the rest of the ward council seems to be. It’s more that I’m quite aware how easy it is to fall into certain patterns of habit, and lately I’ve sensed that he’s become a bit more—restless isn’t quite the right word for it—a bit more, well, not constrained, constraint isn’t in Justin’s vocabulary, and certainly not bored, but he exhibits the slightest bit of attenuation of being, a mild straining in spirit and mind, as if his bountiful approach to this mortal life has inflated ever so slightly beyond the fulfillment his spiritual life currently provides.
So: what do we do about Justin?
As I see it, we have two choices:
We can leave him alone and let the vagaries of life and the trials the Lord will inevitably send his way do their thing.
Or we can lobby the Brethren to change the requirements to become a Bishop.
Respectfully,
Michael Terry
Elders Quorum President
Laguna Hills Ward
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