Hello! Happy (almost) New Year!

I'm not someone who feels compelled to do year-end wrap ups or make resolutions as the new year arrives. But given my ever-shifting focus between the art forms and audiences I'm interested in, I thought it be a good idea to actually take stock this year on where I'm at in relation to Mormon Literature. You'll find that below along with some thoughts on a paper Benson Parkinson presented at an AML conference on his experience trying to publish his Mormon mission novel(s) in the 1990s.

Also: if you missed it, it's not too late to enjoy The Center for Latter-Day Saint Arts short fiction advent calendar, which includes a reprinting of my story "Proof That Sister Greeley Is a Witch (Even Though Mormons Don’t Believe in Witches)."

And a reminder that my non-Mormon lit-focused collection Oddities: Fantasies & Science Fictions is for sale in all the major ebook stores and as a trade paperback from Amazon. If you enjoyed any of the stories in The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, it's quite likely you'll enjoy the stories in Oddities.

My 2025 in Mormon Literature

NEWSLETTER: switching from every month to every other month has made this newsletter a more sustainable enterprise and also allowed me to increase the WHM one from every quarter to every other month as well, so I will be keeping to this schedule for 2026.

AMV: I'm still trying to balance what is a blog post vs. what is a newsletter essay. I might not have that equation quite figured out because all four AMV posts for 2025 appeared in the first half of year. In my mind, the newsletter is for when I want to be more exploratory and/or personal and/or preachy, but that isn't quite right either. Ideally, I'd like to post to AMV at least once every other month. And while I will mainly be focusing on Mormon aesthetics on AMV for the foreseeable future, I would like to get back to covering fiction every so often.

READING: other than the Louise Plummer collection mentioned in my previous newsletter, my Mormon lit-related reading this year was limited to the Mormon Lit Blitz, works related to the Mormon Aesthetics project, issues of Irreantum, and the Center for LDS Arts advent. I need to get back to some book-length Mormon work in 2026, although I did read a lot more fiction overall in 2025 than I had in the previous few years so that's a step forward.

FICTION: much like my blogging, this was concentrated in the first half of the year. Between January and June, I wrote a humorous short story for Irreantum (it was rejected; I thought it was hilarious; email me if you want to read it); completed a long-ish poem (it will appear in Dialogue at some point next year—yes, I who claim to have a complicated relationship with poetry [which is still true!] am going to become a published poet); wrote a Mormon Lit Blitz submission (which was a finalist: A Ward House, Stirring); wrote and submitted a micro-poem to Irreantum (it was accepted!); expanded a rejected Mormon Lit Blitz story from a previous year and submitted it to Dialogue (it was rejected—and rightly so; I submitted it before it was ready); and then I started a Mormon short story that'd been bouncing around my head for years, and then decided I didn't want to complete it. The second half of the year has been devoted to projects for the general SF&F market. I do think, though, that I'll be able to return to the short novel I was working on in 2024 that is a space opera but also a Kunstlerroman and also a work on Mormon aesthetics. I had abandoned it just three or four chapters short of completing the first draft: partly to focus on other work; partly because I got stuck. I re-looked at it last week, and I think I can unstick it. One way or another, I hope to publish a book-length work for the Mormon market in 2026.

CONCLUSION: All in all, a mixed year. I'm finding my interest in writing Mormon short fiction to be waning even though that's the work of mine there seems to be a market for. I think my future Mormon fiction efforts are going to focus on novellas/short novels and short novels in stories, although, of course, if an idea seizes me that's suitable for the Mormon Lit Blitz or Irreantum/Dialogue, I won't reject the impulse. That's what happened with "A Ward House, Stirring," and, I must say, I'm glad I gave in because the more distance I get from it, the more I like it: realism cloaked in the fantastic with a hint of whimsy and humor and darkness and some gentle ambiguity in the ending; able to be read as both critique and celebration, which all my work is at heart.

Benson Parkinson on LDS publishing

I was looking through the AML annuals a few weeks back, and found this 1997 presentation by Benson Parkinson: "Toward an LDS Aesthetic of the Novel: A Report from the Front Lines."

I discovered the existence of the AML in fall 1998 so I missed this edition of the annual, and I knew Parkinson mainly as the moderator of the AML List and author of two Mormon missionary novels before he pretty much disappeared from the Mormon literature scene.

The presentation is a chronicle of his long, winding journey to getting his novel The MTC: Set Apart published. It's a candid look at LDS publishing in the 1990s. Originally, it was all one long novel, but as Parkinson began pitching it, he realized he needed to break it into pieces. As he continued to not find success and get feedback, he changed more aspects of the novel. This includes getting some bites from Deseret Book but no commitment and then a long process with Covenant that eventually fell through, partly because the editor who was championing it left. When that editor ended up at Aspen Books, Parkinson was able to finally get it published, although there were more difficulties, including having to fight with the marketing department to get The MTC to have the Set Apart added as a subtitle (he originally titled it The Little Mission but agreed to Set Apart as a title when it was at Covenant). The MTC: Set Apart was published by Aspen in 1995. Its' sequel Into the Field was published in 2000 (although see the caveat below). I don't believe the third book in the planned trilogy was ever published.

If this presentation was only about Parkinson's publishing woes it would only confirm what most of us already knew or suspected: that the mainstream LDS publishers (specifically Deseret Book and Covenant [which a bit earlier this year was dissolved into DB]) were skittish with any fiction that could smack of controversy and that Signature (although this isn't 100% clear—just what Parkinson suspects) was wary of anything that come downs firmly on the side of faithful activity in the Church, etc. To be clear, some of the changes asked for seem to have more to do with Parkinson being a rookie novelist, but others are clearly motivated by fears of the perceived audience. And the most excitement around it seems to be as something that could be given to young men before they go on their mission, which is not what he was trying to go for at all.

What makes it more interesting is that Parkinson, like many before and after him, starts with an assumption (hope might be the better word) that an educated, arts-interested, faithful Mormon audience is eager for complex but ultimately faithful Mormon literature: they just don't know where to find it.

He discovers that even if that is the case, the LDS publishing world is not set up to market fiction to this audience. At least not the kind of fiction he wants to write.

Parkinson is candid throughout his account, not shying away from how felt about certain decisions, but mostly telling his long, tortured journey as he experienced it. However, he begins it with a stated literary aspiration, one that starts with his excitement over reading story collections by Doug Thayer and Donald Marshal (I too know this feeling) and over certain developments during the 1970s in the Mormon arts scene, particularly at BYU. He writes that his "aesthetic ideals" were:

1. I wanted to make a book that played itself out in the same universe I and my family live in. ...
2. I wanted a book that was stylistically rich. ...
3. I wanted to give my stories dramatic depth and breadth. ...
4. I sought a realistic treatment of my characters’ psychology, but with a difference, and this is key: I took it as my task to foreground and attempt to do justice to their spiritual breakthroughs.

And he figured a Mormon missionary novel would be the best way to accomplish those ideals.

At the end of the presentation, he writes:

I started this process with four “wants.” I wanted a book with a Mormon worldview, with stylistic depth, with emotional range, and with psychological and spiritual verisimilitude. Ten years later I find myself obliged to add four “musts”:

1. Protagonists must be accessible, and it must be clear who is the protagonist. Many readers, including intelligent ones, identify with the first major character they come across. They want to get on board and be taken for a ride.
2. Symbolic material must be explicit—or at least enough of it must be that readers know to look for more. A writer might take as his project to educate this people in typology, but he's got to dish it out in small doses in the beginning.
3. Connective and background passages must be relatively brief. For literary-minded readers these give a text richness, but for recreational ones they merely get in the way.
4. Plots and story lines must reach a clean climax and resolution.

He then says he doesn't see these as compromises and invokes Balzac and Dickens as authors who were able to accomplish his four "wants" alongside the four "musts" of publishing.

He ends his presentation with: "The key is in what you do with tools like these. If you use them to grab your readers and stretch them wider than they've ever been stretched before, then they're not compromises at all."

I don't know, man. I think compromises are compromises. Whether they are worth it, whether they even make the work better (which is a possibility albeit a rare one), is a separate discussion.

I read both of his missionary novels back in the early 2000s and was able to do so because the UC Berkeley library had ordered them (they had a modest collection of Mormon literary work). Either that or I was able to get them through InterLibrary Loan from the University of Nevada - Reno, which is where I was able to get access to much of the Mormon works I read back when I was in college.

My impression—and keep in mind that it's been more than two decades since I read the two novels—is that they contained serviceable prose, fairly compelling characters, and could have benefited from being less restrained and down the middle: not in the sense that I wanted them to be more "transgressive" (more Signature-ish) but in terms of presenting a more intellectually rich text. Now that I know more about their history, I wonder if I would have much preferred his original manuscript. It sounds like a lot of the interesting stuff got pared out. On the other hand, as I recall both novels suffer from some of the hallmarks of a rookie writer: a desire to be iconic rather than themselves; both not enough plot and too much focus on plot; an overall thinness of prose (in spite of his stated ambitions). So it's also possible that Parkinson started out in the wrong place by going after the ambitious project instead of the one that would best teach him how to write fiction, and that he simply didn't yet have the writing chops to fulfill his aesthetic goals. That all may sound harsh, but except for the rare genius, all fiction writers start out with some or all of these same issues, including myself.

I have ordered a copy of The MTC: Set Apart and look forward to revisiting it. If I discover that I need to repent of my opinions above, I will be sure to let you know in a future newsletter (and I'll report back either way). I can't find a used copy for Into the Field, which Aspen Books published in 2000, anywhere. There aren't even used listings for it online let alone any actually for sale. I know it was published, because Andrew Hall included it in his Mormon literature round up for 2000.

I recommend reading Parkinson's presentation if you have any interest at all in Mormon publishing history. I've glossed over a lot of the details, but it's the details that really illuminate what it was like back then (or, at least, what it was like for him).

Also: if you plan on writing Mormon mission fiction yourself, you might want to check out this post by Scott Hales on the AML blog and this follow up bibliography on A Motley Vision compiled by Kjerste Christensen.

See you in February!