On Buffalo Flats and portraying religious experience in fiction
Hello.
I was going to sneak in a Mormon Literaturstreit post here at the end of July, but I used that time to read Martine Leavitt’s Buffalo Flats instead and have no regrets. More on that below, but first:
The Association for Mormon Letters held its’ annual conference this month. It focused on YA, middle grade, and children’s literature. All session but one were virtual, which mean they can be viewed on Youtube if you weren’t able to tune in live. If you only have time to watch one session, my personal suggestion would be the one featuring presentations by Emma Tueller, Kjerste Christensen, and Liz Busby. But really you should peruse the playlist in the first link there and watch whatever interests you.
Earlier this month the Morrises had a family reunion in Wisconsin. Not a huge extended family one—it was my parents, me and my four siblings, and as many spouses and nieces and nephews as were able to attend (not all of us, but most of us). It was great to see everybody. But a side benefit was that due to us being in the area southwest of Madison, we were able to explore our Swiss heritage (I’m 1/16th Swiss) in New Glarus and Monroe. Now, I have my issues with the way America tends to approach historical sites (see my short story “The Darkest Abyss in America”) and history in general. At the same time, a lot of local history and culture (whether settler or indigenous) is getting flattened out by the relentlessness of late modernity. So take advantage of local-ness while you still can. Eat a $4 cheese sandwich in a downtown watering hole. Go to the small museums staffed by seniors who remember the local industries and food stuffs and festivals. Ask the Swiss immigrant who sells cheese to yodel for you. Yes, there was a lot of cheese involved in this reunion. It was pretty great.
Progress proceeds on the Mormon SF novella I’m writing instead of the Mormon SF novel I was supposed to be writing, albeit slowly. And I’m encountering something new. I’m probably about 60% of the way through, and I don’t know if it’s going to come together as viable piece of fiction. Normally, I know by this point in the first draft. Writers vary a lot in this regard, and I realize that I’m somewhat spoiled, but I usually know some 20% to 40% of my way in whether it’s going to work. Doesn’t mean it’ll be amazing. But it means I have a certain confidence that the effort to finish the draft and then revise it will be worth it. Not so here. Fiction writing: you may think you have it figured out, but no you don’t.
Buffalo Flats and depicting religious experience
Martine Leavitt’s Buffalo Flats is a lovely work of historical fiction with a YA main character and a romance plot that proceeds with all three of those genres in ways that are tried and true but also surprising.
For background on the novel, here’s a bookshop link with the marketing description and also check out Leavitt’s post on the AML blog on why she wrote it.
I’m going to spoil the novel below in the sense that I’ll be quoting two passages from it. However, these passages won’t be about the plot and so I’m confident you can read this even if you haven’t read the novel yet, and that doing so will only whet your appetite to read it.
The novel focuses on Rebecca Leavitt, a seventeen-year-old Mormon woman whose family—parents and older brothers—have moved to Canada to help settle the Cardston area. As I mention above, the novel is YA, and historical fiction, and romance, but within those genres it’s mostly about Rebecca trying to figure out what kind of woman she wants to be in the face of the family, community, faith tradition, and landscape she finds herself in, and the challenges and joys each of those present.
It’s a deeply religious, deeply Mormon novel. And yet the scope of that religion is mainly lived religion as Rebecca and those around her experience and understand it. It opens with Rebecca going to her favorite place to think and finding God “sitting on the tor overlooking Buffalo Flats” (1). I had to look tor up. It’s a free-standing outcropping of rock. Anyway, Rebecca has this interaction with God (seems like God the Father, although that isn’t made entirely clear) where the two of them appreciate the view and mourn a bit what was lost (the vast herds of buffalo) and then decides she wants to own the piece of land the tor sits on, which she is only able to do if the young man who currently has a claim for it sells it to her, and her father agrees to co-sign her claim because women aren’t allowed to own homesteads.
She decides to try to earn enough money to buy it before the claim the young man has on it runs out. This is the main plot mechanism, but over the next two or so years the novel covers, a lot happens—some of it predictable, some of it unpredictable, some of it joyful, some of it tragic—in the way life tend to happen, especially in small communities of folks trying to live in a beautiful but harsh land.
The novel does sidestep polygamy (the authors note explains why) and only nods to the settlers role in taking over the land of First Nations people, both of which some reviewers have found a fault with. Fair charges to make, but there is also something gained by not going deep on both of those topics. You’ll have to decide whether that’s worth it.
Others have found the feminism of it anachronistic. I’d say it does much better than most historical fiction in this regard. Indeed, it could go further with it and still be true to the actual history of the times. [Give me the novel about Rebecca’s suffragette-identifying, tall girl energy, frontier intellectual, sister-in-law Florence].
What I enjoyed about the novel is that while it hit the beats it needed to for the genres it is, it does so in ways I found not so much surprising (although sometimes so) as thoughtful and character motivated and shaping. Most importantly, while the Momon-ness of it is ever-present, it’s depicted beautifully particular to each character—not just as matters of belief and practice, but also how they explain and understand their faith.
And by beautifully, I mean not just in the arrangement of words, but what they express. Rebecca, especially given her experience that opens the novel, is in an ongoing dialogue with God. Here’s how she remembers that moment later in the novel and why it’s so important she own the land where it happened:
“She could doubt her own eyes, but she had taken something away with her when she’d had her Sit. She had felt in that moment that living was just a thin floating thing like a cloud, a skim of dust on the river, the call of a wolf filling the air, striking the sky as if it were a glass bowl and ringing away forgotten. She could still feel it, if she tried. If that wasn’t proof, she didn’t know what was.
She couldn’t give up. There had to be a way to have her land. God might have all manner of tricks up his omnipotent sleeves” (102).
While any of those striking images would be fine images in a poem or essay, what I love about them is that they are conjured by a character in a novel at a particular point in the narrative. Religious experiences, especially religious insights, can be useful when described in the abstract, but they are attached to a particular context of time and space and person, and that’s something narrative fiction can (attempt to) depict. There’s a power in that. Or at least there is for me.
Later in a moment of loss that blossoms awful grief inside her, Rebecca both resists and embraces analysis of that experience and what it means for her personal faith:
“She thought that the dust beneath her was whispering something she didn’t want to hear.
If she saw God again, she would tell him all this. He would likely know, but he wouldn’t mind her telling him anyway. He was like that. She would tell and tell and tell, until she was done telling. That, she suspected, was part of what eternity was for” (162).
Buffalo Flats is full of language and insights like this, and it was very much worth delaying my Mormon Literaturstreit work for.
See you next month!
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