Hello.

I hope your summer was as lovely as it could be.

At the end of my June newsletter, I mentioned the possibility of a cover reveal in this edition for The Courtship of Elder Cannon. It's not quite ready yet, but it's close.

If you're interested in me talking more about my Mormon Lit Blitz finalist story "Lucy & Ida at the End Time," the Mormon Lit Lab has published a transcript of an interview I did with Annaliese Lemmon. There's also a video version on YouTube.

In other news: the folks behind The ARCH-HIVE are opening a brick and mortar art gallery called The Outer Veil. Grand opening events will take place Sept. 4-7, 2026, and look like a lot of fun. I can't be there; however, I have donated five signed copies of The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories to the gallery with proceeds to go towards their operations. Books signed by me are very rare, so stop by and pick up a copy. Four of the copies feature the rare (collectible?) "Willian Morris" misprint on the spine.

In my December 2025 newsletter, I wrote about a presentation Benson Parkinson gave at a 1997 conference of the Association for Mormon Letters on the difficulty he had bringing his novel THE MTC: Set Apart to publication and what that says about the state of LDS publishing in the 1990s. I mentioned that I might track down a copy of the novel and re-read it and see if my memories of it hold up.

Well, I finally did that. And so here's my report back, which then gets into a larger issue with the field of Mormon literature.

On Benson Parkinson's The MTC: Set Apart and the Mormon missionary novel

It's easy to see why so many Mormon writers decide to tackle mission fiction (and I'm guilty here as well, although my various efforts are mostly from the POV of the recent RM): it's a formative experience that exposes the protagonist(s) to cultures, people, and situations they wouldn't otherwise encounter and thus lends itself to a variety of genres, especially the Bildungsroman (Parkinson's Set Apart series; Angel of the Danube; On the Road to Heaven; Dendō: One Year and One Half in Tokyo) and the thriller (The Millstone Necklace; City of Brick and Shadow)—for a longer list, see this AMV post by Kjerste Christensen. It can be faith-affirming or faith-breaking. And it easily can lapse into the absurd or melodramatic as well as the sublime (my mission certainly did at times), so it's no wonder that it's such a tempting subject for the Mormon writer, esp. the fiction writer.

Here's what I wrote about Parkinson's attempt back in December 2025 not having re-read the novel:

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.

So what was it like re-reading The MTC: Set Apart, the first of Parkinson's two mission novels, this month?

Interesting. Especially with the the combination of the tortured publication history and Parkinson's stated aesthetic goals in the back of my mind.

My assessment above was mostly on target. However, what I hadn't remembered is where he'd succeeded as well as precisely where and how he went wrong.

To start, I actually don't know that I would have preferred the original manuscript. Parkinson begins the novel with a brief intro, and then flash back to long chapters outlining the route each of the four elders who are his main characters took to deciding to go on a mission. I believe the intention is to help us understand the four elders as characters, and esp. their (not 100% pure yet still valid) motivations for going on a mission so their actions in the rest of the novel have more context. But the chapters read to me now as an indulgence, and if I'd been the editor on the project, I would have told Parkinson to remove those chapters and thread any backstory into the main narrative that takes place in the MTC. A few hints even some summary and then some more telling reveals would have been more than sufficient for us to get a handle on Anthon, Jeppsen, Wilberg, and Rignell.

One of the things rookie fiction writers don't fully grasp is that the superpower of written narrative is the ability to either compress or draw out time. Parkinson seems to understand that a bit—some of the best passages in the novel portray how the eight weeks spent in the MTC for foreign language missionaries both takes forever and rushes towards a terrifying end—but at the same time, the narrative feels indulgent in sections, even beyond the first few chapters. It needs paring down, but not just removal: compression. A bit more telling, but telling (summary) in ways that express point of view and tone.

Now look, I know that a fiction writer telling another fiction writer how they should have written their first novel is ungracious. However, I'm also a critic and an editor, and Parkinson himself chose to write about the project. And he's absolutely correct that both the LDS publishing world and Mormon readers failed him. But I'm not sure that failure is precisely what he said it was, although it does seem to be that in parts as well. For example, one of the more glaring issues that isn't on him is the use of chapter intros that, according to his AML paper, were added to help readers not be quite so judgmental and orient them towards the text. These intros intrude more than they help, adding a voice, a narrator that is nebulous but not in an interesting or experimental way. They are incredibly awkward.

Speaking of point of view issues: the novel is mostly told in third person limited, rotating among the four elders, but there are also moments where Parkinson will dip into another character's point of view. These moments are rare enough that they're jarring when the occur, but also happen enough that it's not clear to me whether they are intentional or not. Either way, they don't work and contribute to the overall feel that the novel hasn't quite coalesced or been shaped into what it should and could be.

All that being said: there are still some aspects to The MTC: Set Apart that are worth reading and are instructive for anyone who wants to write about the mission experience. Parkinson does a great job of showing how annoyances between missionaries (and, especially, companions) can build and dissipate or flare up into a confrontation that either brings the missionaries closer together or doesn't, simmering along until things boil over again. His portrayal of the days when they all get trunky is spot on. And he has a knack for writing about the workings/feelings of the Holy Spirit in ways still seem fresh today.

Even more than that, the long section where the elders go up onto the temple grounds at night to watch 4th of July firework is superb. In it, Jeppsen, an Australian convert who is educated and hard-working but also a stick in the mud, opines on the symbolism of the temple in ways that are both naive and profound. He also offer the best defense for the now-destroyed modernist design of the Provo temple I've encountered, linking its' specific design to the core function of temples. Indeed, I know that the point of the four elders is to bring together some classic archetypes of Mormon masculinity, but if I had been in a position to advise Parkinson, I would have told him to write the novel solely from Jeppsen's point of view. Yes, that would mean that that various scenes, especially much of the Anthon plot (and one of the other weaknesses of the novel is that Parkinson is too much in love with deploying his Corry Anthon pun even as there is something interesting there with the core of the character), wouldn't have been able to be depicted in the way that it was, but there are ways around that and ones that could have led to a bit more plottiness, a bit more narrative juice and focus, which the novel could have used.

It was an interesting experience re-visiting The MTC: Set Apart 25+ years after I first read it. I was frustrated by long stretches of it and also delighted by some sections of it, but most of all, re-reading it made me sad.

For differing, but perhaps related, reasons, some of which I know or suspect and some which I'm unaware of, two of the writers who most ambitiously attempted to portray the LDS mission experience—Benson Parkinson and Béla Petsco—during the long '80s (Petsco's Nothing very important and other stories came out in 1979 and The MTC in 1995, but I'd argue they're all part of the same moment in Mormon literature) stopped writing Mormon fiction.

They deserved better readerships. Not because I think the response from the LDS community is primarily to blame for what silenced them—other writers managed to persist—but because what they wrote were honest, interesting attempts at depicting a fascinating aspect of the Mormon experience even though challenging/experimental (in Petsco's case) or somewhat challenging/awkward (in Parkinson's) for the Utah audience.

More than a better readership, though, they deserved better allies. In particular, Parkinson could have done with a critique group and an editor who would have helped him overcome his rookie writer status while not dampening his aesthetic ambition (which I do admire), although I suppose the problem there is: who would that have been? None of the names he mentions in his essay—Bruce Jorgensen, Levi Peterson, Gordon Allred, Richard Cracroft, Thomas Rogers—were well-equipped to provide feedback on his novel. Yes, Peterson has written novels, but Parkinson's sensibility and what he was trying to do with the project are very different from Peterson's approach to Mormon fiction.

And this is where I land with my journey with Parkinson's fiction and his paper on his experience trying to get The MTC published: Mormon literature has suffered from and continues to suffer from a lack of experienced editors (formally assigned by a publisher or not) who are well-equipped to work with writers looking to write literary fiction and/or accomplished genre fiction, especially for a faithful LDS audience.

I don't know that all that much can be done to change that for reasons that follow from a lot of the work I've done in this newsletter as well as back in the day on A Motley Vision. Maybe I'll explore this topic further. But the point I want to leave you all with is that when we go to judge works of Mormon fiction, especially novel-length Mormon fiction of some literary ambition, we should keep in mind that many of them may not have had the developmental and style-level feedback they ideally should have received (or, sadly and even worse, received poor feedback).

And I can tell you this from both the editor side and the writer side of things (although my experience is mostly with short fiction where the editor situation is a bit better): Mormon writers are hungry for substantial feedback on their work from editors/critiquers who are sympathetic to the aims of the author and story, but are also willing to clearly point out where the text doesn't quite reach those aims.

See you in October!