Hello.

This email is arriving a week late so I could include both of the recent works of mine that have been published. There's a bit more about both works below, but here are the headlines:

• My poem "Samuel Returns" appears in the Summer issue of Dialogue, and there's also a podcast version featuring me reading the poem and talking about it.

• And then my flash fiction story "Lucy & Ida at the End Times" is a finalist in the Mormon Lit Lab's 15th annual Lit Blitz contest. There's also an audio version of it read by me: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

And make sure you vote in the Lit Blitz! Voting ends Sunday, July 12.

In other news: The Courtship of Elder Cannon is ready for proofreading, and my designer is actively working on the cover, thanks to a grant from the Mormon Lit Lab (and their donors). The goal is to publish it early next year, shortly after the time of year where the novel begins, although, I suppose it's mid-2000s setting now makes it historical fiction. If you'd like a review copy, let me know, especially if you're willing to time the review to somewhere around about the release date.

Before the behind the scenes on my two recent releases, I wanted to point your attention to this essay in the Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review I ran across as I was researching something else: Toward an Incarnational Aesthetic.

The author, Ashley C. Barnes, begins by bringing up Weber's notion of disenchantment and modern critics and writers, especially religious and humanist ones, love for the notion of "re-enchantment."

The whole essay is worth reading and will likely have quite a bit of resonance for Mormon artists, critics, readers and viewers. We also might have some extensions, corrections, and tangents from Barnes's argument. Feel free to email me if something immediately comes to mind!

Here's the paragraph that struck me most:

"In contrast to an aesthetics of transcendence, then, an incarnational aesthetic posits that art’s power to move us depends on its emergence in history, and on the arguments, like Baskin and Lerner’s spat, that keep it alive over time. It also depends, crucially, on conserving and reforming the institutions that make such talk possible. If we see art as creating history, then the apparent gulf between knowing and loving disappears. What makes an incarnation miraculous is that it happens in a particular time and place, even though it didn’t have to. To ignore that time and place is to miss the power of the act. A true love for art, then, requires knowing where and how art appears in history, how far it traveled to reach us, and how obligated we are to keep it alive by acting and speaking ourselves. The incarnational aesthetic doesn’t mourn this world as lost to enchantment; it sees the enchantment of the world as our ongoing collective task."

And then also this from the end of the essay: "My argument against the fear of historicism is that the transcendent remains transcendent even when it is incarnate."

I don't have much commentary on the essay itself but will note, as is hopefully quite obvious to anyone familiar with, my creative and critical work is obsessed with the particularity and peculiarity of specific time and place combined with embodiment (incarnation) and the possibilities of transcendence (through art, worship, and community building).

On Samuel Returns and writing poetry

If you listen to the Dialogue podcast, you can hear me talk about how I came to write a poem even though I'm not a poet. The furthest record back I high of it is the bottom of the text file for the project that says:

"1999-2001?? Samuel Returns"

And then has the first 16 or so lines of the poem, mostly like it is published as well as some other random sections.

Beyond that I have distinct memory of writing down the "hearts chiseled from flakes of brittle red sandstone" on torn piece of construction paper. In fact, as I recall, I had lines scrawled across three pieces of papers that followed me for at least one move before being committed to electronic file. I'm not quite sure what possessed me to return to it in March 2025, but all four drafts/revisions of it happened in that month.

It was a strange experience.

I don't write poetry. I write song lyrics (and really bad ones written in my teenage years was the bulk of my creative output until I started writing short stories in the mid-2000s), but I don't write poetry.

And it's true that "Samuel Returns" isn't quite poetry. It has some rhythm, to it and, I hope, some striking imagery, but it didn't necessarily need the line breaks it has.

Except that it did. Because when writing it, I found I couldn't switch between the two points of view in it without the line breaks, and I couldn't maintain a structure to it with that back and forth, without the shape of a poem of sorts.

I have mixed feelings about Dialogue featuring my reading and discussion of it as part of a new series titled "The Poet Speaks," but I suppose that if ones commits an act of poetry one should own up to it.

On Lucy & Ida at the End Times and repeating yourself

We're on more comfortable, familiar ground with "Lucy & Ida at the End Times": weird, near-ish future, Mormon science fiction.

Here's the initial idea for it that I jotted down:

middle of the night idea: teenage girl late to party because has to do evening farm chores / Lucy monitoring the line man shuffling through hope card, retirement card, family support card / Ida watching two men walk down the long drive -- next day expansion refinement: Lucy is monitoring the line, scanning up and down it for irregularities. The old man next in line to check pulls out his faith, hope, and charity chits. Only the charity one is glowing in her headset and even then only faintly. | Ida is sitting in the front parlor watching a feed of two men walking down the long drive. It feels like they have been walking towards the house for hours. Maybe they have been.

As you can see the first thread there got dropped in the refinement, but it kind of had to: 1,000 words isn't much to work with, especially when you're trying to build a science fictional world.

Not that this story builds much of one. It relies heavily on readers being able to do a lot of worldbuilding in their head with very little to go on. Hopefully enough, and the title helps with the setting right away. We don't talk enough about how much work titles can do if you can get them right, especially when it comes to flash fiction and other short work (and, certainly, poems).

Like some of my other work, this story can be viewed as solarpunk or even hopepunk. Not that it gives all that much to go on. But there's some stuff there. It was coming up with the chits, of course, that unlocked the entire story—another entry in my getting kind of lengthy roster of spiritual technologies.

I also return to the triumvirate of faith, hope, and charity a lot, especially if you've heard my sacrament meeting talks over the years.

Once you develop a body of work, it's tempting to not want to repeat yourself. At the same time, I don't think any writer can escape their themes, obsessions, primary modes, etc.

Here's how I proceed and why I also keep doing this future Mormon SF stuff: I don't worry about consistency. I'm not building a coherent world that I write stories in. The world of "PAIH" is not the same as the one of "Dark Watch" or "Strait is the Way" even if the stories sometimes rhyme (intentionally, or, possibly, unintentionally—but I wouldn't know that). Instead, I'm always trying to find SFnal ideas that lead me to be able to say something interesting about the Mormon experience.

Whether I was able to do that with "Lucy & Ida at the End Times" is for others to decide. All I know is that I had a lot of fun writing it, and especially with trying to build a world and a story in so few words, so I'm glad it made it as a finalist.

That's all for now.

Don't forget the Lit Blitz vote!

See you in August!

Maybe there'll be a cover reveal by then!