Strait is the Way liner notes and my holiday lit blitz vote
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and hooray for passing the Winter Solstice!
There is something comforting about the days becoming longer when we've settled into the deep, dark, lethargy of winter and left behind the crisp melancholy of fall (my favorite time of year, as it is of most writers).
Speaking of lethargy: I haven't fully decided yet, but I'm strongly considering switching this newsletter to every other month. This goes against how authors are supposed to build an audience (I should be writing to you weekly—or even better, twice a week: one post for free; one for subscribers), but I prefer my approach. I want to have a surplus of ideas for each newsletter edition that I have to pick from rather than hustling to come up with something just to get it out to subscribers.
My near future science fiction, sort of solarpunk, sort of time travel, sort of meditation on agency short story "Strait is the Way" was published in the winter edition of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Read "Strait is the Way" here for free
I also did an interview with fiction co-editors on "Straits it the Way." Listen to it on the Dialogue website or on Youtube (or your favorite podcast app: search for Dialogue Out Loud, add the podcast to your app, and scroll back to the episode with my name in the title). I also have some liner notes on the story for you below.
But first...
My Holiday Edition of the Mormon Lit Blitz vote
I did not get my vote in for the Mormon Lit Blitz until the late morning of Sunday, Dec. 22. Technically, the vote ended at midnight on Dec. 21, so I don't know if my vote will count.
My excuse is that the last day of the vote was the day I was going to be able to get to it, but then it also became the day I switched computers, and between copying data over, and deauthorizing and downloading, installing, and in some cases re-authorizing various programs and plugins (music companies are notorious for their tetchy and annoying DRM), it just simply slipped my mind because while voting was on my task list, I didn't have my task list open on either the old computer or the new one.
But whether it counted towards the final vote or not, here is how I voted:
It's unusual for me to pick no short stories for the four slots, but out of the finalists, they're the ones I responded to most.
Even more rare is for me to select a nonfiction piece for my top vote (although I think you could argue that it's a prose poem). I really liked the juxtapositions "Three Saints Days" deploys, and the glimpse it gives us of the richer celebration of Christian history found in other traditions (especially Catholic and Christian Orthodox) and how the Saints in Denmark have adapted those traditions into the structure of/local community of the LDS Church.
But it's not just the approach that I liked: it's the way those reverberate into the personal aspect of the personal essay. History is just people trying their best and/or being the worst. So is scripture.
I didn't enter this contest and am not sure what I would have written for it if I'd decided to do so. I do wish there'd been a piece that celebrates the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. I know we as a people don't want to formalize that kind of thing because we're afraid of being seen as over-veneration the Joseph Smith, but as Graabek-Wallace's entry to the Holiday Lit Blitz shows, there is a certain depth of personal, familial, and congregational experience that comes when we celebrate more aspects of our history and do so more often throughout the year.
Liner notes for Strait Is the Way
If you want the full run down of the genesis of the "Strait is the Way," listen to or view the podcast I link to above, including the fact that this story started out as the remnants of a dream I had.
I was especially delighted that new Dialogue fiction co-editors Joe Plicka and Ryan Shoemaker were as engaged as they were with the story because it was acquired by former fiction editor Jennifer Quist. That it was also to their taste made me feel encouraged to keep writing for Dialogue (listen, it may seem a small thing, but having acquiring editors who are understand your project as a fiction writer is a great blessing).
"Strait is the Way" is trying to do many things as a story. One of them is to expand on a theme that has run through some of my fiction (see also, for example: "Fast Offering"): the danger of Mormon men who are charismatic and commit themselves too zealously to a project (whatever that project might be).
Which is to say that the straight edge punk to Mormon to CEO of a transhumanist-focused megacorporation pipeline that's told in the story is both parody and warning; both fascination and repulsion on my part.
However, while it's an important thread in both my fiction as a body of work and this story, in particular, it's not the primary thing that interested me when writing "Strait is the Way." The main thing was once the idea of time travel as a spiritual gift entered my mind, I couldn't but help explore it.
The Dialogue Out Loud podcast is titled something like "breaking rules", and it is true that I had made a rule for myself that I wouldn't write time travel stories. I just don't tend to like them. For reasons of causality.
I have other rules I've broken: for example, I wasn't going to write a Three Nephites story [as I mention in the podcast, I've broken that one at least twice]).
Others I'm holding onto, but may break in the future (writing straight historical fiction [as opposed to alternate history, which I do write]) or may not break (writing historical fiction in a Book of Mormon setting).
[Wm later inserts:] Oh, wait, I actually already broke that second one. Anybody remember a short fiction set in Book of Mormon times project by an anonymous LDS editor? The stories ran on a blog, and there was maybe going to be a printed edition? I had a story in that. I don't even remember what it was called (either the story or the blog that contained the stories) so I can't track it down using the Wayback Machine. If you remember any of that, reply to this email with what you remember.
Yeah, that story taught me that I don't plan on breaking that rule again.
But to get back to the point: I broke the no time travel story rule because I came up with an idea worthy of breaking it. And I think that that's why I have some of these internal rules (they're just for me—I don't care what other writers do). It's not because I want to be cool, or a certain type of writer, or think certain tropes are cringe (although some are): it's because I know myself, and I know there are certain things I can tackle as a writer and certain things I can't. And if I'm going to break one of the rules it has to be because I'm ready to do so and am sure the end result is going to be worth it.
I hope it was worth it for you. I'm quite proud of "Strait is the Way" or rather pride isn't quite the feeling. Let me put it this way: out of the many things I've written, it's the one of the pieces I'm the most satisfied with at the moment.
Okay, three more tidbits:
Tidbit #1: Taylor Petrey, soon to be former Editor in Chief of Dialogue, had to revise the contract for the story because in my submission I had spelled it "Straight is the Way," and then when I saw the contract I changed my mind and had him switch the spelling before I signed it. I had thought using Strait was too cute, forgetting my cardinal rule that when it comes to writing fiction, I should always make it more Mormon/more directly referencing scripture instead of less. Thankfully, he and Jenn were good with the change.
Tidbit #2: this is my second story in a row with Dialogue (the first was "The Ward Organist") told in first person using a narrator who doesn't have gender markers specified in the story itself. That's intentional on my part, of course.
The reason for that I've decided I don't see the need to specify gender unless the story requires it. And so I don't assign the character a gender in my head until it becomes a story where I need to make that specification. This is not because of woke or whatever, but it is because of how we treat gender both in the Church and in society as a whole. When and how should a writer deploy gender markers (let alone stereotypes)? Why make that decision until those become important to the story? Let the reader read into it what they will. And this doesn't just apply to gender. I'm becoming more parsimonious and philosophical in my fiction, I think. This is partly because I'm honing my style as I age (we're not at late style William Morris yet, but I can see that horizon from here); partly because of reading authors like M. John Harrison and Gabriel Josipovici; partly because I strongly believe in leaning into the strengths of prose fiction in a world where visual media is rampant (one might even say, out of control).
Simply put: I think you arrive at more interesting, multiple readings and reactions to both stories if you're open to the narrator being various genders. It was not a surprise to me to see that most readers whose reaction to "The Ward Organist" I encountered assumed the narrator is female. But how do you view the story if the narrator is male? Does it change your reading of it? What if the narrator is nonbinary?
The temptation, of course, is to go for a third because (Western) writers can't not do a series of three. But all the short stories I have in mind right now are told in third person and feature main characters where it is important to designate their gender, so I guess I'll just have to resist the pattern.
Tidbit #3: here is a line from Draft Zero (my short stories are always written in one long text file—Draft 1 is the first draft; Draft 0 is where ideas, story kernels, bits of dialogue, random sentences, musings, references, etc. go): "The problem is that the leap from anarchy to libertarianism is not that much of a leap, especially if ..."
That line probably turned out to be too on the nose to use in the story. Or it's quite possible that I jotted it down and then never looked at it again because I didn't recognize it when I looked through the text file while preparing to write these liner notes. I kind of want to know what was supposed to go in that ellipsis, though. Not much of a leap, especially if what?
That's all for now. See you in 2025! Probably in February! Unless I have something important to say in January!
Links:
AMV bookshop registry
A Motley Vision
Thanks for reading! Donations to support the costs of both this newsletter and keeping A Motley Vision's full archives online are welcome: Paypal