Why I still write faithful realism + Literaturstreit echoes
Hello! Welcome to the first A Motley Vision newsletter of 2025. February has flipped from sub-zero temperatures to above freezing. Spring is now threatening. But we Minnesotans know to be wary. Spring is always a fits and starts thing here.
On the Mormon front: I set the Mormon SF novella I talked about in previous newsletters aside for a bit as I focus on finishing up some work for the WHM side of my writing. I have a decent chunk of fiction that's not for the Mormon market and hasn't been published and just needs a bit more effort to put out into the world. But: getting the first draft of the novella completed is still a major writing priority.
On other fronts: I released a techno single (as w.esp) and since I now have three that use the same cover format and focus on glitchy techno, I've decided to call it the mainframe series (all the titles take their names from computing, especially early computing). As with all my music: if the genre appeals to you, please take a listen! If not, no worries. I will likely be releasing something more to your taste at some point this year.
New AMV posts:
- Mormon Literaturstreit Echoes: Eugene England (in which I take another look at Englands Dialogue essay "Danger on the Left! Danger on the Right!" but this time in the context of the Mormon Literaturstreit)
- Mormon Literaturstreit Echoes: Joanna Brooks (in which I, by happenstance, discover a direct response to the Mormon Literaturstreit that I hadn't previously known about)
Why I still write Faithful Realism
I've mentioned in a couple of interviews that I've tried to stop writing Mormon fiction and criticism and found that I can't (although I've also found I'm unable to limit my creative work to those two genres). I've also noted that while it might make more sense to lean into the weird Mormon fiction thing, I've found that I can't quite give up writing faithful realism (and vice versa).
But why is that?
I've been pondering that question off and on for a decade now, and even more actively since last December when we hit the first anniversary of my release of The Unseating of Dr. Smoot and also continue to slowly makes efforts to publish its' companion work (and predecessor—although the overlap between the two is solely thematic): The Courtship of Elder Cannon.
As Eugene England defined it in his essay on (as he views it) the four historical periods of Mormon literature, faithful realism is "a literature that is both artistic and ethical, that can both teach and delight as the best literature always has, that is realistic, even critical, about Mormon experience but profoundly faithful to the vision and concerns of the restored gospel of Christ."
I'd say a better explanation of it is found in England's "Danger on the Left! Danger on the Right!" essay for Dialogue that I write about and link to above, which spends more time outlining where he thinks the Mormon literature of his time goes wrong.
I would likely modify that definition a bit to something like: faithful realism is literature that shows a strong interest in the experiences of folks who are invested in the project of Mormonism and seeks to depict those experiences using the tools of realism (or what also might be called mimetic fiction).
At the same time, I don't think an exact definition is helpful here: indeed, England's label is meant to be descriptive, but it's also situated in history and applied retroactively (and speculatively towards the future). It's more about the set of writers he identifies and what they are writing than some strong manifesto-like definition. Faithful realism, then is both a loose generic term and a body of work. It's a history and tradition.
I'm not here to outline that entire history. This is instead an attempt to explain why I still write faithful realism sometimes, especially considering the outlets that publish it are few and the audience for it is small—seemingly smaller than it was in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s when England was most active in the Mormon literature scene.
The easy answer is: I continue to write faithful realism because I want to. Or more precisely: I continue to write it because I get something out of it and can do things with it that I can't accomplish by writing other genres.
The thing is, though, that, like other SF&F writers and critics with a more "literary" bent, I don't really believe in realism. Or science fiction. Or even fantasy. This is not to say that genre distinctions don't exist and don't matter, but it is to stress the fictionality of fiction and the fact that the use of metaphor and the experience of time, including compression and expansion of it, is at the heart of all fiction.
And so I suppose what it really comes down to is that there are times when I want to focus on metaphor, time, plot, theme, and characterization in a setting, ore, more accurately, a milieu that gestures at the mimetic, at a certain realism, at a somewhat more familiar experience to (some) readers. This allows me to coax those readers into a world and, perhaps/hopefully, explore finer gradations of the Mormon experience than my speculative/weird Mormon fiction does.
Hmmm.
Although, well, the whole point of that non-realist work is to bring out gradations of the Mormon experience by focusing in on and exaggerating or detailing them through the use of metaphor made real in the world the work creates (speculates). So I suppose by the finer gradations available to faithful realism, I mean more the type of nuance that is best brought out by recognition of or contrast with the reader's own lived experience. And that, perhaps not exclusively but certainly primarily, accomplishes that within an LDS point of view.
Faithful realism for me is, above all, a literature where the worldbuilding—the milieu-conjuring—contains some mix of sociology, history, cultural studies, journalism, and personal experience. Not a rigorous version of any of those, of course. But one that hews towards those genres of storytelling.
So to both expand and sum up, I continue to write works of faithful realism:
- to write in an existing tradition that I find valuable (I draw from Doug Thayer, for example, in my faithful realism way more than I draw from any Mormon SF&F author for my speculative fiction, where non-LDS writers are the primary models for me, and that is both intentional and also just how things happened—the influences I unconsciously and consciously turned to as I moved from only writing criticism to also writing fiction)
- to be more straightforward in my depiction of current or historical Mormon beliefs and practice
- to ground a work historically, which allows both me and the reader to situate the narrative in a context that is larger than the world of the story, which leads to both characterization and thematic resonances that are different from non-mimetic fiction
- to engage in the closest to autobiography I'm going to get (I don't plan on ever writing a memoir [or at least not a conventional one]), and it's not that I don't draw from my own life in my non-faithful realist work, but I'm more likely to include specifically autobiographical details, moments, feelings, etc. in a piece of faithful realism (although such details are almost always transmuted for use in the story, and also note that this doesn't rise to the level of specific characters—all characters in all my work, regardless of genre, are a combination of amalgamation and imagination and also bits and pieces of myself [with two exceptions++])
- to continue to explore what's possible to accomplish in literature within the aims/goals/bounds/promise of faithful realism as Eugene England defined it. As I've said many times, I don't buy into the Shakespeares and Miltons of our own thing; however, if I am going to write Mormon fiction, I'm not all that interested in writing the kind of Mormon fiction that anyone who is willing to fit into the cultural box(es) that mainstream LDS publishers or NY publishers provide writes
- to speak to an audience that isn't interested in weird/fantastic/speculative fiction (this is the weakest influence, but it's not entirely absent)
So that's why I continue to write faithful realism.
And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I'll end with two questions:
What are your favorite works of faithful realism?
What has faithful realism as a body of fiction not explored/depicted that you'd be most interested in seeing?
See you again in April!
++ those two exceptions are the stories "Warning" and "Runaway" in Dark Watch and other Mormon-American stories, which I can, at most, call semi-autobiographical because I have no documentation of them (I don't keep a journal and never have) and because of how hazy my memories of the events are (and when I asked my dad about it, he says he doesn't remember the incident I related in "Warning")
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