The Mormon Lit Blitz recently put out its Call for Entries for its fifth annual competition. Katherine Cowley is a writer, mother of three, and a guest editor for the competition. She compares her experience aurora hunting to reading Mormon literature.
You’ve probably heard of storm chasers—people who go out and chase tornadoes, partly to learn about them, and partly for the thrill. I’ve never gone storm chasing, but I have gone aurora hunting.
When I was in college, my parents moved in Iceland. I visited them for a few weeks one Christmas. Iceland is the land of fire and ice. It has both active volcanoes and glaciers. It’s also a great place to view the Northern Lights.
Almost every day, my parents would check websites to learn about the meteorological conditions that would make it more likely to see the Northern Lights. It might be 8 p.m. or 10 p.m., but if it looked hopeful my dad would pack me and my younger siblings into the mini-van. And then we drove away from the city of Reykjavik, away from all the artificial illumination. We plunged into darkness with the hope of seeing the Northern Lights.
During my visit, we took several drives out searching. I saw the aurora once: green streaks of light spreading across the sky. They didn’t last for very long, but there was something unspeakable about them. Just as a photograph cannot possibly capture the immensity of standing in front of a majestic mountain, a frozen image cannot replace the experience of seeing this otherworldly sensation painted upon the sky. It impacts you to the core, and you come away changed in unexpected ways.
To me, reading Mormon literature is rather like chasing the Northern Lights. We devote our time and energy, we plunge into the darkness with an author, not knowing where he or she will take us. The quest is worthwhile, in and of itself—just the process of metaphorically leaving the city can be rejuvenating and enlightening.
And then at times as we read we see the Northern Lights. It’s often a brief, illuminating moment, but it leaves us changed. It carries with us into the day to day of our normal life.
For the last four years, the Mormon Lit Blitz has sought to provide this illumination. Six to twelve pieces are chosen as finalists each year, and every single year, different pieces impact different readers.
The Mormon Lit Blitz is now in its fifth year, and starting in late May, we hope you’ll read along with the finalists. But before then, we hope you’ll submit your own work. We’re looking for entries under 1000 words in any genre—fiction, essays, poetry, plays, comics, or anything else. The deadline is May 7th, and finalists will be published on the Mormon Artist website. Readers will vote on the finalists, and the winner will receive a $100 prize.
The real prize, though, will be the moments of illumination that readers receive as they read.
Okay, I’m convinced.
I, too, am convinced — but am I convicted?