This Month in Mormon Literature: May 2018

Welcome to This Month in Mormon Literature! This report covers what’s been happening in the world of literature and film by, for, and about Mormons since April 7, 2018.

As Andrew Hall explained in last month’s report, Andrew and I will be alternating months writing This Month in Mormon Literature. Andrew has a marvelous gift for being in touch with what’s going on in this sphere, but I’m new at this and will need all the help I can get. If you hear of anything noteworthy in the purview of Mormon letters, please email us at associationformormonletters120 AT gmail DOT com. (If I missed anything here, let me know and I will edit the post.)

This month features a call for papers, theatre and media arts awards, the pending re-launch of Irreantum, new books and reviews, reviews of older books, film awards, and stats on the current bestsellers. Read on!

News & Awards

 

The Marion K. “Doc” Smith Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy is interested in collecting 40 minute papers for their 2019 conference. They are especially interested in papers in the following areas:

• Literary criticism/analysis of science fiction and fantasy and related literature (medieval, renaissance, mythology, magic realism, graphic novels, etc.)
• Science and technology (especially new or unusual)
• Serious analysis of science fiction and fantasy in cinema, television, radio, and other media
• Analysis of science fiction and fiction relating to poetry or theatre
• Critical analysis of the narrative, aesthetic, and thematic elements of science fiction and fantasy video games
• Mormon culture, literature, and society in relation to science fiction and fantasy

Submission must include the full paper. To submit, please send papers to LTUE—Academics, c/o Marny Park, 1063 JFSB, Provo, Utah 84602 or email electronic submissions as RTF files to marny_parkin@byu.edu. Include name, phone number, street address, and email address on cover sheet. Papers submitted without contact information will not be considered. Student papers welcome. Please see ltue.net for more information.

Papers must be submitted no later than October 1, 2018.

(*Accepted papers may be published in the Proceedings volume at a later date.)

BYU Theatre and Media Arts annual awards

Vera Hinckley Mayhew Screenwriting Contest

Television Spec Script Category

• 1st Place – Kaden Watson ~ Morty Alone
• 2nd Place – Tabitha Brower ~ What Fresh Hell?

Feature Length Script Category

• 1st Place Barrett Burgin ~ Tabula Rasa
• 2nd Place Nicole Wilson ~ Untitled

Short Film Script Category

• 1st Place Eleanor Biggs ~ Don’t
• 2nd Place Weber Griffiths ~ Our Enemy

Aperture Media Journal Awards

• New Media Category: Elena Bender ~ Open Up Your Ribs and Let Them In
• Essay Category: Kaily Goodro ~ Movement in Paprika and Baudry’s Apparatus Theory
• Screenplay: Taylor Davis ~ Dr. Shrink Meets Bigfoot

Vera Hinckley Mayhew Playwriting Award

• Outstanding Full-length Play: Teagan Clark
• Best Premise for a One Act Play: Mari Molen
• Outstanding 10 Minute Play: Susanna BeZooyen, Mariah Eames, Katelyn Naegle, Mandarin Wilcox
• Outstanding Playwriting Student Award: Teagan Clark
• Outstanding Working Playwright: Amelia Johnson and Lauren Young

BYU Studies announces the winners of the 2018 Richard H. Cracroft Personal Essay Contest.

1st place: “Wandering on to Glory,” by Patrick L. Moran
2nd place: “Fine, Thanks,” by Darlene L. Young
3rd place: “Better and Worse,” by Hollie Wise

Magazines

Remember to watch out for the re-launch of the AML’s literary journal Irreantum sometime this summer as an online literary journal. Submissions are closed as of April 30, but the scuttlebutt is that we have a lot to look forward to reading. The URL will be announced soon!

BYU Magazine, Spring 2018. Features a history of the making of Napoleon Dynamite, and and article about Brittany Long Olsen’s missionary graphic memoir Dendo.

New Books and Reviews

Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows. University of Tampa Press. March 14. Prose poetry. Larsen was Utah Poet Laureate in 2012-2017, and he was made BYU English Chair in May 2017.

Darlene Young, Dialogue (forthcoming). “Narrative is risky in a prose poem, where the sense of story, and the way sentences follow each other more logically than in non-narrative pieces, may risk seeming prosy or less poetic. No worries. With Larsen, no poem is ever simply an anecdote; each piece makes use of poetic strategies to make the familiar strange. These strategies can include musicality, startling metaphors, surprising structure, and imaginative framing.”

Maurice Manning (blurb). “Rightly or not, we expect an unreality from a prose poem. A measure of strangeness coming from an affectionately curious mind is present in these poems, but there is a larger serving of intimacy. By beginning with the everyday, the prose form allows these poems to attain an unspooling movement that is incantatory, ecstatic, and wholly convincing. While form in some guise is necessary for any poem, a good poem always escapes its form, as these poems deftly do. Larsen delivers mirth, humor, and spiritual awareness to send them off dancing. He has also made this time-honored poetic form feel wise, and brand spanking new.”

Traci Hunter Abramson. Tripwire. Covenant, April 1. Suspense.

Gale Sears. One Candle. Deseret Book, April 1. Historical fiction. Lorenzo Snow and the first LDS missionaries in Italy. Also published in Italian in an ebook.

Amy Willouhby-Burle. The Lemonade Year. Shadow Mountain, April 3. “Nina’s once-sweet life has unexpectedly turned sour. Her marriage is over, her job is in jeopardy, and her teenage daughter is slipping away from her. Then her father dies and issues with Nina’s mother come to a head; her estranged brother, Ray, comes home; and her sister, Lola, is tempted to blow a big family secret out of the water. They say the truth will set you free, but first it will make a huge mess of things. All Nina’s got left is her final photography assignment shooting images for the book 32 Ways to Make Lemonade. Well, that and the attention of a younger man, but Oliver’s on-again-off-again romantic interest in her ebbs and flows so much she is seasick. And then Jack, her ex-husband, shows up, wanting to get back together. As Nina struggles to find a way through her complicated relationships and to uncover her true path, she discovers just how valuable a second chance at life and happiness can be.”

Life Inside My Mind: 31 Authors Share their Personal Struggles. Simon Pulse, April 10. Includes essays by Aprilynne Pike, Dan Wells, and Robison Wells.

Anne Perry. Twenty-One Days. Random House, April 10. Mystery. Daniel Pitt #1. The first in a new series, set in 1910, featuring the son Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, the stars of one of Perry’s long-running series.

Library Journal (starred review): “Daniel Pitt, son of the legendary Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, is a young barrister determined to save his client from execution. Biographer Russell Graves was convicted of killing his wife and setting her body on fire. Daniel and his colleague Kitteridge have 21 days to find evidence to overturn the conviction or Russell hangs. While Kitteridge looks for legal loopholes, Daniel investigates other suspects. Set ten years after Murder on the Serpentine, Perry’s excellent new series launch expertly takes the Pitts into a new century and makes use of the scientific advancements of the time, fingerprints and X-rays, to add fresh drama to the courtroom scenes. Daniel, having been so lovingly raised, is unused to the more complicated side of the law and life. Consequently, he comes across as a little naive. This innocence is mostly endearing, and he is surrounded by an exciting cast of hopefully recurring characters. VERDICT Fans of Perry’s long-running ‘Thomas Pitt’ series will delight in following the adventures of a new generation.”

Publishers Weekly: “Set in 1910, bestseller Perry’s series kickoff introducing attorney Daniel Pitt fails to impress, in part because Daniel, the son of the stars of the author’s Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series is a much less developed character than his parents . . . The puzzle’s uninspired solution won’t shake the faith of Perry fans. They know that she’s quite capable of doing better.”

Kirkus: “The stage seems set for an epic battle of conflicting passions and loyalties. Alas, the windup of the case is a lot less compelling than its setup. Even so, Perry, who seems just as comfortable in 1910 as she ever did back in Victoria’s day, provides a great first half and raises a number of pointed ethical questions before she rescues her hero from having to resolve them.”

Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, Martin Pulido, editors. Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Peculiar Pages, April 17. Review in Segullah by Melonie Cannon.

BOOK REVIEW: DOVE SONG: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry (and a bee story)

Todd Robert Petersen. It Needs to Look Like We Tried. Counterpoint Press, April 25. Contemporary connected short stories. Blurb: “Everyone has a dream, an idea, a goal. But what happens when those desires are thwarted, when dreams and goals fall apart? In It Needs to Look Like We Tried, Todd Robert Petersen explores the ways in which our failures work on the lives of others, weaving an intricate web of interconnected stories.”

Publishers Weekly: “This propulsive collection from Petersen concerns the bad luck, hard decisions, and poor choices of a group of characters, each in a peculiar and dire situation. The opening story, “The Impeccable Drive,” is about Doyle, a road-tripping son who, taking a detour on the way to his father’s wedding, hits a dog and decides to track down its owners. In “Cape Cod Fear” the bride-to-be from the previous story is a realtor helping clients buy the foreclosed home of an ex-military man, Condit, who tries to intimidate them. As they investigate his past, they discover that he has a famous brother whose wife is cheating on him. In “Unscripted,” the man with whom Condit’s sister is having an affair is about to ruin the lives of a family of hoarders who live across from him. One of the hoarders’ daughters, Jaymee, just wants to get away from the mess in “Providence,” and her boyfriend takes a job trafficking ingredients for methamphetamine to make some quick money. In the last story, “Small World,” things come full circle as Jaymee and her boyfriend meet up with the man from the opening story who never made it to his father’s wedding. Petersen’s stories sing with wise-cracking (a drug dealer on his business arrangements: “It’s an LLC, man. Corporations are people”), irresistible characters who make the best of a world filled with corruption and deception.”

Kirkus: “A variety of lives hit the skids in dramatic and usually self-inflicted ways in this linked story collection. Though billed as a novel, Petersen’s debut more closely resembles a disjointed Pulp Fiction-style narrative, hopscotching west of the Mississippi with a motley set of characters. In the opening chapter, a man is speeding through Arizona to get to his father’s wedding when he strikes a dog on the highway, and in short order he’s pursuing a fling with its owner. Cut to a story narrated by the son of a friend of the groom, recalling the perils of buying a home without a real estate agent. Cut then to a story about the angst-ridden former owner of the house and his brother, whose wife is having an affair with a reality TV star. And so on: The connections between the characters are often tenuous (though Petersen ties a bow at the end), but they’re all grown-ups who make rash, immature attempts to reboot their lives and pay the price for it. “I wanted to find a different path,” says the ill-fated home buyer, though he could be speaking for everybody populating this book. “I wanted to buck the system. That was all me.” Petersen usually delivers the stories in the first person, with narrators recalling their personal-life own goals with sardonic humor or barely contained fury. But the penultimate story, “Providence,” is a gem told in the third person, involving Eric, a deaf teenager attempting to rise above his trailer-park upbringing and sour memories of his mother’s death by delivering chemicals for meth labs throughout rural Oklahoma. Like everybody else here, he’s a victim of his own bad decisions, but Petersen so carefully and compassionately arrays the forces in his life (dead mom, remorseful dad, a conspicuous disability) that every easy assumption gets repelled. An engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.”

Ryan Shoemaker. Beyond the Lights. No Record, April 28. Short stories. Shoemaker got a PhD in literature from U. of Southern California in 2014. One of his stories had been a finalist for an AML award.

Jessica Day George. The Rose Legacy. Bloomsbury USA, May 1.

Reviews of Older Books

Steven Peck. Gilda Trillim. Reviewed by Kimberly, Feminist Mormon Housewives.

Rachel Steenblik. Mother’s Milk. Reviewed by Rachel Helps here.

Theater

Joan Macleod. Gracie. Talonbooks, April 1. Playscript, it was performed in Victoria, British Columbia, in Jan-Feb, 2017. Author is not Mormon. As the play opens, Gracie is eight years old and moving with her mother, brother, and sisters from her community in the southwest United States to a community in south eastern British Columbia, Canada. Her mother has been assigned to a new husband; she becomes his eighteenth wife. Gracie may be eight when the play begins but she is fifteen when the play ends – again with a journey as Gracie leaves the community. In five acts, Gracie plays herself at five ages and also gives voice to thirteen other characters – including her brother Billy who is forced out of the community a couple of years after the family arrives in Canada. The play is a work of fiction but it is inspired by the history of polygamist communities in both Canada and the United States. When the play opened in January 2017, two days later three persons from Canada’s largest polygamist community went to trial for transporting child brides. Gracie loves her family and her faith is strong and a source of comfort to her. Although the play examines practices that are abhorrent critics have noted that a strength of the play is that it does so without judgment. Gracie provides a lens to a complex and secret world.

Film

The eighth annual Utah Film Festival Awards were announced this weekend. Socorro, which won the AML Film Award, won for Short Film Non- English Speaking.

Bestsellers

Tara Westover. Educated
USA Today: #58, #33, #48, #76 (10weeks)
PW Hardcover Non-Fiction: #12, #20, #13, #14 (10 weeks) 7044, 5000, 5578, 5093units. 75,943 total.
NY Times Hardcover Non-Fiction: #10, #6, #6, #7 (10 weeks)

Anne Perry. Twenty-One Days
USA Today: x, #53, x, x (1 week)
PW Hardcover Fiction: x, #24, x, x (1 week). 2939 units.

That’s it until next month!

Featured Photo by Keenan Constance on Unsplash.