AML Conference: President’s Remarks (Saturday, March 30, 2019)

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Welcome! to the President’s Remarks. I am Eric. I am president of the Association for Mormon Letters. And these are my remarks.

The number-one question I’ve been asked this past year is whether we’ll be changing our name. And the answer is no. At least—not immediately. Besides the fact that Church admitted a special “Mormon” dispensation for scholarly organizations, there’s also the fact that AML is in our fifth decade. We’ve earned the right to be conservative.

But—and here begins Remark #2—being in our fifth decade means we also have the obligation to reach liberally outwards. Some of this is happening in Gabriel González Núñez’s El Pregonero de Deseret which has been bringing terrific Spanish-language work to light, including some old comics that I, the so-called Mormon Comics Expert, would never have found on my own. Never.

And the world is big and Latter-day Saints are everywhere and therefore their literature is everywhere—if only we can find it.

The Association for Mormon Letters, from the very beginning, existed to study and promote literature by, for, and about this people, wherever and everywherever they may be found.

Now for Remark #3.

Shortly after high school ended, I travelled to San Diego to spend a week with a couple friends. The week had a few highlights, but the most indelible memory is of being downstairs alone with the radio and this song coming on. It affected me in a way unprecedented. I just—began to dance. In a way I never had before—or even seen before. The music consumed me. Then it was over and I waited for the dj to identify the artist. He did not. So I had to wait by the radio for the song to return. Another day and I heard it again. Again, I suddenly danced. The band: Moonpools & Caterpillars. Perhaps the most joyous of ’90s bands, an L.A. grunge-punk funfest. I never heard them on the radio again. But I bought the album. And it was great.

Postmission, in my still-monkish funk, the Moonps were the first American band I was able to listen to. I bought their new, independently released album. And, years later, I finally managed to track down their first indie album. They’ve never stopped being instantly part of my soul when I hear them play. Just this January, on a long drive alone, I must have listened to 12 Songs ten times.

A few years back, twenty years into my fandom, an acquaintance of an acquaintance of my wife’s posted pictures from her wedding reception. Among other photos were a few of the bride’s friend, Kimi, singing. Lynsey called me over and said, “Isn’t that—?”

Some Facebook research later and, ends up, Moonpools & Caterpillars are a bunch of Latter-day Saints.

This may be nothing more than coincidence.

Or—maybe not. Maybe something about our shared vocabulary and sensibility explains why a band that failed to meet the requirements for One-Hit Wonder were, to me, one of the greatest bands of their generation.

I don’t know.

I do know—Remark #4 beginning now—that perhaps the novel with the most influence upon my own writing that I read in my youth was The Invisible Saint by Modesto Mormon Curtis Taylor. No mistaking this book as anything other than Saintcentric. Ward clerks. Home teaching. Even BYU. Plus, I found it on my grandmother’s bookshelf. She didn’t care for it, so it became mine.

And I spent a lot of time in Curtis Taylor’s Mormon Modesto.

A few years before I was born (this will be Remark #5), Carol Lynn Pearson and her husband printed some of her poems into a book with the crazy hope of selling a dozen or more. And then: phenomenon. I’m not sure Mormon Letters has ever seen anything to compare to the instant impact Carol Lynn’s books had. They sold in remarkable numbers and were handed about, friend to friend. Her poems were included in Out of the Best Books, the BYU professor-edited volumes of literature for the Relief Society that also included the likes of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost and Willa Cather.

Carol Lynn’s voice spoke something true that the Saints needed to hear. And so they turned their heads and listened.

Remark #6.

AML president-elect James Goldberg wrote an essay some years ago for Irreantum about one great advantage LDS writers have when they write for an LDS audience: Our shared history culture vocabulary theology etc etc etc means we have access to a wealth of potential allusions, shortcuts to the soul. This is rich stuff, whether the writer is mining their own experience or others’ works critically.

This may explain a California Mormon kid’s reaction to Curtis Taylor and Moonpools & Caterpillars, or the explosion of English-speaking interest when Carol Lynn’s works appeared, but it’s no less true when reaching across the seas. Later today, we’ll be hearing about a movie created by, for, and about Congolese Latter-day Saints. I’m anxious to see it. It will undoubtedly be alien to me in many respects, but I also anticipate a certain frisson of recognition that comes no other way.

Remark #7.

It is, of course, our differences that make our similarities so exciting.

Melissa Leilani Larsen’s LDS-centric plays often focus on people who are “different”—the lesbian BYU student, the modern couple called to bring back polygamy—but each character in such plays is entirely human and entirely Latter-day Saint. Their details are not mine, yet their lives might as well be.

The work of California’s first poet laureate, Ina Coolbrith—let’s call her Remark #7.5—has never been easy for me to find my way into. We’ll hear more about her later today (and I find her story intriguing and challenging and familiar and personal) but even if I’m stuck outside her words, certain threads still connect me to her. I feel a communal tug to her story.

Remark #8.

Any scholarly institution recognizes these threads. It’s what gives any group of scholars the reason to become a “group” in the first place. And the impetus that may attach a thread can be as slight as a particularly charismatic professor during undergrad. A chance encounter along an abandoned library aisle.

Or maybe something deeper—Grandma’s homeland, perhaps. The faith of one’s fathers.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter if it then becomes a life’s work or remains a beloved hobby. The scholars here this weekend check a nice variety of these boxes. I’m glad to have you all. I’m an amateur myself.

Emphasis on the amare.

Now, Remark #9. My last remark.

In the past, there have been battles in the AML over boundaries and definitions. And frankly, that’s great. Battles give life. They’re proof people care.

And ultimately, the AML exists to be a place where all our various threads—red and blue and cotton and hemp—can come together and snarl into a big, beautiful knot.

Boundaries and definitions can be messy. What matters is that we finish this decade still snarled together—and then that we continue to snarl together over our next five decades.

Come, let us snarl together.

And welcome, to the AML conference.