A Zoom event will be held on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua and Maurine Whipple. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. It will last 90 minutes. Anyone interested in the novel or Mormon literature is invited to attend and participate.
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85698612887
Meeting ID: 856 9861 2887
Andrew Hall and Lynne Larson have been holding a weekly book club for The Giant Joshua at By Common Consent. Please visit the posts, many of which go into the history which inspired the novel, and Maurine’s personal history. Sarah Reed also contributed a fantastic post on 19th polygamy and postmemory. It reminded me of the ideas about “generational trauma” which were explored in the recent Watchmen miniseries.
This is all leading up to the forthcoming publication of ‘A Craving for Beauty’: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson (BCC Press). The collection will include five substantial chapters from Cleave the Wood, Maurine’s unfinished sequel to The Giant Joshua, and many other excellent short stories and magazine articles she wrote over her lifetime.
Here are the BCC posts on The Giant Joshua so far.
Here is the video of Maurine Whipple/The Giant Joshua event. It starts with Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale. Also featured are Carol Lynn Pearson, Curtis Taylor, Lynne Larson, Andrew Hall, Helynne Hansen, and Eric W. Jepson. I failed to record the opening, where I talked about the novel and shared images, and where Carol Lynn Pearson read from letters that Maurine wrote to her in the 1970s. Maurine and Carol Lynn, two of the great voices of Mormonism! I deeply apologize. https://youtu.be/tcWTWS9FCM8
Here a video of Carol Lynn Pearson reading letters she received from Maurine Whipple in the 1970s, a time when Maurine often stayed at the Pearson home when visiting Provo. We redid the section that I failed to record the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzApKodtZVk