Levi Peterson on the genesis of his new collection: Losing a Bit of Eden

Genesis of my new collection: Losing a Bit of Eden: Recent Stories

By Levi S. Peterson

I was naturally pleased when Gary Bergera of Signature Books sent an email in mid-April of 2020 inquiring whether I had enough stories on hand to form a new book-length collection. Putting this collection together helped me keep my mind off the anxieties of the pandemic. There are ten stories in the collection. Seven of them were previously published in Dialogue or Sunstone between 2010 and 2020; the other three are published for the first time in this collection. I have been a slow writer, turning out about one story a year.

I decided a long time ago that Latter-day Saints and their culture would be the nexus of my fiction because that was the only culture I knew well enough to write about realistically. As for my creative process, I have a constitutional need for a writing project, something to think about when I awaken in the wee hours of the night and can’t go back to sleep or when I’m doing something else that does not require concentration. I like making plots, a process that reveals the development of the characters, recorded in a language appropriate to their nature yet hoping to strike a sort of universal eloquence as well. It’s an activity that replaces the fantasies I indulged in as a child and adolescent, an acceptable adult activity, being a written record of an extended daydream.

Where to my plots come from? Sometimes a situation calls for a story. One night as my wife and I returned to our Utah home from an academic conference in Colorado, we were forced to spend a night in a very cold and shabby motel room on account of a blizzard in Wyoming—a situation that much later engendered the title story of the collection, “Losing a Bit of Eden.” I derived the story “The Shyster” from an experience of my feminist daughter who, as a public defender just out of law school, was infuriated by a police bust of a massage parlor in Washington state that resulted in charging seven young women for prostitution while letting their male customers go free. My daughter very cheerfully got the prostitutes off on a technicality.

On one occasion, an appealing title for a story, “Jesus Enough,” occurred to me while I was on a walk. The story took off from there, growing incrementally without my knowing how it should end.

A number of my stories derive from my longstanding interest in sexual sin on the part of youthful characters which leads ultimately to marriage and love—this interest underlies “Kid Kirby,” “Bode and Iris,” and “Cedar City.” It’s probably worth noting that these stories can be seen as brief recapitulations of my novel The Backslider. My story “Badge and Bryant; Or, the Rise and Fall of the Dogfrey Club” touches upon this theme but turns toward a different result, with a coming-of-age resolution on the part of the two youthful characters to adhere to Latter-day Saint standards on sexuality. Conversely, my story “Sandrine” features an untenable love whose memory promises to linger for the lifetime of the two principal characters.

Two of my stories are about rape and its consequences for both the perpetrator and the victim. In one, “The Return of the Native,” the perpetrator seeks forgiveness for a rape he committed fifty years earlier at the age of fifteen. The other, “Bachelor Stallions,” is about a would-be rape of a female professor studying the behavior of wild horses in the Cedar Mountains of western Utah—a story deriving from reading I had done on the behavior of so-called bachelor stallions and also from horseback rides my brother took me on in the Cedar Mountains, where we encountered bands of wild horses.

I have tried hard to achieve compelling plots, complex characterization, vivid description, and a competent style. I hope I have achieved these qualities.

Publisher’s Blurb:

In these ten stories (three of which appear here for the first time), Levi S. Peterson demonstrates his continuing engagement to take seriously the duty of the fiction writer to illuminate and entertain. His subject remains Latter-day Saints caught between the polarities of conscience and passion. Among the stories are sober tellings of rape and misogyny, defiant statements of ascendant feminism and the worship of Heavenly Mother, and—most abundantly—narratives about impermissible love that sometimes lead to heartbreak and other times forges unexpected couplings destined to last a lifetime. Once again Peterson shows himself as a peerless master of the English language, the tools of his craft, and the artistry of creative fiction.

Levi S. Peterson is a retired professor of English presently living in Washington state. He is the prize-winning author of two earlier collections of stories, The Canyons of Grace and Night Soil; two novels, The Backslider and Aspen Marooney; a biography, Juanita Brooks: The Life Story of a Courageous Historian of the Mountain Meadows Massacre; and an autobiography, A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning. He is often considered to be the doyen of Mormon American literature. He is a six-time AML Award winner, was president of AML twice, and was given an AML Honorary Lifetime Membership in 1988 and the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters in 2009. A recording of the story “Bode and Iris” for the Dialogue Podcast can be heard here.