An Interview with Jeanna Mason Stay
For the past ten years, the Mormon Lit Blitz has been publishing short stories, short essays, and poems about Mormon experience and themes. Each spring, the Mormon Lit Blitz holds a general interest contest. Most years in the fall, there’s a themed contest with more specific constraints on submissions.
This fall, Jeanna Mason Stay served as guest editor for the current themed contest: Saints, Spells, and Spaceships. From October 25-November 6, the twelve finalists are being published on the lit.mormonartist.net website. Here are some thoughts from Jeanna about the contest.
Q: Why did you decide to use Saints, Spells, and Spaceships as a contest theme? What were you hoping for?
A: First, let’s be honest: everybody loves a little alliteration, right? Saints, Spells, and Spaceships—all those sibilants just roll off the tongue. But more seriously, I grew up on fantasy stories, particularly retellings. Robin McKinley’s Beauty was probably the single most influential novel of my childhood. I love how the best retellings say something new about a story we already know.
In thinking about what I hoped for from this contest, I realized that was it: stories that would tell me something new about a story I already knew. The gospel and, to a lesser extent, Church culture, is full of stories we think we know. We know about the Jaredite barges, we know about missionaries and ministering and baptisms and ward potlucks. But by looking at these ideas and events through a fantasy and sci fi lens, we get a newness and sometimes it says something different—something that’s imaginary, not real, and yet true.
That’s not to say that I only wanted deeply thought-provoking pieces. I absolutely wanted those, but I also wanted stories that were fun, that would make me laugh—or in at least one story you’ll read in the next two weeks, something that would be just the right level of unsettling and odd.
I think I got what I wanted.
Q: There’s a lot of great speculative fiction by Latter-day Saint writers, and some people have wondered whether Mormon history and thought makes for better science fiction and fantasy. What interests you about having writers go the other way, using science fiction and fantasy to explore Mormon experience?
A: Like I mentioned before, one of the things I love about fantasy and sci fi is that it can explore what is true about humanity without getting caught up in what is real. In reality, none of us has the ability to reverse or pause time, none of us can truly physically experience another’s emotions. So no story outside of speculative fiction could explore those ideas. But in some of the stories from this contest, the authors have imagined what these abilities would mean, both personally and in the gospel. And by doing so, I think they make thoughtful statements about how we can live within reality, how we can consider what’s important and what is worth our time.
On a broader scale, all of the fiction that I personally consider truly great explores in some way what it means to be a good, moral human, even if many of the characters in those stories are not actually human (and sometimes neither good nor moral) themselves. Looking at it from that perspective, it hardly matters whether one writes speculative, historical, romance, literary, etc. I just happen to prefer stories that have dragons.
Q: Can you describe some of the range of approaches to the prompt you saw in story submissions? Did you notice any patterns as far as what writers were interested in?
A: Honestly, I was struck by the broad range of responses. There were references to a lot more fantasy and sci fi concepts than I would have come up with on my own (thank heavens for that). I wasn’t terribly surprised that there were a few more fantasy pieces than sci fi, as that had been my experience when I read short stories for Deep Magic. There tends to be more fantasy short fiction, and the extra short nature of flash makes sci fi, especially hard sci fi, extremely challenging. There were a number of baptism-related stories. A lot of stories centered around funny aspects of American church culture (I say American because, living in Australia now for a few years, I realize that what I thought I knew about universal church culture was completely wrong). There were also stories from all the elements I expected to see—mermaids, dragons, monsters, potions and magic, time travel, space travel, other worlds, and at least two stories about Kolob.
Things that surprised me? I was delighted to recognize a character from Korean mythology (it was sheer chance that I recognized her, as my knowledge of Korean mythology is practically nil, but I still thrilled to see her in this context). The fact that there were almost no pioneer/early Church history stories surprises me in retrospect. And amongst all the variety, I was surprised to even see a few poems!
Q: What was it like to read all of the submissions? What are your thoughts on the stories that didn’t make the finals?
A: I hope you’ll let me give a very personal response for a minute here. I already mentioned the great variety of stories and approaches that I got to experience; this is, to me, one of the sheer joys of slush pile reading. I cannot say enough wonderful things about the opportunity to witness the worlds that authors create. Every time I get to read from open submissions for something like this, I feel deeply privileged to be entrusted with stories written by beginners, by professionals, by writers young and old who have taken up the courage (for some of them, it takes a lot of courage!) to submit their writing.
I think sometimes editors forget how scary it can be to press Send on that story. I can remember times when I was nearly terrified, hoping so badly that the story would land on the desk of someone who would love and champion it. It can be fraught, but I still love being on the editor end of this experience. It’s exciting to choose some gems to share (even though there’s always this background dread that I should have made a different choice, that there was something groundbreaking in there that I just didn’t recognize). It’s both a blessing and a burden of being an editor.
Q: What do you think readers can gain from spending time with these stories?
A: I really hope that readers will experience a spectrum of feelings and thoughts about them. No single story ever appeals equally to everyone, but I think that among them all there’s something here for everyone to love or learn from or discover. Some of the stories are simply meant to make you laugh—I think that’s such a valuable experience that we tend to discount in favor of heavier matters. I hope that some of them will make you thoughtfully consider and deepen your relationship to the gospel and to truth. I think a few of them stand out as interesting, well-told tales that play with religious themes without having a direct moral stance—in other words, they’re just good stories, no strings attached.
On the whole, I hope readers gain something to think about, something to take with them on their travels into whatever the future holds. Reading Beauty as a child influenced the way I moved forward for the rest of my life. Other stories throughout my life have nudged me in specific directions. In the last ten years, reading and participating in Mormon Lit Blitz competitions has given me new little parts to add to my concept of self and what the world means. I think good literature does that.
Elder Uchtdorf talks frequently about tiny little course corrections that keep us on track. I think in a similar way, the stories that we add to our lives make tiny changes—not always for good or evil (though sometimes that too), but certainly changes in how we see the world and what we think about it. Some of this year’s stories did that for me, and I hope they do that for the other readers as well.
Featured Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash