On fast Sunday, my business plan was preached over the pulpit.

OK, it wasn't technically preached. More just shared. And it's not so much a business plan as a running joke. But it was still a surprise to hear the second counselor in the bishopric tell the ward about how I dream of opening a gas station in Las Vegas where, after inserting a credit card and pumping your gas, you pull a giant lever on the side which makes the numbers spin and spin, so that you never know in advance whether you'll get gas free, at a discount, a bit higher than usual, or at double the ordinary rate.

What was more surprising was that the counselor was making an important spiritual point. More...

I enjoyed Kathleen's June post on geneology miracle stories as a genre of Mormon storytelling. I think it's valuable to reflect on the types of stories which matter to us orally as we look for meaning in the stories writers didn't think were strong enough to survive passage from mouth to mouth and therefore felt compelled to write down instead.;)

Last month, our bishop told a story in sacrament meeting about a recent baptism. It sounded like this baptism was particularly important to the family--maybe they weren't all members or active and that everyone could attend was a big deal; maybe there'd been some complication in getting permission from someone for the baptism to take place and so there was special reason to rejoice. All I can really remember was that the bishop was unusually distraught when he arrived just prior to the service to find the font empty. More...

Back in January, I wrote a post wondering whether the primary song genre was home to the greatest Mormon art. The best primary songs are beautifully crafted and resonate powerfully with the target audience (young children) and often with older audiences as well. The bounty of Great Mormon Art for small children is part of why the church is such a good place for a little kid: it's a valuable component of a larger project of community, love, and values education that serves the young well. More...

At some point, we all have to come to grips with the fact that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies sold 100 million copies--and we didn't write it. Such is the lot of the creative writer in the era of the mashup, when concept is king. You and I have to sleep nights despite the persistent feeling that each random, insane idea we've casually discarded might actually have been worth a fortune, especially if said insane idea involved plagiarizing one or more public domain works.

I must admit that I've resorted to snobbery to protect my fragile ego. "Sure," I tell myself, "I don't have a half-plagiarized work gracing the displays of most major bookstores. But I didn't want to be rich and famous anyway" (beep beep goes thelie detector, but I ignore it and press on) "I want to write something really important and moving, something that says a lot more than you can say with a dead British woman's words and a little B-movie make-up."

But oh! how my comfort has been shattered since I picked up Plagues & Prejudice (& Zombies), a graphic novel by B. M. Brar which retells the Exodus with upperclass British zombies as the Egyptians. More...

Two weeks before beginning work on an MFA in Creative Writing at BYU, Anna Lewis turned in her two weeks' notice to the eating disorder clinic where she worked. One of the girls there asked her, "Do you really believe that you will be doing anything as a writer that is more important than what you are doing here?” I know about this incident because Lewis tells it in her thesis's Afterword, in which she searches for the intersections and differences between creative writing and social work.

That struck me as a very Mormon-writer sort of thing to do. More...

My current employment contract ends in mid-August, and my wife and I are expecting a baby in early September, which means that it's time for me to look hard for a next job. Perhaps because of this, I've been thinking a lot lately about money. I realize that in a crowd of Mormon writers, this can be a rather sensitive topic. This is not to say that we're all impoverished--just that there's a prevailing sense that if we understood money, we'd probably be in different fields.

Obviously, there is some money available to subsidize the creation of Mormon literature. Were it not so, it seems highly unlikely that much Mormon literature would exist. But where does this money come from and how does one obtain it? Today, I present a handful of plans for funding one's own work: More...

About a month ago, a younger coworker of mine attended a publishing fair at BYU. At the fair, she spoke with a representive from AML, who was apparently quite enthusiastically giving away back issues of Irreantum. My coworker returned to our office with two and said, "I don't know why she gave me these, but I don't really want any more books right now, and I hate to throw them away. Anyone interested?" Because I already knew Irreantum, I was. I already had one of the issues, but the other was a few years old--maybe 2005?--and didn't look familiar.

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I didn't automatically want it either--so many of the books I already own are in boxes I don't casually add one more--but I did want to flip through the issue before it got thrown away to see if anything caught my eye. Not only did something catch my eye, I couldn't believe my eyes.

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I presented today in my Creative Writing Theory class on Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Most of the pages in that book are split into three "voices": the voice of Kiowa myth, the voice of historical commentary, and Momaday's personal voice. It's a beautiful text. BYU professor Suzanne Lundquist has written on how to use the text as a starting point for students to explore their own heritage in terms of what she calls "mythos, logos, and ethos," or spiritual, scholarly, and personal perspectives and inheritance.

My wife is currently teaching a freshman writing course at BYU which started with a unit on Native American writings (looking at mythic, historical, and contemporary voices) and then went on to a unit on Jewish writing, which followed the same pattern into texts like Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire and Jonathan Rosen's Talmud and the Internet. '

She is now starting a unit on Mormon writing, and wants her students to find texts in which contemporary writers interact with their spiritual/mythic inheritance. She's putting together a list of places to look, which currently includes Irreantum, The Best of Mormonism, Allred's The Golden Plates, Parley Pratt's A Dialogue Between the Devil and Joseph Smith, the Segullah website, several Deseret Book writers (Dean Hughes, Chris Crowe, Gerald Lund, RAche Anne Nunes, Jack Weyland, Anita Stansfield, etc.), Eric Samuelsen's The Plan, and Mormon Artist.

Which places or specific works would you recommend to students as possible texts (or places to look for texts) for this unit?

2007 was the conference where I heard the paper on poetry about Eve by young LDS female writers. In ten or fifteen minutes, I was treated to a wide range of poems I'd never heard of, along with thought-provoking analysis of what the patterns in the poems suggested about the way a generation of women in the church were seeing this world and their incredible potential in it.

2008 I will think of as the year when Angela Hallstrom read from her novel "Bound on Earth" during the evening reading at Charlotte England's. The passage she read was funny, engaging, and oddly resonant for me--though I have never been a teenage girl with strong feelings for her dashing young high school English teacher, I have felt something akin to her disappointment and alienation when she overhears him speaking in dismissive terms about his young Mormon students. To be able to sit in a home with stained glass windows carrying Restoration and Book of Mormon images while listening to Angela read like a great storyteller should and at the same time to feel as though I were in high school in Ohio navigating my own double-minority experience as a multiethnic Mormon again is something I will not soon forget.

It's moments like these that keep me invested in conversations about Mormon letters.

Since my family and I will probably be leaving Utah this summer, the February 27 AML Conference will likely be the last I get to attend for some time. What might I experience this year?

Here's what I'm most looking forward to:  More...

I've been wondering lately if we actually have the great Mormon writing we're waiting for, but have missed it. I'd imagine that serious writers in Shakespeare's day were waiting for the Great English Poet, not a playwright, and might not have appreciated the dramatic genius of the man they knew as a sonnet-writer with a time-consuming day job. What if our Mormon Shakespeares come in a field we don't expect? Say, for example, the Primary Song. 

Seriously. Think, for a moment, of a favorite primary song. Is it memorable? Does it connect with its audience intellectually and emotionally? Does it include powerful images? Does it teach you a different way to see the world?Is it aware of the complicated real life dynamics in which its audience exists? I've been reading the stories about the composition of various primary songs in a book called "Favorite Songs for LDS Children" my wife and I were given as a wedding present, and I'm increasingly convinced that the larger LDS writing community could learn from what these masters do.

This idea is still at an early stage of development for me, but I'd like to publicly wonder what we as writers in other forms can learn from primary song writers, the best of whom may be our community's greatest artists.

A few thoughts:

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