Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (TLP) left me in a love conundrum. More...

My wife and I drove to Ogden on Saturday to be part of the audience for a huge show at Weber State University’s Wildcat Stadium. I had written a song for the event, and had shepherded the song through a couple of big firesides and a recording session. The event itself was monstrous (and the song a very small part of it): 3,500 costumed youth on the field, performing for a packed stadium. And I’m of two minds about the experience. More...

Recently my good friend Heather (H. B.) Moore received a rather scathing review of one of her books. Apparently the reviewer had bought the audio version  and had it playing in the car during a family trip. She was horrified at the content, which she found offensive, and turned it off because her small children were in the car and shouldn't have been exposed to something that deserved a PG-13 rating. (And what, pray tell, she demanded, was such a thing doing on the shelves of an LDS bookstore?)

This from a book published by pretty darn conservative Covenant Communications. 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...

I am not a professional photographer.

I am not a designer of any stripe.

I don't know nothin' 'bout magazine layouts or art direction or any of that fancy stuff.  I just know what I like.  And what I don't like.

And I don't like the new Conference Report issue of the Ensign.

More...

*Don't forget to renew your subscription to Irreantum!  Our new issue just went to the printer.  Check it out here.*

A few weeks ago, a family member asked me a question. “Okay,” she said, “tell me one more time … what you mean when you say literary?” She admitted that she’d once thought the word was only used by certain people to assert their superiority over others. “Are there actual standards?” she asked.

How would you have answered? More...

The recent Utah execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner via firing squad became national news, and led to inevitable editorializing pro and con the death penalty.  Because Utah is the only state that allows for firing squad executions, Utah is presented, by those who oppose the death penalty, as a particularly benighted state, and the discredited doctrine of blood atonement usually gets attention.  Blood atonement is, as Scott Card once put it, "a doctrine never taught in the Church, especially by Jedediah M. Grant."  But Gardner's execution had, for me, a personal historical context unrelated to blood atonement.  Only three Utahns have been executed via firing squad in the last 70 years.  Gardner's one; Gary Gilmore (of Executioner's Song fame) was another.  The third was a man named Donald Condit, who was executed in 1940 for murdering my grandfather. More...

I’m thinking of three things. Here’s the first one: I remember a conversation some years ago with Scott Bronson. Having danced around as sort of an art-hobbyist for years, I was contemplating what I described in conversation with Scott as a kind of mystical leap into greater loyalty to artful pursuits – a new covenant to follow the muse.  My tone was getting pretty lofty, and I was getting kind of worked up. Scott listened patiently, and then brought me back down to earth by saying something like, “Relax, Sam. It’s not like we’re talking about curing cancer.” The comment was made more potent, perhaps, by the fact that Scott was, at that time, battling cancer. Anyway, that’s the first thing. More...

A search for value in fiction, essay, and journalism

It's been a very strange trip for me over the last fifteen years or so, and I find myself suddenly lost in both a superabundance of interest and a declining patience with the many and varied forms of literature that have engaged me in my life.

Before I go any further, I apologize if I have left out a particular form, genre, or flavor in my glib encapsulation. I'm working under a (still largely unformed) model that suggests story as the intentional construction of words in a search for fact (journalism), understanding (essay), or meaning (fiction). As such, I find the specific form (poem, screenplay, lyric, story, ad copy, speech, etc. etc. etc.) far less interesting than the effective accomplishment of these three primary intents. More...

After I had written my last AML blog post I realized two things: (a) I had forgotten to list Sweethearts among some of the best loved edible writings ... ever, those adorable Valentine's Day confections, those little tasty love "tweets" and (b) the Old Testament has some noteworthy, if not kind of crazy at times, ideas about writing, as pointed out by William Schniedewind in his wonderful book How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel, the chief inspiration/blame for my last bit on edible writing. In this post I will do two things: (i) share some of Schniedewind's Old Testament insights on writing and (ii) suggest that these insights have a continuing direct bearing on Mormon authors today. Please forgive my lack of footnotes below--using books on Kindle makes it impossible to adequately document your sources. I have no similar excuse, however, for the absence of substance in this post and my obvious cribbing from Schniedewind. More...