The AML Online Book Club will meet May 21, (Sunday), 7pm Mountain time. We will be discussing two 2022 AML Short Fiction Award winners: Michael Fillerup’s “The year they gave women the priesthood”, a novella from his collection The year they gave women the priesthood and other stories (Signature Books, 2022), and Marcelo Bighetti’s short story “The Intelligences.” (Irreantum Winter 2022). “The Intelligences” is available for free online, you would need to buy a copy of the collection The year they gave women the priesthood and other stories to access the title novella. Michael Fillerup will be joining us for the conversation.
The discussion will be held on Zoom. Please ask for a Zoom link by replying to this post.
Our next book club will be on June 25, 7pm Mountain, when we will discuss Mikayla Orton Thatcher’s Beehive Girl, a memoir focusing on her quest to understand the history of her ancestors and faith tradition.
AML Award citations:
Short Fiction Collection: Michael Fillerup. The year they gave women the priesthood and other stories (Signature Books, 2022).
In The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood and Other Stories, Michael Fillerup afflicts his characters with a startling variety of sins and troubles: a man trapped in a tank in Kuwait meditates on his life as he waits for death from heat exhaustion; a man commits adultery in the mistaken belief that his polyandrous wife loves her other husband more; a father seeks revenge for his son who was murdered while on his mission; a peeping Tom watches his high school sweetheart having sex with her husband. Fillerup uses all these troubles to explore redemption or the lack of it. The stories are not didactic, not cautionary tales but variations on a theme, a distant cousin to Kierkegard’s Fear and Trembling, which retells the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac from a variety of perspectives.
Kierkegaard and Fillerup both reach toward comprehending that which is beyond comprehension—the condescension of God as manifested through the Atonement. Again and again Fillerup’s flawed, complex characters approach the limit of their suffering and stumble forward. The result is a vision of life that is full of difficulty and blessing. One dying man recounts his prayer: “I thank him for those priceless moments on the mound throwing sidearm strikes to Andrew, and for fifty-one years on this beautiful planet, eleven years with beautiful Frieda. I thank him for the pioneer men and women of steel plodding across the wind-swept plains, wearing rags on their feet, pulling strips of rawhide from the handcart wheels and chewing them for dinner.”
The stories take on a variety of forms—a novella, the transcript of a confession, sudden fiction that reads like a prose poem, a letter. His sentences are exquisite: “They squeezed between two giant boulders constricted so tightly that, for Mark at least, coming out the other end felt like a birthing” and “A pregnant mutt, her swollen teats dragging along the snow, plodded towards the rock schoolhouse where Tom earned his daily bread.” While his endings are like the twist of a knife, flowing though the stories is Fillerup’s love for people, the earth, and God. In one of the most moving stories, a man drives into a blizzard with a bad truck, bad clothing, and the feeling he has wasted his life. What he discovers on his journey will knock readers back on their heels.
Short Fiction: Marcelo Bighetti. “The Intelligences.” Irreantum 19:4, Winter 2022. (Originally “As inteligências.” Translated from Portuguese to English by Kent S. Larsen.)
In Marcelo Bighetti’s “The Intelligences,” beings among the stars argue about their progression. Their knowledge is incomplete; some of the intelligences claim to have received messengers from higher states of being, and others seek insight among rebels and outcasts. Fearing a temporal interruption that might thwart their ascension from the Oblilish level to Kolob, the intelligences find themselves trapped by an apparent paradox. To progress in time, they must resort to opening Enish-go-on-dosh, a planet with ruling characteristics—but opening Enish-go-on-dosh will result in the stars’ incurring penalties, which may prevent them from progressing. At the same time, they contemplate an impossible rumor: that the Kolob level is subdivided into three levels, which are occupied by mere material beings!
“The Intelligences” explores thoughtfully our own limitations in following the plan of salvation by considering what constraints we might have suffered from in our pre-mortal existence. The story rejoices in an aesthetic flowing from the Book of Abraham, invites the reader to look backward as well as forward in pursuing her own path of exaltation, and strongly affirms a theology of love.