A guest post by Caleb Griffin, with the traditional first volley into the Mormon arts.
In a memorable scene in Chaim Potok’s novel The Gift of Asher Lev, the protagonist (acclaimed artist Asher Lev) gives a talk to elementary school children on the value of art, and how we can know good art from bad. To demonstrate his point, he draws a ram on the chalkboard in three different ways. In the first he draws a childlike, stick-figure ram, in the second a more conventional, realistic ram, and in the third an abstract representation of a ram’s characteristics. All three represent truth from different perspectives, explains Asher Lev, and the mark of good art is its ability to represent truth.
This is hardly a novel perspective, and one we can usually sense intuitively. For example, I have found that fiction writers who write semi-autobiographically tend to write books that resonate more with me. One of my favorite authors, Paul Bowles, is a good example here. His characters are often outsiders in North Africa, struggling to guess the motivations and goals of the people around them. It was obviously a truth from his own life, and the narration reads truer and more enjoyably as a result. And Potok himself is a good example too; a young man struggling to balance his Jewish heritage with the world of art clearly resonated with his life, and thus his care in writing about that subject translates to us as readers. Of course, this preference for “write what you know” has its drawback in having to read about so many characters who are themselves writers, but I would rather read that than something purely out of an author’s imagination.[1]
This is where I feel that Latter-day Saints as writers often fall short. They do not express themselves truly enough. They typically do not write closely enough to their own lives for it to ring true. The motivations and norms of behavior of the average practicing Latter-day are different enough from the average non-Latter-day Saint to make it difficult for Latter-day Saint authors to write characters outside of their faith convincingly. This is not to say, of course, that no author can write characters outside of their identity group, but when they do so exclusively it is not going to resonate in the same way.
This is compounded by many Latter-day Saint authors’ aversion to including profanity, sexuality, and other adult content in their books. How can one tell any sort of truth about contemporary society without that content? Ordinary people are sexual and profane. There exists a certain orthodoxy among Latter-day Saints to only consume or produce content that is “inspiring” to some degree. And, of course, content that could be eschewed as being anti-Mormon or even anti-religious is right out. Latter-day Saint authors (provided they are active) know that others in their church community will be reading (and judging) their books, and it is perhaps inevitable that much self-censorship occurs as a result. The same problem of orthodoxy exists for many authors outside the church of course, but it is political not religious orthodoxy.
I suspect that the difficulty of writing convincingly about people in contemporary society outside the church is why so many Latter-day Saint authors turn to genre writing, particularly fantasy and period romances. If you cannot write convincingly about your own world, you can just make one up, or at least provide a sanitized version of past society where men and women courted without the nuisance of sex. I am being a little facetious about these “regency romance” books; after all, they do convey truth of a sort. The truth of love as being (sometimes) pleasant and engaging. It is a truth that is repeated again and again throughout these kinds of books, however, and one that is somewhat shallow or at least derivative. If I type “love is nice,” that is a true statement, but if I type it a hundred times, it is no less true but starts feeling a bit stale.
So what is to be done? My suggestion is that Latter-day Saints write a lot more about Latter-day Saints. True, that is going to cut out most of the world’s population; it is a terrible idea from a marketing perspective, but if your purpose in writing is to sell books, you should do something else to make money. We should be hearing about the average sister in Relief Society, about her hopes, fears, dreams, and doubts. About her struggles to conform, to measure up, to find meaning, to navigate her sexual world, and to feel saved. There are so many interesting stories out there; I can think of a few in my own family. Instead of another Brandon Sanderson book about a mythical universe of people with super-powers or another Sarah Eden book about a dashing but chaste highwayman, give me more books about real contemporary Latter-day Saints. Those would be so much better because they would be true.
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[1] This idea of art representing truth seems at first glance like a useful way to resolve the perpetual debate over what is good art versus bad, but that is undercut somewhat by the recognition of truth as being somewhat subjective. That is, if the underlying criteria for separating good from bad art is that good art contains truth, we could only know if art is good if we recognize the truth or truths it represents. And that is subjective—I see the Creation of Adam as representing the truth of the dignity or divinity of man, the importance of the autonomous individual as the locus of importance, and hence expressing the whole progressive truth of the Renaissance and Western heritage, but another person may not. Therefore to me, it is good art, and to her it could be bad.
So really there are two parts: does it represent truth? And how important is that truth? Could there be a third part—how effectively does it communicate that truth? But ultimately the answers to all those questions are subjective, so good or bad art will always be in the eye of the beholder, even if we adopt this universal stance that art represents truth.
Caleb,
I’m really glad you’re interested in Mormon literature and arts. Your instinct that we could tell many more meaningful stories about our own community is correct. As someone who has been heavily involved in the field for 20 years, I appreciate your hunger for those stories.
That said, this blog post is terrible. I don’t want you to feel too embarrassed about that. Lots of smart and talented people have made almost exactly the same shallow and tired arguments that you do above. It feels so exciting to reinvent the idea of Mormon literature that they rush ahead without looking around first. Many people before you have stepped up with sweeping statements about what we should do. Many people before you have dismissed entire genres with the wave of a hand. I get it. But I also want you to slow down and approach the field with a little more humility and curiosity. You don’t find pearls by trampling around like swine.
I’m going to give you some reading recommendations along the lines of what you’re looking for. I’ll also give you some recommendations for things that might push back on some of your assumptions and broaden your narrow horizons a bit.
For contemporary realism with a Mormon setting, two 21st century books I love are Angela Hallstrom’s Bound on Earth and R. de la Lanza’s Eleusis. Bound on Earth is a fantastic mosaic of domestic dramas, rendered with a crystalline precision that is breathtaking. Eleusis is a classicist and philosophical novel that has the kind of sex scenes you’re worried we can’t write–though only the first two chapters are available in English. Jessie Christensen’s translation of the rest is still a year or two away from publication.
If you want to talk in an informed way about Mormon literature, of course, you probably want better chronological coverage. A noted late 20th century novel along the realist lines you’re describing is Levi Peterson’s The Backslider. Based on the kind of literature you describe above, I suspect you’d enjoy it a lot. I have more mixed feelings, which may come from my mixed feelings about American Protestantism. I like Peterson’s short story “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights” much better. You might also like some Doug Thayer fiction. A mid-20th century noted novel is Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua. I’ve never made it all the way through that one. On recommendation from Michael Austin, I recently read Vardis Fisher’s short story “Laughter”–it’s my new go-to recommendation for that period. The late 19th century is a bit early for the kind of realism you’re looking for in Mormon letters. But Sophie Valentine and Josephine Spencer have some stories that are in that style. And there’s a critical edition available of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian, which was written for a mainstream Latter-day Saint audience and does some work to engage with the period’s intellectual developments, acknowledges pre-marital sex in a layered way, and so on. More homework than pleasure as a read, but a good text to look at if you’re serious about the field.
If you are serious about the field, of course, you also need to read the best work in genres your immediate impulse is to dismiss. A while back, I published a review of The Cunning Man by D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey, a fantasy novel set in a thoroughly Mormon setting in mining towns in Depression-era Utah and discussed its overlapping thematic interests with Carla Kelly’s My Loving Vigil Keeping, a romance which also has a Utah mining-town setting. Both books are fun to read and fun to think about. They’re examples of how a writer can use attention to Mormon life as a tool in a fantasy or romance. Given the degree to which Jane Austen and J.R.R. Tolkien influenced English-language literature, you shouldn’t need works of Mormon literature to show you that romance and fantasy can have sophisticated social and spiritual themes, but those books might work as a remedial course for you. Parley P. Pratt’s “A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil” is not a bad place to go for a Mormon example of how fantastical elements can be part of a rich discussion of ideas.
You referenced Brandon Sanderson and Sarah Eden, but I’m not sure how much of their work you’ve actually read. For my money, The Way of Kings is the best place to start to see the range of what Sanderson can do. You might learn a lot from his digressions on aesthetics there. That said, the most satisfying religious passages for me in Sanderson’s body of work are in The Hero of Ages. It’s the concluding book in the Mistborn trilogy and you really need to read the whole trilogy to appreciate it. There are some signs in the series that Sanderson was still developing as a writer, but the good in all three books is very, very good.
Among contemporary literary writers who work in Mormon settings, speculative and surreal elements are quite popular. Steven Peck, William Morris, Luisa Perkins all have works that are more literary in tone and target and reach beyond realism to tell the truth.
Along with novelists, you ought to read some poets, essayists, dramatists. You ought to read some comics! Maybe start with Darlene Young, Eugene England, Melissa Inouye, Charles Inouye, Eric Samuelsen, Melissa Leilani Larson, Scott Hales, Matt Page. I’d also
You might even find that you get something out of my work. I’ve been active in Mormon literary circles for twenty years. I’ve never published a sex scene, I don’t typically swear, and I’m quite optimistic about the power faith can have in people’s lives. So maybe my work is not your style. But you might find that I do find my ways to tell the truth–even when I am overtly lying.
Thank you, James, for writing this comment so we didn’t have to.
I’d add James’s YA romance The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, co-authored with Janci Patterson, to the list. I read it in a day and loved how he and Janci navigated the nuance and complex emotions of a cross-cultural teenage relationship. There wasn’t any sex, but there was some pretty passionate kissing (midnight in a park, I believe.)
I also spent a weekend at an artists retreat with Sarah Eden once and gained so much appreciation and admiration for her as a writer.
That’s all.
caleb! welcome to the world of mormon letters!
in addition to some of james’s recommendations (BOUND ON EARTH is incredible!), you might find it valuable to peruse the AML’s 100 significant works list put together a few years back:
https://www.associationmormonletters.org/2022/07/aml-100-significant-mormon-literature-works/
i’m still working my way through it, but it’s been really interesting to see up close the breadth and diversity of mormon literature.
you might also find tolkien’s “on fairy stories”, along with other essays by tolkien, cs lewis, and others interesting for thinking more about different ways truth can be expressed in story and the role that fairy stories in particular have in teaching truths.
https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
Can I suggest that Caleb is not exactly wrong?
While, as James suggests, we have frequently seen similar arguments, I think that is because those arguments DO have some validity—and the works that are easily available to most Mormons are largely what he describes. The fact is that the works we have listed here are harder to find and less promoted than what we see on bookstore shelves and what most of the LDS audience talks about.
BUT, Caleb, I disagree with your unstated assumption that authors are who should be asked to solve the problem. Sure, authors can write works that resonate better and are more honest. But would those works get promoted?
And while in the past I have suggested that this is a market failure and laid the problem at the feet of the book publishers and bookstore buyers, even that isn’t the whole story. Publishers and booksellers generally respond to what sells, so the audience often determines the bulk of the kind of works that appear on bookstore shelves, and which therefore leads to the bulk of what is sought by publishers, and then to the bulk of what is therefore written by authors.
In short, I think we face a cultural problem, not a problem with authors. Somehow the cultural assumptions and LDS worldview needs to change. Coincidentally, this is what the University of Chicago literature professor Wayne Booth (who is of LDS heritage) called for in the 1980s when he addressed LDS literature. He suggested then that we needed to develop a culture that reads carefully and critically. I agree with him. I wish we had done that.
But I have no idea how to make that happen. Cultural change is hard.
Loved reading this conversation. Thanks, James, for taking time to make these points, and those of you who added.