Thread by @JamesGoldberg

Third Wheel, a collection of two plays by @mel_leilani billed as "peculiar stories of Mormon women in love," is still on sale for $5.
amazon.com/Third-Wheel-Pe…

I got a copy when it came out but went ahead and got more when the book came out. I've seen these plays live and they're breathtaking and I love them and in honor of this sale I'm going to go off for a while with a list of Mormon Lit recommendations and reasons I like each.

I'll start with these plays. @mel_leilani's films (Freetown and Jane & Emma) are more widely known and are both important milestones in Mormon cinema. But Mel is at her very best writing for the intimacy of the stage.

The first play in the collection, "Little Happy Secrets," is about a returned missionary who gradually realizes she is in love with her roommate. I don't even know what to say about this except that I still think about Claire and Brennan ten years after I first read this piece.

There's this soliloquy where Claire is walking in cold and shifts from addressing the audience about her experience to talking with God and it's the most beautiful prayer in Mormon playwrighting history.

I also still think sometimes about the audience talkbacks in 2009 after we produced this play in Provo. The emotional immediacy and accessibility of the play cut straight through the polarized discourse and people with very different life experiences just talked. And listened.

I wish I could have bottled the air we shared those nights.
It was something sacred.

The next play in the collection is called "Pilot Program" and I am not articulate enough to explain what that felt like to see, either.

I don't know if I even want to tell you the premise. I'll just say that it's totally crazy bananas and from the very first scene of the play Mel makes it feel totally real and the characters feel totally real and it's this intense quiet realness that makes her work part of you.

There's a gentleness to the way these plays will break your heart.

Pause. Deep breath.
Let the memories settle.
Next title.

One of the hardest things about writing Mormon experience is that writing is not kind to scale. Each new character you create adds not only a whole simulated soul's worth of depth, but also an exponentially expanding web of relationships with other characters.

From a technical perspective, it is intensely challenging to write big casts of compelling characters. Which makes the familial and communal elements of Mormon life insanely difficult to do justice to.

I have had multiple conversations with other writers about how Angela Hallstrom's Bound on Earth would make us jealous if it didn't do such a total job of humbling us.
amazon.com/Bound-Earth-An…

Bound on Earth is about the relationships within a Mormon family over multiple decades and generations and Angela totally pulls it off. It's got that real, raw feeling and you can taste the different personalities of the characters.

The novel contains way more than it has any right to because each chapter gives you ways to reinterpret what you've already read with new depth and perspective so there's some funky math going on where the number of stories you experience is way more than she wrote on the page.

It is so sad that literary Mormon writing is so niche and the niche is so poorly organized because it feels sometimes like hardly anyone hears about these books. So we end up with all these masterpieces abandoned by their community.

People who want authentic and rich and beautiful writing that resonates with their experience but know not where to find it.

OK: digression time. Have you heard of Sturgeon's Law?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%…

This is the idea that 90% of everything is crap. Like: in any genre, 90% of what is written is gonna be bad. 90% of big budget movies suck. 90% of arthouse movies suck. 90% of science fiction sucks just like 90% of what's in lit mags.

The reason we need a "law" to remind us of this is because people often point to the 90% to dismiss genres they look down upon as categorically worthless.

The satisfaction we as humans find in that sort of categorical condescension may be one of the worst things about us, but it seems pretty hardwired in. Crops up everywhere.

It frustrates me to no end that that's what Mormon Lit is up against.
People find something they don't like and they dismiss everything and then feel very clever and superior for never having read Mel or Angela.
Drives me crazy.

*end of rant*

Next up on my recommendation list: @orsonscottcard's Folk of the Fringe.

An oldie but a goodie, that one. It's set in a world where the Cold War went hot and communications technologies somehow got shut out. Society has collapsed.
Mormons are pioneering again.

It's science fiction, but it's a really good look in a way at the Mormon past. Card's pretty clear-eyed about the complexities and rough edges of building a society.

He's also open to moments of genuine connection and dignity and beauty and provides such iconic images to go with those feelings.

There's a story about looking for treasure in the submerged Salt Lake temple.
It's so good.

Folk of the Fringe plays with Mormon mythos as well as anything I've read. And not just our history. Book of Mormon prophecies/imagery about the future of the Lamanites figure prominently into the book's structure.

This is the real deal as far as what a culture can hope to expect from its literature. It draws from our shared imagination and gives us distinctive, evocative, lingering visuals. Make us feel in our minds by tapping into what already runs deep there.

Gah. I promised my wife I'd wrap this thread up a while ago.
The Christmas Special from the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is calling to her and I don't want to miss out.
But I will continue this another time with more recommendations.

@ScottHales80 @SciHoroscope and Gabriel Gonzalez Nunez are the next three authors on my list. Stayed tuned tomorrow or Monday or whenever I get around to it for titles. I am not messing around, people! I mean this list.

In the meantime...thank you for coming to my TED talk.

OK. Coming back to this thread this morning. The topic (for those of you just joining us) is Mormon Lit recommendations.

But first: a digression! Why am I still talking about Mormon Lit when President Nelson has emphasized using the full name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Shouldn't I be talking about Latter-day Saint literature? Or Literature of the People of the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Or the Tabernacle Literature at Temple Square?

Maybe. I'm sympathetic to concerns about people using "Mormon Church" when that's not the Church's name. And I like the Church's crazy-long name, which for all its high character count, does a really concise job of making some core theological claims.

Trying to avoid all uses of the word Mormon to achieve that end feels a little bit like the time we got mice in our basement and my wife asked what I thought we should do about it and I suggested nuclear weapons.
But hey, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

That said, I don't know if I can make it in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints without also being a Mormon a lot of the time.

The Church's full name carries a certain weight . That can be beautiful, but it can also feel stiff. It's like formal clothing: dressing a certain way for certain occasions can set them apart, but dressing up all the time would be exhausting for many of us.

Mormon, for me, is like wearing jeans. It's familiar. It's sturdy.
I'm not ready to put that in the closet forever.

As a teenager, I needed it. People had different values and norms than I did. I needed I quick, accessible way to explain that.

"I can't; I'm Mormon," works for that.
"I cannot, for I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" would not have worked for me.

I also like Mormonism.

I've been thinking lately there's a distinction for me between the gospel of Jesus Christ--which is made of divine truth I try to grasp in my slippery mortal hands--and Mormonism, which is just a big pile of everything people in my tradition have said, imagined, speculated, done.

I love Mormonism as an imaginationscape. I know it's not all pure divine truth, but playing in Mormon ideas and imagery has let me fall into the divine again and again.

So today I'm going to recommend some very Mormon books. Maybe they'll also speak to people who see themselves primarily as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Maybe they're more for wandering mystics who fell in love with Mormonism like me.

Come, friends, and see.

The first is the Garden of Enid by @ScottHales80. I watched it unfold on Tumblr. You can read it as two books now in print:
gregkofford.com/collections/sc…
gregkofford.com/collections/sc…

The subtitle, "Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl," pretty much sums up the book. Enid is weird and Mormon. Weirdly Mormon. Mormonly weird.

She lives both in the embrace and in tension with her community. And not necessarily in the ways people talk about when they're trying to sound sophisticated.

Enid's most important relationships with other Mormons: her mom and ward members. But she doesn't know how to perform idealized Mormonness.
Some people may not be inclined to do so. Enid does not seem capable.

And she improvises. It's like she's walking this tightrope where alienation and despair are always around her. And she gets them, they feel familiar and real and maybe even comfortable, but she's not willing to go there yet.
She's going to walk this narrow path through the air.

She's developed this quirky, sometimes dark, sense of humor. She's drawn toward the people around her but also constantly marks her distance from them.
Is she trying to guard herself? Is she trying to guard them?

Her safest friends are dead people. She talks with Joseph Smith, Eliza R. Snow.
With the snarky Egyptian mummy who waited for Osiris until he wound up in Kirtland.

She finds solace in the Mormon imagination, envisioning herself zipping through space as an unorganized intelligence. Wondered if an embodied God lies awake at night thinking of us.

And slowly, misstep by step, crisis to crisis, she creeps closer to the people around her.

And it's in that frightened, tentative openness toward others that the gospel of Jesus Christ hits her.
Scott never calls it out. Never lets you feel like a lesson is descending. But charity and grace rise like a tide and carry Enid and you.

I love these books intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.
The technique is really interesting, too. I don't know anyone else in Mormon comics who's played with frame lines in quite the way Scott sometimes does.

Whatever alchemy of craft and philosophy and heart was involved, Enid delivers.
People who didn't check the about tab on the page used to write her emails, offer encouragement, a listening ear. She felt that real.

At the same time, no one else has been as funny sorting through the inside baseball of obscure Mormon history.

Oh, man. I got to work soon. But let me tell you also about Steven Peck (@SciHoroscope).

If you haven't read any of Steve's stuff, I'd recommend starting with A Short Stay in Hell.
amazon.com/Short-Stay-Hel…
It's mindbending and terrifying and I love it.

BUT it's not today's recommendation because it's not that Mormon. It's a book about quantifying the near infinite. Peck could have used a protagonist from another faith and the book would have worked like 97% as well.

No, the book I'm putting on my Mormon Lit list is "Wandering Realities," his short story collection.
amazon.com/Wandering-Real…

Do not start with the first story in this book. Do not start with the last story. They represent the edges of his rhetorical range, and I want you to start in the middle.
Start wherever you feel like in the middle.

Oh, wait! Just checked the table of contents and I lied. It's the second story and the second to last story ("Let The Mountain Tremble, for Adoniha Has Fallen" and "The Gift of the Kings Jeweler") that are the rhetorical edges.

The first story, "Avek, Who Is Distributed" works great as a starting point.
It's about a distributed artificial intelligence who wants to be baptized but doesn't have a body.

You might also start with a story like "The Captain Makes a Friend on the Day His Cravings and Listings Disappear," about what temple work looks like to a pirate in the spirit world. Or "When the Bishop Started Killing Dogs," which is about service.

There are stories here about time travel, and a zombie apocalypse, and a schism between the Churches on earth and Mars, about the origin of Liahona, and the pinewood derby.
As the sages say about the Talmud, "turn it and turn it for everything is in it."

The tone and style are unpretentious and unassuming. They openly acknowledge they're made up, assembled like junk art out of the available floating salvage of our culture. But they get at the lived experience of religion in ways that are engaging and sometimes profound.

The Garden of Enid and Wandering Realities are very *Mormon* Literature.
When suits itch and bind, Steve and Scott give us blue jeans. Religion you can put on, wear to a movie.
It's also religion you can count on when you feel like you're walking a tightrope.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, tied to it by covenant in both its aspirational and actual forms.
That can be exhilarating. That can be exhausting.

I rely on the vast storehouse of Mormonism to make it through when I need to take a deep breath of fresh insight. And I'm grateful for distinctly Mormon literature that shakes, stirs, and remixes elements of that storehouse to help me drink wisdom and grace.

Time's a little more than up. I'll keep this thread going later. But thanks again for listening. And enjoy the books.

Continuing my ongoing thread of Mormon Lit recommendations.
Recap: Third Wheel, Bound on Earth, Folk of the Fringe, The Garden of Enid, Wandering Realities.

Just noticed that all five were written by people who spent time working days jobs funded by the Church: three with Church History, one for the Ensign, and one at BYU.
Whether it's the Church fostering talent or hiring talent, it's interesting to think about.

I wrote a blog post once looking into the literary production from four religious communities with origins in the 19th century: Mormons, Baha'is, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Grateful for the friendliness to creative work in my community.

I know it's a bit unusual to compare our faith to its historic age cohort. We like to weigh our literary output against Catholics and Jews instead.
Maybe that's because they're more visible so it's easier to compare. Maybe it's also because Mormonism feels older than it is?

Gabriel González Núñez is a writer whose work helps the faith feel out of its apparent time. If you read Spanish or can get someone to help you with it, I highly recommend his Estampas del Libro de Mormón:
amazon.com/Estampas-del-L…

The book consists of lyrical first-person character sketches depicting different Book of Mormon figures: some major, some minor. I really loved the piece on Chemish.

OK: here's how I'd describe it. You know how in Dumbledore office in Harry Potter, there are portraits of all the past headmasters?
It's like that for Book of Mormon prophets.

There's movement, characterization, and color in these images. And because they sketches are impressively concise individually, the book is able to cover a lot of ground.

@ScottHales80 told me once that growing up, he loved history because the dead make good friends. They can be there for you in interesting ways that the living can't. Gonzalez's book is a valuable reminder of the invisible hosts we have unique access to.

As someone who would like to produce good writing about the Book of Mormon someday, I appreciate writers who are already working with that terrain.

Speaking of the dead: my next recommendation is Carla Kelly's My Loving Vigil Keeping.
amazon.com/Loving-Vigil-K…

It's set at the turn of the century (literally--pretty sure it starts in 1899 and the climax is definitely in 1900), with scenes in Salt Lake and Provo, but the bulk of the action in the mining town of Scofield, Utah.

Lots of writers use the past as set dressing when convenient without trying to understand it or infuse their stories with it in any meaningful way.
Not Carla Kelly. If you want a sense of what Mormon Utah was like in 1900, this is a great introduction.

You briefly see the more affluent and somewhat cosmopolitan elite of Salt Lake at a time when many of them still grew up as poor immigrants. You also see plenty of poor immigrants: Welsh Mormon miners and their Finnish Lutheran immigrant neighbors.

I really like the scenes at Church, which feel both familiar and distinct in the way wards handle things from callings to the sacrament.
Seeing fellow Saints worship in a different way and recognizing that can be just fine is a reminder we need. This book provides it as texture.

The romance genre it fits into is one of the few genres where there's a solid Mormon market. The reliability of that audience means that Kelly can create a narrative where faith suffuses the background without the book being about faith.

The book, like much of the romance genre, is about finding yourself and your place in the world. As a mixed race kid, I really enjoyed reading about a girl who is half-Greek at a time when that's wildly exotic finding her place in a multicultural immigrant Mormonism.

My kids keep asking me questions about math and astronomy and I am starting to wonder what they're planning, so I'm going to have to stay focused and speed up if I'm going to finish before they launch a rocket or something.
Parenting is scary, guys! ;)

OK. Rapid fire now. I like Merrijane Rice's Messages on the Water:
amazon.com/Messages-Water…

She's been a frequent Mormon Lit Blitz finalist and deals with the everyday demands of discipleship in a lot of her poetry. There are turns at the end of these poems that knock you out of the everyday and toward some kind of other level of experience.
Great stuff.

I haven't mentioned an essay collection yet, so I'll admit to you that my favorite is Carlfred Broderick's My Parents Married on a Dare:
amazon.com/My-Parents-Mar…

My grandparents used to give that to returned missionaries from their mission when they got married. I hope none of them were offended. :)

Broderick is often funny, but is really straight with you. A lot of the images from that book have stuck with me for years.
My first finished Mormon play was a telling of a story he tells in the collection's standout piece, "The Uses of Adversity."

I also want to recommend Kristen D. Randle's YA novel Slumming.
amazon.com/Slumming-Krist…
Two different people have told me they had a hard time getting into it at the beginning because you're in the point of view of a character who clearly needs her point of view widened.

For me, though, the book is totally worth taking the time to get into. And it's very Mormon.

I like that the main characters are the Mormons in their grade. Being in a community where you're part of a small minority is the most common Mormon experience and doesn't come up nearly enough in our fiction.

I also love that in addition to having Mormon main characters, the book deals with very Mormon questions. It's about three kids trying to reach out and serve--each learning somehow through the experience that the world is complicated in ways that break our frameworks.

In conclusion:
Religion is good only if we tend it. Imagination can be help weed out the self-importance and rigidity that so easily creep in when you're trying to be righteous.

I believe in seeking wisdom out of the best books.
My experience is that many of those books are not manuals, but parables. Experiments in thought and feeling that challenge us our own limited frameworks to grow, evolve, improve.

I love all kinds of books in this world, but I do feel privileged to be able to hear from some writers who speak in my own native language: about my people, using allusions to our shared heritage.

Maybe it's commercial suicide, but I've spent a lot of my own energy writing in the Mormon imaginationscape.

Odds are that if you're still listening to me, you've already run into my books, but in case you haven't, here's a quick list of what you can find:

There's a novel and two poetry collections you can find on my Amazon author page:
amazon.com/James-Goldberg…

The Five Books of Jesus (free on Kindle now through Christmas) is a novelization of the gospels. It's not overtly Mormon, but having spent time with the Joseph Smith Papers and watching a movement's birth was definitely a big influence.

Let Me Drown with Moses has a lot of poems about Mormon belief and history.
There's a whole section about the Provo War, fought between early settlers in Utah Valley and the local Ute band. Hard history I tried to digest.

There's another section that touches on random different moments in our whole history. Joseph Smith Senior's drinking. The Third Convention schism in Mexico. The more or less present.

I always get really excited when I meet someone who has read that book.

My most recent collection is Phoenix Song.
I don't know what to tell you about it. It's still so recent.

Let me try anyway.
It's about being burned down and rising from the ashes. It's about cancer and our country and my ward and the beauty of subtle virtues and also the apocalypse.

But then again, everything I write seems to end up a little bit about the apocalypse, so maybe that's not helpful as description.

I used to write a lot of short plays and really should collect them somewhere but have never gotten around to it. One ended up in Stephen Carter (@sunstoneed)'s collection The Best of Mormonism: 2009.
amazon.com/Best-Mormonism…

Two and an essay are in Davey Morrison's "Out of the Mount: 19 from New Play Project."
amazon.com/Out-Mount-New-…

I should gather up a bibliography of my short work with links but one Mormon piece I was feeling nostalgic about recently is "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg":
mormonartist.net/pdf/issueC1/is…

Another piece of mine--a review of the Church History Museum's avant garde wing--is forthcoming in @irreantum when its relaunch launches in the early months of the coming year.

Oh, and I should link to two more pieces Stephen Carter was gracious enough to publish: "Remember the Revolution" and "Singer and Saint: An Interview with Jeevan Sidhu."
sunstonemagazine.com/remember-the-r…
sunstonemagazine.com/singer-and-sai…

I am not sure, reflecting on the various roles of revolutionary, saint, and singer, which one I am supposed to be.
Guess I'll have to make due with all three.
Love to you, my brothers/sisters/comrades, who strive to do the same.