Today, Exponent II has two big announcements!  We are unveiling our exciting new webdesign, lovingly created by our Exponent sister of many hats, Jana.  And, we’re thrilled to publish our first issue since Winter 2009.

Our latest issue is available for free at our new website and contains articles from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an excerpt from an 1881 issue of The Woman’s Exponent, and a tribute to our friend, Linda Sillitoe.  Also, read personal essays on finding spiritual strength through other religious traditions, being inactive and still loving the Church, and how to educate others about sexual abuse.

Exponent II was first published in 1974 and has been a voice for Mormon women for over 30 years. The new ExponentII.org allows you to access the latest online copy for free (information on how to order your very own hard copy will be forthcoming), and has informative links on: our history, our annual retreat in New England, The Exponent Blog, request for submissions, and prior issues of the paper.

We welcome submissions to Exponent II on all topics relating to the diverse experiences of Mormon women. To submit your work, please send us an email at exponentii editor at gmail dot com.

Reminder: Today is the last day for submissions that will be read by our Readers’ Committee over the summer. The next round of submissions are due September 13th.

**Exponent II’s Summer 2010 Issue’s cover art by Tessa Lindsey

After a publication hiatus and the naming of new co-editors, Aimee Hickman and Emily Clyde Curtis, Exponent II’s Summer issue is slated for publication this June.  We’re now looking for personal essays, poetry, book reviews, fiction, art and other writing for upcoming issues including our next due out in the fall.

Please submit pieces by June 15, 2010 to exponentiieditor@gmail.com.  Suggested (but flexible) length of submissions is between 1,000 and 3,000 words.

Can’t think of what to write about?  Consider some of these ideas:

Upcoming Topics
a.  My Spirituality and My Passion: How has your spirituality helped you to discover a passion you pursue outside of the Church?  Does the statement “the glory of God is intelligence” (D&C 93:36) influence you in your studies?  Have you comforted those that stand in need of comfort according to the baptismal covenant in Mosiah 18:9?  Has the Word of Wisdom, a principle with a promise, encouraged you to look more deeply at your eating practices?
b. Raised Mormon: What are your reflections on the unique experiences of a Mormon upbringing?
c. Interfaith Practices: How have you incorporated non-LDS religious practices into your spiritual life?  How have they helped you grow?
d. Mother’s Day:  What are your experiences with this infamous holiday?  Do you love it?  Hate it?  Why? 

Ongoing Features
a.  Global Zion: A new column featuring essays and articles related to the experience of Mormonism outside of the United States.  We’d love to hear your experiences.
b. Sister Speak: Mormon women ask each other for advice in this long-standing column.  See Sister Speak editor Caroline Kline’s question for the June issue and watch for Fall’s question on the blog next month or write to Caroline with a question of your own.
c.  Awakenings: This new feature asks women to capture moments in their lives where they discover a new part of themselves or the world around them. The category of awakening can include many types of experiences: social, religious, feminist, personal, etc.

Preferred formats for submission are Microsoft Word (.doc) or rich-text-format (.rtf).

Upon receipt of writing, authors will be notified via email about when they can expect to hear back from us once submissions have gone through our Readers Committee.

Print submissions may be mailed to Aimee Hickman, 2035 Park Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217

We’re looking forward to reading your work soon!
The Exponent II Board and Editorial Staff

When it comes to writing, I am an Oliver Cowdery. I’ve got a few smarts and an education. I can write my way out of a paper bag. But when compared with Joseph Smith, I’m nothing special. You remember that after acting as Joseph’s scribe for a while, Oliver wanted his own chance at translating the Book of Mormon. If he was at all like me, he likely envied Joseph’s ability to enter into the ecstatic muse of translation, and wanted his own taste. So he managed to get permission from the Lord to do some translation, but when he tried his hand at it, he failed. Why? According to Doctrine and Covenants 9, Oliver hadn’t prepared well enough. “You have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me,” reads the revelation.

This verse encapsulates my many early years of attempted writing. I would get an idea that I thought had some potential and sit down to write. I had great faith that the muse would descend upon me and push words out of my fingertips. But it never worked. Never. I would frequently find my idea dried up and dead by the end of a single page. A narrative brick wall blocking my way.

It soon became painfully clear that I was in no way a natural born storyteller. But I’m a persistent little cuss, and I decided to learn how stories work the same way a mechanic learns how an engine works, or a doctor the human body. So what follows are the observations of one who had to learn story structure from the ground up. I’m like an autistic person who learns to read the emotions of others only through mapping the human face. I find the wheels and gears, the organs and veins of stories and watch them work.

I’ve never been very good at talking about what I’ve learned. People often accuse me of pushing formulaic storytelling. But what I try to present is a set of principles. These principles, far from fettering me, have unleashed my creative abilities. They’re like launching pads, booster rockets, and navigation systems, helping me chart a course. I know that many people believe that outlining a story will neuter the creative process. That the Muse will not descend on too tidy a brain. And this may well be the case for some writers. Like Joseph Smith, some people might just have the right wiring for ecstatic storytelling. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, these people are few and far between. I think the rest of us can enhance our storytelling abilities with a bit of planning.

For me, planning is the enjoyable creative work that precedes any complex endeavor. It resides in the architect who labors to draft the plans for a magnificent building.  I enjoy crafting the mainspring of a story and arranging the gears around it to achieve maximum effect. I enjoy sculpting and articulating the bones so that when they are covered with flesh, the body can move uninhibited. And then, when writing time comes, I find myself in possession of extra creative energy that I can pour into the drawing of characters, precise word choice, and apt metaphors because part of my brain isn’t worried about what will happen next in the story. I never hit dead ends. And often, in the thick of writing, I stumble across exciting ways to improve on the story. My own little bits of ecstasy.

So, with that introduction, I’ll talk about a few elements that I use as I prepare a story or a personal essay. The fist few principles will likely strike you as elementary, but I hope my formulation of their interaction will be helpful.

The most basic thing people look for in a story, even if they are not aware of it, is character change. Take a look at great literature and, with the exception of comedies, you will find that the main character goes through a mighty change, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Think of Henry V, or Bilbo Baggins, or Frank Miller. In this way, my approach to crafting a story is very character driven. The ways of coming up with a character are numerous. You likely have a way that works for you. When I’ve deveopled a character, and maybe even a situation, I appreciate having methods of plumbing the character’s depths, of finding his or her weaknesses and strengths, and of testing his or her character.

The first principle that has allowed me to do this is called a goal.

The Goal

The goal is the basic propellant of a story. It’s like the gas you put in a car. If the character has a small goal, any potential change will also be small. A large goal will increase the potential for change and therefore the power of the story. Now when I say small goal or large goal, I’m not necessarily talking in Hollywood terms. Taking down an earth-destroying super villain verses trying to get a bicycle back doesn’t have to equal big and small. A large goal is one that demands much from a character’s emotional and relational resources.

Principle 2: Opposition.

Along with the goal comes the need for antagonism: someone, or something, that opposes your character’s reaching of the goal. Again, you don’t need to think of opposition in Hollywood terms. A good antagonist can be the indifference of a large city or the prejudices of a small town. It can be the protagonist’s own fears, or a family tradition, or a piece of music. What you need is something or someone to resist your character’s attempts at the goal. Why do you need this resistance? Because otherwise your character will not struggle and will not change.

As the story goes along, the opposition should get stronger. There’s not much need for this principle in short stories where often there is room for only a single struggle, but in longer works, I have found it to be essential. Once you’ve tested a character to an intensity of 3, the character has demonstrated that he or she can also overcome opposition of intensity 2. But an intensity of 5 has yet to be attempted. The higher intensity the opposition is, the more powerful the story.

The story of a character with a goal who encounters opposition over a period of time looks kind of like the schema below; a series of goal attempts by the protagonist that result in larger and larger conflicts with the antagonist:

But this is the realm of the Saturday morning cartoon or the superhero movie. The goal merely tests the protagonist’s strength, or cleverness, or ammunition. The only thing the character needs to succeed is more of something than the opposition. But we’re here to talk about literary writing. In my definition, literary writing goes beyond the goal, heading into the dramatic need.

The Dramatic Need

The dramatic need is something in the protagonist that needs to change. The change is often a spiritual or moral one that strikes at the core of the protagonist’s life. As with the goal, the more sacrifice it takes for the character to achieve the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

It is often difficult to build a full-bodied dramatic need into a short story simply because there is so little time to make the change seem real. Think of half-hour sitcoms where a character says, “Oh, I see now that I was being insensitive. I will change.” We are rarely moved by such declarations simply because we don’t believe the change really occurred. This is why so many short stories that work have as their climax a character first glimpsing the terrifying notion of change, or suffering under the weight of consequence brought on by their brokenness.

If you build this into the schema, you’ll see that the dramatic need is often in direct conflict with the goal.

This is because goals are illusory. They rarely address the soul, though they often act as a metaphor for the dramatic need. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all these things shall be added unto you.” The Buddha said that is it our desires that bind us.

I’m in the middle of watching the HBO television series, The Sopranos, many of the episodes are excellent examples of literary writing: the characters have compelling goals that are deftly balanced by their dramatic needs. Tony Soprano, for example, learns at the beginning of the first season that his deepest fear is that his position as a mob boss will strip him of his family. In one episode, he and his daughter are touring New England colleges. On the way, she confronts him with her evidence that he has ties to the mob, and he is semi-truthful with her. In return, she is truthful with him about her recent use of speed. “We have that kind of relationship, right?” she asks. “Where we can be honest with each other?” Tony wants that relationship really bad. His family means a lot to him.

The problem is, Tony spots a man who used to be a member of his father’s gang. The man had assisted the law in setting up a sting that had killed some of Tony’s friends and sent his father to jail. He is rightly angry with the man. He also takes his oath to his mob very seriously and knows it is his duty to off the man for his crime against the organization. He also wants to avenge his dead. His goal for the episode is to make sure this man is who he thinks he is, and take him down. But his daughter keeps catching him in incriminating situations: using a pay phone when his hotel room phone works fine, leaving the room in the early morning, coming home with mud on his shoes and lacerations on his hands. Their new-found honesty becomes untenable. How is he supposed to tell her that he’s tracking down a man so he can kill him? How can he not track this man down and kill him?

Tony reaches his goal in the end. He positively identifies the traitor and kills him. But his relationship with his daughter crumbles. He can’t be honest with her and she can tell. He’s losing his family, just as he had feared.

This ending is compelling because the goal and the dramatic need are deeply at odds. This is often the case with good literature. The more tension exists between the goal and the dramatic need, the more powerful the story is.

The basic structure of a drama is that a character meets his or her dramatic need. The basic structure of a tragedy is that the character doesn’t meet his or her dramatic need, often because he or she reaches his or her goal.  The basic structure of a comedy is that the character changes only minimally, if at all.

I found it interesting to apply these principles to the recent, highly successful move Avatar. I enjoyed the movie—actually watched it twice, which I rarely do—but I was disappointed by the story. The basic idea is that a crippled Marine named Jake becomes part of a program that places him inhabit an alien body. His mission is to find a way to convince a tribe of aliens to relocate so humans can mine a vein of valuable ore located beneath their village. The story goes along fine for the first act: Jake tries to become a part of the tribe, meeting opposition along the way. Then he meets larger opposition in the humans who are willing to bring their superior technology and firepower to bear on the village. There are goals a plenty, and there is also a stab made at a dramatic need. Jake does, after all, forsake his own people for the aliens. That seems like quite a change, and the movie tries to give it weight at the end when Jake’s human nemesis says, “How does it feel to betray your own kind?” However, how much did Jake have to sacrifice in order to join the alien culture? The movie makes it very clear that there is nothing Jake wants in the human world. He has no legs there; he has no community or family. The humans that surround him are ruthless, unfeeling moneygrubbers. On the other hand, there’s this great family-oriented race of blue-skinned supermodels who fly around on cool winged reptiles. Where’s the sacrifice? Had the story provided Jake with some compelling reasons for staying with the humans, the story would have been more powerful because then Jake would have had to sacrifice. And sacrifice is the foundation of a powerful story.

It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times in the last two months. I’ve had a lot of time to ask myself questions because I am the primary caretaker of the world’s most beautiful baby girl. How does the person inside the Bear in the Big Blue House costume see? Is it time for mom to come home, yet? Have I really needed to pee for four hours now? When was my last shower?

Taking care of my baby has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, but there is no doubt that my work has suffered. I used to sit down at my desk at 8 a.m. when my family went out the door and work straight until they returned at 4. It was a lovely, meditative life. I had time to do extra projects on the side. I was PRODUCTIVE.

Then came the world’s most beautiful baby. Now I spend my waking hours building block towers for smashing, watching puppets sing about oral hygiene, picking raisins and cheerios off the floor, and playing with my baby. Now I start work at about 6:30 p.m. And go till 2 a.m. My brain doesn’t function as well then, and I can’t crank up my tunes. I have zero time for side projects.

At first I tried to work while baby was around, but the laptop buttons are an irresistible siren to her. It was too much of an effort to get the laptop open and start something that needs as much focused attention as editing knowing that I would be interupted. I found myself getting irritable, being caught between baby and work.

I’m the oldest of nine children: I know that babies grow up fast. So I decided to dump work and just play with baby. It was a good idea. I’ve been able to savor her babyhood, which I will never get another chance to do.

But I had no time for doing my own writing and it really started wearing on me. Would I not have a creative outlet for another four years when baby went off to school? Would I still be sane by then?

I hear generations of women heaving an exasperated sigh :women who spent 30 years in my same position without any respite on the horizon. What would they do to me if they found out that my life has been given back to me through the miracle of a cell phone?

I was going to get the free cell phone because I pride myself in staying aloof from our consumerist, toy-obsessed culture. But then I saw that some phones come with a qwerty keyboard, and the gears started to turn. I got the tough phone, the phone with a keyboard my fat thumbs could navigate, the one with the GPS I still haven’t learned how to use.

I have since become an avid Facebook user, a dedicated New York Times reader, and — yes indeed — a writer of short stories.

At first, I thought the cell phone would only be good for outlining and planning, and it worked very well in that capacity. But the boredom of watching that Bear in the Big Blue House episode one more time drove me to try my thumb at composing. And by gum, it works!

I’ve started to realize that the thumb board, which allows me to type at about a tenth of the speed I can type on a full-size keyboard, is actually well suited to my composing speed. When it comes to fiction, words don’t surface very for me quickly, and I hate it when my inner editor makes me focus more on what I should have written rather than what I am actually writing. The thumb board seems to give me permission to just keep plodding along. And the words scroll up out of the screen quickly. Out of sight, out of mind.

A week or so ago, I finished my first cell phone tome. I figure I wrote about 500 words a day, which is 500 more words a day than I used to write.  Admittedly, I still have to revise on my computer, but I’m not complaining. I’ve got my writing life back.

This post brought to you by my Nokia E71.

I admit that it took a bit of time for me to get into it. The first segment was a telling of the oft-repeated story of the shootings in an Amish school and the community’s seemingly instantaneous forgiveness of the perpetrator. Then the movie headed into the story of a woman who managed to live a happy life despite an abusive childhood and being infected with HIV. I can’t remember much about that segment.

But the next two segments really intrigued me. The first dealt with Terri Jentz, the author of Strange Piece of Paradise, who survived a brutal, anonymous attack. After the attack, she lived through 15 years of torpor and depression. During that time, when someone would ask her about her feelings about her attacker, she would say, “Oh, I’m above that. I’ve forgiven him.” It wasn’t until she started to dig into her case, trying to track her attacker down, that she came alive again. She says near the end of the segment that her 15 years of “forgiveness” were unhealthy for her.

The last segment was about Katherine Ann Power who, during an armed bank robbery to get money to support her Vietnam War protest, was complicit in the killing of a police officer. She managed to evade the law for 23 years, and probably would have done so indefinitely, except that, being overwhelmed by her conscience, she finally turned herself in.

As Whitney told us before the screening, the meaning of forgiveness is under intense debate right now. But I saw an interesting definition arising from these stories. It’s best illustrated with a scene from the movie Stranger than Fiction, where Will Ferrell’s character realizes that he is a character in an in-progress novel. In the middle of the movie, Ferrell decides that if he remains immobile, he can derail the plot and get his life back. So he sits in a chair for hours until his apartment wall is suddenly knocked in by a crane. The plot has come to get him. After that, he becomes a very active main character, tracking down the author and taking control of his story.

As Frances Menlove wrote in the most recent issue of Sunstone, “We all know that the universe isn’t made of atoms; it is made of stories.” Each woman spent a lot of time hiding from her life story. The woman infected with HIV turned to addictive behavior to avoid dealing with her life’s plot points. Jentz pretended that a major character in her life’s story didn’t matter. Power, like Ferrell, hid from the sad stories she had set in motion. They were passive main characters, letting other forces run their lives. And, of course, if you relinquish the story of your life, your soul is bound to start fading. Life seemed to regain richness and meaning when the women actively re-entered their stories.

So perhaps forgiveness is when you become an active protagonist in your life story. It’s when you say, “Here are the pieces of my story. I’m not going to ignore them. I’m going to make something new out of them.”

Prizes: A total of $450 will be shared among the winning entries.

Rules:

1. Up to three entries may be submitted by a single author. Five copies of each entry must be delivered (or postmarked) to Sunstone by 15 February 2010. Entries will not be returned. A $5 fee must accompany each entry.

2. Each essay must be typed, double-spaced, on one side of white paper and be stapled in the upper left corner. All essays must be 3500 words or fewer. The author’s name should not appear on any page of the essay.

3. Each entry must be accompanied by a cover letter that states the essay’s title and the author’s name, mailing address, email address, and telephone number. Each cover letter must be signed and attest that the entry is the author’s work, that it has not been previously published, that it is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere, will not be submitted to other forums until after the contest, and that, if the entry wins, Sunstone magazine has one-time, first-publication rights.

Sunstone

England Essay Contest

343 North Third West

Salt Lake City, Utah 84103–1215

For a long time now, Dialogue has subdivided the prose in each issue into  Articles and Essays, Personal Voices,  and Fiction.  These divisions are  strained by current submissions.

The division between Articles and Essays always seemed pretty nebulous to me–”Articles” is, I think, meant to signify academicishness, while “Essays” are, presumably, thinky but not necessarily heavily footnoted.  But since most academics younger than 40 (50?) don’t feel the need to scrupulously avoid the first person or affect the semblance of “objectivity” that once characterized scholarly writing, and since  postmodern theoretical frameworks in many disciplines actually encourage the self-conscious articulation of one’s subject position, a good deal of academic writing seems less formal and more “Essay”istic than in decades past.  Still, since these two categories have been lumped together for a long time, it’s easy to just leave them that way, without too much fretting about what’s an article and what’s an essay.

The distinctions between “Personal Voices” and “Fiction” are blurred by the newish category (is it a genre yet, or still?) of “creative nonfiction.”  There is, of course, a whole (sub)genre of writing devoted to the exploration of what creative nonfiction is, but this is the sort of thing that even someone who managed to tolerate an entire graduate seminar on the definition of postmodernism (and its discontents), can hardly wade through for more than a few dozen pages without starting to mutter things like “ivory tower”, “navel gazing”, “job security for English majors”  under her breath.  If pressed for a shorthand definition, I would say that “creative nonfiction” organizes itself around a narrative sequence, where a personal essay grows out of the exploration of an idea or a theme.  [I know that's not a terribly satisfying definition, and I hope it will lead to plenty of  interesting quibbling in the comments].

So far, I’ve lumped one creative non-fiction piece in with the fiction, and put one into Personal Voices, which used to mean “Personal Essays.”   But the Table of Contents is not really the problem, of course–such practical issues of categorization are easily managed.  What troubles me is that I think Creative Nonfiction may eventually edge out Personal Essays altogether, and Mormons will join the rest of the world in creating slightly detached, ironic memoirs, heartbreaking works of staggering genius, and non-fiction that is so “creative” as to create epic scandals on Oprah.

This, it seems to me, would be a terrible loss.  My sentiment may be merely the midlife nostalgia of  someone whose early intellectual life was nurtured by Eugene England, Laurel Ulrich, Marden Clark, Louise Plummer, Elouise Bell and other mid-20th-century Mormons who found the personal essay form apt for the function of exploring the tangled intersections of their own thoughts with Mormon theology and culture, and, in essaying those heights and depths, laid down a thin golden thread for me to follow home after venturing into my own wildernesses.  Certainly Mormon artists and thinkers have used other genres to accomplish some of the same work–there were the novelists of the 1940s, historians and biographers whose narratives of the Mormon past took on the contours of a founding epic (or myth, if the word can be tolerated), poets and hymnodists who made both art and theology, folklorists and storytellers, and always autobiographers and journal-keepers.  One could argue, in fact, that the sine qua non of modern Mormonism, Joseph Smith’s account of the First Vision, was itself a work of creative non-fiction, and that the proliferation of that genre is thus wholly appropriate and ought to be welcomed as quintessentially Mormon.

And still, I want to argue that we need the Mormon personal essay, for another couple of decades, at least.  It is an important mode of resistance against the tropes of post-post-modernism:  irony,  satire, parody,  snark.  We like our memoirs biting–David Sedaris vivisecting his family for our amusement, Augusten Burroughs mining addiction and ruin for dark comedy, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Marya Hornbacher making depression and eating disorders into lurid spectacle.  Always, the narrative “I” is disconnected–the story is always in the past tense.  Wherever these authors were then, they are not now–now they are on book tours (which will later be cynically described and illustrated with sketches of amusingly pathetic audience members), allowing readers a faux-intimacy with a literary version of their past selves.  Sincerity has somehow come to be seen as antithetical to the “authenticity”  of such rehearsals.  And Mormonism could lend itself perfectly to the wry, sardonic-but-affectionate tone of the memoir/sketch/vaguely parodic short story.  What could be better, funnier, more authentic then poking a little fun at your own religious convictions and practice?  How better to show that Mormons are not weird, that we are good Americans, that we get the jokes in Big Love, too, and ought to be allowed to hang out with the cool kids now?  Maybe we could even get Ira Glass to do one story where the Mormon character is not a bigot or a rube!

But we are weird.  We believe (or wish we could) in angels, gold plates, prophets in bad suits and conservative ties, sending our children to faraway places to do that most unhip thing of all–proselyting!  We spend three hours (!) every week talking didactically [I would say sermonizing, except that "sermon" implies a liveliness and polish we eschew in favor of unskilled sincerity] about our doctrine, debating the significance of grammatical errors in holy writ, exhorting each other to repentance, enduring “special musical numbers”  [seriously, how could you possibly parody something that unironically calls itself "special"?], organizing do-good-y projects of all sorts, testifying in tearful, clumsy words and acts of pure grace.  We are earnest.

And so is the personal essay–it’s not properly “authentic”, because the author deigns to invite the reader into the creative thicket with her.  The invitation only works when it is sincere, when the author cares about the reader, recognizes that author-ity is always a gift, whether by the laying on of hands or of eyes and reading glasses.  Creative nonfiction can be “truth…independent in that sphere where [the author] has placed it.”  If a memoir falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether or not anyone hears it–its narrative is still “true.”  Not so the essay–it is meaningful only in community, where two or three (well, at least two–a writer and a reader) are gathered.   It is tentative, pensive, incomplete, partial; it believes in and relies on that which is yet to be revealed. [Like blog posts by certain writers, it may overuse the em-dash, the semi-colon, and the parenthetical aside].  It works only when it is earnest, unabashed, when the writer is willing not only to confess her indiscretions, but to abandon discretion and announce her convictions as well as questioning them.  Belief and hope are terribly out of fashion just now, and look to be so for a few years yet, and that is why Mormon literature needs a literary form that allows us to “believe all things, …hope all things,”  to “seek after” things that are true and lovely, not from the artist’s garret or the therapist’s couch or the book tour lectern, not in the safety of the ironic past tense, but in the earnest, present willingness to subjugate narrative authority for the sake of communal pursuit of ideas.

Call For Papers
The Association for Mormon Letters announces that our Annual Meeting will be held on Saturday, February 27th on the campus of Utah Valley University. The theme of the Meeting is “One Eternal Round: Mormon Literature Past, Present, and Future.” We welcome submissions on any topic relating to Mormon literature, film, or drama. Please submit a short (2 to 3 paragraph) abstract of your paper proposal to Boyd Petersen, boyd.petersen@uvu.edu or to Eric Samuelsen, eric_samuelsen@byu.edu, on or before February 1, 2010.

AML Blog
The AML’s new blog, Dawning of a Brighter Day, has just launched. Permabloggers include Gideon Burton, Margaret Blair Young, Rachel Nunes, Chris Bigelow and more. It should be a great new place for conversations about Mormon literature.

Fiction:
Cara Diaconoff, “I’ll Be a Stranger to You,” Vol. 10 No. 2
Orson Scott Card, “The Elephants of Poznan,” Vol. 11 Nos. 1 & 2
Darin Cozzens, “The Treading of Lesser Cattle,” Vol. 11 Nos. 1 & 2

Creative Nonfiction:
Jaren Watson, “Of the Drowned,” Vol. 11 Nos. 1 & 2

Poetry:
Donnell Hunter, “Children of Owl,” Vol. 10 No. 2
Doug Talley, “Finding Place,” Vol. 11 Nos. 1 & 2

Congratulations to the nominees!

Also, our Spring/ Fall double issue (Vol. 11 Nos. 1 & 2) is still at the printer but will be mailed out within the next week or two. If you haven’t subscribed yet, remember that if you subscribe or renew your subscription during the month of November, you will also receive a complimentary copy of the excellent anthology The Best of Mormonism. You still have a few more days, so don’t miss this opportunity.

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

Angela Hallstrom
editor, Irreantum