IRREANTUM

EXPLORING MORMON LITERATURE

MAGAZINE OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR MORMON LETTERS

AUTUMN 2003 • $4.00

Jack Harrell, author

Also featuring Kris Bluth, Samuel Brown, Louisa Wray Dalton,
Eugene England, Brian Evenson, John Fulton,
Angela Hallstrom, Lorraine Jeffrey, Keith Moore,
Coke Newell, Jana Bouck Remy, and Margaret Young
Poetry, reviews, literary news, and more
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 IRREANTUM
Autumn 2003 • Volume 5, Number 3
C O N T
Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 20 in 1953, 70 Next Week, Kris Bluth . . . . . . 55
AML News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Interviews
Jack Harrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
John Fulton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Eugene England’s Last Interview,
Louisa Wray Dalton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Novel Excerpts
Vernal Promises, Jack Harrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
More Than Enough, John Fulton . . . . . . . . . . 23
Stories
Toaster Road, Coke Newell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Trying, Angela Hallstrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Neighbors, Brian Evenson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Screenplay Excerpt
Haun’s Mill, Coke Newell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Essays
Neglected Stories Brought to Life:
A Report on the Documentary Film
Eleventh Hour Laborers,
Margaret Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Put Your Gun Away, Bishop: Brigham City and
the Problems of Rural Theocracy,
Samuel Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Poetry
Heritage, Lorraine Jeffrey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Little Motel Girl, Keith Moore . . . . . . . . . 50
continued on page 5
IRREANTUM
E N T S
Wheel, Jana Bouck Remy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Connotation Study, Keith Moore . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Fisherman, Lorraine Jeffrey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Reviews
A Modern Parable of Religious Excess and
Human Weakness, Jeffrey Needle
A review of Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises . . 71
A Thought-Provoking Examination of Eve,
Amelia Parkin
A review of Beverly Campbell’s
Eve and the Choice Made in Eden . . . . . . . . 72
Tale of Polygamy Both Answers and Raises
Questions, Charlene Hirschi
A review of Dorothy Allred Solomon’s
Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk:
Growing Up in Polygamy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Author of Western Adventures Does Right
by Huck, Carolyn Howard-Johnson
A review of Mark Twain and Lee Nelson’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . . . . 76
Southwest Politics Brought into Vivid Focus,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
A review of Warren Studki’s Boy’s Pond . . . 77
Clean Tale for Teens, Katie Parker
A review of Tamara Norton’s Molly Mormon? 78
Honest and Poignant Story of Divorse,
Charlene Hirschi
A review of Kathryn Elizabeth Jones’s
A River of Stones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Upbeat Sequel That Teens Will Love,
Charlene Hirschi
A review of Susan Law Corpany’s
Brotherly Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3 Autumn 2003
 E D I T O R I A
Christopher K. Bigelow . . . . . . . Managing editor
Harlow S. Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry editor
Travis Manning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essay editor
D. Michael Martindale . . . . . . . . . . . Film editor
Scott R. Parkin . . . . . . Speculative fiction coeditor
A M L
Gideon Burton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President
Melissa Proffit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President-elect
Suzanne Brady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Board member
Sharlee Mullins Glenn . . . . . . . . . Board member
A M L
Linda Hunter Adams . . . . . AML ANNUAL editor
Christopher K. Bigelow . . . . . . . Magazine editor
John-Charles Duffy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Treasurer
Andrew Hall . . . . . . Assistant AML-List moderator
IRREANTUM (ISSN 1528-0594) is published four
times a year by the Association for Mormon Letters
(AML), P.O. Box 51364, Provo, UT 84605-1364, (801)
714-1326, www.aml-online.org. © 2003 by the Associa-
tion for Mormon Letters. Membership in the AML is
$25 for one year, which includes an IRREANTUM sub-
scription. Subscriptions to IRREANTUM may
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expressed in IRREANTUM do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of the editors or of AML board members. This
magazine has no official connection with or endorsement
by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Autumn 2003
L S T A F F
Marny K. Parkin . . . . . Speculative fiction coeditor
and AML-List Highlights editor
Jana Bouck Remy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review editor
Edgar C. Snow Jr. . . . . . . . . Rameumptom editor
Quinn Warnick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fiction editor
B O A R D
Gae Lyn Henderson . . . . . . . . . . . Board member
Tyler Moulton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Board member
Eric Samuelsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Board member
Jen Wahlquist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Board member
Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury . . . . . Board member
S T A F F
Terry L Jeffress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Webmaster
Jonathan Langford . . . . . . . . . AML-List moderator
D. Michael Martindale . . . . . . Writer’s Conference
IRREANTUM welcomes unsolicited essays, reviews, fic-
tion, poetry, and other manuscripts, and we invite letters
intended for publication. Please submit all manuscripts
and queries to irreantum2@cs.com. If you do not have
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IRREANTUM is supported by a grant from the Utah
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Washington, D.C.
4 IRREANTUM
 C O N T E N
( c o n t . )
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
D. Michael Martindale
A review of The Book of Mormon Movie,
Volume 1: The Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
A Playwright’s Tremendous Debut,
Eric Samuelsen
A review of Mahonri Stewart’s play
Farewell to Eden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Mormon Literary Scene . . . . . . . . . 85
AML-List Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
L E T T E R
IRREANTUM welcomes letters to the editor about any-
thing in the magazine or related to Mormon litera-
ture. Send letters to irreantum2@cs.com, and be sure
to include your full name and hometown. Letters may
be edited for length or clarity.
Correcting a Typo
I would like to correct an error in my review of
Scott Chisholm’s book Following the Wrong God Home
that appeared in the summer 2003 issue. I said that
Chisholm claimed to have used 3,500 sources. Then,
what I meant to have said was, “I have no reason to
doubt that he did.” Instead, I typed, “I have reason
to doubt that he did.”
Charlene Hirschi
Logan, Utah
IRREANTUM
T S A M L N E W S
I RREANTUM Fiction Contest
T he Association for Mormon Letters is pleased
to announce the fourth annual IRREANTUM fic-
tion contest. Because IRREANTUM is a quarterly lit-
erary magazine dedicated to exploring Mormon
culture, all contest entries must relate to the Mor-
mon experience in some way. (However, authors
don’t have to be LDS.) As long as an entry doesn’t
exceed 8,500 words, any fictional form will be con-
sidered, including short stories and excerpts from
novels. Any fictional genre is welcome, including
literary, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy,
historical, and horror.
The first-place author will be awarded $250, sec-
ond place $175, and third place $100 (unless
judges determine that no entries are of sufficient
quality to merit awards). Winners agree to give
IRREANTUM first publication rights. To facilitate
S blind judging, entries must be submitted with a
removable cover sheet that includes the author’s
name, address, telephone number, e-mail address,
and manuscript title, with only the manuscript title
appearing on the rest of the manuscript. For a list
of winners, include a self-addressed stamped enve-
lope. Entries must be postmarked by May 1, 2004.
Send to IRREANTUM Fiction Contest, c/o AML,
PO Box 51364, Provo, UT 84605.
5 Autumn 2003
 I N T E R V I E W Regarding the novel, author Marilyn Brown wrote:
Jack Harrell
I n 1981, Jack Harrell moved from Illinois to Vernal,
Utah, following his older sister and brother, looking
for work and change. A year and a half later, at age
twenty-one, he joined the LDS Church. His first
introduction to Mormons was the people who wanted
their beer in a sack at the grocery store where he
worked. Even as a nonmember, he figured God could
see through the sack and they were really hiding the
beer from each other. After serving a mission and
marrying Cindy Hunsaker, a first-grade teacher, he
moved with Cindy to Provo to go to school. His first
college class was English 99, remedial English, on the
Provo campus of Utah Technical College. At age 27,
after two years of full-time work and part-time school,
he enrolled at BYU, where he graduated with a B.A.
in English in 1992. In 1994 he received an M.A. in
English from Illinois State University. He spent a year
as an adjunct faculty member at Parkland College in
Champaign, Illinois, before coming to Ricks College,
now BYU–Idaho. Two years ago he began work on a
Ph.D. in education at the University of Idaho–Idaho
Falls. Jack and his wife live in Rexburg with their
three teenagers.
Harrell has published short stories in Dialogue,
IRREANTUM, Manna, and elsewhere and nonfiction in
Popular Music and Society (“The Poetics of Destruc-
tion: Death Metal Rock”). Signature Books recently
published his first novel, Vernal Promises, which won
the AML’s Marilyn Brown Unpublished Novel Award.
The novel is described as follows: “Jacob Dennison
believes that every good thing in life comes at a cost.
His wife Pam’s miscarriage confirms that. Never mind
that his boss at Food World has outrageous demands;
that his father, a shady oil field equipment salesman,
wants to make him a man in his own image. Never
mind that his new friend Dwayne, a cunning drug
dealer and occultist, wants nothing less than his disci-
pleship. Jacob is willing to push beyond their expecta-
tions. His greatest struggle will prove to be his saving
grace: he can follow only one voice—the one that speaks
within him and drives him to the brink of ruin and
ultimately a higher price than even he had imagined.”
Autumn 2003
“This is a brilliant novel, written with language that
crackles. The relationships are treated with force and
poignancy. The power of the story is its authenticity
and the character’s compelling conversion. He begins
as a boy who refuses to accept responsibility, becomes the
husband who longs for freedom, and at last the man
who feels God’s grace in spite of himself and the self-
destructive path that has beckoned to him with a siren’s
allure. This brings a voice to Mormon literature that
is clearly worth honoring.”
W hat were your motives and desires in writ-
ing Vernal Promises? What effect do you
want it to have on readers?
For me, the novel is a redemption story. The main
character, Jacob Dennison, is a twenty-two-year old
Mormon who believes in God despite the fact that
he hasn’t attended church in years. He smokes and
drinks and works hard every day at a job he hates.
Probably every elders quorum president in the
West knows a guy like Jacob—a name on the rolls,
someone they have a hard time reaching.
I started writing about Jacob because he’s the
kind of guy I understand. He’s a believer, even if his
actions don’t show it. I grew up in Parkersburg, Illi-
nois, a farm town of 250 people where blue-collar
work is the only work and everyone believed in
God in some form or another. Most of the men
in my family drive truck, most of the women work
as secretaries or waitresses. When I lived in Vernal
it was the same. When Jacob leaves his job in the
grocery store and goes to work for his father, selling
oil field equipment, he tries to drown himself in
drug and alcohol use because he wants to run away
from God. Jacob believes in Christ’s suffering, but
he doesn’t believe he deserves it. If he can smoke
enough and drink enough, he thinks, God will give
up on him, realizing he’s not worth the Savior’s sac-
rifice. The problem is, God’s love is tougher than
that. If there’s any particular effect I want it to have
on readers, it’s the impression that God is just as
concerned about Jacob’s soul as he is about the
souls of “the righteous.”
After reading an early draft of the novel, a friend
of mine asked me a question: “Why would literary
6 IRREANTUM
Mormons care about the struggles of a cigarette
smoker in a Vernal trailer park?” He really threw
me off balance with that one—I hadn’t realized
some people might be that smug—but I kept
working on the book because I believed Jacob’s
struggle was important.
What prompted you to start writing? How
did you learn the craft?
In freshman English, I wrote an essay about my
mom’s “second life,” a life that started when I was
five, when my dad left us. I loved the sense of
authenticity that came from writing about that
change in her life. Her story was real and poignant,
it was a story I knew, and no one else in the class
could tell it. At BYU I used my English electives on
creative writing courses. The first hundred pages of
the first draft of Vernal Promises came out of Bruce
Jorgensen’s fiction class. I wasn’t a very good writer,
I don’t think, but I had a clear vision of what I
wanted to say. That first draft grew to 200 pages
before I deleted seventy-five percent of it. I still do
that sometimes—write a hundred pages and then
delete half of them. I wouldn’t call myself a good
writer, but I have learned to work hard. In the end,
maybe hard work is more important than talent,
anyway.
After college, I started reading books published
by Writer’s Digest Books—books on plot, charac-
ter, and the writer’s market. Possibly the best book
in this genre is Orson Scott Card’s Characters and
Viewpoint. These books have their limits, but they
contain a lot of very important nuts-and-bolts
information that isn’t taught in college English
courses. English classes teach criticism. They teach
you how to analyze a story once it’s made. If you
want to learn how to make a story, you have to go
somewhere else, because most English professors,
schooled in criticism, don’t know how a story is
created.
Do other cultural influences besides fiction—
such as music—play into your creativity?
Music has always been important to me. In my
teens I played guitar in a rock band and learned how
to work hard at something I cared about. I enjoyed—
and in my own way made a study of—bands like
Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes, the Beatles,
IRREANTUM
and Genesis (the early stuff with Peter Gabriel).
Since then I’ve gotten into other bands like Pearl
Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Dave Mathews.
As an English major, I learned about poetic devices,
literary terms, and the evolution of literary move-
ments, which gave me a vocabulary for the things I
had intuitively gathered as a teenager from listening
to rock music. After joining the church, my musi-
cal interests expanded to include classical and folk
music, but I haven’t lost my first love for rock music.
Not long ago I was listening to a Pink Floyd song
called “Echoes,” a twenty-minute piece that moves
the opening theme through a kind of trip to the
underworld and then to a final, more triumphant
reprise of the original theme. I said to myself, “If I
can learn to write a story as good as that, I’ll be
doing okay.”
A novel that tries to
prove the Church is true
will be just as bad as a
novel promoting the gay
lifestyle or the virtues of
working for Microsoft.
What is your greatest reward as a writer? Do
you ever feel inspired in a spiritual way with
regards to your writing?
The best reward for me is that private moment
when I’ve written something I’m really pleased
with. The real test is: Will I still like it in a week or
a month? Often I finish something that I’m very
pleased with, but a week later I can see it still needs
more work. When that happens, there’s only one
thing to do: work on it some more.
I often feel spiritually inspired as a writer, but it’s
not writing itself as much as it is a desire to do
something good that draws me toward that feeling
of holiness. I believe God wants us to do good
things. One person might make a beautiful quilt
7 Autumn 2003
to show at the county fair, another might restore
old cars. I don’t know if there’s a great deal of dif-
ference between the creative drive that makes one
person write poetry while another makes fine wood
furniture.
Not long ago I was helping my wife paint our
youngest daughter’s bedroom. I was doing some
careful work around the window frame, painting it
a different color than the walls, focusing on keep-
ing the line straight. While I worked, I felt that same
joy I feel when I try to get a sentence just right.
That’s the thing that inspires me: putting love into
something, trying to do a good job—dressing and
keeping the Garden, so to speak.
Most fiction is a combination of three elements:
what the author has experienced, observed, and
imagined. How do those three elements work
together for you?
As with most writers, a lot of my fiction comes
out of my own experiences or the experiences of
people I know. The stuff about drugs and alcohol
in Vernal Promises is familiar to me because of the
experiences I had as a teenager, before I joined
the Church. But in fiction, what’s needed to make
a story work is always more important than the
question of what really happened. Even if I do start
with something that happened to me, it’s not long
before it’s shaped into something new to meet the
needs of the story. Then it’s no longer my experi-
ence; it’s the experience of the characters.
Tell us about your writing habits: how often
you write, how you balance it with other things,
any rituals or conditions you require for a good
writing session, and perhaps some comments
about how you use notes, outlines, research,
multiple drafts, et cetera.
I try to write at least an hour a day. I have a hard
time writing when my mind is burdened by the
cares of the day, so I write in the morning, before
my family wakes up, before I teach or read my e-
mail or do any other business. I usually write on
the computer, and I usually have music on the
headphones when I write. Music helps me shut out
the real world and focus on the imaginary world
of the story.
Autumn 2003
When I’m plotting, I do a lot of sketching; I put
things on slips of paper and arrange and rearrange
them on my desk. I keep a writing journal, too,
to help me untangle the knots that come up.
I research facts—even things like how many miles
it is on the highway from one town to the next. For
the first chapter of Vernal Promises, which begins
with Jacob’s wife having a miscarriage and going
to the hospital, I did a two-hour interview with
an emergency room nurse who had been through
that sort of thing more than once. I do a lot of out-
lining, and I revise a lot. Nothing I do seems very
good after a first draft. I have to work it over
several times before I’m willing to let someone else
see it.
What works of Mormon literature have you
personally most enjoyed? What works of general
literature have most influenced you?
I admire a lot of Mormon writers—Levi Peter-
son, Doug Thayer, Lance Larsen, Margaret Blair
Young. I took a couple of classes from Eugene Eng-
land and simply loved him. But the author who has
influenced me the most is Flannery O’Connor.
I did my master’s thesis on her first novel Wise
Blood, which had a big influence on Vernal Promises.
I love O’Connor for her unflinching realism about
the challenges of being a Christian and a writer.
Her letters in The Habit of Being contain some
great insights for writers, believers, and thinkers.
She was all three of those things.
But besides O’Connor, I’ve loved—and learned
lessons from—Wallace Stegner, Raymond Carver,
Sherwood Anderson, Barbara Kingsolver, E. L. Doc-
torow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, and
even Stephen King. His book On Writing is great
stuff. Another book that every Mormon writer and
artist should read is Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher
Lev. And John Cheever—reading one of his short
stories is like listening to a chamber orchestra. His
moral life was a wreck, but his writing was sublime.
That’s a conundrum for Mormon writers. We should
try to figure that out—the relationship between
personal morality and the production of good art.
Let’s talk about your teaching profession and
how it plays into your writing career. How does
8 IRREANTUM
teaching writing and literature affect you as a
writer?
The best thing about teaching and writing—
especially at BYU–Idaho, where there’s no faculty
rank and the focus is on teaching first, rather than
publishing—is knowing that my writing has no
connection to my paycheck. If my writing isn’t suc-
cessful, I still have a job. The interaction a teacher
has with other people is always helpful to the writ-
ing life. Among other things, a writer has to be an
amateur psychologist. Dealing with a variety of
people and watching their lives unfold provide all
kinds of valuable insights.
What is your best advice for aspiring fiction
writers? What are your observations and advice
related to students of creative writing?
Write all you can, knowing that the relationship
of raw product and finished product is about the
same as the relationship between how many hours
an NBA player spends practicing and how many
minutes he spends on the court in the playoffs.
Find out when you do your best work, what moti-
vates you, what discourages you. Don’t try to work
and write the way others do. Learn to work with
your own temperament and circumstances. Write
what you want to write; don’t worry about whether
or not it will sell. The inauthentic person who tries
to imitate others and follow trends will probably
just write drivel anyway.
What are your observations about the current
state of Mormon literature? What’s your impres-
sion of today’s Mormon reading audience?
Faulkner says that great literature involves “the
human heart in conflict with itself.” I believe that’s
true. But Mormon culture tends to frown upon inner
conflict because we associate it with sin. If we’re
keeping the commandments, we sometimes think,
we should be completely happy all the time. There’s
something wrong with that line of thinking. For
one thing, it often leads to terrible disillusionment.
If a person is living the Book of Mormon injunction
to “Mourn with those who mourn,” there is going to
be some conflict, some pain in that person’s heart.
Our culture is too concerned with looking happy,
looking good, and looking moral. We want to win
the respect of the respectable. But this tendency flies
IRREANTUM
in the face of good literature and good religion. There’s
a saying that goes: “The gospel comforts the troubled
and troubles the comfortable.” Good literature is
like that, too. I’m not talking about insulting readers
or shattering their faith. John Gardner talks about
this in his book On Moral Fiction. He says good lit-
erature is life affirming. Good literature offers a par-
adox: life is very difficult, and it’s totally worth it.
The first half of that statement makes the second
half more meaningful. Sometimes as Mormons we’re
afraid to talk about the difficult things, but if we
don’t acknowledge them, we weaken the truth that
life is worth the struggle. That’s why easy pop liter-
ature, in the end, can’t offer the kind of gritty life-
affirmation that gets people through the rough spots.
Is it a worthwhile goal to get Mormon char-
acters and themes before a national audience?
Do you think this nation will ever have a Mor-
mon Saul Bellow or Flannery O’Connor, some-
one winning top awards for literature that deals
with Mormon themes, settings, and characters?
Trying to get Mormon themes before a national
audience is the wrong way to go about it. The
things we struggle with that are important on a
human level are not exclusive to being Mormon.
Name any “Mormon theme”—being persecuted,
loving our families, having a unique doctrine of
God—and these things are not unknown to other
groups. We need to focus on what we have in com-
mon with others if we’re going to speak to them in
ways they can understand. Too often our writing is
like an inside joke. When a person tells an inside
joke, outsiders are alienated.
People are also alienated when we begin with the
assumption that we have all the answers, when we
put dogma before humanity. People can sense that
sort of thing. Maybe we, as Mormons, have grown
insensitive to that approach because we’ve experi-
enced so much of it. Good literature never begins
with answers; it begins with questions. When it
comes to art, certainty crushes creativity. In order
to write things other people will care about, one
has to be like a child: purely curious, having more
questions than answers.
We also make a mistake when we try to sell
people on our lifestyle. I can’t imagine anything
9 Autumn 2003
more boring than a Wasatch Front version of Life-
styles of the Rich and Righteous. It’s not the Jewish-
ness of Saul Bellow’s characters that makes his writing
great; it’s not the Catholicism of O’Connor that
moves us. It’s the human struggle we care about.
Going back to Faulkner: “The human heart in con-
flict with itself.” Flannery O’Connor constantly
received letters from good Catholics asking her to
write a novel that showed the blessings of being
Catholic. She refused because she didn’t want to
write bad fiction. Propaganda—information advo-
cating a doctrine or cause—has its place, in the
Church and elsewhere. But propaganda is never
good literature. A novel that tries to prove the
Church is true will be just as bad as a novel pro-
moting the gay lifestyle or the virtues of working
for Microsoft. Good literature is about people, not
institutions or doctrines.
While your publisher, Signature Books, pro-
duces beautiful volumes, this publisher is not
known for selling many copies of fiction titles,
occasionally only in the low hundreds. Perhaps
Signature publishes fiction more as a philan-
thropical act than as a commercial endeavor.
What are your comments on that, both in gen-
eral and as it relates to your own book?
That’s an interesting comment on our culture.
We know that in America certain things, like sym-
phony orchestras, libraries, and public television,
would not survive without a combination of gov-
ernment funding and public philanthropy. Often
the sensational and the shallow thrives, while the
deep and meaningful barely survives on grants and
donations. Perhaps things in the Mormon commu-
nity should be different, but they aren’t. Many of
Signature’s fiction titles sell in the thousands, but
it’s also true that Signature sells more history than
fiction. This may be related to the general notion (a
false notion, I believe) that “true” things are more
valuable than fiction. In my view, fiction can be
more “true” than history. I don’t think there’s much
difference between the Mormon publishing world
and the larger American context when it comes to
these things. Novels sold in the grocery stores sell
better than novels taught in English classes. Maybe
most people don’t want to be challenged by their
Autumn 2003
fiction because their lives are already challenging
enough. I don’t know. My book will offer some
readers more challenges than comforts. That’s why
I’m grateful for publishers like Signature Books.
I get the impression that a big sell isn’t the only
thing on their agenda. It’s actually pretty refreshing
to see that commercial interests don’t always per-
vade everything.
What’s ahead for you? What’s coming out in
the near future, what are you working on now,
and what will you turn to next?
Right now I’m working on some short stories
and another novel. I have a story about Adam and
Eve coming out soon in Dialogue. I have some
short stories that aren’t Mormon in their characters
or settings that I’d like to find places for. One story
is coming out soon in a non-Mormon publication
that’s called (ironically) Words of Wisdom. The novel
I’m working on now is about an Idaho state park
ranger and a man who was once instrumental in his
conversion to the church, a man who turns out to
be very dangerous. I’ve been working on it for more
than a year. If the first novel was any indicator, it
will probably be three or four years before I’m fin-
ished with it, especially since I like to stop from
time to time and work on short stories. But that’s
the good thing about not writing for a living. If it
takes me twenty years to finish this one, that’s
okay—my family still gets fed. That’s what I call
keeping things in perspective.
10 IRREANTUM
 N O V E L until the bookkeeper he was having an affair with
E X C E R P T ran off with $10,000. Management had banished
Vernal Promises
By Jack Harrell
Author’s note: The protagonist of the novel Vernal
Promises is twenty-two-year-old Jacob Dennison, a
native of Vernal, Utah, who hasn’t lived his religion
since he was twelve. Shortly after his wife Pam has a
miscarriage, he and Pam accept the bishop’s invitation
to attend church. This excerpt from chapter two, “Let
Him Deny Himself,” presents a man in contradiction.
Instinctively certain of the reality of God, he is only
beginning to wrestle with the question of his own
integrity.
I t was a Monday morning in mid-July. The rest of
Vernal was getting ready for a beautiful summer
day, and Jacob was working in the dairy cooler in
the dark back quarters of Gary’s Food World. Amid
the dim light of the cooler, amid the humming of
the fans, the faint smell of sour milk rising from the
concrete floor, Jacob was filling the shelves. He
pulled a crate from one of the pallets, brought it to
the floor, and knelt down. He slid open the metal
door in front of him and placed four gallons of
milk squarely on the shelf—one, two, three, four.
He looked at his watch: 7:50 A.M. There was a
store meeting scheduled for 8:00. He threw
another dozen gallons onto the shelf and stepped
through the double doors to the east into the back
aisle of the store. He was dressed in high-top gym
shoes, jeans, a brown T-shirt, and a soiled red
apron. On his way past the dairy case, he stopped
to straighten a section where someone had just
bought two containers of yogurt.
In the stock room, employees were sitting on
pallets of freight, cases of bathroom tissue and empty
milk crates. Jacob sat down on a half-pallet of whole
kernel corn as Marty stood before the employees,
folded his arms, and began speaking casually.
Rumor had it that Marty had managed a store in
Provo before coming to Vernal and that he had
been on his way to becoming a district manager
IRREANTUM
him to Vernal.
More employees gathered and found seats—
people from the bakery dressed in white, the pro-
duce department in green aprons, the lady who
handled the flower shop, checkers out of uniform
because it was their day off. Marilyn, the deli lady,
lit up a Virginia Slim. Everyone knew it was a vio-
lation of the Utah Clean Air Act, but nobody cared.
“Okay, folks,” Marty said. He clapped his hands
a time or two, drawing everyone’s attention. “First
item.” He paused and waited for the employees to
listen. “I’m happy to be here in Vernal. Salt Lake
has a lot of confidence in this store, I can tell you
that. But there are a few things that need to change.”
He smiled, folded his arms, shook his head. “I hate
to start off on a bad foot,” he said, “but I look
around and I start to wonder.” Still smiling, arms
folded, he looked up at the ceiling for a second.
“I can only think of one way to ask this question.
Just what are the dress standards in this store?”
He pointed at Jacob. “What’s your job, young
man?”
Jacob was caught off guard. “Dairy boss,” he
answered.
“Good,” Marty said, “that’s good. Come up
here, son.”
Marty held out an arm as Jacob walked forward
and stood next to him. Marty was in his forties and
seemed comfortable in his tasseled black loafers,
slacks, white shirt, and tie. There was a pack of
Camels in his shirt pocket.
Marty smiled at Jacob and then at the employees
gathered before him. “Do they have a dress code in
the trailer park where you live, son?”
Several of the employees laughed. Jacob looked
down. He brushed the front of his apron.
“When you’re on duty, you should wear a white
shirt and tie. That’s company policy. Did you know
that, son?”
Jacob shook his head.
“You have a name tag, too,” Marty said. “Where
is it? If I was a customer, I wouldn’t know what to
call you. How long has it been since you washed
that apron?” Marty looked around the room. “What
11 Autumn 2003
I’m saying goes for everyone. White shirts and
ties for men, slacks and white blouses for women.”
He patted Jacob’s back and sent him to his seat.
“From here on out, everyone in this store wears a
name tag.”
He’d put five months
of hard work into his
religion. Ever since the
miscarriage, he had tried.
Jacob sat down on the pallet and stared at his
shoes, embarrassed and angry. For the next ten
minutes, Marty talked about quarterly profits. He
said he wanted to meet with department heads that
afternoon. He talked about clean floors and clean
employees and clean profits. He told them again
how excited he was to be in Vernal. Finally, he
clapped his hands. “Okay, let’s go out and make
this the best quarter this store’s ever had!”
Jacob got up quickly, but Marty was right
behind him, patting his shoulder, flashing a smile.
“Let’s walk through your department first,” he said.
He told Jacob to get a pen and paper. They would
look over the dairy case, the eggs, and the mar-
garine. Marty started pointing out things that Jacob
should be doing differently. “Write that down,” he
said. “I want this done every day.” Standing in
front of the bread, the new boss said, “You’ve got to
go the extra mile. What you do affects the books.
If we lose money, I get pissed off.” He paused and
waited for Jacob to look directly at him. “I don’t
promote guys who piss me off.”
In the back room they stopped at the cardboard
compactor. “This is my pet peeve,” Marty said. He
took out a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled the smoke.
“Look down in there,” he said, pointing down the
compactor’s filthy chute. Jacob looked while Marty’s
secondhand smoke teased him. In the compactor a
box of refuse from the produce department sat on
top of the crushed cardboard. “See that,” Marty
said. “Some lazy ass didn’t want to walk out to the
Autumn 2003
dumpsters, so he threw that crap into the card-
board compactor.” Marty took a puff from his cig-
arette and flicked the ashes down the chute. “The
recycling company deducts a percentage if we don’t
give them pure cardboard. That shows up on the
books. Since you work back here, it’s your respon-
sibility to monitor what goes into this compactor.”
He took a quick puff and exhaled through his nose.
“I want you to make sure nothing pollutes the
integrity of this cardboard.”
“The integrity?” Jacob started to say. “What
about after I clock out?”
Marty flicked his ashes into the chute. “You’ll
have to figure that out. It’s your responsibility. When
the recycling company comes, I want this com-
pactor to be as clean as a missionary’s white shirt.”
“I’ll put a sign up,” Jacob said.
Marty put his cigarette out on the wall, leaving a
mark. It was only half smoked. He put the
unsmoked portion back into the pack in his shirt
pocket. “Yes, put up a sign,” he said. “That’s a good
start. And before you fill the dairy, climb in there
and get that damned produce box out. You need to
sweep around the dumpsters outside, too. Add that
to your list.”
“The baggers are supposed to do that. Jeff wanted
me to keep to the dairy.”
“Jeff ’s in Bountiful,” Marty said. “Jeff ’s got a big
forty-eight-register store, and I’m stuck here in this
God-forsaken ghost town. My own personal hell,
see?”
“How can I sweep up and keep the cardboard
clean and do everything else and still get the rest of
my work done in eight hours?”
Marty smiled. “You’ll find time.”
“There’s not enough time,” Jacob said. “There’s
no way I can do all that unless I work off the clock.”
“There you go,” Marty said, “work off the clock.”
“That’s against policy.”
“Listen,” Marty said, “get the work done. That’s
all I want.”
That morning Jacob cleaned out the compactor,
filled the milk and bread, got a bucket of water and
sponge and cleaned the moldings around the mar-
garine cooler, swept around the dumpsters, and
swept the back room floor. He wasn’t about to work
12 IRREANTUM
off the clock. He made a cardboard sign and placed
it next to the compactor. With a big black marker,
he wrote: CARDBOARD ONLY IN THIS COMPACTOR!!!
He worked two hours past his usual lunch break
doing everything on the list he could get to. By
2:30, quitting time, he still had not finished every-
thing. He didn’t intend to either. He took off his
apron, hung it on the nail next to the entrance of
the dairy cooler, and punched out.
• • •
H e spent part of his afternoon at Wal-Mart buy-
ing cheap white shirts and ties. The next day,
he worked as hard as he could, avoiding Marty as
much as possible. There was no way he could get
everything done.
In the dim light of the dairy cooler the next Fri-
day afternoon, Jacob squeezed between the pallets
of cottage cheese, yogurt, and milk and began slid-
ing gallons onto the shelf. Kneeling there, all he
could think about was what he wanted to do when
he got off work. His favorite temptation possessed
him: an evening with a few beers and some dope or
even a cigarette—even just one of Marty’s stupid
Camels—would be fine, he thought. It would be
a relief.
As he moved stacks of gallons into straight lines
on the shelves, he imagined a beautiful woman in
a glamorous evening gown. She appeared out of
nowhere, right there in the dankness of the cooler.
She handed him a beer. She gave him a cigarette.
She pursed her lips as she lit it for him. She led him
out of the dairy cooler past all the awestruck cus-
tomers, out to the parking lot to her pink Corvette.
“I’ve got a motel room down the street,” she said in
a sultry voice. It was a stupid fantasy and it made
him feel guilty, but it was a relief from cold reality.
Reality was that he had responsibilities to his
job, his wife, the church. He’d put five months of
hard work into his religion. Ever since the miscar-
riage, he had tried. He knew the church was good,
but that wasn’t enough for him. Everything that felt
natural and good and normal also felt wrong. His
wicked desires were wrong. The problem was, he
didn’t want them to be wrong.
Kneeling there, he whispered a prayer. “Please,
Father in Heaven, forgive me for wanting to smoke
IRREANTUM
a good joint and swig a nice ice-cold beer. Help me
not to get turned on when I see a pretty woman.”
He prayed hopelessly. “Bless me to keep a lid on my
wicked desires. And even though Marty needs some-
one to beat the crap out of him, bless me to not be
the one to do it.”
He grabbed another crate, knelt down, and put
four more gallons of milk on the shelf. He was doing
his job. That was what God wanted him to do. He
stacked the empty crate behind him and grabbed
another full one. He had a wife, and he had respon-
sibilities. That was God’s plan. He could see the
strait and narrow path—the job, the boss, the wife,
the church. Someday there would be kids. Doctor
Ward put Pam on the pill, but that wouldn’t last
forever. Someday she’d want to try again. Then he
would be strapped for sure. No detours, just a lot
of hard work. Try to stay clean, an eternal test.
He placed the last gallon on the shelf. Now he
had to fill the shelves with cottage cheese, half gal-
lons, quarts, buttermilk. He had to avoid Marty, no
matter what.
“Bless me, Heavenly Father, to see my way
through,” he begged. He looked at his hands, red
from the cold. They didn’t seem like his hands. His
body didn’t seem like his body. In his own hands he
saw the soft, pink hands of his grandfather, Vernon
Tibbs, the man who had given him his name. He
cupped his hands and imagined Grandpa Tibbs hold-
ing him as a tiny baby. That was when the struggle
began—his grandpa blessing him in church, dedi-
cating him to God before he was old enough to
speak or even understand such a thing. What if a
child didn’t want to be dedicated to God? Was it
fair to do it when he’s just a baby, before he could
choose?
The bishop told him a month ago, “If you keep
up this progress, we’ll ordain you to the Mel-
chizedek priesthood.” Last Tuesday night he was
interviewed by Brother Combs, a member of the
stake presidency. “Do you know what the oath and
covenant of the priesthood is?” Brother Combs had
asked. Jacob had never heard of it. Brother Combs
read from the Doctrine and Covenants that if a man
broke the covenant and “turned altogether there-
from,” that man “would not have forgiveness.” Jacob
13 Autumn 2003
felt a vacuum sucking him in. It was true. If he fal-
tered—and he would—he would be damned. How
could you get away from it? You can’t fight the
truth, he thought. There was truth, and there was
sin. But there was truth in sin, too.
He had known this since he was fifteen years old,
since that week before Grandpa Tibbs died. By that
time Jacob had started to separate himself from the
church. He had already smoked cigarettes, drank
coffee, looked at Harvey’s dirty magazines. He had
already started to hang out with the guys in junior
high who chewed Skoal.
The old man tried to explain things to Jacob.
Grandpa said that he gave him the name Jacob and
his middle name Israel to set him on the strait
and narrow, and he had blessed him to ferret out
“hypocrisy in the church, wherever it was hidden.”
Grandpa knew about hypocrisy. After Jacob was
born, he had left the church because of all the hyp-
ocrites. “What’s the crime in leaving a church full
of liars?” Grandpa had asked.
Kneeling on the damp floor of the cooler, Jacob
knew that his blessing was real even if his grandpa
had gotten it backwards. It wasn’t the church that
was wrong. Jacob looked around the cooler. The
scales of blindness fell from his eyes. He whispered
the word “hypocrisy.” That was the emptiness he
felt inside his chest. He was the one who was the
hypocrite. He was the one who was untrue. He
looked around the cooler again. There was a strong
smell of sour milk. “I’ve got to stand up,” he said to
himself. “I’ve got to be true.”
Marty’s head popped in the cooler. “What are
you doing, kid, praying?” Marty chuckled.
Jacob came out of the cooler and followed Marty
down the hallway that connected the store’s two
back rooms. “We need to talk,” Jacob said.
Marty shook a cigarette from his pack. “I don’t
get paid to talk. You don’t get paid to pray.” He lit
the cigarette and let the smoke billow out the side
of his mouth. “That bread rack is bare,” he said,
looking at the backstock along the wall.
Jacob could smell Marty’s smoke. “Maybe it’s
not a good idea to come in here and change every-
thing in a week.”
Autumn 2003
Marty flicked his ashes on the floor. “There’s a
customer out there looking for low-salt peanut
butter. Didn’t I see a case the warehouse sent by
mistake?”
“We know how this store runs,” Jacob said.
Marty looked sideways Jacob. “About fifty thou-
sand dollars goes through those cash registers every
day. Do you grasp that?”
“I’m just saying—”
Marty’s eyes caught sight of the low-salt peanut
butter. “I noticed on the schedule that you get
Sundays off.” He put his cigarette between his lips
and opened the case of peanut butter.
“Scott did that so I could go to church. My wife,
she—”
Marty took a puff of his cigarette and stared at
him hard, then let out a quick, narrow rush of
smoke. “Do you know how many dairy bosses get
Sundays off?” he asked. “Zero. In the whole com-
pany, you’re the only one.”
“I asked for Sundays off, and that was fine with
Scott.”
“Listen, pal,” Marty said. He spoke with forced
concern. “I’ve gone easy on you because I know
how it is. Are you married?”
“Yeah.”
“A real Vernal honey, I bet.”
“Well, she’s. . . . She’s been through some tough
times.”
“Great. I was there once, too. Life’s a bitch, and
then you marry one. But what you need is to keep
your job, and what I need is somebody to fill that
bread. Didn’t the church teach you anything about
hard work?”
“I need to know what I’m working for, that’s all.”
Marty dropped his cigarette on the floor and
crushed it out with his tasseled loafer. “Okay, let
me spell it out. You work for me, period. In this
store I’m the Ten Commandments and the Book of
Mormon and the prophet Joseph Smith all rolled
into one. That’s what you need to know. When you
walk in here, I’m God!”
“You don’t understand—”
Marty calmly raised a forefinger. “Correction!
You don’t understand. If you don’t want this job,
14 IRREANTUM
there’s plenty of guys out there who can fill your
shoes by Monday morning.”
Marty pulled the jars of low-salt peanut butter
out of the case and started walking away. As he
swung open the double doors, Jacob could see the
old lady waiting for him. “Here you go, ma’am,”
Marty’s voice sang out to the customer. “You’re lucky.
Those were the last two jars we had!”
Jacob reached for a hand truck, wheeled it across
the back room floor, and slammed it under a stack
of bread trays. There was no question about it. He
knew where he stood. He wheeled the stack of
bread out and started tossing loaves onto the shelf.
“What’s it going to take for me to stand up and be
true to myself?” he mumbled. “I’ve got to be a man.”
At 2:30 P.M. when it was time for him to clock
out, half of the things on his list were still waiting
to be done. Without thinking twice, he headed for
the back room to hang up his apron.
As he approached the double doors, he saw the
new girl from the bakery—the one with the nice
figure and pretty face. What Jacob liked best about
her was the way she matched the color of her ear-
rings to her lipstick. She was walking slowly and
carrying a box of baked goods. Jacob slowed down
and waited for her to go through the double doors
first.
He watched her figure as she walked ahead of
him. She was close enough to touch. She was like
everything else he couldn’t do, everything else he
couldn’t have. She was like all the other pleasures of
the world—right within reach, always before him.
If God wanted obedience, Jacob wondered, why
did he make sin so sweet?
He slid his hand truck under a stack of pallets as
the bakery girl said, “Somebody told me to bring
this day-old stuff back here and dump it.” She
looked at the cardboard compactor and asked, “Can
I dump it in there?”
“Honey,” Jacob said, “you can do anything you
want.”
She tossed the box down the chute and walked
out.
Jacob took off his apron, hung it on the wall,
and headed toward the front of the store. He picked
up his check and cashed it at the service desk. He
IRREANTUM
walked out to his green ’85 Ford pickup, the dry
heat of July reminding him it was this time of year
he had met Pam. They had been married for almost
a year now. He thought about going to the state
liquor store and stocking up on all the things he
and Pam would have enjoyed before they got mar-
ried, before they started going to church. He didn’t
really want to sin. He just wanted a little peace, a
little pleasure. He imagined Pam in a slinky dress,
swaying to some good country western music down
at the Last Chance Bar. It was a sentimental dream,
he knew, but that didn’t make it any less sweet.
Driving down the dusty streets of Vernal in his
pickup, past the gas stations and motels, and dream-
ing of living his own life the way he wanted to, he
felt free for the first time in weeks. If he could tell
Pam that it was a new start, maybe she’d under-
stand. Maybe he could tell her that some people
weren’t meant to be saints. He could take her out
on the town. They could have some big steaks and
a couple of beers. She could put on her best jeans,
a pretty blouse, some makeup and jewelry. He
could put on a sharp button-up shirt and nice pair
of Wranglers. They could plan it all just right. They
could start everything over, just the two of them,
without the whole Mormon Church taking over
their lives.
“It’s not right,” he said, “pretending to be some-
thing you’re not.”
As he drove the streets of Vernal that July after-
noon, he knew there was a whole horizon of possi-
bilities before him, if only he had the guts to reach
out and grasp it.
15 Autumn 2003
 I N T E R V I E W much physical and emotional pain drawn here, and
John Fulton
J ohn Fulton was born and raised in Salt Lake City.
He earned his B.A. in English literature at Whit-
man College in Washington state. After graduating, he
moved to Europe for five years, living in Basil,
Switzerland, and Berlin, Germany, where he sup-
ported himself as an English teacher and freelance
translator while working on his first short stories. In
the early nineties, he published his first short fiction in
The Quarterly, a now-defunct literary journal, and
The Oxford American. In 1995, he returned to the
United States to attend an MFA program at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, studying with Charles Baxter
and Nicolas Delbanco. He continued to publish his
fiction in such journals as The Southern Review,
Zoetrope, and The Sun. His stories have been short-
listed for the O. Henry Award and published in four-
teen national and international journals. In 2001, he
published his first book, Retribution (Picador USA),
a collection of stories that was awarded the Southern
Review Short Fiction Award for the best first collec-
tion published by an American in 2001. The follow-
ing year, he published his first novel, More Than
Enough, which was selected for the Barnes and Noble
Discover Great New Writers series, named the best
novel of the West for 2002 by the Salt Lake Tribune,
and selected as a finalist for the Association of Mid-
land Authors award for fiction. He currently lives in
Boston, where he is a professor of English at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts.
Regarding Fulton’s novel More Than Enough, a
Baltimore Sun reviewer wrote: “Fulton cleverly uses
the monochromatic Mormon society in this novel,
against which the Parkers’ collective oddity becomes a
serious handicap. Steven’s first-person narrative, rich
with adolescent awkwardness and anger, hones the
emotional edge of a family falling apart.” A San Fran-
cisco Chronicle reviewer wrote, “Fulton . . . bring[s]
drama and ambiguity to the City of Zion.” A Current
reviewer wrote, “More Than Enough . . . investigates
suburban shadows . . . in Mormon Utah. The novel
is nearly 200 pages long, yet the central action takes
place in one day. The effect is stunning, for there is
Autumn 2003
to dwell with vivid pain at such length makes it feel
very real—the power, of course, of all good writing.”
A Salt Lake Tribune reviewer wrote, “More Than
Enough is an honest, if sad, look at a family of fail-
ures. Fulton consistently refuses to fall into optimistic
pabulum that provides filler for so many novels about
the poor.”
H ow would you describe your novel?
More Than Enough is about a proud family of
atheists down on its luck that moves to Salt Lake
City in an attempt to turn things around. As so often
happens when things are going badly, they only get
worse for this family, which struggles to assimilate
without much success into Mormon culture. It’s
the early nineties, a boom time for the whole coun-
try, and not only does this family fail to fit into the
religious climate, but it also remains poor while
everyone seems to be thriving. As a result, the fam-
ily begins to fall apart, and the central figure of the
story, fifteen-year-old Steven Parker, does every-
thing in his power to hold his parents together. In
the process, he discovers the limits of family loyalty
and the harsh concerns of adult life that pit his
mother, Mary Parker, and younger sister, Jenny,
against Steven and his irresponsible father, whose
failures and dead-end dreams have repeatedly lead
the family into near ruin. The novel takes on the
central American themes of money, class, religion,
and the individual’s struggle to define himself against
or within these social forces.
What were your motives, goals, and influ-
ences in writing this novel?
In many ways, More Than Enough was a formal
challenge for me. Most of this two-hundred-page
novel takes place in one tense afternoon in which
everything that has brought the Parkers to this
moment of crisis must be clear and fully realized.
In one afternoon, I am presented with the chal-
lenge of developing characters and delivering them
to an outcome that is both inevitable and unpre-
dictable. And by holding myself to the few hours in
which the action takes place, I hope to reproduce
for the reader Steven and his family’s duress as they
see themselves unraveling.
16 IRREANTUM
 I also wanted to write a novel that takes place in
Salt Lake City and deals with the Mormons with-
out making either this particular place or its culture
appear extreme or cartoonishly bizarre. Whether
they are Mormons or not, most people from Utah
are perceived by the outside world as Mormon, and
therefore weird; they’re seen as religious extremists
who either are themselves polygamists or who prob-
ably lived near and knew polygamists. While living
in Europe, I was especially surprised by the preva-
lence of this perception. A lot of people I met
expected me to tell them about all the wives the
Mormons kept, the underwear the Mormons wore,
and the extreme anxiety the Mormons felt towards
caffeine and alcohol. And these people were rather
disappointed when I told them I hadn’t met a single
polygamist. When I would tell people I wasn’t Mor-
mon, they hardly seemed to believe a non-Mormon
could live in Salt Lake City.
That said, the city is unique for its religious cul-
ture, a culture I underscore in the book by making
my characters atheists. And while there is conflict
between my Mormon and non-Mormon charac-
ters, I was determined to show the Mormons in
this book in an accurate and realistic light. I wasn’t
out to underscore a minority of extremists. I was
out to show the experiences of real non-Mormons
as they clash against real Mormons, a run-in that
has to do more with money and class—social forces
that exist just about everywhere—than polygamy
and what kind of underwear people wear. While
these social forces do, I think, appear slightly dif-
ferently in a setting dominated by Mormonism, the
Mormons and Salt Lake remain recognizable and
relatively normal in my book.
Finally, I wanted to do justice to all my charac-
ters in this book, make them fully human and, to
an extent, sympathetic to the reader. The book
involves the breakup of a family and impending
divorce, so I expect my readers to have a moral
response—in short, to judge my characters and
their decisions. But I don’t want to make it easy for
the reader to make a clear judgment. When writing
about kids, especially in extreme situations, the
tendency can be to present them as straightforward
victims and to sentimentalize them. I hope I avoided
IRREANTUM
that. Likewise, I didn’t want the parents to be seen
as victimizers. They want to do the right thing in a
difficult situation and don’t always succeed. When
a character hurts someone else because there is no
way around it or because he or she can’t help but do
so, you have an interesting situation. At certain
points in the novel, the father, Bill Parker, uses
Steven and Jenny as pawns to get their mother
back. His use of the kids is both unforgivable and
an expression of how desperately he wants his wife
back. In the same way, I hope the mother’s choices
can be seen as both hurtful to her children and,
from her perspective, necessary. It’s hard to say
what a parent should sacrifice for his or her child.
Steven’s mother wants to believe that leaving her
husband is one way in which she can meet her basic
needs and so perhaps protect and care for her kids
best. But in leaving him, she’s traumatizing her kids.
I can imagine readers having different reactions to
her decisions because her situation is complex.
The minority-within-a-majority theme is
something others could relate to from other eth-
nicities. Could this novel just as easily have been
set among a Jewish population or in a predomi-
nantly Baptist or Lutheran community? How
dependent are your themes upon the action being
set among this particular group of people? Is the
Mormon community particularly exclusionary?
This is an interesting question and one I thought
a lot about as I wrote and revised the novel. And
my answer is: yes and no. I don’t think the Mor-
mons are a particularly exclusionary religion. In
fact, my experience of them has been the opposite.
As everyone knows, they’re particularly interested
in bringing people into their church, and so they
reach out. They want to share themselves and their
community with others. And, in many ways, I think
this novel could have taken place in another setting
with any religious majority goading this family of
atheists. And yet, had it been about a family in the
South attempting to get along with Southern Bap-
tists, it would have been a dramatically different
novel.
What I wanted to capture was the sense of place,
both socially and geographically, of Salt Lake City.
It is, literally and figuratively, a city on a hill. It’s
17 Autumn 2003
not just a religious city but a wealthy and class-con-
scious city where one’s money is expressed by how
high up the surrounding hills one’s house sits. And
so, to a certain extent, money and religion in this
city go together, especially as seen through the eyes
of an atheist family who live literally and figura-
tively at the bottom of the hill. And because the
Mormons are a family-oriented religion, both Steven
and his sister Jenny are able to see in their neigh-
bors, who have large, seemingly close-knit family
units, everything they want and don’t have.
Finally, the physical space of the West—Utah,
Idaho, Montana—is very important and dear to
me. I seem to need its landscape, its views, its par-
ticular dry air, its visas and skies in my fiction. I was
born and raised in the West, left it at the age of
eighteen, have never been able to return, and so I
compensate by recreating what I miss most about it
in my fiction. For years I lived in Europe, then in
the Midwest, and now I’m on the East Coast. And
the further away I get, the more I need to write
about the West.
You have the Parkers move from Boise to Salt
Lake City. Idaho is roughly twenty-five to thirty
percent LDS, and Salt Lake County is barely
fifty percent LDS. Why did you feel it was nec-
essary for the Parkers to move to Salt Lake City
as a catalyst for change? Would any move have
been a sufficient stress on the family to bring
about the same result? Would the family have
eventually broken up even if they hadn’t moved?
The move to Salt Lake City is motivated by the
father and his unrealistic sense that any move will
somehow bring good fortune. And while the Parker
family certainly must have encountered Mormons
in Idaho, Mormonism has a cultural cachet in Salt
Lake that it doesn’t have anywhere else, especially
in the Salt Lake City of the nineteen-eighties and
early nineties, when the action of the novel takes
place. Salt Lake, after all, is the Rome of Mor-
monism, the holy city. I thought of placing the
story in contemporary Salt Lake, but the city now
feels much less Mormon than it did ten, fifteen
years ago. On my recent visits to the city, I’m struck
by the number of brew pubs and bars that are
everywhere now and by a large population of
Autumn 2003
mountain-climbing, nature-loving, slightly left-wing
young people who moved to Salt Lake as young
adults and most of whom aren’t religious at all. In
the Salt Lake of today, the non-Mormons make up
a rather visible and vocal group, so much so that, as
you say, the non-Mormons really aren’t a minority
anymore.
That said, I do think the city plays an important
role in the breakup of the family. Eventually, the
Parker family would have broken up, whether in
Idaho or in Utah. But the setting underscores some
of the more interesting forces behind the breakup—
faith, money, and social standing among them.
Some readers feel as though the Salt Lake City
setting and the depiction of Mormons in your
novel follows in the long tradition (going back
to the early nineteenth century) of exploiting
existing prejudice against this religious group.
How would you respond?
Well, I don’t think so. Certainly the beating Steven
takes may be seen, at least superficially, as another
one of those bigoted depictions of Mormons. In
fact, it’s more about the way kids simplify issues
and underscore differences in order to be cruel.
Whether or not the issue of contention is about
what kind of God one believes in or what kind of
music one listens to, kids will seize upon differ-
ences as a pretext for injuring one another. And so
will adults. However, the Mormon parents in this
novel hardly behave as badly as the kids do. The
father of the kid who hurts Steven forces his child
to admit he was wrong and to apologize to Steven
and his family. He does the right thing. And while
Steven may see Curtis Smith, for instance, as the
Mormon who breaks up his parents’ marriage, I
make it clear to the reader that Steven’s mother makes
the decision to leave his father without any heavy
pressure from anyone else. In fact, when Steven
first meets Curtis Smith, the future husband of his
mother, he’s frustrated because this man is so much
more pleasant and human than Steven wants him
to be. Steven wants to demonize him, but he can’t
because Curtis is both kind and concerned about
what Steven and his sister must be going through.
In fact, in some ways, the success of the novel relies
on a fair treatment of Mormons. Had I demonized
18 IRREANTUM
them and made them responsible for what happens
to this family, the complexity of the Parkers would
have failed to develop. I would have had a bunch of
flat characters: the good guys versus the bad guys.
That doesn’t make for much of a story.
From the acknowledgments, it appears that
Ian Fulcher and your brother Ben provided you
with the details about Mormons and Salt Lake
City. How much time have you actually spent in
Salt Lake or among Latter-day Saints? Was this
novel written entirely from outside of the place
and the culture that it features?
I lived in Salt Lake from 1977 to 1986, when I
left for college, though I always came back to Salt
Lake and called it home until I was well into my
twenties. If people ask me where I’m from, I tell them
Salt Lake and brace myself for that funny Are-you-
a-Mormon? look I often get. I wrote the novel while
living in Michigan, and much of the geography of
the city, especially the directions (east, west, south,
north) and some of the street names and locations,
had become vague for me. So my brother, who still
lives in the city, helped me get the details right.
Ian Fulcher is a close friend of mine and a lapsed
Mormon who knows a lot more about Mormon
theology than I do. Growing up, a lot of my friends
were Mormons and Jack-Mormons. My family was
rather strict, fundamentalist Southern Baptists. My
friends and I found it best just not to talk about
religion. So Ian was able to help me out with some
fine points and give me some literature that helped
with actual doctrine and the sort of language—
songs, scripture, et cetera—that Jenny and Steven
might hear at Mormon services and from their
Mormon friends.
Why did you feel you had to use made-up
place names and locations, for the most part?
I made up names and places in order to con-
struct a more fully realized imagined space for the
novel. While I might be writing about Salt Lake
City, I use it as a setting for a piece of fiction, and
so it comes to mean something more than merely
a backdrop for action and characters. Imagine the
difference in The Great Gatsby if Fitzgerald would
have called East and West Egg Little and Big Neck,
the models for the Eggs that actually exist on Long
IRREANTUM
Island. A lot would have been lost. When Steven,
his mother, and sister are driving into the upper
Avenues, Steven notices that the streets are named,
unlike the lower avenues, and that “rich people like
names . . . and no doubt they got to choose what
to call their streets.” The street names he sees—
Milky Way Boulevard, Venus, Neptune, and Mars
Drives—are all made up. As far as I know, this
neighborhood doesn’t exist in the Avenues. But the
names get at a truth about the difference between
those who have money and those who don’t. Those
who have it shape their world and their fate, far
more so than the poor do. Steven doesn’t want to
believe this, even as he drives through a neighbor-
hood that models itself after the universe and the
solar system, that sees itself as the whole world.
After all, Steven is poor and needs to believe in the
power of his father to rise above his failures and
make more of himself and his family. But the pres-
ence of this neighborhood and the outlandish lan-
guage it uses to define itself suggest that he’s wrong.
Steven seems to have started out as the antithe-
sis of his father. Steven gets good grades and sees
the value of education. But in the end you ban-
ish Steven to his father’s custody. This leads to
several questions about Steven: Do you feel that
Steven would have eventually exhibited his self-
destructive behavior regardless of his circum-
stances? That the beating by the neighborhood
kids was just a catalyst for the emotions he devel-
oped in his dysfunctional family? Or do you feel
that Steven might have never acted out if he had
not been beaten up?
Steven ends up with his father because, like his
father, he’s a dreamer who believes more in the world
as he wants it to be than in the world as it is. He’s
so invested in his hopes that he’s willing to do just
about anything to make the world conform to his
vision of it. At the same time, Steven is a smart,
very practical kid, and so he can see that his mission
and his vision are doomed. It’s a painful position to
be in, and it makes his self-destructive behavior
inevitable, given what is happening to his family.
Steven’s behavior is not simply about his circum-
stances, however. It’s also part of the condition of
being an adolescent, straddling the fence between
19 Autumn 2003
two worlds. When he acts out, he’s testing his power
to determine events and to control others. He
wants to know how much his mother loves him.
What is she willing to give up for him? Will she
stay with his father because she loves Steven? Will
she refuse to fulfill her own desires because of her
emotional ties to her son? And, yes, his behavior is
also an expression of the emotional chaos and des-
peration he experiences as a result of his family’s
breakup. On the afternoon Steven’s mother decides
to take her kids and leave her husband, Steven
doesn’t know what to do. He is suddenly con-
fronted with his mother’s adult motives—lack of
money, security, and love—for leaving her hus-
band. And in the face of these baffling but very real
and powerful concerns, he can only explode. Finally,
one of the lessons he learns in this story is his own
powerlessness. His mother is her own person. She
has her own needs, her own will, and is willing to
hurt him if she has to.
Mary and Jenny both adapt by conforming to
the local environment; they both show interest
in joining Mormonism, seemingly as a coping
mechanism. Billy and Steven both resist the sta-
tus quo of their environment. From your end-
ing, it would seem that you don’t reward either
Billy or Steven for their nonconformist attitudes.
Do you feel that one should really conform in
order to gain acceptance and peace of mind?
I think Jenny is more of a conformist than her
mother. Jenny takes the path of least resistance. She
does so because she is more aware than Steven of
the social forces at work and their power over her.
She also wants to be a part of the social world. She
wants to be accepted. She wants to have friends and
belong. I’m not sure she’s really rewarded for her
conformity, however. Unlike Steven, she has to deal
with the fact that she is betraying her father. And
while she’ll live a more comfortable life, she will
have to live with this fact.
Mary’s position is far more complicated because
she is a wife and mother who leaves her husband
and, in some way, betrays her children, especially
Steven. She might be called a conformist save for
the fact that she is acting very much against the
accepted social norms for women. I see her as a sur-
Autumn 2003
vivor, as someone who has to make a difficult deci-
sion because she believes it will be best both for
herself and her children in the long run. Again, as
with Jenny, I’m not sure she’s really rewarded for
the difficult decisions she makes. What I hope the
end of the novel shows is the difficulty of her situ-
ation. It’s a situation in which she gets hurt and
hurts people no matter what she does. I hope her
situation both provokes a moral judgment from the
reader and causes the reader to question his or her
tendency to judge the mother in the first place.
You have Steven carry his soiled clothes around
for quite a long period of time. This seems to
symbolize his inability to get rid of his negative
attitudes and also indicate that his experience in
the retirement home was an opportunity to get
rid of some of these attitudes. What makes Steven
hang on? Why wouldn’t a teenager so aware of
his position of lack not want to have the oppor-
tunity to get away from his father, the cause of
his lack, and into an environment filled with
abundance?
I don’t really see those soiled clothes as reflective
of Steven’s negative attitude, though I do see where
your reading makes a lot of sense. Let me first explain,
for those who haven’t read the book, that Steven,
due to stress and exhaustion, has an embarrassing
accident, dirties his clothes, and must change and
carry around his soiled clothes for the rest of the
day in a plastic garbage bag. Those clothes are
Steven’s, and he won’t let go of them because they’re
part of who he is and who his father is, never mind
the fact that they’re profoundly dirty. And so, later
in the novel, when his mother, with her newfound
financial resources, buys him new and better clothes,
he won’t take them. And as much as Steven wants
to own his clothes and his identity as an atheist, an
outsider, a dreamer, and a struggler, they’re not ter-
ribly desirable. They make him suffer, and yet they
belong to him and are part of what it means to live
as he and his family have for years, threatened by
poverty and social insignificance. Giving them up
would be nice, but it would also be tantamount to
losing his family as he knows it.
The Parkers don’t believe in God. But, Steven
and Jenny long to believe in something. When
20 IRREANTUM
Steven is desperate to find a way to keep his
family together, he secretly says a prayer to God,
which goes unanswered. So, in a way, God has
disappointed him too.
Having just moved to Salt Lake City, the Parkers
are outsiders. They have no friends, and they don’t
share the sort of beliefs and values that would make
fitting in easier. The fact that they are supposed to
believe in nothing beyond themselves, to believe
only in themselves, as their father preaches, means
they don’t have a lot to believe in. Steven and Jenny
can see that their family might fall apart any day.
Without friends, family, or a God to believe in,
they are left with nothing. When Steven wanders
through Oak Groves, the convalescence home where
his mother works, lost and alone and surrounded
by old people who are as alone as he is, he realizes
how terrible nothing can be. And when his sister,
who makes friends with Mormons and has begun
to attend church with them, quizzes him on the
Ten Commandments and he realizes that he and
his family don’t know these laws and have never
tried to follow them, he sees that his life has no
structure, no direction. It’s a frightening realization.
And so, when he is most alone, he does say God’s
name out loud, and he strains to hear some sort of
response. He wants to believe that something or
someone out there in the universe will look out for
him and his family. Of course, what he wants is a
simple solution to his problems. I think everyone
feels this way any number of times in life. And
what he faces here is the fact that there is no simple
solution and that he is powerless to keep certain
events from happening. In a more cosmic sense, he
faces the possibility that there might be nothing
out there, that life may be meaningless, especially if
it is attended by enough loss and pain.
Throughout my novel, the theme of waste acts
as a kind of counterpoint to the theme of God.
Everywhere Steven looks, he sees the threat of waste—
the homeless people in the restaurant, his father’s
meaningless spending of money, his parents’ dis-
solving marriage, his father’s failure in school, his
own injured arm, the aging and ailing people in
Oak Groves, the dead Mr. Warner, his own soiled
clothes that he carries around. Then, of course, there
IRREANTUM
is the scene in the bathroom where Steven is literally
confronted with waste. In the face of this threat,
Steven is compelled at points to hope for the exis-
tence of something beyond himself and his world.
Are you familiar with other depictions and
critical treatment of well-heeled Mormons in lit-
erature, such as the work of Levi Peterson? To
what extent are you familiar with any contem-
porary Mormon imaginative writing or writers,
such as Darrell Spencer, Walter Kirn, and Brady
Udall?
In fact, Darrell Spencer was the first teacher I
ever worked with. He was at a writers conference
called Writers at Work, which then took place in
Park City, Utah. I must have been eighteen, maybe
only seventeen, and I wanted very badly to write.
So I convinced my parents to pay for the confer-
ence and wrote my first-ever short story, which I’d
rather not think about now. I read Darrell Spencer’s
short fiction early on. I gave more thought to his
style—a kind of lush minimalism that really con-
vinces you that, at least in his case, less is more—
than I did his subject matter. Does he write about
Mormons? I’ll have to go back and read him again.
Likewise, I’ve read Walter Kirn and Brady Udall
and have appreciated their particular takes on the
West, though I wasn’t aware that either writer was
Mormon. I’m not familiar with Levi Peterson. That
said, I think the Mormon experience, and religious
experience in general, is rather underrepresented in
contemporary literature. I myself am not religious,
but the subject of God and how we relate to God
remains, in my mind, one of the more important
themes for art to take on.
Tell us about your writing process for this
book and its journey to publication.
I started out, as do many writers who enter MFA
programs, as a short story writer because the short
form is ideal for the apprentice writer and ideal for
workshops where writers critique each other’s work
in a few hours. As a professional writer, however, I
soon found out that stories were far less marketable
than novels. Every agent I approached with my sto-
ries liked them and was interested in selling them
if I had a novel or part of a novel to sell along with
them. While my current agent agreed to sell my
21 Autumn 2003
story collection, Retribution, without a novel—I
feared above all else selling an unfinished piece and
writing on a contract—she eventually called up to
say she had interested buyers if—and I knew what
was coming—I also had a novel to sell. So, at last,
I caved in and presented the first thirty or so pages
of something that I had thought might become
a novel, though, at the time, I saw it as a self-
contained story. In addition, I wrote an outline to
accompany this “first chapter.” The outline seemed
to have the effect of morphing the concept of the
story into a novel. After it sold, I had eighteen
months to write it.
Working on a schedule with a deadline, I
expected the worst. I thought I’d be calling my
agent and begging her to ask my editor for more
time. But, for the most part, the writing went sur-
prisingly fast and smoothly. I wrote the first hun-
dred pages or so in about a month. Then I hit a
frightening period of about four months in which
I couldn’t bring the narrative forward. I was blocked,
and every effort, it seemed, was hopeless. It turned
out that I was trying too hard to follow the outline
I’d sold the book with. Originally, my story was
going to take place over a period of two years and
was going to involve a daring, drug-taking, suicidal
femme fatale under whose spell Steven would fall.
As soon as I figured out that more than half of my
novel would take place over one afternoon and
would not include this character—Daisy Lip was
her odd name—the project took off for me again.
It took about six months to get a rough draft and
another six to revise it. For the most part, it was a
pleasure to write.
What has been the response to the book?
For the most part, it has been good. The book
has gone into its fourth printing in this country,
and while I don’t yet know how many copies have
sold, it has done a lot better than my story collec-
tion, mainly, I think, because so few readers out
there want to read stories. It was just published in
the United Kingdom by Random House and may
come out in translation in Germany. So some good
things are happening. That said, I try not to dwell
on it, and I don’t go out of my way to read reviews,
though I do eventually get around to reading them.
Autumn 2003
My main challenge, and one I don’t handle well if
I’m fixated on how my books are doing, is getting
myself to the writing desk on a daily basis and pro-
ducing new work.
What are your current projects and future
writing plans?
I am currently working on a collection of long
stories or novellas, forty to a hundred pages in
length, which is one of my favorite forms to write,
as well as a novel. The novel has no young children
or adolescents in it, which is a real change for me.
I’m eager to try out new territory, though I’m still
dealing with family discord. The novel concerns
two adult brothers in a lifelong feud. Among other
things, they fight over their aging mother’s favor
and how best to care for her in her later years.
Because one of the brothers is a dentist and some-
thing quite terrible goes wrong in his clinic, I have
done a great deal of research about teeth and den-
tal procedures. It’s been fun to get into the head of
someone who does something so different from
what I do. Dentistry aside, it is a Cain and Abel
story about old grudges and the possibility of for-
giveness after years of anger and misunderstanding.
The long stories I’m working on all surround people
in the grips of terminal illnesses or those who have
survived the deaths of family members from such
illnesses. While the subject matter may sound grim,
I don’t think it is. The stories focus on the grieving
process and the way those who suffer, either directly
or indirectly, from terminal illnesses manage to find
surprising meaning in a terrible experience.
22 IRREANTUM
 N O V E L accountant after a two-year program at Salt Lake
E X C E R P T Community College. It was important that he do
More Than Enough
By John Fulton
Editor’s note: The following excerpt comprises the first
eighteen pages of chapter one, which is a total of forty-
two pages long. This novel was published in 2002 as
a paperback original by Picador USA.
A few hours before things took a turn for the
worse, Jenny and I came home from school to
find our father standing out on the gravel driveway,
his shoulder-length hair thrown back in the wind
and a pencil clenched in his teeth. He wore an old
pair of blue jeans that had holes in the knees and a
faded plaid pajama top. It was one of his study
days, when he often stayed in his pajamas, and I
was glad to see that, at the very least, he had his
pencil out and seemed to have the tired eyes of
someone who had been reading and working over
math problems. He was looking at the sky and
didn’t stop looking at it when we walked up. “We’re
going to get a nice storm today,” he said, taking the
pencil out of his mouth and pointing it at the
clouds caught in the mountains. “We need some
new snow to clean things up.” He kicked at the
muddy slush beneath him.
“Aren’t you cold in just that?” I asked, gesturing
at his pajama top.
He was stretching and still looking at the sky.
“It’s fresh out here,” he said, “not cold. It feels
good.” My father liked to feel good about almost
everything, and he liked other people to feel good
about things, too. People create life for themselves,
and so they might as well create a good one. That
was more or less the way he thought.
Inside, I was happy to see my father’s papers
scattered over the kitchen table—more proof of his
studying—which would be important for my mother
to see when she returned from ZCMI, where she
sold cosmetics during the day. My father’s latest
ambition, and the reason we had moved from Boise
to Salt Lake, was to become a certified public
IRREANTUM
well because his courses were expensive and because
the last year in Boise—where he’d been let go from
National Harvester, and from Raider Truck Com-
pany before that—had been difficult for us. But he
was not always, I knew even then, the most disci-
plined of students. Once I had looked at a sheet of
his work left out on the counter and saw that, for
the most part, his answers were wrong. I was a good
student, especially at math, and was getting A’s on
my Algebra II tests in my first semester as a sopho-
more at Billmore High. I could see what he had
done wrong, the mistakes he was making. But I
didn’t mention it to him, and I decided not to look
at his work again. I was sure he’d improve, fall into
the swing of being a student. Besides, he was doing
his part, working twenty hours a week at a garage
downtown, and was often tired and a little moody.
After studying for a while, Jenny and I went out
to our ten-by-ten square of backyard and untangled
Noir from his chain. He put on his usual show of
unrestrained happiness—leaping, barking, pounc-
ing at our legs—because he’d been freed from his
cramped little space and knew he was going for a
walk. It was great to see and tended to infect me
with the same ridiculous excitement, even if I’d had
a terrible day. Noir was a funny name for my dog
because he was large and entirely white save for the
smallest streak of black on one leg. He’d been named
by a German hippie, who had lived two apartment
doors down from us in Boise and had given him to
me soon before we left for Salt Lake. I hadn’t much
liked the name at first, though later it seemed to
work; it simply became him, whether he was white
or not.
With Noir running in front of us, we headed up
Ensign Down Boulevard, the main street that ran
through the Downs. Like many neighborhoods in
Salt Lake, the Downs was built over the foothills
in a town where money and class were easy to see:
those who had them lived up high against the moun-
tains closer to their God, and those who didn’t
lived down low, farther away from someone else’s
God. The streets on the bottom half of the Downs
were numbered. We lived in a duplex on Second
23 Autumn 2003
Street, where most of the small two-room houses
were rented by medical students, single mothers, and
bachelors who lived with other bachelors. A mile or
so up Ensign Down Boulevard, large new houses
with balconies, sloping yards, and huge windows
had been built into the hills on streets that had
names like Joy Road, Paradise Drive, Marvel Circle.
Above these neighborhoods, bulldozers carved the
land into roads and partitioned it into lots, where
dozens of new houses were just then being con-
structed. It was the early nineties, and there was a
housing boom in Salt Lake and in the rest of the
country, too. You read about it in the papers and
heard about it on the news. People were making
money, inflation was low and under control, and
though I did not know exactly what that meant,
I knew it was a good thing. I knew our family had
reason to hope for the best.
Jenny and I were headed to the neighborhood of
half-built houses and muddy streets and yards,
where NO TRESPASSING signs warned walkers-by to
stay out of the construction sites. Because most of
those houses had no walls yet, you could walk
through the frames and into the middle of the
structure, look up at the sky and imagine the height
of the absent ceilings, the color of the carpet not yet
laid, the number of rooms and windows, bathrooms,
balconies, and porches. A few houses were closer to
completion, and once Jenny and I had gotten into
one of them. It was a three-story house off to the
side of a road so freshly asphalted that you could
still smell the tar in the air. Inside, large stacks of
white tile lay covered in plastic. Written in pencil
on the blank white walls were words like SINK,
BATHTUB, KITCHEN COUNTER, WASHER AND DRYER,
WOOD-BURNING STOVE. These objects lay heavily
over the floor, wrapped in plastic and brown paper,
waiting to be installed. They amazed Jenny and me,
and we ripped a hole in the covering of the largest
object and felt the cold enamel of a tub.
As sometimes happened on our walks, we were
followed by a pack of neighborhood boys, some
from my class at Billmore, and other, smaller boys
who tagged along. They lived in the large, silent
houses far above our duplex and knew that we were
strangers who lived in every way below them. As we
Autumn 2003
climbed higher into those wealthy neighborhoods,
more and more of them came out of their houses
and walked behind us. In the past, they hadn’t done
much to us. They’d called us names. They’d thrown
a rock or two. But mostly they’d kept their distance
and let us be.
That afternoon they stopped leaving us alone. It
was a gray day in early January, and you could see
the storm trapped up in the mountains and guess,
as my father had, that it would soon be snowing
down in the valley. A car or two drove up the hill,
but it was around four o’clock, which meant the
street was mostly deserted and we could easily walk
up the middle of it and let Noir roam free, search-
ing the wet yellow lawns for places to pee. At our
backs lay the city—the State Capitol, the LDS Mor-
mon Office Tower, Temple Square, Main and State
Streets, the Avenues, and the Upper Benches run-
ning south along the Wasatch Front, where Big and
Little Cottonwood Canyons led up to the ski resorts.
From the top of the Downs, you could easily see
the endless grid of streets stretching west beneath
a haze of pollution. When we neared the end of
Ensign Down Boulevard, where the asphalt gave
way to gravel, and then mud, and from where we
could see the strange neighborhood of skeletal
houses, Jenny looped her arm in mine. The boys
had come within a few paces of us, so close that we
could hear the crisp slap of the baseball that they
threw back and forth across the street. “Should we
run?” Jenny whispered.
“No,” I said, angry that my sister failed to see
that running was not an option for me. The base-
ball shot overhead and was caught by a kid who’d
sprinted out in front of us. He threw it back just
above our heads, so close that I flinched, and Jenny
looked away and let out a shriek. “Shush,” I said
beneath my breath. I was embarrassed to be seen
with my sister, who was fourteen, eighteen months
younger than me. We’d both begun irritating each
other during our first months in Salt Lake. But I
had no friends yet, no one else to spend time with,
and neither did she. Another kid ran out in front of
us, where he caught the ball and hurled it—again
just over our heads—to a boy who stood behind us.
Jenny wanted to stop, but I pressed forward—boys
24 IRREANTUM
on all sides of us now—until we were walking over
the mud of an unnamed street on the sides of which
construction vehicles—a small yellow bulldozer
covered in dirty snow and two pickup trucks that
said ZION CONTRACTORS on the sides of them—
had been parked. Building materials—boards, bricks,
coils of black hose, and lead pipe—lay stacked and
partially covered beneath canvases held down by
large rocks. Noir ran between the boys, wagging his
tail and being too damn friendly. He leapt at them,
his tongue dangling. When one of the smaller kids
took a kick at him, he thought they were playing
and began turning circles; then he lunged through
the mud and into the middle of one of those large
stick houses. The boys were dressed more or less
alike in yellow and orange ski parkas from which
dangled square paper passes from Alta or Snowbird
or whatever expensive resort their families had last
skied at. They wore bulky sports shoes of all col-
ors—blue, black, red—with thick rubber heels that
had little transparent plastic windows in them.
Those were expensive shoes, I knew—eighty-dollar
shoes. The kids were blond, their hair cut so short
that it grazed their golden scalps. They looked less
like a religion than a race, a kind of people. That
wasn’t a nice thought, but it was how I felt about
them then.
“Hey,” one of them said, “your dog’s pissing on
that house.”
Noir was in somebody’s future living room or
kitchen lifting his leg on a two-by-four. “Noir,”
I called out. He glanced at me quickly, put his leg
down, and began sniffing the cement foundation
for his next place to pee.
“What did you call him?” one of those kids asked.
Jenny and I stopped walking; I turned around
and tried to address whoever had said that, but they
were like the same kid in different sizes. “Noir,”
I said.
“Moir,” the kid with the baseball in his hand said.
He threw it, again over our heads. “What’s Moir?”
My dog looked our way, confused by hearing his
name tossed around like that. But he soon went
back to his animal chores, sniffing and searching
out that house for whatever he could find.
“Noir.” I spelled it out. “N-o-i-r.”
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“That means ‘black’ in French,” one of them said.
“He’s white. Why did you call him black when he’s
white?”
That question bothered me, since his name made
no sense to me, either. “Maybe I wanted to call him
what he’s not,” I said.
“He shouldn’t be peeing on these houses,” a kid
said. He was one of the few kids who had some-
thing different about him. He wore glasses and had
a chubby face. He bent down then, grabbed some
dirty snow, and began to pack it. The two smaller
kids on either side of him did the same, after which
the kids on all sides of us started packing muddy
snow into hard, brown balls. I felt Jenny moving in
still closer and holding on tighter. She wanted to
walk down the hill and in the direction of our
house. But I didn’t think we should look like we
were retreating. So instead we followed Noir into
the half-built house—a cement foundation and
stick frame—where he’d been peeing. We walked
over the driveway and through what must have
been the garage and into the kitchen or the family
room. Had Jenny and I been there alone, we might
have surveyed the place and begun claiming rooms
for ourselves, which we’d often done. “This is my
room and this is my bathroom,” we’d say, running
from room to room until the whole house had been
claimed and divided between us.
“Hey,” a kid said from behind us, “it says no
trespassing.” I heard someone kick the sign that
had been stuck out front in the mud. The pack of
kids followed us into the house anyway. We could
see them through the walls of two-by-fours in front
of us and to the sides of us, dirty snowballs in their
gloved hands. “Can’t you read?” the same voice
asked.
Someone threw a snowball that hit my sister in
the back. “Ouch,” she said. I could tell she wanted
to run. But I squeezed her hand tightly to let her
know that she couldn’t show fear.
“Sure,” I said then, turning around and facing
the chubby kid with glasses. He was the one talk-
ing. “We can read.” I looked around for Noir, who
had disappeared. I wanted him close by. I thought
he might seem threatening, though I knew he
wouldn’t hurt anyone.
25 Autumn 2003
 “Then why are you trespassing?”
“You’re trespassing, too,” I said.
“That’s not what I asked you.” He threw the
baseball again, this time so close to my head that I
had to dodge it.
“Don’t do that,” I told him. Someone behind me
threw a snowball that hit my side. I didn’t budge
despite the fact that it stung like hell.
“What’re your names?” the kid with the glasses
asked.
I told him.
“You don’t go to the ward,” he said.
“No.”
“What ward do you go to?” some kid behind us
asked. Jenny wanted to turn around, but I didn’t
let her.
“Tell them to stop throwing snowballs,” she said
to me. Another came flying at us then, though we
dodged it. “Stop throwing snowballs!” she shouted
at them.
“Shush,” I said.
“What ward do you go to?” the kid with the
glasses asked again.
“None,” I said.
One of the smaller kids had picked up a board
from the ground and was smacking it against some-
thing.
“What do you believe, then?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I took my glasses off and zipped them
into my coat. They were unattractive and had thick
black frames. But I knew that we could not afford
to replace them. Things went a little blurry, and I
had to squint at the kid to keep his features in focus.
“How can you believe nothing?”
“We’re Catholic,” Jenny said.
“No we’re not,” I said, not sure why my sister
would tell this lie.
“We go to the Catholic church,” she said.
“We don’t,” I said. “We don’t believe in God.”
The kid with the fat face was tossing the baseball
up and down in one hand. “You are,” he said. “You’re
Catholic. You believe in the pope.”
“No,” I said. “We aren’t. We don’t.” The fact that
we believed in nothing, no God, no pope, nothing,
had just become important to me. It was the only
thing that I could own at that moment.
Autumn 2003
“You’re lying,” he said.
Two more snowballs hit me—one in the side and
one in the back of the head. Jenny ducked down
and held her hands out. I bent down and picked
up a board. There were boards and discarded nails
all over the cement floor. The kids around us also
picked up boards, though not the one who was
talking. He was still tossing the baseball up and
down in his hand.
“Don’t do that,” Jenny said, looking at me and the
other kids. She wanted us to put the boards down.
I saw Noir sprinting toward us along the muddy
road, happy in that stupid, excessive way of dogs.
“You’re lying,” the kid with the glasses said
again. Then, without blinking,
he hurled the ball into my gut. For an instant, bent
over and wheezing, I went blind. The board
dropped from my hand.
“Catholic shit,” one kid said.
“Steven,” my sister said, though I no longer
knew where she was. I felt the ice-cold concrete
beneath my hands and knew that I was on my
knees. Noir yelped with pain and then began to
bark. I opened my eyes, reached for the baseball,
and hurled it at the fat-faced kid, missing him.
Something hit me from behind and I went down,
tasting blood, warm and sudden, on my lips. Two
or three drops hit a patch of snow in front of me,
and I heard Jenny scream. The fat kid was strad-
dling me, his knees pressing into my back. He put
his hand on the top of my head, took a fist of my
hair, and pulled until I felt a clump come loose. I
screamed and he pushed my cheek into the con-
crete until I was silent again. In front of me, I saw
multiple pairs of new, expensive sports shoes walk-
ing over the ground. “Beg for mercy,” the kid on
top of me said. He turned my head and pushed my
other cheek into the concrete.
“It’s cold,” I said.
“Mercy,” he said. “Say it.”
“Mercy,” I said. But he didn’t stop whatever ter-
rible thing he was doing to me with his knee.
“Your sister ran home,” some other kid said.
“Louder,” the kid on top of me said. “Say, ‘I beg
for Mercy.’”
“Fuck you.”
26 IRREANTUM
 “You’re making me do this.” He cocked my arm
behind my back and slowly pushed it up toward
my shoulder. “Say it,” he said, cranking my arm up
another notch. I yelped and tried to ask for mercy,
though no words came out. Tears streaked down
my face. “He’s crying,” some kid said.
“I’m not,” I managed to say.
“You will be soon.” The fat kid repositioned his
knee, stood up a little on his other leg, and fell on
me with all his weight. “One more time,” he said.
But instead of falling on me again, he grabbed my
arm and slowly, with what must have been all his
strength, lifted my bent arm, elbow first, upward
over the back of my head until my shoulder quiv-
ered with pain from a place deep inside the socket
where I’d never felt pain before. “Say it,” he said
fiercely into my ear. I felt the muscle begin to tear,
slowly, then more quickly. “Jesus,” someone said.
I heard a distinct pop of bones and then my own
voice screaming, long and sharp. My arm went slack
and my chest collapsed. “Oh,” he said, standing up.
“What did you do to him?” another kid asked.
I rolled over and saw the weird frame of the house
above me seeming to lean into the air and hover
there, bend and quiver the way something reflected
on water might. The fat face of the kid who had
hurt me floated into this picture. His stupid open
eyes told me that he was afraid before he turned
and ran off with the other kids.
Lying on the concrete foundation, I felt waves of
pain roll over me and cold air move through my
throat and into my lungs. Noir whimpered above
me and licked my face. “No,” I said. Speaking hurt.
Half of me was abuzz with hot pain. I struggled to
my knees, pushing myself up with the arm that
seemed to work. My other arm was bent in a strange
way so that the palm of my hand pointed away from
me. I tried not to look at it. Looking at it made it
hurt more. The first steps were nearly unbearable.
When I concentrated and breathed and walked
slowly, the pain eased a little. Whimpering, Noir
walked at my side. “No. No,” I said for some rea-
son. I heard a car rush by, and then another. The air
was gray and I thought maybe it was snowing
lightly, though I only half registered this fact. At
one point, I looked around and knew from the cars
IRREANTUM
and houses that I had gone too far down the hill and
had passed our duplex. Finally, at my front door,
I could not work the key into the lock, and so, like
a stranger, I rang the doorbell.
“Steven,” my father said. Usually when I arrived
home, my father would not lift his face from his
math textbook to look at me. He often tried to seem
busy with his schoolwork when my mother and I
were at home. That afternoon, he dropped his
notepad on the entryway table and let me in. “Jesus
Christ,” he said. “What happened to you?” He
touched my shoulder and I screamed. “Oh, God,”
my father said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I got lost,” I said. “I didn’t know where I was.”
My mother was running for the phone. “I’m
calling an ambulance.”
“We can’t call an ambulance,” my father said.
“We can’t afford a bill like that.”
“Look at him, for God’s sake,” my mother said.
She held the phone in her hand but wasn’t dialing.
They were both looking at me now.
“We’ll drive him ourselves,” my father said.
“How did this happen?” my mother asked me.
She came at me with a washcloth she’d just run
under the water. “Stand up straight,” she said. “Stand
up so that I can take care of this cut.”
“I can’t,” I said, trying to stand straight. “It hurts
too much.”
“Jesus.” I saw the fear in her face. She bent down
and wiped at my mouth. Her perfume was almost
acidic and turned my stomach. Because she had to
wear the scents she sold at work, she often smelled
harsh and floral.
“Ouch!” I yelled. The blood on the cloth scared
me. I hadn’t thought I was bleeding that much.
“Your arm,” she said, “what happened to your
arm? What happened to his arm?”
My father bent down, gently lifted my red parka,
and looked inside. “I think he’s dislocated his shoul-
der,” he said.
“It was an accident,” I said, knowing I could not
become a snitch. “I fell.”
“Who did this to you, Steven?” my mother asked.
“Your sister already told us you were having an
argument with someone. Who were you arguing
with?”
27 Autumn 2003
 “No one did anything to me,” I said. “Where’s
Jenny? What happened to Jenny?”
“Let’s get him in the car,” my father said.
“I want to come,” Jenny said. She was crying and
curled up in the fat green TV chair that we had
bought from Deseret Industries and that smelled
faintly of cat piss, so faintly that we had all decided
to believe it wasn’t cat piss and never mentioned
it to one another.
I yelped. My father had touched my injured arm
again. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was trying to stand
me up and turn me toward the door.
“Let me walk myself,” I yelled, even though talk-
ing hurt. Each word seemed to push against a tight-
ness in my chest. There were two spots of blood on
my white tennis shoes. “Am I bleeding a lot?”
“Not a whole lot,” my father said.
“He is,” my mother said. “Look at him. Some-
body did that to him.”
“You’re not helping,” I heard my father whisper
to her. He looked at me. “It’s just your lip. It looks
like you cut your lip a little.”
We were outside now. The air was gray and the
snow had begun falling in heavy sideways sheets.
My parents walked on both sides of me, their arms
out to catch me if I fell. “It hurts to talk,” I said.
“It hurts him to talk,” Jenny said, her voice
panicky.
“I’m not injured too badly, am I?” I had to whis-
per. If I whispered, the pain wasn’t as bad.
“No,” my father said. “No, you’re not.”
I didn’t remember getting in the car. I remember
only opening my eyes and seeing that I was in the
backseat with Jenny’s hand in my good hand. “I’m
sorry for running,” she whispered.
“Running from what?” my mother asked. My
father was outside brushing a thin dust of snow
away from the windows. “You tell me what hap-
pened,” she said. I squeezed Jenny’s hand as tightly
as I could to let her know that she’d better not say
anything, and she didn’t. When my father sat down
in the car, my mother looked at him and said,
“He needs an ambulance, Billy. We need to call an
ambulance.”
“He’s fine,” my father said.
“He is not fine,” she said.
Autumn 2003
“You’re scaring him,” he said. Then he whispered
in her ear. “He might be in shock. The best thing
to do is to keep him talking.”
“I hate this,” my mother said.
“I can hear you,” I said. It hurt less to talk now
that I was sitting and speaking in a very soft voice.
“I’m not in shock.”
“Good,” my father said. “That’s what we want to
hear.” He was driving now and trying to look at me
in the rearview mirror while he kept an eye on the
road. “I want you to keep talking to me. I want you
to tell me how you are. How are you?”
“Okay, I guess.” If I concentrated, I could keep
the pain at a distance, like a sound you hear at night
in your bed that grows farther and farther away.
When I looked down at my injured arm, it didn’t
seem to be my arm. It felt unnaturally attached to
me, awkward and foreign.
“He’s staring at his arm,” Jenny said to my parents.
“Look at me,” my father said, by which he meant
that I should address him in the rearview mirror.
I did. “Good boy. Now speak to me, Steven. Tell
me something. Anything.”
“Where’s Noir?” I asked. I couldn’t remember at
that point whether he had followed me home or
not. I remembered only hearing him yelp soon after
I had hit the concrete.
“He’s fine. He’s back home. What else would
you like to talk about?”
“Could we talk about our house?” I asked. “Could
we talk about moving up the hill?”
“Of course we could,” he said. In fact, the house
was one of his favorite topics of conversation.
“When are we moving up the hill?” Jenny asked.
“Soon,” he said. “The times are pretty good just
now. There’s a lot of activity going on, and we’ll be
able to take advantage of that. As soon as I’m a cer-
tified accountant, we should make our move. No
more than a year, a year and a half maybe.”
“Please,” my mother said, “let’s not go through
this. Steven is hurt, for God’s sake.”
“We’re not going through anything,” my father
said.
“No more about the house,” she said.
“It will have three stories, right?” I asked. My
father nodded. “It will be up on Green Hill or Lemon
28 IRREANTUM
Circle?” I asked, referring to two of the nicest
streets above our duplex, streets where the kids who
had hurt me that day probably lived.
“Sure,” my father said. “Those are both possibil-
ities. Or we’ll take one of the new ones they’re
building now. Those look promising.”
“And it will have a trampoline and swimming
pool in the backyard?” Jenny added.
“No,” my father said, surprising me because we
had always planned to have a swimming pool and
trampoline and because I had assumed that great
plans—at least in the realm of dream—never had
to change. “The trampoline can stay. But the swim-
ming pool is inside the house now . . . just off the
living room. What’s the use of an outside pool in a
place where it snows five months of the year?” He
gestured to the world outside our car, where the
snowfall had become so thick that you could barely
see the ghostly outlines of the mountains in the dis-
tance. “It will be enclosed and climate-controlled
so that you kids can swim in the middle of a bliz-
zard if you want. We’ll be able to enter it from the
living room or kitchen through sliding glass doors.
A deck will lead from the pool out onto the back-
yard where you can sun yourselves in the summer
or just sit and drink Cokes and listen to music with
friends.”
I looked over at Jenny, who was smiling and who
clearly liked the sound of the new pool as much as
I did. “My room,” she said (and I knew very well
what she was about to demand since she had done
so many times before), “will have two large win-
dows and will be far away from Steven’s, all the way
down the hall from his, and right across the hall
from a bathroom.” Then she said, “My bathroom.”
I usually snapped back at her for her nasty posses-
siveness and her desire to escape me, but Jenny and
I had been in cramped quarters for as long as we
could remember, and that afternoon I understood
her wish for her own space, for two windows and a
bathroom all her own. I wanted that, too.
“Of course,” my father said to Jenny. “You will
have your own bathroom. Steven will have one, too.
I will have one and your mother will have one.
And,” he added, “we will also have a guest bath-
room. Five bathrooms.” He lifted his hand from
IRREANTUM
the steering wheel and put out five fingers, wiggling
them a little for emphasis. I imagined these bath-
rooms, my mother’s done in pink colors with little
pink seashell soaps beside the sink, Jenny’s done in
purple with seashell soaps of that same color, my
father’s bathroom and my bathroom in marine blue
or in rustic earth colors, though I didn’t know much
about how bathrooms should look. I knew only
that there would soon be five bathrooms where
there was now only the hurried and shameful pri-
vacy of one.
“How are you feeling, Steven?” My mother had
turned around and I could see from her face—tired
and worried—that she didn’t believe a word my
father had said and that she was in no mood to pre-
tend that she did.
“Fine,” I said. “Great.”
“Great,” she said, laughing a little. “How could
you feel great?”
“I just do,” I said.
My mother said something odd then. “You don’t
have to feel great for our sakes, you know. You’re
allowed to feel however you feel.”
I didn’t understand her and neither did my
father. “Why are you telling him that?” he asked.
“He’s doing just fine and you’re telling him he
shouldn’t be.”
“He’s hurt, Billy,” my mother said, “and we’re
acting like nothing has happened.”
“We’re not acting like anything,” my father said.
“We’re just making conversation.”
“We’re talking nonsense. We’re talking about
bathrooms we don’t even have.”
“I like to talk about them,” I said. “It makes me
feel better to talk about them.” My parents were
too angry to continue speaking, and whatever spell
I had been under, whatever state of mind had kept
the pain away, was broken now. I looked down at
my lap and saw again how my palm and forearm
were turned up at a wrong angle. My upper arm
was swollen, and I moved the ice bag that—though
I didn’t remember it—my father must have given
me farther up on my shoulder. I felt a stabbing
pang, then another and another. “Jesus,” I said, try-
ing to concentrate and keep the pain away.
“We’re almost there, kiddo,” my mother said.
29 Autumn 2003
 “A minute ago,” my father said, “he was just fine.
And now, no thanks to you, dear, he’s in agony.”
“Please,” I said, “please don’t argue.”
They were quiet for a while and I was glad since
the pain now demanded all my concentration and
made the tears come to my eyes, though I managed
not to sob or make any humiliating childish noises.
I just let the tears fall and held on to my arm and
was thankful for the silence until my mother turned
around again and said, “Please, Steven, tell us how
this happened. We know you didn’t fall. Who did this
to you?”
“I fell,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“Jenny,” my mother said, “what happened to
your brother?” I looked at my sister and tried to tell
her with my eyes, full of tears or not, that if she said
anything I would hurt her, I would make her life
miserable.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said, looking down in
her lap.
“Jenny,” my mother said.
Jenny looked up. “Why don’t we believe in God?”
she asked.
There was a silence in the car. “Because we
would rather not believe something just to make
ourselves feel better about the world,” my father
said. “Because we’re not afraid of the truth. Because
what we have is what we see in front of us, and
that’s good enough.” We had heard our father’s lec-
tures on this subject before whenever we asked this
question. He had always felt strongly about his
atheism. He seemed to feel that he—and his fam-
ily—were stronger because of it.
My mother turned around and looked at Jenny.
“Why are you asking?”
“Because that’s what the boys who hurt Steven
wanted to know.”
“Shut up!” I yelled, even though my lungs felt as
if they would shatter. “Shut the fuck up.” I wanted
to kick her, but I didn’t have the strength.
“They were Mormons,” my sister continued, hav-
ing decided to betray me completely. “Kids from
our neighborhood. Kids who live up the hill.”
“Shut up.” I was crying out loud now and hated
her for reducing me to sobs.
Autumn 2003
“Did you hear that, Billy?” my mother said. “The
Mormon kids. Those little brats. When we’re done
at the hospital, I’m going to find them. I’m going
to go to their houses.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“Damned if I’m not. Look at what they did to
you.”
“Please don’t,” I said. I looked up at the rearview
mirror where I met my father’s eyes and thought I
saw that he understood me, that he knew that his
son could not become a snitch.
“No one’s going over to anyone’s houses,” he said.
“Let’s just get to the hospital. We’ll think about the
rest later.”
My mother turned back around in her seat.
“We’ll see,” she said under her breath. I knew then
that my father would do what he could for me. We
were all quiet again, and I hoped it would stay that
way until we arrived at the hospital, though finally
Jenny sighed. “I wish we went to church like every-
body else in this city. I wish we believed in God.”
She was writing her initials over and over again in
the steamed glass of her window.
“We believe in ourselves, Jen,” my father said
enthusiastically. “We’re not afraid of the fact that
we have no one and nothing else to rely on. People
don’t get anywhere thinking that something out
there is going to make life better. You think that
way”—he cleared his throat—“and you never have
to look at yourself and see who’s really running
your life.”
Jenny didn’t answer him. None of us did except
for my mother, who laughed bitterly at his remark.
“I’m not joking, Mary,” he said. I could tell by
the way he leaned into the steering wheel that he
was irritated and maybe even hurt. “Please stop
writing on the window, Jenny,” he said. “That makes
a mess. And who do you think has to clean it up?”
“Okay,” she said, and stopped.
30 IRREANTUM
 P O E M S T O R Y

Heritage Toaster Road

Women of sunbonnets and fortitude By Coke Newell
I touch your callused hands
and feel your strength Editor’s note: Originally titled “The Education of
and commitment. Little Tree Boy,” this story won first place in this year’s
IRREANTUM fiction contest.
I am warmed by your quilts
pieced together with sacrifice and constraint.
I feel your covenants
in the bound edges.
I should have turned and run for the woods when
at first I heard her name: Molly Strait. Because
she was everything it intimated: a straight-laced
Molly Mormon. Only I didn’t know a Molly Mor-
You extend your work-reddened hands mon from the Queen of Sheba, so I had to find out
through generations the hard way. You know, getting lifted to the heav-
offering ens and then dropped on my butt.
your gifts. A Molly Mormon, just for the record, is a young
pink-cheeked thing—usually blonde, by the way—
I hold heritage, who’s never done anything so bad even as split her
faith and endurance Oreo and eat just the cream. But before I knew her
but guilt name I simply knew what she looked like: sweet-
seeps through dream lovely, with bright auburn hair hanging in
my natural cascades clear to her fine and dandy blue-
fingers. jean fanny. Her daddy had probably been disap-
pointed about the hair, not being blonde and all.
—Lorraine Jeffery It was when she turned and looked at me, staring
at her, that I saw her eyes were emerald green.
Lorraine Jeffery is coordinator of children’s services for I couldn’t even turn away, and she froze, herself,
a public library in Chillicothe, Ohio, and has been a for a moment.
library director and children’s librarian in Houston, Which, as much as I liked the look, kind of
Texas. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and a broke my concentration and, I have to say, my will.
master’s degree in library and information science I was the first one to look away and get on the bus.
from BYU. She has published poetry in Ibettson Street, • • •
Calliope, Cappers, Anderie Press and Christian Poetry
and articles in the Ensign and Church News, with a
short story coming out soon in Standard, published by
S ee, I was in college, but not quite your typical
Mormon freshman. I was twenty-two and fresh
off the road or, should I say, fresh off the mountain,
the International Church of the Nazarene. She and though I suppose either one would do. Four months
her husband have 10 children, eight adopted from earlier I’d been minding my business, sitting out
various ethnic backgrounds and races. under the pine trees smoking a joint with the open
baggie and a pack of ZigZags right there on the
tabletop, picking my guitar, when a couple of boys
in suits walked up the driveway. I said suits.
Now you have to understand, our driveway was
a good set of ruts digging their way up the red-dirt
slope of a piñon-pine-covered hillside half a mile

IRREANTUM 31 Autumn 2003

from U.S. Highway 64 heading east out of Taos,
New Mexico. Seven of us, from time to time, but
usually just the four of us—me and Lisa, Steve and
Rosey—living in an old Bluebird bus with a chim-
ney. Actually, it was a just stove pipe, the bottom
end anchored onto a nice little Yotul cast-iron
wood burner Mark Lambert and Pippin Francis
had rounded up at a flea market down in Santa Fe
one day about four years before.
That was before I got there. Actually, that was
before any of us came together, everyone still scat-
tered hither and yon across the butter and bacon
and Saturday-morning pancakes patchwork of sub-
urban America, all living with our mommies and
daddies in their quiet desperation looking for some-
thing to take away the pain. Then my mom died
almost overnight.
Pain relief for me came in the form of a blonde
guitar and a long, black highway. Any highway, as
long as it was narrow and quiet and led to some-
where far away. Mine eventually led from west Texas
to New Mexico, by way of everything between east
and west, including Minnesota, Montana, and Mon-
terey. I met Lisa Deru while lying around in the
shade of Redrocks Amphitheater up in Colorado,
waiting for Radiohead to take the stage. She was all
alone, heading home to Norman, Oklahoma, heaven
forbid, after a bad year at Colorado School of
Mines, her wanting to be an engineer and the guys
wanting her to be the dorm mascot, so to speak.
Anyway, we eventually headed north together clear
to the Black Hills, but finally back to the south,
where we first met Pippin at a Laundromat in Taos,
and he invited us up to share his Bluebird. And
then one day these two Mormon boys blow a tim-
ing chain out on the two-lane and follow the guitar
picking right up to my sweet little spread.
The guy out in front says “Hey” and gives a little
wave. Me, I kind of froze, thinking here come the
Fibbies, ready to fling my herb to the four winds
and dash for the high country, but his companion,
what they call each other, kind of stalls out ten feet
behind him when he sniffs the smoke signals and
kinda whines, “Elder, let’s go back out to the high-
way!” Well, I’d heard “Elder” before, and then I see
the black name tags and relax.
Autumn 2003
“Mick Phanton,” I said, offering my hand. “Pull
up a stump.”
We’d had a couple of these boys in our living
room one time, my mom letting them in out of the
west Texas sun for a lemonade, and my dad the Air
Force officer comes home and freaks his flippin’ lid.
Walks right up to one of them, who had stood out
of respect and to shake his hand, and bumps chests
with the guy. Knocked him right on his butt back
into the couch, calling him “Mr. Preacher Boy” and
crap like that. Boys excused themselves real kindly
and split.
So here I got them on my own turf, and I invite
them up, cramming the image of my dad into any
corner I can cram it. Guy in front, dude called “Elder
Johnson,” says, “That’s pretty good pickin’,” like he
knows what he’s talking about, and starts looking
around for a place to sit.
I’m motioning him toward a cut-off tree stump,
and the other guy, “Elder Call,” asks me if they could
use my phone, car broke down out on the road.
It’s actually Johnson laughs first, saying, “Dude,
he lives in a school bus!” And so I laugh too, figur-
ing Suit Number One isn’t that scary, and then Lisa
walks out of the bus putting her shirt on. As she
walked. These two boys thinking what the heck,
and me thinking yeah, she’s a peach.
Anyway, just to be nice I offer them both a toke,
and Johnson says no thanks but Call’s just staring
at Lisa, then Johnson, like, Is this heaven or hell?
Lisa wasn’t ugly.
Well, long story short, me and Johnson exchange
some licks on my Taylor and then I load them into
my ’72 VW Toaster bus (it was a little boy at a gas
station in Tacoma called it that one time, which is
just what it looked like) and give ’em a ride to a
phone booth outside the Chronicle newspaper offices
up in Angel Fire. Nearest phone I know of, not
being much of a user myself. These two are mis-
sionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints, what my tenth-grade history teacher
back in Barksdale called “Mormons,” and they’re
out seeking searching souls.
Crawling up the mountain to Angel Fire, Johnson
had asked me if they could come out sometime,
talk about Jesus. I looked in the rearview and notice
32 IRREANTUM
Elder Call just looking out the window as the scrub
oaks zoomed by at about 28 miles per hour, and
decided to say yeah just to spite him. Not to say I
wasn’t searching. Well, Call looks up at me and our
eyes meet in the mirror, his a lot bigger than mine.
They taught me right there in the Bluebird, Lisa
and Rosemary hanging around for the first mission-
ary lesson, and then just Lisa for the next two, Steve
refusing to come in, just sitting outside sucking
reefer and strumming my guitar or dinking around
under the hood of the VW. My VW. (’Course, he
figured it was his Bluebird, since he got there the
year before we did.)
Well, damned if I don’t, excuse my French, love
everything they tell me over the next three weeks.
And I go and get myself baptized a Mormon up in
Eagle Nest Lake. Call had said the proper thing to
do was go to the Mormon chapel clear down in Taos,
get dipped in a little pool right there in the build-
ing, the official way to do it. But I kind of fake-
shuddered and told them I was afraid of water inside
buildings, and Johnson laughed and said, “Dude,
the pond it is!”
• • •
B y mid-May I was sleeping in the Toaster, the
elders having committed me to the premarital
chastity thing. Lisa was still in the bus, and we were
still in love, arms-length, but she just wasn’t truck-
ing with the religion thing. Interested, half-willing,
but mostly just confused. I wondered if we’d last
out the year.
But then I find out about the Mormon college
up in Rexburg, Idaho, and start thinking about that,
asking myself, what am I doing, where am I going?
Living in a bus and mending fence for the ranchers
and playing little coffeehouse gigs once or twice a
month and stuffing cash money into an old fishing
tackle box. My dad a dark, distant, and bitter mem-
ory. Mostly. Sometimes just wanting to go back
and bump chests with the SOB and say what gave
you the right? And then wanting to hug him and
cry and be ten again and throw a football and
thinking of my mom all along.
Hell.
So the Mormon college thing: I turn in the appli-
cation showing no high school diploma—I believe
IRREANTUM
I was lying on a rock on the west side of Flathead
Lake in Montana about the time the kids back in
Abilene were walking the aisle or the plank or what-
ever they do. But I’d done pretty well on the ACT,
and Ernie Begay, my church leader there in Taos,
gave me a great letter of recommendation, and the
school let me in, public school paperwork be damned.
Lisa talked about coming with me, living in the
Toaster, separate bedrolls, but in the end I left her
standing there in my rearview mirror crying and
holding her arms tight across her chest like a little
girl whose family dog was going off to be put down.
Like she was cold.
August in New Mexico.
Left her standing there.
• • •
I spent some downtime of my own heading north
to Idaho. Except for the occasional nighttime
Norah Jones cry-in-your-beer moan-along, I kept
the music off and just drove, thinking man I been
everywhere and never got nowhere. Me and the
Toaster and my Taylor; I didn’t even own a dog.
Solemn.
Scared. But pretty sure I knew what I was doing.
I
• • •
was assigned to a two-bedroom apartment
designed to accommodate three other guys, two
per room, but one of them never got there. Bob
Bellison and Colin Walker were “RMs,” returned
missionaries—guys like Elder Johnson who had
already finished their two-year stint, Bob in Chicago
and Colin in Sweden. They had arrived first and
chosen separate bedrooms, each praying the third
and especially fourth roommates never showed up.
Only I did, so Colin very kindly invited me to take
the other bed in his room. Bob never offered.
Which was fortuitous if for no other reason than
I would have gone nuts with Bob. Colin and I hit
it off quickly, he being very interested in my status
as a recent convert, something that justified and
kind of fulfilled for him everything he’d done for
two years in Sweden, not a single person having
ever become a Mormon under his tutelage. He was
ever solicitous, instructive, patient. Bob, on the other
hand, was disingenuous at best, offering a false-
front smile that usually masked a seeming fear that
33 Autumn 2003
I was infected or something, like what gave me the
right to think I was a real Mormon? He was pio-
neer stock, after all; his forebears had lived in Mis-
souri and fled from the persecutions there in the
1830s. I told him once I was descended from Mis-
souri pioneer stock too: my forebears had been the
ones ran his forebears clear the hell out of Jackson
County and onto the Mormon Trail. Which wasn’t
true, as far as I know, but it got him out of our room.
My main problem with Bob: He wanted to be a
concert producer or event management type of guy.
He was a dancer on the college ballroom dance
team and chairman of the college Cultural Programs
Council, responsible in large measure for the type
of talent that performed in campus venues, large
and small. Colin told him early on that I was a
guitar player/songwriter—he’d listened to me and I
was good—and Bob had kind of looked at me like
yeah, right, actually doing a little flinch with his
deprecatory smile.
• • •
F irst day in Idaho I go talk to a lady in academic
advisement, saying whaddaya got? Meaning,
things to study.
And she said, you’re kidding?
I said, lady, the only thing on my mind coming
up here was to learn how to really be a Mormon,
maybe even get ready for a mission, like Elder
Johnson and Colin, go be Mr. Preacher. I really
meant that; I really wanted to go someday, some-
thing that gets in the blood of a young man want-
ing to find peace and do something worth doing
that doesn’t include joining the military. Gets in
your blood. So the lady actually sat there with me
for forty minutes, asking me about my life, what I
liked, where I’d been (she said “Oh my heck” maybe
thirty times, that being the most common Mor-
mon expletive), where I wanted to go. Several times
I said anywhere but Texas, but then finally zeroed
in on the natural sciences, something like forestry,
or maybe geology, both of which had occupied my
child’s mind a lot when we were living in Iceland.
Either way, far as I could get from Texas.
Finally this lady, “Sister Brewer,” opens the book
to an optional program available to natural science
majors: an eight-week seminar on the road, I’m kid-
Autumn 2003
ding you not, traveling in a bus, sleeping in tents,
real live field study getting college credit in geology,
biology, English (we’d keep a graded journal), botany,
even physical ed, as they’d be kicking our booties
up and down mountains and canyons all over the
Western states.
I said, Sister? This college thing is tight, y’all. And
she said, huh?
• • •
I n the lazy hours and days before school started,
Colin would often take me down to the Arctic
Circle for a malt or show me around campus or just
sit and talk with me for hours. Colin carried a dou-
ble burden: he was nearing twenty-six, still unmar-
ried—rare in Mormondom; and his kidneys were
beginning to fail. One night in the living room,
Bob out playing the social game neither Colin nor
I found an interest in, he told me the kidney thing
he could live with, even if it killed him. It was the
spouse thing that was eating at his guts.
See, in Mormon theology, the family is right there
with Christ as the center of faith. Marriage is one
of the highest aspirations, marriage in one of the
Church’s temples one of the highest sacraments.
Colin didn’t even have a girlfriend. He was so des-
perate he asked me for counsel. He was reasonably
good looking, polite, and comfortably gregarious.
He had talents, interests, and certainly a kind
heart. He said every time he had ever gotten two or
three dates with the same girl, somehow the failing
health often came up. He was honest and up front
about it, nothing hidden. But in fact he rarely got
a second or third date, let alone a first one. What
to do?
I had no answers, I’ll tell ya, but I really hurt for
the guy. Losing a woman, hell; never having one?
Sheesh.
• • •
T hree days later all us Road-Seminar kids are
putting our gear in the belly of a big travel bus
and preparing to hit the road, thirty-three of us
plus two professors and a bus driver named Earl.
Idaho boy. The first thing I noticed about our group
was a lot of flannel and scarves or headbands. The
second thing was a specific student body running a
brush through her waist-length locks on the far side
34 IRREANTUM
of the crowd. She saw me staring at her, like I said
before, a real sweet honey with hair the color of
Flame and Trouble, and just stared back. No smile,
just this hard stare, saying, I suppose, what the heck
you looking at and what you gonna do about it?
A real challenge.
I felt my father
breathing down my
neck and wondered if I
could really live up to
being the New Me.
So I shake it off and lead the charge onto the
bus, a lot bigger than my old Bluebird, plus with
air conditioning and a toilet in the back. Coulda
used one of those back in NM. We say a group
prayer and head north toward Yellowstone National
Park, stopping for lunch at a wide spot in the road
just as we climbed up off the Snake River Plain and
entered the Island Park volcano caldera. I was stand-
ing on a rock humming a Freddy Jones tune and
looking out over the country below us (flat, but not
Texas) when this girl Molly came up and offered
me a sandwich, tentative at first, but then a gentle
smile. Beautiful teeth. And something went sproing
in my guts.
I had never kissed a girl seriously until Lisa Deru,
and that didn’t happen overnight, lemme tell you,
not after her rough year at college. I had had a lot
of girl friends, but no romances. Never really cared
much until my mom died, and then I wanted some-
thing real bad and took my guitar and the open
road as valid place holders until Lisa came along.
And so Lisa had been my everything and my only
thing until the Mormon thing became the Big Thing.
Molly and I introduced ourselves, or at least she
did: Carey, Idaho, oldest daughter of a farmer, child
number two of eight, Daddy’s first child in college.
I was visibly thrown off, not wanting to talk Texas
IRREANTUM
at all but knowing how to explain neither New
Mexico nor the years in between. I’d had to prac-
tice that with all the Mormons back in Taos and
had never gotten it down real smooth or without a
lot of explanatory mumbling—lifers were shocked,
the other converts and the Mexican-Indians more
than mildly intrigued. So I blundered: “And your
mom?”
To which she kind of froze up. Staring me right
in half without blinking, she said, “Why would you
ask about my mom?”
I stared back, wavering a little but magnetized by
her eyes, and said, “Sorry, you just didn’t mention
your mother. I was only trying to round out the
picture.”
She stared at me another couple moments, then
exhaled and looked away. She said quietly, “My
mom died of cancer when I was fifteen,” and that
was all it took. We were seat mates after lunch,
Molly grabbing her daypack and telling the guy
next to me to go meet someone new—smiling all
the while.
My mom picked out her own casket two days
before she died. Pointed to it in the Elliott-Hamil
Garden of Memories brochure right there in the
hospital. Couldn’t talk any longer. Of course, she
only had three weeks to even know she was dying.
Glioblastoma multiforme: aggressive brain cancer. We
hardly had time to learn to pronounce the friggin’
disease. Two weeks of gradually worsening head-
aches, then the diagnosis, then three weeks to die.
Three freaking Dog Damn What’s the Use Adios
weeks to say good-bye. My mother.
Major hell.
After she died I got the headache, too, only mine
was in the form of a twenty-four-year veteran of the
United States Air Force: Chief Master Sergeant M.
Cyrus Phanton, Dyess Air Force Base, Abilene, Texas.
By way of Barksdale, Louisiana; Keflavik, Iceland;
and Blytheville, Arkansas. So as you can see, I hadn’t
seen much of anything worth seeing in my seven-
teen years.
My dad was always a tough guy. Had a funny
last name that kids took advantage of until he got
bigger, and tougher, than any of them. Then he
didn’t go to officer’s school, just the recruiting
35 Autumn 2003
office in Lilburn, Georgia, so he made up for both
by busting his and everyone else’s butts for twenty-
one years, including mine. Oh, he was a real dad,
I suppose, and a good man. Even introduced me to
the guitar. He never hurt my mother, but man was
he tough on me and my little brother Curtis some-
times. But when Mama got sick and then went
away like a Russian thistle in a west Texas wind-
storm, he just went nuts. Then he went inside. He
disappeared.
So I did the same, hoping Curtis, then fourteen,
could outlive the funk. He did, thankfully, and
is now in his third year of engineering school in
Galveston. Says Dad is almost a whole human being
again, although he’s not too sure how he’d take me
if I were to show up after five years and three post-
cards. And a Mormon to boot, which is something
I’ve told Curtis quite a bit about.
• • •
O ne afternoon we climbed Yellowstone’s Mt. Wash-
burn, then ate brownbag dinners cuddled up
into the base of the summit fire lookout, a cabin
sitting atop a framework of huge thirty-foot logs.
Everyone but me turned their backs into the stiff-
ening September wind to await the rising of the full
moon. I stood up and stared right into it, thinking
oddly of the fireball dustbowl sunsets out over Big
Spring and Odessa, when all my travel partners
start singing a song I’d never heard before, a church
hymn they’d all learned as kids. It was the most
beautiful song I’d ever heard. I said to Molly, what
is this? And she looked up at me weird and said,
“I Am a Child of God.”
I am a child of God
and he has sent me here.
Has given me an earthly home
and parents kind and dear.
Lead me, guide me
walk beside me,
help me finds the way.
Teach me all
that I must do
to live with him some day.
They all sang on, two verses, and I listened and
kind of hummed along and then got tears in my
Autumn 2003
eyes, all these good Mormon boys and girls singing
fundamental doctrine they’d known since they were
three, sitting around the hearth with their mom-
mies and daddies and a warm mug of cocoa and me
tearing up and saying damn, I’ve wasted a lot of
time and blown a lot of years, and why didn’t I
know this sooner? And they sang on, verse three,
and the moon came up way out over the petrified
forest and lit up their faces, and I moved away to
watch both the group and the moon, same time,
because I’m crying anyway, and they sang on, Molly
not even noticing me go. I looked away just at the
moon, and at the woods, and wanted to be alone so
bad, and so I moved quietly off into the trees and
wandered off to stare at the sky and sit on a rock,
and they sang.
Then it got quiet and I sat on my rock and just
looked out over the mountains, everything finally
people-silent; just the mountain-top wind and the
natural creaking of trees, sounds I knew real well.
Me and the woods and the moonlight. I knew this
gig; I was comfortable.
But I also knew I was right in between two worlds,
the new and the old, and I was feeling almost an
anxious fear. I’d never felt it in Taos. There I was,
just one of many converts in a church that got
them all the time. I could look out my Bluebird
window or down any regional road and know it,
know the horizon, the smells in the air, where to
find snowpack in June or raspberries in August.
I could close my eyes, which I did, and see/smell/
hear that world as clearly as if I was there.
But here I was struggling to keep my composure,
even thinking of ditching the group and finding
my own ride back. Back to Rexburg and my Toaster
and the open road, maybe Taos, maybe western
Montana, back to the cold deep waters of Flathead.
Taking off. I felt my father breathing down my
neck and wondered if I could really live up to being
the New Me.
I finally wandered back up to the road, every-
body else already gone, and followed it down by
moonlight, coming on to the group a couple hun-
dred yards above the bus. I kept my distance from
everyone, just wandering alone, but then Molly
was right at my side out of nowhere. She moved
36 IRREANTUM
right up to me, and we walked like that brushing
shoulders for maybe fifty yards. She said, You okay?
real gentle, and I wasn’t sure what to say so I just
took her hand and she let me.
• • •
W e pulled into the campground at around
11 P.M., a flat, grassy area overlooking Yel-
lowstone Lake—Bridge Bay and Stevenson Island
under the moon. I walked Molly out to the lake
shore for a look, but she just kept looking up at me
with those shiny beautiful emerald greens with the
snow-white moon dancing its cross-country dance
through the iris fields of her eyes, and I leaned down
to kiss her, long, hard, and full of conviction, not
seeing Lisa anywhere at all.
And she turned her head and buried it in my
shoulder.
After several moments, me just hanging on
thinking what the hey, she looked up again and
apologized, saying she had made a commitment to
herself and to God that she would never kiss a man
until she was over the altar in “the temple of our
God,” exactly what she said.
And I said are you serious? And she said no one
nowhere no how until I’m kneeling with the guy
that’s forever, sorry. And I said ibbity ibbity schnit
and went to bed seeing Lisa all over the place.
• • •
S o that’s how we spent the next seven weeks,
hand in hand, cuddling cozy in the long ride
seat and around campfires and up trails but never
kissing. I tried it one other time, and she said now
Mitchell! Like my mother. She was even reluctant
to call me Mick much of the time, thinking nick-
names less than proper.
I should have gotten the hint then.
One Wednesday morning we all took off from
the north rim of the Grand Canyon and came out
five days later on the south, having walked right
across that behemoth, the place John Wesley Powell’s
expedition geologist, Clarence Dutton, described
as being “a great innovation in modern ideas of
scenery.” I’ll say. Try west Texas for seven years.
We did church services in the dirt at Indian Gar-
dens on Sunday. I had even packed a white shirt
and tie, just to surprise everyone.
IRREANTUM
When we came out on the South Rim, I picked
Molly a Sabbath bouquet of desert flowers: scarlet
gilia (red), gaillardia (yellow-red), and sand verbena
(white). She took it leaning way into me, rubbing
her nose right up against my cheek and my lips,
and said teasingly, “I know what you want.”
She didn’t have a clue.
• • •
T wo weeks later on the way to Craters of the
Moon in Idaho, Molly rubs my neck all the way
to Arco then runs her fingers around my T-shirted
chest, drawing flowers, clear to the National Monu-
ment campground. We set up our separate tents,
girls on one side of the road, guys on the other, and
then go for a walk into the dusty dusk. One point
she turns around to check on me, checking on her,
and she stops and looks through my heart and soul
with those big green eyes and I bury my head in her
luscious hair and inhale deeply and rub my hands
up and down her back, right down to her belt line,
then even to her back pants pockets, putting my
hands right in, holding on, and she cuddles in tight
and I say oh baby I love you, you’re so good for me.
But she just says hmmm, real long, and rubs me
back. And we just stand there rocking in the scram-
bled lava sunset, her wondering what I might do
next and me wondering why she didn’t say it back.
I spent a lot of time alone that trip, especially
once we got down to southern Utah, the absolute
magic of the country just requiring the reverent
focus of my whole soul. I’m sitting on a high slick-
rock wall above the Garden of Eden, no kidding,
the real name of the place, just staring out at the
distant, jagged rim of the San Rafael Swell, and
Molly comes up the ridge and finds me, at first just
taking my hand, watching the sun, but then turning
to face me, moving in close and pressing me right
back onto my back on the warm rock. But instead
of kissing me, like I was hoping, wishing, lord aching
in my bones, she takes my other hand and pins both
of them out straight, then leans back up and strad-
dles me, sitting right there on the hard spot, and
starts massaging my chest, my shoulders, my neck.
I came right out, told her what I wanted to do,
and she said why do you think I’m pinning you
down, you wild man, I’m saving you from yourself.
And I said man are you naive, I’m ’bout to roll you
37 Autumn 2003
into the desert dust and suck your face till it swells,
maybe more, and she’s breathing hard then, blow-
ing out her breath, one hand under my shirt, rub-
bing, and she says, oh man are we in trouble. Then
she practically jumps up and runs back to the camp,
leaving me in the smoke.
I sat up, alone again, and just stared off to the
west, finally noticing that the sun was setting right
smack in the middle of the Capitol Reef gap, going
down, blinking out, like the end of an era. And I
thought to myself: where on earth does this road lead?
I was in this whole new world, a world where the
girls shaved their legs every other day and wore
pretty little things in their hair and fancy dresses
on Sunday and did things like dance and sing silly
songs outside guys’ apartment windows and listen
to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Sunday morn-
ings. (Not another person I had talked to in seven
weeks had ever lived in a school bus with a wood
stove.) And I figured that Molly’s footsteps were
probably the ones I should follow. She would be
my guide to the New World.
I didn’t have a clue.
• • •
W ell, that whole luscious lovely on-the-road-
for-Jesus-and-Geology gig came to an end
Halloween weekend, all of us having a barbecue
back in Rexburg and me pulling Molly into a cor-
ner and saying this and that and baby you know
I love you. Molly smiling sweetly, her green eyes
swimming, but just saying hmmmm. And then the
next Monday I’m in a real classroom, kinda gazing
out the windows at first. I was continuing on the
geology-forestry track, more or less.
What Molly wanted me to take was “Social
Dance.”
Back in the city, stoplights and telephone wires
and ice cream socials and girls in dresses and guys
in Hondas and big diesel pickups, I was all of a sud-
den feeling way out of place. Molly actually said
okay, I’ve seen your world, come see mine. Like the
previous eight weeks had just been a field trip, a
pastime. She said a prom was coming up and
explained to my vacant stare that that meant a
dance, me never having been to one except as the
lead guitarist in a mosh band back in eleventh
Autumn 2003
grade. That one, I’d never watched the dancing at
all, just the flashing lights and the babe we had
singing—Pinky Moline—and the drummer, Clif-
ford Sambora, cranking like a turbine that gave me
my juice. I’m slingin’ that ax so bad I fell off the
freakin’ stage one time, couple joints in my blood,
then climbed back up and whacked it some more,
Cliff yellin’ “Hot damn, boy, let’s rock!”
Social dance, she says, that will teach you all the
steps, have you moving like a pro. Me, I’m thinking
Brian Setzer, ranh, ranh, ranh; she’s thinking Celine
Dion or Josh Groban or something, woo, woo, woo.
She’s not in the class, of course, she’s on the
school folk dance team, been on tour all around
the state and all that. No, in the class are all the
chicks couldn’t get a date on the Planet of the Apes,
not very nice, but that’s what I’m thinking. The
girls the gentlemen of Mormon collegiality call
“sweet spirits.”
I’m also thinking, this is the most contrived, arti-
ficial, unnatural human activity I have ever witnessed,
let alone put my hand and feet to, and what’s the
use anyway, I’ve had two dollies in my arms ’n’ never
left the farm.
So I’m halfhearted even when I’m faking it really
well, blood barely pumping when I’m not, but
Molly’s wanting to dance in two weeks.
• • •
M id November comes the dance, me and Molly
hitting on about five cylinders in a V-8 world.
I show up at her apartment in a borrowed suit
(Colin, bless his soul), me still just owning a couple
ties and one white shirt, and the other guys are
assembling as well, each of the four girls in the apart-
ment set up right for the evening. Only I’m the one
didn’t bring a flower.
Jeannine says, Where’s Molly’s corsage? Did you
eat it, Wilderness Boy? And everybody else laughs,
guys and girls, while I look around and say what’s a
corsage? Nobody laughing. So Molly says, bless her
soul, “Oh, Mitchell gave me a whole bouquet ear-
lier,” not saying it was eight weeks earlier, and
sweeps me out of the house, holding my arm tight.
And it went downhill from there.
Not only could I not dance well, but I couldn’t
get it through my thick head that doing so, even well,
38 IRREANTUM
could possibly be somehow somewhere anytime
enjoyable. Molly was all decked out, a satiny dress
and curls in her hair and fancy shoes and a little
stuff on her eyes, and I kept seeing her in a T-shirt
and jeans, swinging my hand through the red sand
of Utah.
We left early, but we couldn’t go home, look like
failures, so we went for ice cream at the Manwaring
Center, me trying to smile, make hah-hah about hav-
ing three left feet and her saying, more like scolding,
you’re just not trying hard enough, Mitchell. “You
can’t just be a country bumpkin forever. There’s
more to having fun than just the woods.” And me
thinking but not saying: And that wasn’t it.
And we went on that way for a few weeks, trying
real hard both of us, really wanting to love and
hang on and touch and hold and make it work, but
her slipping inexorably farther and farther away
into her reality and me wondering where mine was.
She begged for me to come along, assuming with
great compassion the role of my tutor, in the same
stroke assuming that her personal experience defined
the only course of worth and rightness and value
in the eyes of God, a pathway above mere unen-
lightened mountain bumpkinhood.
Informed of the task, their help enlisted with all
good intent, her roommates, all lifelong Mormon
girls from Mormon ancestry, joined her in the edu-
cation of Wilderness Boy, all thinking they were
helping me out, nurturing me toward full bloom as
a child of God. At least one of them, however, Jean-
nine, grasped it as her chance to treat me like a fool.
First of December, four weeks off the Grand
Tour, Molly took me to a campus concert, saying
this is what you need to be “exposed to,” four guys
with matching Dumb and Dumber haircuts and cor-
duroy jackets actually dancing while they sang,
kicking their legs up in unison, a little “pop” orches-
tra in the pit behind them, anonymous, and me
trying hard not to heave or leave after the second
number, Molly real “disappointed” in my comments
afterward.
So then I took her to one, bunch of barbed wire
and cocklebur longhairs out of Ronan, Montana,
doing some absolute kick-butt clap-your-hands
bluegrass, Molly saying beforehand I’ve never heard
IRREANTUM
of bluegrass, the whole genre of music. (Alison
Krauss? Nickel Creek? Dan Tyminski? Come alive,
girl!) But she loved it, and we both left the concert
(not a dance) with our hands so swollen from clap-
ping along I thought mine were gonna pop.
But then it got personal.
Fat hands or not, she told me a couple days later
my taste in music was not up to the Lord’s stan-
dard, look at the guys who played it, long hair and
all. Hippies.
I told her, not all of them, look at Billy Corgan,
he cut his, and she said never heard of him, but
that wasn’t her point anyway. It was simply wrong.
It wasn’t righteous music, and my full and appro-
priate conversion would require a purging of all
the old ways and an acceptance, which would soon
blossom within me like a good seed, of a new stan-
dard of musical composition. Stuff with a lot of piano
or organ, I reckoned, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
doing “This Land Is Your Land” instead of Woody
Guthrie, who wrote it.
So I said what about the stuff I play on the gui-
tar, I thought you liked my tunes? And she said,
those are nice, some of them, but you’re still pro-
gressing toward what is truly right and proper.
• • •
I hung out alone with my Taylor that weekend and
wrote Molly a long letter, handing it to her at her
apartment door Sunday night. Then I stayed away
all week, thinking to myself I’m running on just
about empty. She handed me a letter of my own
Thursday night. Had someone drive her up to my
apartment, a smile at the doorway, but then a rapid
retreat. The envelope was scented lightly with the
stuff in her hair that just drove me into fits. I waited
for night, then went out and sat in my Toaster to
read it by frosty parking lot light.
It was nine pages. The first thing she wrote was
oh baby I love you. And I thought heck of a time
to bring that up. But she brought it up again and
again, telling me how she was soaking her pillow
with her tears—the girl who never cried—and so
ashamed of how callous and arrogant she must seem,
but she had no other idea of how to express her love
except by, as I had recently accused her, mothering
me, a role she had been forced to assume in her own
39 Autumn 2003
home five years before. But I had taught her so much,
given her so much courage and told her she was a
princess, and could I forgive her and what do we
do next?
• • •
S o we tried again, one last Saturday afternoon
just before the Christmas break, an aimless ride
in my VW. But something was broken and we
couldn’t find all the parts. I stopped on the “hill”
above the Rexburg water tower and I told her I
wanted to hold her, hold her real tight, for maybe
a hundred years. But she said it scared her, I made
her feel like she was burning up inside, like she
couldn’t hold back what she really wanted to do
next, and that would ruin both of our lives.
And so we looked at each other from fourteen
inches apart for what seemed like thirty years, run-
ning the movie forward and back, looking at the
parts, the plot lines, the characters. And the longer
we looked, the shorter the movie became, until it
simply fizzled and went poof in front of our faces.
And that was that. Our story was over.
• • •
I drove down to New Mexico for Christmas break,
but it was just Steve alone in the Bluebird, saying
Rosey had left for college up to Cheney, Washing-
ton, and Lisa had just up and disappeared, not even
telling him good-bye, maybe heading back to Okla-
homa. Just gone. I ’bout choked on that, but what
was I expecting?
We sat around for a day and half trying to talk,
him really pissy and sour about my “Jesus trip,” so
I went down to Taos and shuffled around amongst
the folks who had welcomed me to Mormonism.
Ernie Begay, the Mormon branch president, insisted
I come to his place for Christmas dinner and then
park the VW next to his little house and use their
bathroom, so I did. The folks there in the little Mor-
mon branch loved me and missed me and asked me
all about Idaho, so I fed them the good stuff in the
evenings, but just sat and stewed on the creek bank
east of town during the day, staring off into the box
elders and the piñons. And sat and stared and won-
dered, what had gone wrong? Two loves, two lives,
two eternities.
Autumn 2003
Early January I climbed back into the Toaster and
waved good-bye, up through Denver and across Wyo-
ming to Salt Lake City and then north to Rexburg.
Not two days back, a couple of fellas from
upstairs knock at the door and say, we’ve heard you
pick. Want to join a band? So I did, the three of us
starting to jam in their apartment on a regular basis,
then on the lawn out front as it started warming
up, meaning high forties by April. Bluegrass. Two
guitars and a banjo, Jared Purcell switching now
and then to mandolin.
We called ourselves Captain Moroni and the
Gadianton Band, Book of Mormon names that
made everybody chuckle and say “cool!” Then we
set a concert date for the last week of school, secur-
ing the main floor of the apartment complex’s rec
center, and continued to jam out on the lawn.
• • •
I dated a handful of other girls over the next two
months, one right there in the apartment com-
plex named Katie, a good-looking brunette who
told me first date that she’d just “been waiting” for
me and Molly to tank. And I played guitar, oh I
played guitar. Suddenly I’m on fire again, writing
songs left and right, better stuff than I’d ever done,
with new themes like finding God and looking for-
ward with hope, with just a bit of lost-the-girl stuff
thrown in for spice. I was hyped enough to tell Bob
I wanted to play a concert, do a solo gig: find me a
crowd. He said I’d have to audition for the Program
Council, but he’d set it up.
So I went, I played (two of my own composi-
tions, of course), and the Program Council (Bob
recused himself ) said interesting, but just not our
type of music, we’re looking for a little different
sound. And I said to the main guy, is that jacket
you’re wearing corduroy? And he says, no, I think
it’s nylon or something, why? And I went back to
the apartment and wrote some more songs and
practiced till my fingers bled and took Katie on
another date, her looking pretty good, me wearing
Band-aids on my left hand. I had said, kind of sheep-
ish, that we ought to take her car, as it wouldn’t
look good the two of us out in my camper bus. She
visibly shrugged, didn’t care, but finally agreed to
let me drive her Corolla.
40 IRREANTUM
 Afterward, in the apartment complex parking lot,
9:15 at night and the weather finally being reason-
able, mid-April, she asked me to kiss her. Facing
right up to me across the parking brake, wearing a
satiny black dress that buttoned up the front—all
the way, knee to neck. I said, you kidding? And she
said, not at all, and maybe more than kissing. Which
would get us both kicked right out of school at a
Mormon college.
We actually sat there and discussed getting it on,
me cold and calculating, adding it up, she saying
man I been wanting to roll around with you for
eight months, take me. And me telling Colin after-
ward, she scared me to death, I never even gave her
a kiss, and him saying Holy Hannah and Sweet
Reese’s Pieces I can’t even get a date!
I said, try Katie.
On Friday night, one week before the end of
semester, we took the stage, really just the floor, in
our world premier concert. It was me up front, the
guy telling jokes and singing and getting the girls to
smile and announcing some of my own tunes, the
crowd all dancing and clapping and saying wow,
even the good girls raised in little Mormon towns.
And me saying, take that, Ideeho.
• • •
N ext morning, the last weekend of the school
year, Molly calls and invites me to a “fireside,”
what the Latter-day Saints call a Sunday night
devotional talk when the speaker’s really good and
they’re expecting a crowd. (The others they just say,
wanna go hear some guy talk? Maybe there’s cook-
ies.) She even said, I can be your date, if you’re
interested.
I said sure, even escorted her to the car holding
her elbow, Jeannine looking through the curtains.
But the devotional talk had quite a bit more spirit
and direction than did the companionship. Com-
ing home, pulling into a parking stall, Molly said
well we can always be friends, kind of tepidly hope-
ful. And I turned the car off and looked at her.
Straight on, the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever
seen my reflection in. And I said I don’t see how.
And she started to speak, but then turned aside,
lowering her head but never shedding a tear.
IRREANTUM
I said, “I wanted more than that, Molly,” and I
didn’t mean sex. “I really wanted you to love me, to
help me grow. Maybe even wait for me when I go
on my mission,” which I was going to do. Finally I
said, “I really loved you, Molly, and I meant every
minute of it, don’t you ever doubt my sincerity.
Tonight was honest, too, I really wondered. But I
think we’ve gone as far as we can go. We’re just on
different roads to heaven.”
She looked back up at me, finally turning to
tears, and said, “I meant it, too, Mick. I really loved
you. I’ll never forget you.”
Then I said, “Molly, will you please just kiss me
good-bye?”
But she never did.
• • •
A nd then it all ended. I hugged Colin and even
Bob and the boys in the band and pointed the
big fat snub nose of my Volkswagen toward New
Mexico and went zoom, thinking, well here I go, all
alone again.
But then I drove all the way to Texas, by way of
Norman, Oklahoma.
Coke Newell is living proof that the Mormon mis-
sionary net is very generous in its haul. Tracked down
in 1976 while enjoying a peaceful flower-child exis-
tence in the Colorado mountains, he now works as a
corporate PR guy in Salt Lake City. He spends the bet-
ter part of his life with his childhood sweetheart and
their seven children at their home in northern Utah,
where he raises honeybees, dabbles in the garden, and
writes and records guitar-centered rock and roll. His
third nonfiction book, Latter Days: A Guided Tour
Through Six Billion Years of Mormonism
(St. Martin’s Press, 2000), is used by journalists
nationwide.
41 Autumn 2003
 S T O R Y How she improved through the night and finally
Trying
By Angela Hallstrom
Editor’s note: This story won second place in this year’s
IRREANTUM fiction contest.
A s a child, Marnie knew a lot of things. She
knew her father was kind and strong and
could be counted on. She knew her mother had a
lot of friends. She knew being the oldest of four sis-
ters, and smart, meant she must shoulder her fair
share of responsibility. She knew living in America
made her lucky. She knew God talked to people.
She knew everything happened for a reason.
She liked getting up in testimony meeting the
first Sunday of the month and telling people what
she knew. Imagine her: Nine years old, pale and
slim shouldered, her long dark hair braided tight
and circling the crown of her head like a princess.
She stands among the folding chairs in the overflow
of the Logan 25th Ward chapel. The deacon with
the microphone comes at her slow, dragging the
cord behind him. She wonders if he’s seen her, if it’s
her turn yet to talk. She stands on her tiptoes and
tries to catch his eye, but he is looking off to the
left, two rows ahead of her.
The deacon hands the microphone to Brother
Mullin, who is short and slim, the creases standing
sharp along the length of his pants. His hands
tremble, and nothing comes from him for a few
moments but unsteady breathing. The congre-
gation has shifted in their seats, dozens of heads
craning backward, eager eyebrows lifted, children
hushed, waiting for him to tell the story that they
all know is coming. And he tells them: how his
daughter, three years old, fell off the bunk bed the
week before; how he and his wife heard the crash
and came running; how he thought she was dead,
lying there so still, but Sister Mullin put her hands
up underneath the girl’s pajama top and onto her
chest and said, “She’s warm, she’s breathing, I can
still feel her heart.” How, at the hospital when he
blessed her, he felt the presence of God in the room.
Autumn 2003
opened her eyes. How he is grateful to all of them,
for their phone calls and meals and offers of sup-
port, but, mostly, he is grateful to God for his kind-
ness, as he is a sinner and not very deserving.
Marnie watches all the people watching him and
she can see how they love him. She notices her
father’s eyes are bright and wet. This feeling in the
room—this fullness, this quiet—she knows is the
Spirit.
Brother Mullin sits down and the deacon comes
toward Marnie now with the microphone. She
stands. She tries not to stand up every testimony
meeting because, even though she is a child, she
understands her tendency to wear people out. But
there are times, like today, that the knowledge of
things as they are is so heavy and real that she can
feel it pressing taut inside her skin, struggling to get
out, pulling on her heart. She has heard people say
their hearts pound just like hers does, prompting
them to stand and speak. “I would be ungrateful
if I didn’t stand,” they explain, and Marnie agrees
with them. She doesn’t want to be ungrateful.
Marnie grasps the microphone.
“I’d like to bear my testimony,” she says.
“I know this church is true.”
She notices the heads turning back around and
away from her as people shift in their seats to face
forward again. This ward knows Marnie, knows what
she will say—what she always says—and while it is
charming and dear it is hardly dramatic. They get
back to shushing their children, thumbing through
their lesson manuals, closing their eyes.
But Marnie’s testimony keeps going. “I know,”
she says, again and again. When she finishes and sits
back down, her father covers her knee with his hand.
• • •
W hen Marnie was seventeen years old, her
little sister Tina stood up during dinner and
announced, “I’ve got to get out of this place.”
Very calmly Tina rose from the table, walked to
the front door where her shoes waited with every-
one else’s shoes in neat little rows, slipped hers on,
and exited. Marnie’s family stayed in their chairs,
quiet and curious, listening as the door clicked
behind Tina’s back.
42 IRREANTUM
 “What’s her deal?” Marnie’s sister Tracy said, her
mouth full of creamed potatoes and peas.
Marnie’s mother sighed. Her father rolled his
eyes to heaven for relief. Everyone kept eating. It
was such a quiet act of rebellion that it wasn’t until
bedtime that Marnie’s mother started calling.
“Sorry to call you so late,” she would apologize.
Or, “We seem to have lost Tina, somehow.”
Around midnight Marnie’s parents shut them-
selves inside their bedroom. Marnie could hear
their voices behind the door, tense and hissy. Then
she heard her father’s heavy steps down the stairs,
the car starting and the garage door rising. Marnie’s
sisters came into her room and they listened there
under Marnie’s plaid bedspread until they were all
too tired to listen any more. They fell asleep together,
cheeks on backs, legs intertwined.
Tina didn’t turn up for two days. She’d ridden
her bike to a boy’s house that nobody knew she
even liked—a skateboarder named Keith—and
took off with him in his stepdad’s Chevy Citation.
The two of them got pulled over after the car had
been reported stolen. They were in Carlsbad, New
Mexico.
Marnie’s mother was fond of saying in the months
and years afterward that they should have seen it
coming, but who were they to know? The slipping
grades, the sluffing, the sassiness: all had been mis-
interpreted as normal adolescent boundary testing.
“Certainly Marnie left us unprepared,” Marnie’s
mother would say, and anyone who knew their
family would smile and nod, aware of Marnie’s role
as the family’s shining proof of success. The easy
one. The gift.
When Marnie went away to BYU her mother
called her almost nightly with more bad news: Tina
had been suspended, Tina had been caught having
sex in the basement, Tina had cigarettes in her jean
jacket pocket. “Where did we go wrong?” her
mother would whisper into the phone, as if she
believed Marnie knew, and could fix it.
• • •
H ome for Thanksgiving during her sophomore
year of college, Marnie listened to her mother’s
long breathing. She watched her father steer him-
self through the house like an affable guest, clearing
IRREANTUM
himself a path around the women. She noticed he’d
taken up whistling. These changes made her tired,
and lonely, and she decided that something must
be done. Her two younger sisters couldn’t be counted
on to change things. Their days were taken with
applying sparkly pastel fingernail polish and mak-
ing breathless telephone calls to unsuspecting boys.
Marnie felt she alone was positioned to alter the
universe.
On Saturday night she decided to wait up for
her sister, who’d gone to a friend’s house for a party.
Her mom and dad had stopped trying to enforce
Tina’s curfew. (“I’ve told her,” her mother said to
Marnie as they dried the silver after Thanksgiving
dinner, “‘Six months to high school graduation.
Don’t get pregnant. Don’t get arrested. Then you
can be on your way.’”) Tina was a senior now, tall
and bright with anger. She’d only made one appear-
ance on Thanksgiving Day, during dessert, and
Marnie noticed the way she carved herself through
the clusters of chatting relatives with her elbows
out, unapologetic. She dared them all to look her in
the face.
Marnie was not afraid of her. This, after all, was
her sister, only twenty months behind her, and
up until the last few years the whole of their lives
had been lived as if it were the same life. Same toys
shared, same socks worn, same bedtimes kept, same
jokes remembered. They used to press their hands
together and measure the length of their fingers,
and even though Marnie was older, their hands
were always exactly the same size.
So Marnie waited in Tina’s bed. Tucked herself
up right under her quilt. The night was long and
Marnie had a lot of time to prepare what she
should say. She opened her scriptures and prayed
for guidance. Alone there, in the silence, she could
have sworn the air felt thicker. Heavier, somehow,
with inspiration. At times it made her feel like she
might cry.
At a little after two in the morning Tina swung
herself into the room. She smelled of smoke and
sweat. Her mascara had run from one eye down to
the middle of her cheek. She stopped short in the
doorway and made a sound at her sister, like a snort
and a sigh, and suddenly Marnie felt ridiculous
43 Autumn 2003
sitting there in her flannel pajamas with the scrip-
tures balanced on her knees. This was wrong, she
knew, a bad idea. The timing was off, or the place
was all wrong, or she didn’t really understand what
it felt like to come home late from a party buzzed
and exhausted, wanting to fall into bed. Not want-
ing to talk to your sister about self-worth and true
joy and God.
But, she thought to herself. Here I am.
She opened the scriptures and said to her sister,
“I’ve found something I want to read to you, because
I love you and I’m afraid for you, how you’re wast-
ing your life, how you’re forgetting everything we
ever learned. It’s about repentance,” she said, and
started to read.
She noticed Tina holding her fingers to her
temples like a tired man with a headache, but she
kept on reading. She’d found four scriptures and
she read each one without looking up. When she
finished she sniffed, clapped the Book of Mormon
closed, widened her eyes and met her sister’s gaze.
They stayed like that, eyes locked together, for a
few long seconds.
Finally Tina spoke. “Answer me this,” she said
slowly, intent on Marnie’s face. “How can you even
stand yourself?”
• • •
I t was a good question. If she were truthful with
herself, brutally truthful, Marnie realized her
sister had asked a good question. After returning
home from Thanksgiving break, and throughout
her final two years of college, she spent a lot of time
thinking about herself and whether she was a prob-
lem to people—all her earnestness, all her trying—
but she wasn’t sure how to go about changing
things. Boys liked her, but the wrong boys: dutiful,
solemn, wife-seeking boys who liked feeling right-
eous when they opened her car door. She got a
sense that her girlfriends respected her more than
they loved her. “You make me want to be better, to
do better,” her roommate had once told her, before
bolting out the door and heading to a party to
which Marnie had not been invited.
She spent a lot of time on campus watching
people, girls in particular, loud and beautiful girls
specifically. The way their limbs moved, loose and
Autumn 2003
easy. The way they never seemed in a hurry. As she
watched them she knew she could never be one of
them, but she also recognized a certain joy these
girls had learned that she, too, must be entitled to.
Her parents and her grandparents on both sides
came to Provo for her graduation. Not only had she
gotten her B.A. in history and secondary teaching
certificate in record time, but in her family she was
the first to graduate magna cum laude from any-
where. Yet, sitting in her seat among the graduates,
she was overcome by the smell of perfume and hair
spray, the whispering and bumping, all the frenzied
waving. In their blue gowns, shoulder to shoulder,
she understood that from a distance they all
appeared to be the same person. Who were her par-
ents watching? she thought. How could they even
find her?
The girls on either side of her both sported fat
diamond rings on their left hands. In front of her,
two skinny blondes with identical, flipped-up hair-
cuts discussed their mission calls in loud whispers.
Marnie concentrated on her own deep breathing.
She should have been one of these girls, she knew.
It was the logical progression: college graduation,
no ring, mission call. She’d spent many nights pray-
ing, some nights crying, even, but she couldn’t will
herself to want to spend the next year and a half
with either of these flippy-haired girls, struggling
to learn Spanish or Thai, shuffling along dusty
streets in low-heeled shoes. She knew this meant
something was wrong with her. And to make mat-
ters even worse, the thought of starting her career
and spending her days discussing the Revolution-
ary War with seventh graders filled her with fear
and regret.
After two hours, the time came for her name to
be called. She strode solemnly across the stage. She
thought she heard her father’s lone voice—“Woo
hoo!”—echoing around the auditorium. She kept
her gaze fixed straight ahead. She saw her destiny,
thin and tight as a guitar string. She wondered if
she should cut her hair.
• • •
O f all the daughters, Marnie had been the only
one to keep her hair long through junior high
and onward. When they were children, their mother
44 IRREANTUM
had been famous for the intricate and original hair-
styles she practiced on each one of her four daugh-
ters: French twists, complicated braids, enormous
starchy bows and beaded barrettes. No sister’s hair
had been more than briskly trimmed all through
grade school. To their mother’s dismay, all three of
Marnie’s younger sisters had demanded the newest
hairstyle or perm before turning twelve, but Marnie
had always been too proud of her hair to cut it. She
would brush it to a gleam and let it hang down the
length of her back, black and shiny as a cat’s. People
noticed it. Strangers, even, would sometimes com-
ment. But beyond the look of her hair, Marnie had
viewed its length as a sign of perseverance. An emblem
of her ability to set goals and see them through.
In the two weeks since graduation she hadn’t
been washing it much. She was living at her par-
ent’s house, going to bed early and waking up late,
watching game shows and listening to her mother
talk on the phone. Sometimes her mother went
into the laundry room to talk, ostensibly to keep
her from overhearing, but Marnie would mute the
television and hear phrases like “driving me crazy
with her sighing and wandering around” coming
from under the door.
Midway into week three her parents sat her down
at the dining room table. It was clear she wasn’t
calling school districts or sending out her résumé,
and no mention had been made of preparing mis-
sionary papers. They needed answers.
“What’s the plan?” her mother asked.
“We only want to help,” her father said.
She thought about Tina, living far away now
in California with a boy named Jimmy, unencum-
bered by expectations, free from questions.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Marnie said. She
traced a gouge in the table with her fingernail.
She could hear laundry spinning in the dryer, the
metallic ping of change come loose from a pocket
hitting the side of the drum. Her father coughed.
All three of them waited.
“So that’s it?” her mother finally asked. “We’re
done here?”
“If I knew what to tell you, I would say it,”
Marnie said. “I’ll let you know when I come up
with something.”
IRREANTUM
Her mother opened her mouth like a fish. She
turned her face to Marnie’s father.
“So this is what we’re getting from her now?
We’re getting sarcasm now?”
Marnie couldn’t help herself and laughed, two
sharp staccato notes. It came to her that, in her
entire adolescence, she’d never had a conversation
like this with either of her parents. Now here she
sat, slump-shouldered and sullen at twenty-one.
She supposed it would be fitting to huff up to her
room, fling herself on the bed and turn up the vol-
ume on her stereo.
Instead she looked her mother in the eye.
“It’s not sarcasm,” she said. “I’m telling you the
truth. And now I’d like to go to bed.”
She concentrated on walking up the stairs calmly,
like an adult. No trudging or clomping. After clos-
ing the bedroom door behind her, she could hear
her mother pushing in the dining room chairs hard
and fast, the legs a shrill squeak against the hard-
wood floor.
• • •
She woke the next morning before dawn. For the
first time in weeks she had a plan. She took the scis-
sors from her mother’s craft closet, situated her-
self in the guest bathroom with a towel across her
shoulders and wet her hair down with a spray bot-
tle. She gathered her hair in the circle of her palm
and started cutting. Her right hand trembled as the
scissors pushed through the coarse thickness of it,
but finally the hair broke free and fell into the basin
of the sink. It curled into itself like a dead animal.
She wondered if she should leave it there for her
mother to find.
She kept cutting, watching as hairs floated down
past her shoulders and onto the floor. Her head and
neck felt loose and light. Her blood raced under
her skin, thrilled and terrified.
When she finished cutting she raised her eyes up
to the mirror, held in all her breath and looked.
Her hair jagged across her collar, slanted and
broken.
A hollow-eyed stranger gazed back at her. A girl
with a pale and doughy neck, a jutting chin. She
saw the face of a crazy person, a wild and lonely
person, a person she had never met.
45 Autumn 2003
 She looked at her hand holding the scissors, and
the mess, the terrible chaotic mess of her own wet
hair clumped on the floor, strays clinging to the
wall and sink and toilet. It looked to Marnie like
the scene of a violent, passionate crime.
It took her fifteen minutes to clean it all up. She
could see through the window the outline of the
sun coming up against the mountains. Her heart
sped in panic that she might be found there on her
hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, her hair piled
up in the sink without excuse or explanation. But
she was fast and thorough. She checked every crevice,
caught every hair, wrapped it all up tight in a towel
and threw it in the garbage can in the garage. She
left the bathroom spotless, as if no one had been
there at all.
She crept back upstairs to her bedroom, where
she waited in the gray morning light until she heard
the family stir around her. She buried herself in her
bedspread, the covers up around her neck and ears.
After she heard the door slam for the final time she
let the stillness settle around her until she could be
absolutely sure she was alone. Then she put on her
shoes and drove herself to Great Clips, where a silent
woman named Sandy gave her a tidy new bob.
• • •
Within a week Marnie found a receptionist job
at a mortgage company and a cheap apartment in
West Valley City, a couple hours south of home.
On move-in day her father helped her unload the
tiny U-Haul trailer. Her mother scrubbed out her
bathtub and laid contact paper in all the kitchen
cupboards. She bought herself a table and chairs on
clearance at Target and hung yellow curtains in the
bedroom.
Once she moved in, her mother made a point of
calling every night after she got home from work to
pass on neighborhood news and discuss the ridicu-
lousness of Marnie’s move. “I don’t know what you
think you’ll find in West Valley City,” she would
say. Or, “The least you could do is apply to a grad-
uate program.”
Girls Marnie knew started leaving on missions: a
high school friend went to Iowa, a couple of girls
from her home ward left for South America, one
terrified former roommate took off for the Ukraine.
Autumn 2003
And of course there were the weddings. Even though
she’d moved away her mother mentioned each invi-
tation that arrived at their house, even if Marnie
wasn’t invited.
Finally she felt
she had a destination
worth speeding toward
and she couldn’t get
there fast enough.
She still went to church every Sunday, but not
the singles ward, where the men were even stranger
and more insistent than the ones at BYU. She went
to the regular neighborhood ward and taught nurs-
ery. Every week she would prepare her lessons:
“I Am Grateful for My Eyes,” or “Music Makes Me
Happy.” On Sundays she played Ring around the
Rosy, blew bubbles, sang “Once There Was a Snow-
man.” When the snowman melted, small, small,
small, she would make herself as tiny as she could,
wrap her arms around her knees and tuck herself
up hard as a nut. The children would climb all over
her, pulling on her shoulders and grabbing at her
hair, until she would pop her head up and grin and
spring back to life. The children screamed with
laughter. At church, Marnie had no real friends her
own age.
She came home from work every night, poured
herself a Diet Coke, sat at the window watching the
empty sidewalk and waited for her future to pres-
ent itself. She liked to think she’d been led, for
some reason, to the ad in the Salt Lake Tribune for
River City Mortgage and Financial; she’d been
directed to this particular apartment just off Red-
wood Road for some purpose. It seemed the only
reasonable explanation since, her protests to her
mother notwithstanding, she didn’t know what she
was doing in West Valley City. It seemed only right
that God would.
46 IRREANTUM
 But she didn’t meet a man; she didn’t have an
accident; she didn’t befriend a wise, elderly neigh-
bor. She woke up every morning at 6:45, got dressed,
and drove herself to the mortgage company. She
went to the movies with friendly acquaintances.
She took black and white photos of bare-limbed
trees and old houses. She gained ten pounds. Finally,
after months of suspense, something happened.
God’s hand, she believed at the time, had finally
tilted toward her. It made her tremble with relief.
• • •
M arnie came home from church on a sunny
Sunday afternoon to find her sister Tina
sitting on top of a rolled-up sleeping bag in front of
her apartment door.
“Look at what the cat dragged in,” Tina said.
They went inside and dumped all of Tina’s things
on the futon in the living room. Marnie poured both
of them a Diet Coke. They sat together at the glass-
topped kitchen table and Tina emptied both her
pockets on its surface, letting the pennies and nickels
and dimes roll around and spill on to the floor.
“This,” she said, “is it. Nowhere to go but up.”
“That’s a good way to look at it,” Marnie said.
Tina didn’t look bad at all. She’d always been the
most beautiful sister: her wide green eyes, her skin
as cool and smooth as a Barbie doll’s. Beside her
Marnie always felt puffy and overdressed. Tina
yawned and stretched her long brown arms above
her head in a way that seemed so easy and relaxed
to Marnie, considering her situation. Almost liter-
ally penniless, wandering, coming to her, of all people,
this sister who shouldn’t be able to stand her own
self. Marnie didn’t want to seem too anxious that
she’d stay. She wanted to seem an unthreatening
solution.
“I hate to ask you this,” Tina said, “but I need
a place to crash. For a few days, or weeks maybe.
I don’t know.”
Marnie tried to seem measured. Contemplative.
“Why not?” she said. “I mean, yeah. Sure.”
Her heart thrummed inside her with the thrill of
purposefulness. She decided not to ask any questions,
not about Jimmy or California or how she even got
there in the first place. She reached her hand across
the table and laid it lightly atop her sister’s.
IRREANTUM
“Whatever you need,” she said.
“Thank you,” Tina said. “Truly.”
• • •
T hey each had their conditions. Tina’s was, don’t
tell Mom and Dad I’m here till I say so. Marnie’s
was, don’t lie to me. It worked for a while. Tina had
been there for a few days sleeping on the futon
when a guy from the ward mentioned a cashier
position at his hardware store. Tina took it, work-
ing the noon to seven shift. Since Marnie usually
got off work first, she started making sure dinner
was on the table when Tina came home. She would
plan menus and write them in her day planner:
spaghetti, chicken tacos, tuna noodle casserole. One
Sunday she even cooked a roast, with potatoes and
carrots and gravy made from scratch. Tina always
did the dishes. Then they would sit together on the
futon watching cable television until 10:30 or 11:00.
“You sound so much happier,” her mother would
say when she called. “Have you met a boy?”
“Let’s just say,” she would answer, “that I have
more company than I used to.”
Marnie loved being coy with her mother, stringing
her along. She wasn’t sure if she felt guilty about this.
Sometimes when her mother called Tina would
poke Marnie in the side or stick out her tongue
or do silent impressions of their mother’s “chatty
face,” as they liked to call it, trying to get Marnie
to laugh. Whenever their mother started talking
about Tina, Marnie would roll her eyes in her sis-
ter’s direction, a signal saying, “Here we go again.”
Her mother thought Tina was still in California,
living with “that guitarist in some crazy band.” She
usually only heard from Tina every month or two,
so she hadn’t started getting too suspicious. Marnie
even lied once outright, telling her mother, “I’ve
talked to her, she’s fine, she says hello.”
Then, after living with Marnie for almost a month,
Tina started missing dinner.
“Me and some friends went out after work,” Tina
would explain, coming home to a chugging dish-
washer, a fridge full of Tupperware containers.
Marnie couldn’t help being angry.
“Ungrateful!” she would think. “Inconsiderate!”
One night she watched as Tina hitched a denim
skirt around her hips and spritzed herself with
Marnie’s body spray.
47 Autumn 2003
 “So who are these people you’re going out with?”
Marnie asked.
Tina sighed at her. “You’re just as bad as Mom,”
she said. She strung up her pair of thick brown
boots and strode to the door without even looking
at Marnie’s expression. Without even waiting for
her to respond.
Marnie walked out onto the apartment’s tiny
balcony. The night was turning blue and dark and
she could just make out her sister’s form trudging
across the parking lot, heading for a rumbling pickup
waiting in the street.
“Don’t you ever say that!” she yelled into her sis-
ter’s rigid back. “Ever!”
• • •
F or days afterward neither sister spoke to the
other. Marnie stopped doing Tina’s laundry.
She purposefully changed the channel when she
could tell Tina was watching something. She made
meals for one.
Then one night Tina didn’t come home at all. At
first Marnie was plain mad. She sat on the futon
waiting, trying to watch late night TV, but all the
shows were either infomercials or recreations of
gory crime scene investigations replete with fore-
boding background music. “Little did she know,”
the ominous voice-over guy would intone, “that
this would be her fatal mistake.”
So she turned off the television and sat on the
futon in the darkness. She looked out the sliding
glass door and thought about her sister out there in
the world, beyond her, doing secret things. When
she began crying she decided not to stop it. She
pushed the sobs out from her chest and let herself
wail until she choked, until she was afraid she
couldn’t breathe. She balled up her fists and ground
them into her thighs. She shuddered and moaned.
She cried so long she slipped right into sleep with-
out noticing. She woke up at 6:45, achy and stiff,
to the sound of her alarm clock buzzing in the bed-
room. That morning, she called in sick.
• • •
B y noon she was driving north on I-15 in the
left-hand lane, five miles over the speed limit,
her windows rolled down. She wanted to feel the
world coming at her: the rush of wind blasting
Autumn 2003
through her hair, the sounds of the cars hurtling
past, the thick, acrid mixture of tires and asphalt
and speed and heat. Finally she felt she had a desti-
nation worth speeding toward and she couldn’t get
there fast enough.
It hadn’t taken her long that morning to discover
her responsibility. She needed to head home and
tell. She imagined herself sitting on the couch with
her mother, holding onto both of her hands. She
would keep nothing back, telling everything she’d
lied about and everything she’d tried, explaining
the way things seemed to be just turning hopeful
before crumbling. She would say that she under-
stood all her mother’s frustrations and that the two
of them were in this thing together now. “We’ve got
to have faith that someday she’ll come around,” she
imagined herself saying, and her mother crying,
maybe, or just holding her tight and strong, the
two of them united in resolve and frustrated love
for Tina.
Pulling into her parents’ driveway, she saw the
front door was open. Only the glass storm door
stood between the living room and the world out-
side, the way her mother liked it in the summer.
Her mother opened doors, opened windows, raised
blinds up as high as they could go until they bowed
in the middle.
She jogged up the concrete steps and onto the
front porch. The afternoon sun slanted against
the front of the house. Marnie cupped her hands
around her eyes, shielding them from the glare, and
pressed her face up against the cool glass door just
like she had as a child.
She saw them before they even knew she was
there: the backs of both their heads as they sat
together on the couch, Tina leaning against her
mother’s shoulder, her mother’s hand in her sister’s
hair. Marnie stood, watching, frozen. Then they
sensed her, both of them together, and turned their
heads to see her standing there gaping. When she
saw Tina’s blue-black cheek and the gash under-
neath her right eye, she understood, instantly, the
meaning of the hard set of her mother’s mouth. It
was an expression reserved specifically for Marnie,
perhaps one reserved by mothers for oldest sisters
the world over, a particular mixture of disappoint-
48 IRREANTUM
ment and blame. “Why weren’t you watching her?”
it demanded. “Irresponsible!” it said.
Marnie turned her burning face away from them,
afraid they would see her shock and guilt and
anger, and started down the stairs. She heard Tina
calling to her through the glass—“Marnie!”—and
she paused on the bottom step. But before she could
turn around she heard her mother’s voice.
“Let her go,” it said.
• • •
B ut she couldn’t go. She tried to. She jumped into
her car and screeched away from the house.
She took the southbound freeway on ramp, but
that was as far as she could get and she circled the
cloverleaf back around north. The more she thought
the angrier she got. Always, always, she was the one
to walk away from a fight; always she had been the
swallower of words. What good had it done her?
What joy or grace or good will had she won? She
deserved her turn at exploding. It was her time to
make a mess and see everyone around her scuttling,
rushing, cleaning it all up.
She scripted her arguments in her head: “So I’m
the one in trouble here? I’m the one at fault for
lying about Tina coming home, when it’s obvious
to me and everyone else we know that you can’t
parent her, you’re the one who’s screwed her up? All
I was trying to do was give it my best shot and help
her without you mucking around and making it
worse, scaring her off. I’ve done nothing but try to
please you and she’s done nothing but screw around
and here I am, in trouble, here I am, the bad guy,
here the two of you sit with your arms around each
other like best friends, staring me down like an
enemy. Well, I won’t have it! I won’t take it any-
more! I can’t stand it!”
Or something along those lines.
She careened into the driveway too fast and one
tire went into a flower bed, but she didn’t care, she
yanked the parking brake and left it. She slammed
the car door and stormed up the stairs. She flung
open the storm door, but no one was there to wit-
ness her resolve and her fury. She stood for a few
moments, waiting and looking, and could feel the
red heat draining from her face and the pace of her
heart slowing.
IRREANTUM
“Hey,” she called. Her voice rang through the
silent house.
Then her mother appeared from the kitchen. She
had a glass of lemonade and a plate of Ritz crackers
and sliced cheddar cheese.
“That’s for her, I see,” Marnie said.
“It is. She’s hurt. She’s hungry. I told her to go
upstairs and rest and I’d bring her something.”
“So that’s it? After everything, you’re just tucking
her in, bringing her crackers? Do you have any idea
what she’s been doing?”
Marnie’s mother raised her eyebrows. “A better
idea than you do, I’d wager.”
“So that’s what this is all about. This is all my
fault. Never mind she’s the one running around in
the middle of the night, hanging out with boys
who beat her up and crazy people on drugs, ruin-
ing everyone’s lives. I lie a little—for a good reason,
a real purpose—and suddenly I’m the bad one? It’s
my fault now she got hurt, like I should have been
watching her better? Like worse things than this
haven’t happened while you’re supposedly in charge?”
“I don’t have time for this,” her mother said, and
started up the stairs. But halfway up she turned
around and faced her daughter.
“Please,” she said slowly. “Just understand. This
has nothing to do with you.”
• • •
S he climbed into her childhood bed and rolled
herself up into a ball. Her body throbbed with
spent emotion and she didn’t have the energy to
take off her shoes. She stared at the wall. Tacked all
over it was evidence of her good intentions: ribbons
from the Reflections contest; prom pictures with
Marnie in stiff and uncomfortable dresses, holding
hands with stiff and uncomfortable boys; posters
with inspirational sayings (“When you can’t stand
it . . . then kneel,”); her Young Womanhood theme
(“We are daughters of our Heavenly Father who
loves us and we love him . . .”). And Christ, wise
and masculine in his scarlet robe, his patient gray
eyes looking down on her, knowing her heart.
“Everybody suffers,” he seemed to be saying. “All
of us.”
• • •
49 Autumn 2003
T ina must have slipped in beside her in the
night, softly, quiet enough not to wake her. As
P O E M

the morning came and Marnie started rising out of The Little Motel Girl
sleep, it didn’t feel strange to have her sister’s warm
body curled up against her; it felt familiar, like when Childhood is for dreams
they were children and would sneak into each other’s I’m often told
beds in the night, giggling, excited about having But I can’t forget the girl
their own little plans and hatching them. She felt At that Alturas motel
Tina’s warm breath along her neck. She listened to She wanted to get away from Mother
her exhales, each like a tiny sigh. A nervous, austere woman
The sun shafted through the blinds, and in each I’d just paid, got the unit key—
finger of light Marnie could see dust tumbling, vis- On her tricycle she was bored
ible, invisible, then visible again. In the dimness of The Saturday night I arrived
the morning, Tina’s unlined face looked as if it had And hovered around as I took things in—
been sculpted from a cool, smooth stone, like gran- In chatting, it wasn’t long before
ite or ivory. Around her eye the colors started, first I said, “What will you be when you grow up?”
a purple deep as night, then fading into blue and And “Will you go to college?”
dusty gray, and ringed, along the bottom, with yel- (It somehow came up naturally)
low and earthy green. So many lovely colors, Marnie She sagged and parabola’d
thought, all living there just under our skin, wait- The way kids do on trikes,
ing to be revealed. Wore an inured, adult look,
She wanted to touch her, to smooth her fingers Said, “Nuh-uh, we’re poor”
along the pain that had bloomed across her sister’s
—Keith Moore
face. But she didn’t want to wake her. She didn’t
want to talk. Instead she let her hand hover just
Keith Moore is a native Salt Laker, about which he
above her sister’s skin. She caught her light, warm
writes contemporary fiction, and a graduate of the
breathing in her palm. She turned and faced the
University of Utah. He was an LDS missionary in
morning.
the province of Ontario from 1950 to 1952 and
served in the Army in Germany soon after. He has
Angela Hallstrom is a Utah native and former high
published a story in Western Humanities Review
school English teacher. She now lives in Minnesota
and has had a novella and a book of poetry published
with her husband and family, where she pursues her
by Wordrunner Press of Petaluma, California. He now
MFA in writing at Hamline University part time
publishes a literary monthly called Wasatch Poetry and
and her three young children full time. Her fiction has
Prose. Submissions are welcome at topazhouse@
appeared in the New Era and she has served on the
redrock.net.
editorial board of the literary magazine Water~Stone.

Autumn 2003 50 IRREANTUM

 S C R E E N P L A Y Above the mill a large pile of fresh dirt reveals labor
E X C E R P T underway. Men are gathered around, their breath
showing in the crisp fall air. A change of angle allows
Haun’s Mill us to peer into a deep hole, six feet in diameter and a
good twelve feet deep. JACOB HAUN, 40, and his 16-
By Coke Newell year-old son, WILLIAM HAUN, are in the hole, digging.
We get a good look at Jacob, who speaks:
Editor’s note: This excerpt won third place in this
year’s IRREANTUM fiction contest. It is the opening JACOB HAUN
scene of an unproduced full-length screenplay about Take it!
the Prophet Joseph Smith’s last days, entitled The
Prophet and the Princess. Two men on top begin to pull a rope leading through
a pulley hung from a hoist arranged over the hole.
FADE IN: A large bucket filled with dirt emerges and the men
dump it on the growing pile. Then they return their
EXT. TINY PIONEER VILLAGE OF HAUN’S MILL – DAY hands to their pockets for warmth.

The setting is late afternoon, nearing dusk, in a tiny BACK TO HORSES

settlement set in a wooded cove in frontier Missouri,
1838. A watermill turns slowly, driven by the quiet
flow of a slow river. Although ledges of ice and patches
of snow hang into the river, a number of children play
on the banks while women wash and rinse clothing
nearby. The women talk amiably; the children giggle
and tease, tossing pebbles, floating sticks.
THE HORSES are restless, prancing and blowing clouds
of steam in the cool air of dusk. The sound of a DOG
BARKING can be heard in the distance.
A wider shot reveals the riders, all men, carrying guns,
heavily armed, grim faced, focused.

A SUPER READS: Again, six, eight, ten go by. The shot is too narrow to
see the full extent, but we can’t help but wonder how
“HAUN’S MILL, NORTHWESTERN MISSOURI, OCTO- many there are.
BER 30, 1838”
VILLAGE
AMBIENT SOUND ONLY
A wider view of the village shows it to be a tiny thing,
INTERCUT TO: barely sprouting from the ground. The shack-houses
are neat, but clearly built in some haste and from the
TIGHT SHOT limited resources of poverty. Within the unchinked-as-
yet log walls of a building adjacent to the mill, one
Horses, moving quietly yet steadily, almost as if in a man, WARREN SMITH, 36, works the implements of
march, down a shaded trail. Horses go by, revealing the farrier’s trade, shaping something on an anvil.
boots of riders, dozens of them, one after another after Two young boys, SARDIUS SMITH (10) and ALMA
another. SMITH (8), play hide and seek around the tools and
apparatus of the shop.
INTERCUT TO:
Assorted activity occupies our view, the sounds of fun
THE VILLAGE and industry our hearing.

IRREANTUM 51 Autumn 2003

Off screen a DOG BARKS again. Little Alma breaks off
from the chase and calls for his dog from the doorway
of the blacksmith shop.
ALMA
Pirate! Come here, boy! C’mon.
WARREN SMITH
(To the older boy)
Sardius. Hold this for me. C’mon. Now keep it level.
Sardius moves to help his father as the dog barks again,
twice, this time clearly agitated. Alma continues to
look for his dog.
HORSEMEN
Now a widening shot reveals the extent of the approach-
ing militia, more than 300 men and horses, all armed,
gathering into a meadow. A single uniformed man,
CAPTAIN WILLIAM O. JENNINGS, late fifties and coarse
looking, parades haphazardly at the front of the crowd.
At his side and following him closely is WILLIAM
REYNOLDS, 40ish, wearing a uniform shirt, but dun-
garees and boots.
JENNINGS
Your mission is clear, men. The squatters on the
river are occupying land that belongs to the citizens
of Missouri. They have come here without invita-
tion, and they will leave without farewell. The hon-
orable governor of the state has spoken. Now enact
your duty.
REYNOLDS
Rogers, lead out!
JACOB ROGERS, 38, determined and smiling, lurches
his horse forward, and the others fall in behind, rap-
idly, urgently, in a line that fills the road and spills
into the woods for 30 yards on either side.
TITLE READS:
“A TRUE STORY”
Autumn 2003
VILLAGE POV
Alma runs along the small river, bouncing a stick on
the rocks as he moves. AMANDA SMITH, 33 and pretty,
rises up from the stream with a load of wet clothing
and moves off toward her cabin. Alma runs past her,
following his dog, who has stopped at the crown of the
hill, his hair bristling. Amanda calls out to Alma.
AMANDA
He’s okay, honey. Let him run.
As she turns to watch Alma move toward a rise on the
wagon road that enters the village, Jacob Rogers moves
quickly into sight out of the woods. He is followed imme-
diately by two more riders, guns at the ready, then the
entire force begins to pour over the rise. The dog scrambles
for cover and Alma runs back toward the village.
AMANDA
(continuing)
Alma!
Amanda runs out to grab Alma by the hand and then
runs back toward the village.
AMANDA
(continuing)
Warren!
All the villagers look up now at the approaching mili-
tia. Amanda rushes Alma to the blacksmith shop and
shoves him inside. Then she turns and screams for
another child.
AMANDA
(continuing)
Elizabeth! Elizabeth!
She sees ELIZABETH, 5, by the river and runs to her,
where other women are rising from their work, gath-
ering children who have frozen in their play. Men
scramble away from their work to face the horsemen.
Rogers kicks his horse forward and raises his musket.
The line of horses begins to stream past the well and
fill the little village.
52 IRREANTUM
MAN AT WELL
What do you want?
He is shot in the chest in response, falling half into the
well. The balls begin to fly. Women, grabbing chil-
dren, pound back across the stream, running for cover
of the woods. Most of the men run for the mill or the
blacksmith shop.
HAUN (FROM WITHIN THE HOLE)
Hey! What’s happening?
Haun emerges from the hole only enough to be knocked
back into it by the passing hoof of a horse. He falls into
the well, where his son catches, then cradles his body,
in absolute fear.
Balls are flying everywhere, more than 60 riders now
in the village. Women and screaming children are shot
indiscriminately. Men are bludgeoned and shot. Now
100 riders are in the village, some dismounting and
pummeling men with the butts of their muskets, some
chasing the women into the woods, laughing, whoop-
ing, as they drag some down, ripping their clothing.
Two-dozen men are poking their muskets through the
gaps in the blacksmith shop logs and firing over and
over at the men there, who are attempting to fight off
the muskets with iron-working tools, pokers, brooms.
Several riders in the village are holding back, unsure
of what to do, clear confusion on their faces.
CONFUSED RIDER
(Yelling to Jennings)
These are women and kids, captain! Lord Jesus,
we’re killing kids!
One rider, about 18 years old, leans over the neck of
his horse and throws up. Others are pulling back into
the woods, clearing out.
Reynolds drives his horse right up to the door of the
blacksmith shop and peers in. The gunmen move off,
their work completed.
Outside, they begin to strip the dead and dying, tak-
ing watches, checking pockets, etc. Some poke at the
IRREANTUM
dead with their guns, testing their prey. Jacob Rogers
rides up to 60-year-old THOMAS MCBRIDE, lying on
his back, gut-shot, and demands his shotgun, which is
lying over his wound.
ROGERS
You’re supposed to be unarmed, squatter. Your
“prophet” signed a treaty.
MCBRIDE
Take it.
ROGERS
Why, thank you. Reckon I will.
Rogers dismounts, takes the gun, turns it on the old
man and fires. He then mounts up and rides away.
INSIDE THE BLACKSMITH SHOP
The light is dim, but we can see that William Reynolds
has entered the blacksmith shop, still mounted, and is
picking his way around the bodies when he sees the
two boys clinging to their father, who is trying to keep
them silent although he is bleeding and in pain. Reynolds
shoots the man, then turns the gun on Sardius and fires
again, splattering Alma with the debris. Alma contin-
ues to hold to his father’s leg.
Another man, MURPHY, steps into view, dismounts,
and speaks but weakly at Reynolds.
MURPHY
God, Bill, he’s just a damn kid. Let him go.
Reynolds looks at Murphy, as if he’s considering his
logic, and spits tobacco without regard. Then he re-
aims the gun at Alma.
REYNOLDS
(As if he’s sorry)
You can see his poor daddy’s dead, Murphy. And
probably his mama too, about now. Little nits grow
up to be lice.
Reynolds shoots Alma (it appears to be a gut shot),
spits again, and rides out of the building.
53 Autumn 2003
OUTSIDE OTHER MAN IN CROWD
Maybe she needs all of us!
Outside the only ones moving are the militia gunmen,
stripping the dead, firing rounds into those still breath- Laughter.
ing or even those long gone.
REYNOLDS
Several gunmen are coming back out of the woods on Mount up.
the far side of the stream; one, 25ish, is force-dragging
Amanda Smith, one hand wrapped tightly into her Jacob Rogers mounts his horse and moves toward the
hair, another at his side holding a pistol. She is bat- road. Reynolds holds back watching Jennings, but other
tered and holding her ripped dress up over her upper marauders begin to ride out of the village. In the back-
body, but oddly silent and uninvolved. ground of the shot, the vigilante pushes Amanda away
from him and aims his pistol at her, but just fakes the
VIGILANTE shot and holsters his weapon. She falls to her knees,
Looky here, fellas, I got me a live one. There’re sev- then to her hands, and then falls prostrate in the dirt.
eral back yonder still kicking if you’re interested.
And some that aren’t if ’n that’s more to your taste. REYNOLDS
Now what? Does Boggs expect us to shoot every
Reynolds rides out into the open, where Jacob Rogers is damned Mormon in Missouri?
just sheathing his knife. One man is sitting on the
ground, holding his head, having clearly been sick. JENNINGS
Reynolds just bumps right through him on his horse. That he does, Mr. Reynolds.

Captain Jennings rides up and watches the woman
with interest.
REYNOLDS
(To Jennings)
This is a piss poor lot of soldiers you got here, cap-
tain. Crap their pants at the sight of blood.
Jennings mounts his horse, spits. Other men move
toward their horses. The vigilante approaches a group
of them where, laughing, they begin to pass Amanda
around among them, groping, acting romantic. She is
powerless, near catatonic. She can only stare toward
the blacksmith shop, her eyes vacuous.
REYNOLDS
(To the crowd)
Let her go.
VIGILANTE
Ah, c’mon, captain. You can see she likes me. She
needs me.
The dog, Pirate, is sneaking back into the village, his
hackles up, his lips curled in fear and anger. Jacob
Rogers fires once, wounding it horribly but not killing
it. He saddles his gun and rides off.
REYNOLDS
There’s about five thousand of them in Caldwell
County alone. How’re we supposed to do that?
The general exodus of the village proceeds, Rogers at
the head.
JENNINGS
(Casually)
One at a time.
REYNOLDS
I say we shoot their damned prophet and they’ll all
just fade away, go back to New York or wherever
they run them out of last.
JENNINGS
I’ll just do what the honorable governor tells me.

Autumn 2003 54 IRREANTUM

REYNOLDS Although she doesn’t explicitly think so anymore
And what’d he tell you to do with Joseph Smith? it still feels
nice to be naked
Jennings spits, and looks at Reynolds directly. without having to arch her back and tilt her head

JENNINGS without needing some extra money

Hang him.
Reynolds holds the stare, then, breaking eye contact for
only a second, turns his head and spits tobacco at a
body, hitting it square in the back of the head.
and winding up in a coffee table book
forty years later with Bettie Page on the cover.
She does enjoy coming up with little sayings
or epigrams or what have you.

Reynolds harrumphs in satisfaction, then looks up to The camera may love you,
admire the beautiful day, the clearing sky, the colors of but it’ll never be monogamous
autumn.
or
REYNOLDS
(Smiling) There’s more to being a pioneer
Hell of a day, ain’t it, captain. than crossing the plains;
you have to know when to say,
“This Is the Place.”
—Kris Bluth

Kris Bluth has a B.A. in English from the University

of Oregon and works at a nonprofit agency that pro-
vides vocational and transit assistance for people with
P O E M
disabilities. He was married last year in the Portland
Temple to Debbie, which also gave him a stepson named
20 in 1953, 70 Next Week
Porter. He’s currently in the Seventh Ward, Eugene
Oregon Stake, where he teaches in the elders quorum.
She finishes up in the shower
while her husband cooks breakfast.
The Very Best
of Sting and the Police is on
the portable CD player.

A T-shirt and khakis

are hanging on the doorknob.

After scrubbing her hair dry

(She cut it short in 1978
and hasn’t missed a strand of it since),
she uses the towel to sop up the steam
evaporating off of the mirror.

IRREANTUM 55 Autumn 2003

 E S S A Y the Mormon priesthood was restricted from them
Neglected Stories Brought to Life:
A Report on the Documentary
Film Eleventh Hour Laborers
By Margaret Young
E leventh Hour Laborers is a documentary film
being produced by Robert Foster, the first black
student body president of Brigham Young Univer-
sity, and by Wayne Lee, an experienced filmmaker
and founder of the Gloria Film Festival. The direc-
tor and co-scriptwriter is Richard Dutcher, well
known for his award-winning God’s Army and his
critically acclaimed Brigham City. The other script-
writer, Margaret Blair Young, is an award-winning
author who, with Darius Gray, former president of
the official church auxiliary Genesis Group, a sup-
port organization for black LDS members, has
written extensively about black pioneers and inter-
viewed many historians, church leaders, and black
Mormons. She brings with her some otherwise
unavailable photographs, tape recordings, and doc-
umentation about the lives and issues this docu-
mentary will treat.
Eleventh Hour will present details about black
leaders and missionaries in the young days of Mor-
monism as well as the three “coloured servants” who
were hand-chosen to participate in the vanguard
company of pioneers journeying from Illinois to
Utah. Among other neglected stories, it will tell the
little-known history of Biddy Smith Mason, a slave
of a Mormon family who was emancipated in a
landmark decision by California judge Benjamin
Hayes. The day after Judge Hayes officially freed
Biddy and her fellow slaves, his grandson was res-
cued from danger by one he had just emancipated.
Judge Hayes’s decision had been controversial, and
he looked upon that rescue as a direct reward from
God. Biddy Smith Mason went on to become a
founding member of the AME Church in Los
Angeles and a great and wealthy philanthropist.
The documentary will go beyond these pioneer
times, however, and also address the lives of black
Mormons during the more difficult years, when
Autumn 2003
(1850–1978). It will cover the Civil Rights move-
ment and include interviews with key players dur-
ing the years when Brigham Young University was
boycotted by a variety of performers and athletic
teams because of the priesthood restriction. The
film will also discuss the life and surprising conver-
sion of former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.
Finally, it will also address the lifting of the priest-
hood restriction.
The significance of this project is clear. There is
scanty material available on the life of African
Americans in the early west. Some has been written
on the Buffalo Soldiers (one cavalry and one infantry
were stationed in Utah just prior to the Spanish
American war) and some about black cowboys, but
there is a void in recognized black history after the
Civil War—and understandably, a good part of the
pre–Civil War history revolves around slavery. This
documentary will seek to fill the void and will dis-
cuss the Mormon migration—a subject of great
historical significance in and of itself—from a new
perspective, recognizing the presence and the vital
work of blacks in that migration. Though slavery
will be touched upon (since a number of Mormons
brought their slaves west with them), it will not be
the primary focus of this documentary. Mormons
and non-Mormons alike know little of the note-
worthy history of black pioneers, and there is much
misperception about the history of the church as
it relates to race. This documentary has the poten-
tial of correcting misperceptions and even of heal-
ing old wounds. The filmmakers hope to see that
potential fulfilled.
The project is well underway. Richard Dutcher
has already filmed interviews with leading scholars
on the race issue in the LDS Church (Armand
Mauss and Newell Bringhurst), black church mem-
bers, and national Civil Rights leaders (Martin
Luther King III). He hopes to interview prominent
black Mormons such as Gladys Knight and Thurl
Bailey and is seeking out members of the “Wyoming
Fourteen,” black athletes who were dismissed from
their team because they wanted to protest Brigham
Young University. (The firing of the Wyoming
Fourteen precipitated an uproar in universities all
56 IRREANTUM
over the United States in 1968 and in many ways
became symbolic of the struggle for racial equality
during those turbulent years.) Darius Gray met
with the Wyoming Fourteen at a time when the
emotions were most tense. He will be one of the
main interviewees.
Thus far, funding has come from a grassroots
effort and has been adequate to cover what’s already
been filmed. At present, however, the project needs
more funds. Eleventh Hour Laborers should be fin-
ished in about a year. Further information on the
film can be found at www.the11thhourlaborers.org.
Margaret Young is a faculty member in the English
Department at Brigham Young University. She is the
author of a number of books, including the acclaimed
trilogy Standing on the Promises, three historical
novels about the experiences of black Latter-day Saints
from the days of Nauvoo until the late twentieth cen-
tury.
IRREANTUM
I N T E R V I E W
Eugene England’s Last Interview
Interviewed by Louisa Wray Dalton
I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, April 15, 2001.
The Englands’ dog, Mandy, greeted me with her
tail, and Charlotte, Gene’s lovely wife, brought me
into the living room. My parents had been friends
with the Englands since before I was born, and in the
past weeks I had heard from my mom of the headaches,
the sudden surgery, cancer, then chemotherapy.
When my essay-writing teacher at UC Santa Cruz
asked us to interview a living essayist, I knew who I
wanted to talk to, but didn’t know if it would be pos-
sible. I never took a class from Gene at BYU; I was a
science major. But since leaving BYU, I had read
more of his work and came to feel that if there was any
writer I thought was the voice of my culture—the
voice that I wanted to represent my roots, in any
case—it was Eugene England. I was coming to Provo
for a break from my graduate program in science writ-
ing and called Charlotte to see if he might be up to
talking with me.
When I arrived at their comfortable Provo home,
he sat in a chair half-facing me and the kitchen, from
which Charlotte wandered in and out. Gene’s eye-
brows were gone. A head of pale smooth skin starkly
jutted up from his lined, sun-tanned face. Yet the
hearty greeting, the thoughtfulness, the words full of
ideas were all still there.
In the middle of our discussion, their long-time
friends Bob and Francine Bennion arrived and
Francine played the piano for him. In addition, I
accidentally let the tape run out in the middle of the
interview, so I missed recording the portion of our con-
versation about male and female writing styles. I have
noted holes in the interview with ellipses where I
could not understand a word or phrase.
Generally, I tried to let the interview go where he
wanted it to, so as not to tax and overextend his lim-
ited energy. I was merely the daughter of a family
friend being allowed to visit on a quiet Sunday
afternoon.
57 Autumn 2003

DI don’t
o you remember how you first began to
generate ideas?
remember having to consciously generate
ideas. I usually wrote an essay in response to a need
or an assignment or a responsibility, or an idea I
just couldn’t get rid of. I guess if there’s anything
I would advise essay writers to do, it’s to follow up
on ideas that grasp them, or themes or images.
I think the best subject for an essay is whatever it is
that wakes you up in the morning, that you can’t
stop thinking about. That’s happened to me, I think,
with my best essays.
One of the first essays I wrote was for the intro-
duction of the first issue of a journal I’d started
[Dialogue]. So it was kind of an obvious subject.
I tried to defend why we needed, in the Mormon
church, a journal that was open to a variety of
points of view and why that was consistent with the
gospel. For me, it was a personal religious journey
and a responsibility to think through why I was
doing what I was doing. Very often an essay will
come out of a controversial idea—that is, one in
which not everyone agrees. You have to defend a
point of view. So my thesis, essentially, was that
Mormonism needed, and could benefit from,
something that seemed somewhat inconsistent
with its authoritarian nature—that is, a journal
that was not controlled by anyone in authority, but
only by the vision of the writers and the editors of
how to best explore Mormon thought and culture.
I wrote an essay about that.
Not long after, I couldn’t get out of my mind
some experiences I’d had where I’ve actually given
blessings to my car. It seems like such a strange idea
to many people, and yet it was an idea that was part
of our culture because we do have interesting sto-
ries from the pioneer period of people blessing their
oxen, which is very close to a car. [Laugh] Actually,
one of the best Mormon novels, Maureen Whipple’s
Giant Joshua, tells such an incident in fictional
form. But it is surely based on traditions in her
family. Using that parallel, I told about my experi-
ence. Twice, when my car was having real trouble,
I actually found myself somewhat automatically
putting my hands on its hood, and giving it a bless-
ing, and seeing it recover in what seemed like a
miraculous way to me.
Autumn 2003
So those are, I think, pretty good examples of
how essays can arise. Now, I’ve written other essays
about complicated theological subjects. For instance,
one time I wrote a book on Brigham Young, and as
I researched for it, I found interesting passages
where he argued that God is progressing, that God
is still learning and developing in his realms—not
in relation to us, not learning more about us and
our world and how to save us, but simply in some
way still growing and learning and developing.
Now this was an idea that, as I explored it and
expressed it, I found that other people in the
church disagreed with. They thought that the state-
ment that God is all-powerful and all-knowing was
absolute and there’s no way that he could do any-
thing more.
So I decided to explore that idea by looking up
all the material I could from all the different church
writers and prophets. What I did was come up with
an unusual idea that you could actually, depending
on what you meant, describe him as both—as both
progressing and as perfect, as perfect in relation to
our realm and as progressing in his realm. So I
explored that and expressed it as a way of helping
Mormons deal with what seemed like contradic-
tory ideas, then seeing that sometimes ideas that
feel contradictory may actually illuminate. You can
transcend the contradiction. You can actually get a
fuller vision of new possibilities. I wrote an essay
about that.
Another thing I’ve loved to do as I’ve grown older
is fly fish. I’ve found this special place up above
Ogden, the south fork of the Ogden River, up
toward the mountain called Monte Cristo, which
of course has symbolic meaning: the Mount of
Christ. As I thought about fishing, and that fish
have always been a symbol of Christ, and about the
peace that I experienced there, I thought maybe
I could describe what it’s like to go fishing. So I
wrote an essay called “Monte Cristo” about that
experience and the peace it led to in my own heart
to do something with skill and integrity. In fact,
part of the subject of the essay is a friend of mine.
He is one of the best fishermen I know, and how
honest he is about his fishing. He never pretends to
catch more than he does.
58 IRREANTUM
 Once you’ve got your subject—something that
wakes you up in the morning—how do you focus
that idea? Do you do that simply by writing it?
In most of what I think of as my artistic personal
essays—that is, ones that I think of as art essays
rather than arguments, or theological essays, or
something like that, which I usually outline, or I
can outline—I just do a term paper.
In my personal essays, it’s more of an organic
process where I have an image or something that
gets me started and I work on developing that
through association, or through telling a story.
I think an essay usually works best if it’s organ-
ized around a story, an actual experience, or a
couple of them that are related. Usually I try to
organize the essay around the experience, and
where it’s appropriate develop parts of it for more
commentary or a related experience. Probably the
best essay I’ve written was one called “Easter Week-
end,” which grew out of an experience I had
attending a scholarly conference on Shakespeare, a
subject I’ve taught and have strong feelings about.
It was kind of a controversial idea, that he was a
devout although unorthodox Christian and that his
plays are really a serious exploration of what can be
done about sin, especially the sin of retaliation and
revenge, which was something that interested him—
how destructive those impulses are. All his plays
have some element of retribution and show the
destructive effect of it, and I think his best plays
show the alternative, which is the only thing that
can stop the revenge impulses: unconditional love,
which comes ultimately from Christ. So I thought
about that and I just began to explore the connec-
tions between Shakespeare and the question of sin
and hope . . . in my own life and I just began to tell
about that weekend and some . . . and struggles.
Actually, earlier in that weekend I did something
kind of like sin—that is, I went to New York where
they have all these people on the streets trying to
get your money by playing these con games. One
of them, I think it’s called three-card monte, where
they shuffle cards around and you try to guess, and
they have some cons worked out. I watched them a
while. I watched some of the others playing the
game, and I thought how stupid these people were.
IRREANTUM
Then I said to myself, It looks so easy. The guy said,
Got twenty bucks? So I described that con in some
detail. Then I went back to an experience I had
with my father. We were in a car wreck together
and I had been kind of low, I had been doubting
my own spiritual qualities. But after the crash, the
first thing I remember was giving my father a bless-
ing with the blood coming out of his . . . So I tried
to write about these connections. And of course the
essay is ultimately about sin and redemption; but it
is told through stories.
If there is anything my
essays try to do, it’s to
take contraries, then by
proving them, by testing
them out, by following
them through, exploring
them, and then seeing
new truths emerge.
[I stopped here for a bit. Francine and Bob Ben-
nion had come by for Francine to play the piano for
Gene. When we returned to the interview, it was
obvious he had been thinking about the essay “Easter
Weekend” during the interlude.]
In that last essay I told you about, “Easter Week-
end,” I discovered something that may be useful to
other people. I know there is a lot of modern the-
ory about this that I think supports what I learned.
Men and women, because of the way our culture
trains us . . .
[Because of tape recorder problems, I missed part of
the interview here. I don’t know how much. I remem-
ber I missed recording the part about how men and
women write differently, that men have more of a goal
and women write more roundabout, more in touch
with feelings, etc. I also asked him if he had an essay
he was thinking about right then, and he said he had
59 Autumn 2003
been thinking about some service that former students
of his had done. He felt that there was this spirit for
service, what he called the Spirit of Amos, similar to
the Spirit of Elijah.]
. . . have a wonderful combination of emotion
and good thinking. Among LDS writers, I think
some of the best are Ed Geary, Mary Bradford,
Emma Lou Thayne, Louise Plummer, and her hus-
band Tom; all write good essays. I think it is impor-
tant for writers to read other good writers, not copy
them so much as develop an ability to be sensitive
to the same things they are, to pick up on the ways
they build up . . .
I see you as someone who very easily and
effectively fosters other writers, especially other
LDS writers. Do you do that deliberately?
I don’t think of myself as a model, but I taught
Writing the Personal Essay at BYU and tried to
encourage trying that genre. When I teach Mormon
literature I offer as an option for the term paper
writing a long personal essay, and I hope that will
encourage students to try it.
When I founded Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought, I established a section in it called Personal
Voices, where we regularly published essays that
had this personal quality, and that’s continued. For
instance, in the fall issue, there are two wonderful
personal essays. Paul, noticing numbness in his
hand, put himself through an MRI and diagnosed
himself with cancer. Very tender and sort of hard
to read, but an excellent essay. In that same issue
a young woman from Alpine, Utah, has an essay
about going to the temple. Just a wonderful and
thoughtful exploration of that experience. So the
essay tradition is continuing.
What are some of your favorite themes, the
ones you tend to come back to?
Spiritual experiences, and mercy . . .
Why mercy?
I wrote a book called The Quality of Mercy. One
of the things I am most interested in is how the
power of unconditional love can change both our-
selves and other people—especially ourselves. One
of the points that I want to make in my essay about
the Spirit of Amos is that giving and serving other
people is a wonderful thing to do for them, but
Autumn 2003
ultimately it’s the way we save ourselves. Because it
enables us to accept. If we can give mercy and accept
mercy, then we won’t judge ourselves [harshly]. We
won’t say, “Oh, I don’t deserve it,” because we’ve
been willing to say, “I’ll give even if they don’t.”
I don’t think we can accept Christ’s love until we
get to that point of saying, “Even if I don’t deserve
it, I accept it.” So I think it’s a wonderful prepara-
tion for the Atonement.
A lot of your essays deal with gender issues.
First of all, how has that changed? How have
your feelings about gender issues in the Church
changed, because you have written about it a lot.
Well, I think I’ve gone through, I think, a fairly
normal liberation, through the effect of my wife
and daughters. I grew up in a very patriarchal world
and church, where men were in charge and supe-
rior and women’s opportunities were somewhat
limited . . . and I kind of fell into those patterns
myself. Even in our marriage, I think I neglected
Charlotte’s needs. I think I’ve learned how wrong I
was, and how we need to combat . . . and really
believe what God says in the Book of Mormon,
that all are alike unto God, male and female, as well
as black and white, and think through better what
that means, until we really are saying to God, “In
what way should they be?” and “Have we failed to
make them alike to us?”
I think I’ve developed better attitudes. Whether
I’ve developed better practices remains to be seen.
[It is interesting to me that I had asked about his
writing, essentially. That was the question I meant to
pose: How have your ideas changed? Instead, he told
me how his life had changed, how his own practices
had changed. He doesn’t make a distinction between
his writing—his ideas in his writing—and his life.
And in particular, Gene does not make a distinction
between his ideas and his practice of those ideas.]
. . . And maybe this I’m going through right now
where I’m totally dependent on Charlotte [she has
come to sit by him] and I’m so grateful for her and
willing to release myself to her is certainly part of
that . . . I mean, I’ve certainly felt, oh, I wish I’d
done this long before, when it wasn’t because I had
to, but because I wanted to. I think she is wiser
than I am and stronger than I am, and I could have
60 IRREANTUM
had—I could have done better writing. I could
have avoided some of the mistakes I’ve made, when
I’ve challenged things I probably shouldn’t have. It
just caused pain and difficulty there, rather than
increased understanding. And if I had listened to
Charlotte and not published certain things, it might
have been better. So I’m still learning.
Peace?
Yes, peace is important, of course. It’s related to
mercy. I really think that’s the only way to bring
peace in the open. I think force always begets force.
I think even arguing violently for peace is a good
way to increase violence. And I’ve been guilty of
that sometimes. In my book Making Peace, the argu-
ments I make there against violence may not be as
important as my essay in there, “Monte Cristo,”
which describes what peace is like. I’m trying to get
to a point where I can describe peace as maybe the
best way to help people find it. If I can get through
the experience I’m in right now, I’d like to write
about it in an essay or book called Being Here—
what it is like to be, rather than so actively doing or
changing.
You talk about that in one of your essays, how
being is a feminine quality.
Yes.
Do you agree with that, Charlotte?
I think it’s true because women tend to be, on
the whole, kind of caretakers, whether it’s teaching,
whether it’s caring for a family, whether it’s running
some type of volunteer work. Just watching the
nurses, many of the nurses in the hospital, it’s very
interesting, I think the ones that do the best work
and relate to the patients best are the ones who are
there in the moment, and they allow time and heal-
ing to take place with the patient. When they are
with the patient, they don’t make them feel like
they are too busy for them. They have time to lis-
ten to them and their needs. With women, it’s just
their nature to get together and talk personally.
I think the communication is there, living at that
moment. It’s the sharing of our lives . . . and I think
the influence of six females in the family—as I’m
sure your family was the same way—that has had
an impact on Gene. First of all, to be interested, to
be made aware of many feminine settings. And it’s
IRREANTUM
true that he was very active in the study of them,
but then making the transition to actually living
that way was harder for him. He pretty much car-
ried on the traditional kind of life: did work, came
home, sat down with the paper, he did his job. He
didn’t really get too involved at the house, or activ-
ities. And it wasn’t until, I think, this last year,
when he and I were alone more, and then I tried to
get him to do some cooking, or learn to make a
dish or two, his own little item. So we’ll have
another opportunity to do that. I think women
tend to be more appreciating the moment, even
though we get really caught up in having so many
different things we’re involved in. It’s really hard
sometimes just to stop. I think we tend to do it bet-
ter than most men. We’re less ambitious in a way,
that they have to get . . . from higher compulsions
and accomplishments and things like that. So maybe
it’s a cultural . . . We’ve been so used to being not
considered.
I used to feel pressured to do a lot more than I
was doing. But it took me a good part of my life to
realize that what I was doing was as valid as any-
thing else going on. I think a lot of the work that
women do is absolutely critical.
Gene, one of the things that affect me is your
description of things that seem contradictory, or
are contradictory in the Church.
I’m very attracted to paradox and contradictions,
and really believe that one of the great inspired
insights of Joseph Smith is one he expressed by say-
ing: “By proving contraries, truth is made mani-
fest.” If there is anything my essays try to do, it’s to
take contraries—that is, ideas or experiences that
seem to deny each other—then by proving them,
by testing them out, by following them through,
exploring them, and then seeing new truths emerge.
And I think they do. I think there is a truth that
comes out of the conflict of justice and mercy that
is more complete than either justice or mercy, male
or female, or God’s progression and his perfection.
So many of my essays have to do with an attempt
to prove contraries, to follow through and explore
what seems like a contradiction and hope that
process itself will reveal truth greater than either
part of the contradiction.
61 Autumn 2003
 How does that happen in the Church? P O E M
I think we are divided, not formally but infor-
mally, between liberals and conservatives. And I Wheel
think it is the interaction of liberal ideas and con-
servative ideas that can make a dynamic culture. jostling, bumping over rocky paths
Out of that come new expressions, new ideas, new spokes stretching from hub
thoughts, and tolerance. If we learn to do that with seek true
tolerance for each other, that itself is a new truth.
I’ve constantly tried to help Mormons get over Turn, Turn, Turning
using those as labels, name-calling, demonizing dizzy rotations bespeak futility
each other, and simply recognize them as descrip- revolutions without resolution
tive. Liberals tend to have a certain kind of approach
to life, an interest in freedom and expression and yet, momentum overcomes friction
various things, and progress. Where conservatives rolling onward: a time to Turn.
have another set of interests they value. It’s not
—Jana Bouck Remy
wrong; it’s different. They are interested in stability,
in tradition, and those are great values. And if we . . .
Jana Bouck Remy is the book review editor for IRRE-
one or the other, we’d be in a lot of trouble. But if
ANTUM. She is studying U.S. history at UC Irvine.
we combine the emphases and the strengths of those
two concerns . . .

Louisa Wray Dalton grew up in Provo, Utah. She

now reports for the magazine Chemical & Engineer-
ing News in Washington, D.C., and is getting better
at not letting the tape run out when interviewing fas-
cinating people. She will be forever scheming to get
back to northern California, seaside home to the
famous banana slugs.

Autumn 2003 62 IRREANTUM

 E S S A Y them: the film’s contents and its goals may be
Put Your Gun Away, Bishop:
Brigham City and the Problems of
Rural Theocracy
By Samuel Brown
Author’s note: This essay discloses plot lines and should
be read only after viewing the film. I am indebted to
Kate Holbrook and Andrew Brown for their comments.
Perhaps the LDS film of greatest interest outside
Utah, Richard Dutcher’s Brigham City has occa-
sioned considerable debate as it has shared a view of
Mormon society in settings as diverse as Israeli
cable stations and Provo’s dollar theater. A common
theme in criticism, particularly among more cos-
mopolitan reviewers, is the film’s failure to explore
the moral limits of the provincial theocracy the
fictive Brigham City represents. While there are
other voices, Michael Minch’s thoughtful treat-
ment1 appears representative of the argument that
Dutcher fell short in his consideration of the moral
dimension of rural Mormon society.
While the film suffers from minor plot tangles,2
uneven acting,3 and not quite professional cine-
matography, Dutcher has improved dramatically as
a filmmaker since his first film, God’s Army. Specifi-
cally, Brigham City is a compelling and believable
portrayal of an insulated theocracy in the Mormon
hinterland. And contrary to Minch and others, I
believe that Dutcher explores the dark side of such
a society, though he does so from the inside, with-
out clear labels, an approach that probably under-
lies the criticism of the morality of Brigham City.
There are four broad groups of problems with
the traditional, religion-based village. They tend to
repress deviants and dissidents, they distrust and
alienate outsiders, and they deal poorly with trou-
bled, complex personalities. Finally, when prophet
is lawgiver, members of a community may lose
access to an unsullied source of spiritual conso-
lation. Brigham City contains examples of each of
these failings. Before turning to them, however,
I should note the reason I think others have missed
IRREANTUM
discordant.
Critics appear to be responding to Dutcher’s lack
of distance from the society he has created. As hero
of the film and creator of the story, he has elected
to communicate rural Mormonism from the inside.4
Not only does the film show, without explicit nor-
mative comment, examples of each class of prob-
lems, but the film itself participates in that society.
In my view this makes the film more compelling
than a moralizing tale whose stated goal is to expose
Mormon provincialism, even if it leaves the audi-
ence ultimately unsure of the creator’s intent.
We should recognize at the outset that the major-
ity of people in a traditional (provincial, theocratic,
conservative, rural) society enjoy being there. They
constitute the society and choose to continue to par-
ticipate in it. It is the minority, those who exist on
the periphery, who suffer and struggle most and may
find their civil rights curtailed. Their situation is cru-
cial to an understanding of the morality of the film.
Rural societies may have a difficult time dealing
with dissidents and deviants, a topic cited fre-
quently by critics, as Dutcher’s character, Wes, uses
his ecclesiastical authority in his secular work
almost from the beginning. He mobilizes the
Aaronic Priesthood to canvas the neighborhood for
information regarding Caroline’s murder. He later
calls the LDS men on a witch-hunt. The combina-
tion of church and state escalates as Terry morosely
gathers fatal momentum. The more the society
closes down to expel the outsider, the more Terry
kills, in a vicious cycle.
The unconstitutional excess culminates in a
house-to-house search for the handsome girl who
introduced us to Brigham City society in the film’s
opening scene. But the illegal search proves useless,
and the chief lieutenant of the search is later
exposed as the murderer they were seeking. Not
only did this violation of civil rights fail, but it
empowered the murderer. In the course of the
search, Steve—the shy and lonely man who harbors
an addiction to pornography—is betrayed by his
sheriff-bishop, who brusquely violates his privacy.
This humble man acknowledges his subservience
to Wes when he concludes their interaction over
63 Autumn 2003
the crime scene photos by noting, “You’ve kept
my secrets.”5
Mormon society is often criticized as being closed
to single adults, and in this respect Brigham City
differs little. With the exception of Wes (a widower
and hero-martyr), all the single adults are outsiders
or deviants: Meredith and her agent-partner, Steve
the closet pornography addict, Ralph the obese
Latino businessman who imports drug-addicted
laborers into Wes’s idyll, Judy Perkins the frail sin-
ner, and Stu Udall the cigarette-smoking widower.
Terry’s wife joins their ranks outside society on the
cruel irony of her husband’s impromptu execution
by their ecclesiastical leader. Peg and Ed, the closest
we have to normal singles, are gladly and safely
engaged.
Ralph is a special case, worth detailed review.
A Latino bachelor, he is morbidly obese (the only
actor with that condition in the film), and he is the
cause for Terry’s infiltration of Brigham City soci-
ety, a fact reinforced early in the film by Terry’s
threat to return to work for Ralph, as Wes cannot
afford to pay a competitive salary. There is tension
between Wes and Ralph throughout Brigham City.
In their first encounter Ralph asks, “You trying
to put me out of business?” as part of his defense
of his undesirable employees. Later Wes violates
Ralph’s privacy by revealing Ralph’s income to a
former employee (information he would have from
Church tithing records). Ralph will never be at
home in the society that, in his bishop’s view, he is
despoiling with venal cosmopolitanism. In the final
scene Ralph sits solemnly alone.
The director is complicit in the community’s
rejection of deviants. His attempts to mislead the
viewer regarding the killer’s identity are a case in
point. With ominous music and an intruder-in-
the-backseat sequence, Dutcher leads the viewer to
believe that the murderer is the not-quite-Mormon
Ed Gray, fiancé of Wes’s assistant Peg. A similar
scene is devoted to the pornographer Steve, who
takes pictures of Caroline’s grave to the accompani-
ment of eerie music and then refuses to allow the
bishop into his closet, tension building palpably as
they illegally search his home. In both instances,
Dutcher targets society-internal deviants, hiding
Autumn 2003
the fact that it is the true outsider in insider cloth-
ing who is guilty.
An arresting transition in editing underscores the
director’s complicity as well. Meredith’s FBI agent
partner is a lapsed Mormon who sneers that he is
on “sabbatical” from his faith community. The image
immediately following the man’s smug expression
is horse manure littering the roadway after the
annual parade.
Outsiders fare little better than deviants in
Dutcher’s village. The FBI agents, as clumsy as they
are,6 prove the point7: outsiders are not welcome in
these societies, except when they attempt to inte-
grate (witness the unbearably sanctimonious Sun-
day School teacher forcing Meredith to read aloud
a section of the Book of Mormon). The agents are
branded as foreign in black suits, hiding behind
the soulless oculi of mirrored sunglasses, an effect
Dutcher would have us believe they cultivated. The
first murder is of a quintessential outsider, a name-
less Arizonan speeding past the town on the inter-
state, captured fatally as a result of her minuscule
overlap with the town. In the ultimate rejection of
outsiders and deviants, Terry is executed moments
after his outsider status has been disclosed. Under-
scoring the fact of his alienation, his is the first
body in the film not attended to after death.
In addition, the film depicts the negative spiri-
tual effects of the fusion of church and state. The
first instance, occurring as we realize Wes Clayton
is both sheriff and bishop, is the pilgrimage of Judy
Perkins, a haggardly sinful woman, who comes to
the sheriff ’s office to confess. Wes tries to clarify
her needs, asking, “Are you here to talk with your
sheriff or your bishop?” but she manifestly needs a
spiritual guide to hear her confession, answering,
nonplused, “Oh . . . my bishop.”
Prepared now to hear Judy’s sins (admittedly
dipping into the city coffers illegally by hearing
confessions “on the county clock”), Wes is reminded
by her tears that she has “never confessed [her] sins
to a man wearing a gun before.” In her time of
need, she is repulsed, perhaps emotionally dam-
aged, by the sight of the cold, impersonal punish-
ment of the sheriff ’s pistol (I’ll leave to those who
still believe in Freud the task of sorting out the
imagery here).8
64 IRREANTUM
 This theme, of finding a man of weapons, pun-
ishment, and sorrow where the bishop ought to be,
is a common one in Brigham City. Steve is another
sinner harmed. Clerical confidentiality is breached
as Peg realizes—she has a knowing expression as
Judy is publicly deprived of her church calling—
that Judy Perkins is guilty of important sins, as she
witnessed her tearful pre-confession in the sheriff ’s
office. This breach takes its place with the divulging
of Ralph’s tithing information in the course of a
working day for the sheriff and his employees.
The guiltless also suffer in a theocracy, as evi-
denced by the trauma experienced by Evelyn and
Ernie over Caroline’s death. They will never be able
to look at their bishop the same again, as he—a
sheriff in bishop’s clothing—announces their daugh-
ter’s death in their living room, when he should
have brought the pleasing news of the Kingdom. As
Evelyn calls him bishop, Ernie refers to him as the
sheriff, reflecting his divided personhood in their
home. The later panning shot of Ernie talking with
reporters, contrary to Wes’s preference, underscores
their sense of alienation from him. At the final scene,
prior to the spirit of reconciliation, Ernie glares
sidelong at the bishop during the prayer; neither of
them is able to partake with closed eyes of the prayer
of communion uttered at the altar below the ros-
trum. The same is true for the towheaded younger
brother of the slain convenience store clerk.9
The most tragic instance is Terry’s wife, who will
forever bear the image of her bishop executing her
husband over her immaculate hearth. For her to
remain in the community, in the Church, would
require a marshaling of emotional and spiritual
strength that exceeds the capacity of most individ-
uals. As members of his ward, they would have
required Wes’s blessing for their marriage. The man
who counseled them, who gave official permission
for their union, is the one who violently ends it. At
the end of the film, she is left with a murderer’s
child in her womb and nowhere to turn for sup-
port. She disappears.10
A prominent criticism of Minch’s is that Dutcher
doesn’t address Brigham City’s failure to reform Terry.
However, the theme is explored from the first con-
versation, an interchange on the way to keeping the
IRREANTUM
peace at the outsider’s nest, the construction site.
Terry switches the radio receiver from the cloying
bleats of a country singer to the news station, which
Wes instantly turns off, complaining, “I don’t want
to listen to the news.”
Terry, who states that his mentor is shutting out
“the real world,” seems to be expressing a frustrated
wish to share the complexity of his own soul. In
response to this suggestion that there is more to
him, to life, than can be filtered through the rose-
colored glasses of Brigham City’s theocrat, he
encounters the eternal answer of a closed society. In
the sheriff ’s words, outsiders are “murderers, rob-
bers, rapists, kids with guns. It’s the same story over
and over again.” In this dehumanizing phrase, Wes
(and by extension his society) rejects complex sin-
ners, people with pathology that rises above an
occasional cigarette or—we suspect in the case of
Judy Perkins—a sexual indiscretion. Terry need not
wonder how the society would react to his dark
past or his ongoing obsessions, for Wes has pro-
vided the definitive answer.
At the crime scene, Terry kneels over his victim,
with Wes framed in the light of the doorway, his
stern shadow cast over the unknown sinner. Terry,
aghast at his own depravity, says, “Why did they
have to leave her like that?” Wes offers no explana-
tion for evil or hope for rehabilitation. Instead, in
the next scene, he forbids Terry to discuss the crime
with his wife, a potent (perhaps intentional) refer-
ence to the society’s failure to allow Terry to face his
sins, and in a sense the phrase that seals the fate of
Terry’s wife.11
Shortly before his execution, Terry bemoans the
fact that Wes trusted him, as if such a trusting soci-
ety were made for his style of sin. He may have a
point. Terry could not be healed until he con-
fronted his sins, and the society in Brigham City
had no room in its inn for a soiled outsider, no psy-
chiatric facility or social worker. A society that can-
not face problems and uncertainty, that would
shun and ostracize deviants with all its energy, may
have little hope of rehabilitating them. Brigham
City certainly failed.
Much has been written about the closing scene
of communal forgiveness. Dutcher has created an
65 Autumn 2003
affecting image of communal forgiveness that tugs
at the tear ducts of many viewers. But even at the
redemptive pinnacle of the film, the missing faces
are potent testimony: the betrayed pornographer
sits alone, alienated, his mother absent and com-
pletely estranged; the serial killer’s wife is missing
from the chapel and likely from the community;
and a string of women molder in their graves arguably
because a kindly Mormon bishop attempted to run
his sheriff ’s office the way he runs his ward. Judy
Perkins is notably absent, having (we presume)
dwindled in her faith as she failed the plan for
repentance laid out by the bishop with the gun.12
The outsider Meredith leaves to avoid being embar-
rassed during an intimate moment in a society that
cannot welcome her.13
Perhaps the reason the congregation did not ini-
tially partake of the sacrament was not so much a
desire to please their bishop as recognition of their
shared complicity in living the lie of paradise. Only
after Wes took the sacred bread could they also
believe themselves ready to be absolved of their
sins. They all are willing to try again. But as tears
dry and hugs disintegrate into handshakes, the
fact remains: many are dead, others betrayed or
abandoned.
Brigham City is a complex and illuminating
exploration of life in a rural Mormon theocracy.
Though Dutcher speaks from deep within the soci-
ety he portrays, this does not lessen his clear vision
of the conflicts, entanglements, and distress that are
the Achilles’ heel of such societies. Many will find
the film moving, though I suspect it will fail to win
any supporters of rural Mormonism. That, per-
haps, is Dutcher’s triumph. He manages a rich
story about an inhospitable place full of contradic-
tions and paradoxes, and he does so from the
inside.
A physician by profession, Samuel Brown writes about
religious imagination, insanity, and infection. His
favorite authors are Nabokov and O’Connor. He lives
with his wife and daughter in Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts.
Autumn 2003
Notes
1. “The Tragedy of Brigham City,” presented at
the AML annual meeting, Feb. 21, 2003, Utah Val-
ley State College.
2. For instance, Ed Gray arrives with his tow
truck at the initial crime scene with the FBI agents
in the light of day. The following scene, taking
place several hours later under a starlit sky, has
Terry still waiting for Ed and his truck to arrive. In
further day and night confusion, Caroline’s death is
announced to her parents early in the day, but the
removal of her body is delayed until after nightfall.
3. Particularly Tayva Patch (Meredith), Matthew
Brown (Terry), the Sunday School teacher. Brimley
is a delight, while Jon Enos (Ed) and Carrie Mor-
gan (Peg) are an affecting couple. Dutcher himself
has improved since God’s Army and has moments of
excellent acting.
4. In a Mormon parallel, the only successful town
Joseph Smith ever ran was Nauvoo, where he was
also politician and theocrat. Wes’s limp could be
seen as a parallel of Smith’s well-known limp, due
to his having lost a section of bone to osteomyelitis
in his youth.
5. It would appear that he had thus far kept his
addiction secret, as he is shown in the first church
scene partaking of the sacrament in Wes’s sight.
6. It’s not clear to me why people with Wasatch
Front accents are being cast as New Yorkers. Surely
there are enough unemployed actors in New York
to find someone with a believable accent. Though
nowhere near as egregious as in the recent film
adaptation of Jack Weyland’s Charly, the outsiders
cast in Brigham City are unconvincing at best.
7. I admit that Dutcher’s casting doesn’t fit the
mold exactly. While his “outsiders” all appear to be
Utah actors, the non-LDS South African explant
Matthew Brown is his costar. Brown’s use of a British
tea drinker’s pinkie in his drinking the sacramental
water may unconsciously reinforce his character’s
outsider status and betrays the actor as not local.
8. Interestingly, Wes forgets his gun after this
encounter; Terry has to remind him that a sheriff is
naked without his gun. The sheriff cannot be both
lawgiver and priest without disruptions.
66 IRREANTUM
 9. A minor example in the same vein is the dis- P O E M
ruption of a religious meeting by the panicked
trash collector who has discovered Caroline’s body. Connotation Study
10. Ed Gray’s status as a Mormon is also in
doubt, as he was baptized by the impostor Terry, City canyon: catch the connotation
another instance of the ecclesiastical complexity of Oh, you suave denizens of the East,
Terry’s time in Brigham City. And tell me what you think I’ve said.
11. Wes asserts that he speaks for the community No I haven’t, I was being literal—
as he says, “They don’t want to know anything Come and see and get to know
about it.” I leave open the question of whether this A wooded one in the West
could be seen as an allegory of domestic abuse.
12. The presence of another forlorn-appearing Though now we grow the more like you
single woman makes Judy’s absence appear inten- And fret a little, too
tional. Even if this occurred unintentionally, my Lest city canyon connote anew, amiss, askew
analysis comprises the completed film and is based
—Keith Moore
solely on its contents.
13. For integrity of effect, Steve, the shamed
pornography addict, should not have participated
in the final act of communal forgiveness.

IRREANTUM 67 Autumn 2003

 S T O R Y fence. Before going inside, he brushed himself off
Neighbors
By Brian Keith Evenson
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in
The Leading Edge, no. 19 (September 1989). Even-
son says, “The story was both written and published
when I was an undergraduate and represents a par-
ticular moment early in my writing life.”
T he previous month, Martin had gone over to
tell the neighbors that they were crazy. He told
them that watching bugs crackle and die in the
electric bug killer was perverse.
“What are you,” Mr. Baum said, “some damn
insect lover?” They had all laughed at that one.
“What’s so funny?” Martin had said.
“Soon there won’t be any bugs left to crackle.
Take off that damn suit and have some whisky.”
Then the rain had come, leaving long gray streaks
on the fence boards. Martin had run back to the
house, down the stairs to the shelter beneath. The
neighbors had stayed outside, laughing as the rain
fell. Martin, below, could not hear the laughter.
• • •
T hey all looked different now, even Mr. Baum.
They had lost most of their hair, and their skin
was the yellow of an old bruise. They still sat on the
patio, they still laughed, but now when they
laughed they coughed blood too, spitting it into
their glasses, mixing it into the drinks with their
fingers. Flecks of blood, like crushed mites, dotted
the patio.
“It’s not too late,” said Martin, looking from face
to face to indicate that he was speaking to every-
one. “I’ll help you.”
“Go to hell,” said Baum. “What makes you so
righteous anyway?” Everyone laughed.
They were almost dead anyway, there was really
no point. Martin walked back through his yard,
toward the house. The grass was yellow, except in
certain places where it had formed tangled clumps,
sending out shoots at odd angles. The dust was
everywhere. It had blown into piles against the
Autumn 2003
as best as he could. He did not remove the suit; he
rarely removed the suit. He slept in it because of
the dust. When he ate, he only removed one glove
and the helmet. He ate sparingly.
• • •
M artin knew that the windows should be kept
closed, but when they were closed the heat
inside was incredible. Besides, he wore the suit so
there wasn’t much danger.
But with the windows open, he heard the laugh-
ing of the neighbors, the crackle of their electric
bug zapper. He wondered if an electric fence would
make the same sound. After a week, he couldn’t
stand it anymore, so he shut the window.
The heat did not begin to build until a day or
two later. Then the plants wilted and died. Down-
stairs in the shelter, the filtered ventilation system
was clogged, filled with the dust. The dust spilled
out onto the floor, creating piles below the grates.
The heat down there was even worse. He wished he
had a thermometer to see how hot it really was. He
stayed upstairs.
The neighbors were always laughing, even at
night. It seemed that they never slept. The sweat
ran down into his loose boots, making walking
slippery. Martin imagined the suit slowly filling
with his own sweat until he drowned, and discov-
ered that he could hardly breathe.
Burning up, he thought.
Running into the bathroom, he turned on the
cold water. He fell face down halfway in the tub,
motionless, trying to feel the cold water through
his suit. It helped a little; it was better than nothing.
He spent most of his time at the window, staring
out at the street or at the fence separating him from
the neighbors. Nothing ever happened. He sat and
stared and sweated, waiting for someone to come
rescue him. He waited until he could no longer
stand the heat, and then fled to the shower again.
• • •
E ach day he would decide that the neighbors
must surely be dead and he would open the
window only to close it quickly. Day after day, he
still heard the laughter and the bug killer. Some-
times he would run from the house and up the
68 IRREANTUM
road, trying to escape both the neighbors and the
heat. Too much heat will make you go mad. He
remembered reading this but he could not remem-
ber where.
The dust fell
from the sky like snow,
except it was black and
never melted.
Once he had escaped the laughter, he would
walk slowly, looking at the houses that were cov-
ered with a thin layer of ash, looking for footprints
in the dust. The dust became thicker each day. He
considered moving to another house.
When his wife and child had died, it had been
quick; they had refused to linger like the neighbors.
He had been in the front room watching TV when
the test pattern had flashed on. He had rushed
downstairs into the shelter. His wife and child had
been across town, shopping. After the initial burst
and the rain, he had put on the suit and gone in
search of them. He’d walked down the streets, the
dust beginning to blow, until he found the car.
It was a green ’76 Saab, all they could afford after
paying for the shelter. The rear window was shat-
tered and there were no groceries in the back. His
wife slumped over the wheel, dead. The child, in
the back seat, was dead as well.
That’s impossible, he thought. They couldn’t have
died. It takes weeks to die.
Even though he knew what must have happened,
Martin did not look for the wounds or the bruises.
There was blood on the child. He noticed that the
dust fell from the sky like snow, except it was black
and never melted.
He lifted his wife from the car and carried her
to the field across the street. He dug at the earth
with the gloves, giving up when it became clear
that he was making no progress. After dragging her
by the wrist back onto the street, he got the child
IRREANTUM
out of the car. The blood was no longer wet, and
the child’s clothing stuck to its body.
He caressed his wife’s face through his glove
before burying them beneath the gray dust. Filling
up their mouths with dust, covering the bodies com-
pletely, he made sure that everything was perfect.
Then he went home.
• • •
I n the sun, the blinds’ open slats created a pattern.
In earlier days, the shadow had made him feel as
if he were in a bar. Not the real kind of bar where
people get drunk, but the kind they always show in
old westerns. Now it didn’t remind him of anything.
He looked out between the open slats, the shadows
creating stripes on his thick suit. As the sun climbed,
the stripes became sharp and defined—the heat
increased. His feet were rotting because of the sweat.
He could smell them rotting all the way through
his suit. He sat in the chair, unmoving, watching
the road.
The dust was gathering on the outside of the
window ledge. Where the cracks were, it was slowly
seeping in. Martin realized this and knew that the
inside would become exactly as the outside.
He finally got up from the chair. He tore down
the blinds, carefully, as one tears off paper towels.
He knocked out the window glass with his gloved
hand. The neighbors were still laughing outside.
Using his hand he broke out the rest of the win-
dows, traveling clockwise around the house until
he was done.
The shotgun was still in the back of the closet,
where it had always been. Martin loaded it. He let
it hang, over one arm, under the other, trying to
look like an experienced hunter. He looked at him-
self in the mirror and found that the suit detracted
from the effect he was trying to create.
• • •
M artin shot the tape recorder when he saw it.
Those bastards, he thought. He reloaded the
gun and fired until nothing was left of it.
Baum looked like he had been dead the longest.
He was all curled up and very dry. Where his skin
had cracked little lines of gray dust had adhered,
giving him a shattered appearance.
69 Autumn 2003
 He looked at them. Their eyes were all gray from P O E M
the film of dust that covered them. Martin grasped
Baum’s glass. The finger crackled and broke off, Fisherman
sticking to the glass. The glass was full of the dust.
“I believe I’ll have that drink now, Mr. Baum,” I will take you across the water, Lord
said Martin, pronouncing the words carefully. but show me no miracles.
He walked slowly around the circle, clinking My loaves and fishes are yours
every glass as he tried to think of an appropriate with no coin of Caesar.
toast for the neighbors.
Peter and I pulled nets together,
Brian Evenson is the author of three collections of and he rose to meet you on the water.
short stories (Altmann’s Tongue, The Din of Celestial He casts his nets in other seas.
Birds, and Contagion), a novel (Father of Lies), and His voice is mighty.
a fiction chapbook (Prophets and Brothers). His fic-
Do not heal the sound from the gutting knife,
tion has appeared in numerous literary journals,
I am comfortable with the pain.
including The Quarterly, The Southern Review, The
The nets drip silver in the moonlight and
Mid-American Review, and American Literary Review.
the lap of water on wood is a lullaby.
He has published two poetry translations and written
an opera libretto and two radio plays that were Show me no miracles, Lord.
adapted for the stage. Evenson received a National
Endowment for the Arts grant, and in 1998 he was —Lorraine Jeffery
awarded an O. Henry Award for his short story “Two
Brothers.” With a Ph.D. in literature and critical the-
ory from the University of Washington, he taught pre-
viously at Brigham Young University and Oklahoma
State University and is currently a professor of creative
writing at Brown University and an editor at Con-
junctions magazine (www.conjunctions.com). His
website is located at blessed1054.com/evenson.

Autumn 2003 70 IRREANTUM

 R E V I E W S in Vernal, for a new career involving oil rigging and
A Modern Parable of Religious
Excess and Human Weakness
A review of Jack Harrell’s Vernal Promises (Signa-
ture, 2003)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Needle
I n the biblical tale of Job, this poor guy, who did
everything he could to fulfill his duties as father
and priest of the family, is dragged through his own
personal hell until he finally meets God and through
God his own humanity, face to face. It’s a rough
story, a tale of a man who loses everything and
finds little comfort in the presence of his friends.
In an odd way, Vernal Promises comes close to
being a modern-day Job tale, a parable of religious
excess and radical human weakness. It is a chilling,
thoroughly engrossing read, with one of the most
engaging protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.
Jacob and Pam Dennison are not your normal
Mormon couple. Having met and married within
the span of just a few weeks, they plunged into
their relationship from the perspective of flawed
childhoods and dysfunctional families. In Jacob’s
case, his mother has cycled through a series of hus-
bands, one of whom is an unsavory machine bit
salesman, disreputable and cynical, a thoroughly
bad influence in Jacob’s life. Lacking any real role
models, Jacob and Pam get off to a bad start.
Together they decide to return to the church, hop-
ing that their renewed commitment to the gospel
will set them on a straight path.
When Pam miscarries their first child, Jacob is
sent into an emotional spin that loses him his job
at the local supermarket. In need of money, Jacob
goes to work for his stepfather Harvey, the above-
named machine bit salesman, and begins delivering
machine parts, some of which are stolen. It is on
one such delivery that Jacob becomes immersed in
a world of drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess. He
meets Amy and finds a willing sexual partner.
Worse, he meets an ex-con named Mickey Rickles
and his mystic-magician friend Dwayne Helper, to
whose company he abandons his wife, and his life
IRREANTUM
lots of beer, lots of pot, and lots of trouble.
The author sets us on a rocky course at the out-
set, when he has Jacob asking the question that sets
the tone for the rest of the book: “If God wanted
obedience, Jacob wondered, why did he make sin
so sweet?” (27). And as if Harrell wanted this thought
book-ended in the story, we find this near the end
of the book: “All he had ever wanted was to stick to
what was true. The problem was the truth didn’t
make things any easier” (290).
Jacob, given the middle name Israel, travels a
tortured path of self-discovery and ongoing revul-
sion. Nothing he does brings him the peace, the
satisfaction, that each of his influences promised.
For Jacob, the church becomes just another drug,
one that promises him tranquillity but delivers only
emptiness:
Israel. The name was burdensome. “Israel, Israel,
God is calling.” “Woe is Israel!” The House of
Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty
years, blind and complaining, proving that
God didn’t give a damn about who they were.
He only cared about what he could make of
them. Jacob looked at his eyes, a darkly lined
dapple of brown and hazel and gray. He felt
his own emptiness like it was a revelation. The
wandering Israelites had faced the wilderness
for a mere forty years, bounded on all sides by
earth and sky, but the wilderness inside a man’s
soul was endless and eternal because the soul
was endless and eternal. “Who are you?” eter-
nity asked. Jacob couldn’t answer. (123–24)
Midway through the book, Jacob and Dwayne
(the mystic) engage in one of the most powerful
and riveting dialogues I’ve ever read. The energy,
the bluntness, the honesty of the exchange are rem-
iniscent of that stunning closing three-way con-
versation in Margaret Young’s Salvador, where all
pretense is stripped away and good and evil emerge
as powerful forces. Harrell adds a new layer, one of
complete confusion of gospel and evil, turning
common sense on its head, a layer that brings us no
closer to the “truth” that Jacob so badly wants for
his own as the personification of evil usurps the
position always claimed by God.
71 Autumn 2003
 This discussion provides one of the several clear
turning points in the story and perhaps in our own
understanding of the gospel. The careful reader will
find so many fundamental issues discussed—
agency, grace, good vs. evil—but in a way that is
foreign and difficult to work through. Finally, one
emerges from the discussion with a renewed sense
of the struggle, the violence inherent in any spiri-
tual struggle.
The more we learn about Jacob, the more we
view his character as an addictive personality. He
needs to be mainlining something—and it can
either be religion or drugs. At one point Pam, his
wife, wonders about Jacob, all the time he spends
reading the scriptures, underlining in various col-
ors, studying, praying, etc. One is reminded of Job
and his passion for sacrifice (see Job 1:8).
When Jacob falls from grace, he falls big. Pot and
cocaine are just the beginning. LSD becomes part
of his experience, a time when he thinks he has
clarified his life path, but it is only muddied. He is,
after all, a Mormon, and to return home, which he
must do, he is returning to Mormonism. Can he
make Mormonism his new addiction? Can he drag
himself out of the pit he’s in and return to the life
he wants?
The book closes with a horrifying vision of what
can happen when religion and God become your
drug of choice. This is no facile tale of happily ever
after. Life isn’t neat; neither is this book. Life is con-
fused, sometimes violent, always challenging. Jacob
lives this kind of life.
Harrell knows how to write dialogue. He’s
equally good at developing character. Each of the
players is fleshed out and given a face that is unfor-
gettable. He keeps the narrative moving; the story
simply never lags. I read this book in two sittings.
If there is a moral to this story, it is, as stated,
that life is filled with hard questions, and simple—
or rather, simplistic—answers just don’t work. A
well-intentioned bishop (such as the one who fig-
ures prominently in this story, whom I grew to
admire) can only go so far. In the end, each of us
must look deeply into our souls and decide what
direction our lives will take. And if, as did Jacob,
you begin in an unstable environment, your task is
all the more difficult.
Autumn 2003
Vernal Promises is a cautionary tale about the
addictive nature of religion and righteousness, about
the cultic aspects of personal piety and the failure
of organized caring. Deeply personal and deeply
felt, this book is, in my view, a triumph in the
world of Mormon publishing. I anxiously look for-
ward to more from this fine author.
Jeff Needle lives in Southern California with his books
and his computer and spends far too much time read-
ing. He won the 2001 AML award for his reviews.
A self-described Jewish Gentile, he remains on the out-
skirts of Zion, despite the elders’ best efforts to get him
under the water.
Thought-Provoking Examination
of Eve
A review of Beverly Campbell’s Eve and the Choice
Made in Eden (Bookcraft, 2003)
Reviewed by Amelia Parkin
W hen Beverly Campbell began working on
this book in 1986, it was a project that was
to address the “current challenges facing women
and the choices available to them” (xi). However, as
she set out to write her book, she felt inspired that
she should instead research and write about Eve
and her role in the Garden of Eden and the fall
of man. Campbell interpreted this inspiration as
“a promise that many of the troubles now con-
fronting women and men would be laid to rest
with a correct characterization of the events and
motivations of the great drama in and around the
Garden of Eden” (xii).
After receiving this inspiration, Campbell
shifted her focus to Eve and the story of the fall. In
her book, she tells of her journey as she researched
and thought about Mother Eve. Campbell weaves
together her narrative of self-discovery and per-
sonal reflection on Eve and womanhood with an
examination of the scripture and doctrines that
helped her reach her conclusions. The book begins
and ends with Campbell’s personal experiences as
she thought about Eve. Throughout her doctrinal
inquiry, Campbell touches back upon her personal
72 IRREANTUM
reflections about womanhood and Eve, sharing her
own experiences, reflections, and poetic response to
the nature of womanhood. She relates the experi-
ences of other women as she shared with them the
discoveries she made about Mother Eve.
In seeking a more correct personal understand-
ing of Eve, Campbell carefully examines the stories
of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall.
She asserts that such an examination and under-
standing will help solve the problems caused by
misunderstanding the nature and role of women
and men, primarily by helping women understand
their own nature. In her introduction, she writes,
“There is no question that we can initiate a course
correction by restoring Mother Eve to her rightful
role in the grand plan—and in that process begin
to reclaim the value that God has placed on all His
daughters, in all ages, at all times” (5). She asserts
that “the object of this book is to shed light, not
heat, for it is clear that division between male and
female may yet prove to be the most powerful
weapon in Satan’s arsenal for confounding the work
of the Lord” (xv). She sets out to show how having
a correct understanding of the Creation, the Gar-
den, the Fall, and Eve’s role in them will defuse this
weapon.
Addressing adult Latter-day Saints, Campbell
tracks the story of the Creation, the Garden, and
the Fall in a fairly chronological fashion. She shares
her personal reflections and transformation while
examining points of interest to her stated objec-
tives. Those points of interest include Eve’s roles,
her titles, her choice, her knowledge and education,
her relationship with Adam, and the consequences
of her choice. Campbell does a good job of delving
into the details of the story of Adam and Eve in
order to create a more correct understanding of
that story. However, she does not consistently tie
her examination of the story to her stated purposes
of “course correction” and reclaiming “the value
that God has placed on all His daughters” (5). She
often makes the connection loosely, sometimes cre-
ates a very tight connection, and occasionally loses
sight of this objective altogether.
Campbell’s writing is not powerful. She occa-
sionally introduces information that is pertinent
IRREANTUM
and important to the entire work but that does not
fit in the place she assigns it, leaving the reader con-
fused as to what argument or point she is trying to
make. Her accounts of personal experiences and
reflections on Mother Eve reveal the impact that
her research and study had on her own life and the
lives of other women. However, it is in her personal
reflections that her writing is at its weakest. Her use
of citations is often awkward. But her research is
strong and the book as a whole is provocative. She
relies heavily on scripture, both the traditional Old
and New Testaments and the scriptures of the
Restoration (especially Moses). She relies equally as
heavily on the words of modern prophets and apos-
tles as she develops her account and understanding
of Adam and Eve. She also turns to scholars, both
Mormon and non-Mormon and contemporary and
ancient, for support of her ideas.
Campbell addresses head on some of the histor-
ically most troubling elements of the story of Adam
and Eve, especially as it pertains to the true nature
and role of Eve. Some of these elements include the
creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, Eve’s role as “help-
meet,” her identity as the “mother of all living,”
Adam’s and especially Eve’s seeming ignorant inno-
cence, the fact that Eve was “beguiled” by Satan,
God speaking only to Adam and never directly
addressing Eve except to punish her, God instruct-
ing Eve that Adam would rule over her, Eve’s con-
demnation to experience sorrow in childbirth, and
the curse of the earth rendering Adam’s work diffi-
cult. Campbell uses the story of Adam and Eve to
explain the equation of motherhood and priest-
hood, offering a scientific argument that is, to my
knowledge, unprecedented.
Campbell relies in many instances on new trans-
lations of the original Hebrew text in order to under-
stand Eve’s role better. For instance, relying on the
work of a Hebrew scholar, Campbell asserts that
the Hebrew word commonly translated as “beguiled”
is a “rare verb form of unusual depth and richness.”
She continues to quote Dr. Aschkenasy as saying
that “it is safe to say that it indicates an intense
multilevel experience which evokes great emotional,
psychological, and/or spiritual trauma” (71). Upon
this new definition of beguiled, Campbell builds
73 Autumn 2003
her theory that Eve understood the nature of her
decision in all of its nuances, that she carefully con-
sidered the consequences of her choice and what it
would mean not only for herself but also for the
spirits waiting in heaven to receive mortal bodies.
Using such new translations of the original Hebrew,
Campbell builds support for the idea that Eve
chose the path that would result in the greatest
good for the greatest number of people.
Some of the brightest moments in the book are
those in which Campbell employs modern scien-
tific discoveries in order to shed light on Eve’s, and
by extension woman’s, true nature. She puts forth
the argument that Eve is called the mother of all
living because only women’s mitochondrial DNA
is passed on to children and that mitochondrial
DNA is necessary for life to exist on its most basic
level. She then uses this argument to explain why it
is that women are assigned motherhood and men
are given the priesthood, arguing that God created
the “linkage of humankind through the mother
and the lineage of the priesthood through the father”
(48). Campbell uses modern science to create new
understanding of both Eve’s and Adam’s individual
“curses.” She explains that the stress and recovery
involved in childbirth and labor pains give strength
to the newborn baby. The same principle of stress
and recovery involved in physical labor (necessi-
tated by the cursed earth) create health and vigor
in adults.
Campbell frames her book in terms of making
choices that accomplish the greatest good for the
most people. She begins by quoting John A. Wid-
stoe as saying that when we must choose between
two goods, we “each must choose that which con-
cerns the good of others—the greater law—rather
than that which chiefly benefits ourselves—the lesser
law” (viii). And in her “Afterthoughts,” Campbell
explores mercy and justice in light of Carol Gilli-
gan’s theory of female moral development. Gilligan
argues that women, when they have achieved the
highest level of moral development, carefully con-
sider the decision they make in light of its conse-
quences for themselves and for others and make the
choice that balances the interest of the self and of
the other. Campbell’s treatment of this idea in her
Autumn 2003
“Afterthoughts” goes further than any of her other
arguments towards achieving her stated objective of
resolving the troubles between men and women
constructively through an understanding of Eve.
She writes, “It seemed to me that theirs [Adam and
Eve’s] was a story of care and concern (mercy) mov-
ing in parallel with a story of right and wrong (jus-
tice). Could it be that men and women were
endowed at the time of creation with two distinct
but equally important traits, traits that are both
essential and complementary and are to be used
together in wisdom for the greatest good of all
mankind?” (177)
In her book, Campbell addresses many signifi-
cant aspects of Eve’s story. She creates some intrigu-
ing arguments for new understandings of Eve’s, and
woman’s, nature. However, the work’s greatest
weakness is its inability to fulfill its own promise.
Throughout, the book shows an unwillingness to
delve into the meat of its own arguments. Camp-
bell explores in great detail the idea that Eve made
a choice when she partook of the fruit, drawing
connections between many disparate elements of
the story. However, she fails to flesh out the under-
standing of woman’s nature based on her examina-
tion of Eve. While original, her use of scientific
theory to support the parallel of motherhood and
priesthood remains fairly superficial. She never
explores the promise of such an argument. The
same is true of her use of Carol Gilligan’s insightful
theory of female moral development. Campbell
uses Gilligan’s theory to support Widtsoe’s idea of
the greater law, rather than using it to expand upon
Widtsoe’s idea as she very well could have. Gilligan
postulates that the highest level of female moral
development is one where self and other receive
equal consideration in making a choice; Widtsoe’s
quote, relied heavily upon by Campbell, empha-
sizes consideration of the other without requiring
consideration of the self. How much more interest-
ing it would have been to explore whether, in mak-
ing her decision, Eve considered her own needs
as equal to those of humanity—and how much
more useful to women, and particularly Mormon
women, as a whole to assert the importance of one’s
own needs.
74 IRREANTUM
 In addition to not pursuing further her doctrinal
exploration, Campbell’s book fails to use personal
narrative as the powerful tool it is. Her use of her
own responses to her examination of Eve lends
validity and power to her thesis that a better under-
standing of Eve would change the dynamic between
women and men in our world. However, she quite
often generalizes her experience, pondering what
she has learned about Eve in terms of “women” or
“humanity” rather than speaking as herself. Rather
than speaking on an individual basis, Campbell
tries to speak with a general voice that can establish
universal truths.
Campbell’s book is at best mediocre in its writ-
ing. But she acknowledges that her “training is not
as a scholar or as a writer” (8). She is instead a
seeker of knowledge. She often relies upon old and
unsatisfactory ideas of what woman is by nature
and role, rather than redefining what woman’s
nature and roles are. However, she examines the
story of Eve in such a way as to encourage new
ideas and thoughts. Even as she reinforces stereo-
typical understandings of women’s roles, she asks
questions and probes her sources for ideas that
could flesh out those stereotypes and make them
live. Her book does not follow through on all of its
promises, but it could function as a catalyst for its
readers to think more carefully about some very
important issues. In her introduction, Campbell
writes, “Being a practical thinker, I find answers
best through questions. You will therefore find this
work laced with questions” (9). It is in this role that
her book functions best. It offers some answers.
Often they are new explanations of old answers.
But the book’s true strength lies in the questions it
poses and leaves for the reader to explore after the
book has been closed.
Amelia Parkin was born and raised in Southern Cal-
ifornia. She received her B.A. in English from BYU
and her M.A. in English from the University of
Virginia. She is currently working on her Ph.D. at
UC Irvine and plans to teach literature at the uni-
versity level.
IRREANTUM
Tale of Polygamy Both Answers
and Raises Questions
A review of Dorothy Allred Solomon’s Predators, Prey,
and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy
(W. W. Norton, 2003)
Reviewed by Charlene Hirschi
W hen you sit down to read Dorothy Allred
Solomon’s Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk:
Growing Up in Polygamy, be prepared to spend
some time. When first handed the book to review,
I had a backlog of books to read and thought I
would just browse a couple of chapters and put it
on my to-do list. Wrong! From first word to last,
this book held me spellbound.
From the time I joined the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, I’ve been fascinated with the
practice of polygamy. Finally, here is a book that
answers my twenty-five years’ worth of questions.
From the very first page, Solomon transports the
reader into the world of modern-day polygamy.
She starts her book: “I am the only daughter of my
father’s fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-
eight children—a middle kid you might say, with
the middle kid’s propensity for identity crises” (17).
What sets this book apart is the lack of rancor.
Solomon obviously loves her father, Dr. Rulon C.
Allred, leader of the Allred clan of polygamists.
With access to his diaries and his admonition to
write about the family “as a good and saintly
people,” Solomon chooses to write the truth as she
lived it. “I knew of the impoverishment of Aunt
Rose and her children, but in my [earlier] writing I
had skimmed over deeper secrets and darker
issues . . . unconsciously selecting facts to support
my father’s view of life. One of the lovely lies I had
perpetuated was that our family was happy, living
in a little Eden where lions lie down with lambs. In
this blissful garden, persecution came from out-
siders, not from members of the family. But now I
had discovered another story to tell” (322).
So what is that story? First and foremost, it is a
story of love—her love for her father and his deep
and abiding love for his wives and his children. At
the same time it is a story of deceit and the power
75 Autumn 2003
of secrecy to bind people together while destroying
them. It’s the story of male ego, pride, denial, and
patriarchal power.
Although he comes from a long line of polyga-
mists, as a young man Rulon Allred, as his father
before him, disavows polygamy. But both eventu-
ally succumb to its lure. In a monogamous relation-
ship, active in the mainstream church, Rulon, at the
urging of his father, becomes a student of polyg-
amy. Without his wife’s knowledge, he takes a plu-
ral wife. It is a story of loneliness and jealousy, as
the ever-expanding cadre of wives and children vie
for his attention. At times of intense persecution by
the law, they endure long periods of separation as
they scatter like leaves in the wind to avoid detec-
tion. Both the children and the wives suffer poverty
and hunger, but when he arrives for his infrequent
visits it is a time of celebration for the few hours
during which they have his undivided attention
and the meager supplies he brings.
Solomon reveals her inner turmoil in trying to
extricate herself from “The Principle.” She writes:
“Perhaps my own need to be special made me ill-
at-ease around my family. [. . .] Mainly I knew
what I didn’t want: I didn’t want the emotional
pain of my mother, with its giddy highs and devas-
tating depressions” (53). Elsewhere, she writes:
“I harbored a selfish dream of being the only wife”
(220) and “I worried what my father would do if he
found out that I didn’t want to live polygamy. That
if I had my way, our mother would be the only
mother. [. . .] Such thoughts about my brothers
and sisters, the other mothers, people I loved, sent
shame licking up my neck, across my cheeks, along
my hairline” (213).
Yet she makes it clear that there is another shame
associated with growing up in polygamy, which
comes from the fear of being detected, the dread of
taunts from playground associates, and the con-
stant battle to prove themselves to the outside
world. “We strove to be top students, star athletes,
conscientious citizens. [. . .] Still we did not feel we
were good enough. In our own minds, we were on
the run, afraid that others would find out who we
really were, and if they did, our real selves would
be inadequate” (178).
Autumn 2003
One lasting impression of this book is that the
line between prey and predator is often blurred.
I was struck with the naiveté of Rulon Allred and
how easily others took advantage of him. Regard-
less of one’s stand on the practice of polygamy,
Solomon paints her father as a sympathetic figure,
while at the same time acknowledging his faults.
Allred remains somewhat of an enigma, but his wives
even more so. The question that remains unan-
swered is: Why do women choose to live this way?
Allred’s early wives came from the mainstream pop-
ulation of the church. It is amazing to learn that,
recruited in cottage meetings in California, these
women sought him out. He met his first plural wife
“when he spoke at a cottage meeting in the Holly-
wood Ward and twenty-five year old LaVerne made
it clear that she was available” (142). He collected
many of his other wives in similar fashion.
When Solomon relates the shame, the poverty,
the constant fear of “investigations, arrests, trials
and subsequent incarceration,” the long separations
and the loneliness, again and again I ask myself
why. But no answer comes.
Charlene Hirschi’s book review column, Regional
Reads, appears monthly in Cache Magazine. She
teaches writing at Utah State University, works as a
freelance editor, and is former State President of the
League of Utah Writers.
Author of Western Adventures
Does Right by Huck
A review of a sequel to The Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn, begun by Mark Twin in 1885 and fin-
ished by Lee Nelson (Council Press, 2003)
Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
T his is the year that Mark Twain is back in the
news. The University of California Press has
just published an amazing—for lack of a better
word—“study” of Huckleberry Finn, and several
groups have formed a consortium and issued a
CD-ROM that examines the process that went into
the writing of this novel. With all this fuss about
Huck, it seems a shame that the Los Angeles Times
76 IRREANTUM
and others have pretty much ignored another effort
that helps make this the year of Huck Finn.
Those who love Mark Twain know that he
started another novel called Huck Finn & Tom
Sawyer among the Indians, told in Huck’s voice, and
that he stopped dead in the middle of a sentence
somewhere along about the middle, or what schol-
ars assume would be the middle. I remember read-
ing this fragment in Life magazine in 1968, just
as a fellow author from Utah did. The difference
between our two experiences is that Lee Nelson
decided to do something about it; he obtained the
rights to use this fragment so he could finish Twain’s
last book featuring one of our nation’s most well-
known protagonists.
Amazingly enough, Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer
among the Indians, told by both Twain and Nelson,
was issued this year along with these other scholarly
tracts on Huck. My part in this story is merely to
try to get this book more recognition in the face of
all this competition.
Given that the first part of this novel is only
Twain’s rough draft and that the reason he didn’t
finish it may be that he didn’t think enough of it,
Lee Nelson has done an admirable job of making it
a readable piece. Actually, the second “half ” moves
more quickly than the first.
Now, before anyone thinks I’ve just committed
blasphemy, I refer you to the disclaimer above. It is
believed that Twain’s part of the book is a first and
rough draft. I found it poorly motivated and very
nearly a snooze. Somewhere, though, it became a
page-turner, and that happened about where Nelson’s
story took over. Nelson had a couple of advantages:
1. He had a chance to polish his part of the
book. He couldn’t do so with Twain’s part; it is
obviously too sacred to touch.
2. The book is, at least in part, about the “defile-
ment” of a young woman, and that was a touchier
subject back in the 1800s than it is now. Although
Nelson treats it delicately as possible, he has a cer-
tain advantage because of changed attitudes.
What felt uncomfortable to me in light of the
fact that Twain himself called the Book of Mormon
“chloroform in print” and that he was otherwise no
big fan of the Mormon culture is that Nelson brings
IRREANTUM
lots of extremely idealized Mormon history into this
book, especially the near hero worship of a couple
of Danites who undoubtedly would be neither
admired by Twain nor by a young man as clever as
Huckleberry Finn. Nevertheless, this is fiction, and
Nelson does not claim to be a literary scholar.
That this book was released at a time when the
treatment of women after their reputations have
been sullied (through no fault of their own) is reg-
ularly in the news makes this book as relevant as
if it had been thought of only yesterday. Huck
observes that the “stuff ” that comes from books
isn’t the same as the “stuff ” that happens in the real
world; basically he’s saying that idealizing any sub-
ject may lead to intolerance. He applies his theories
of acceptance to the debasement of his dear Peggy’s
reputation as well as to many other situations he
meets along the way to adventure in the West. It is
interesting to note that Nelson’s Huck is just as sage
without nary a shred of book larnin’ even when he’s
assessing a subject as serious as this. He’s just as
droll and witty, too.
That Nelson did a good job of remaining faith-
ful to an unfinished Twain original should certainly
qualify his book for inclusion in the hefty publicity
these other books on Twain are getting.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a columnist and reviewer
for MyShelf.Com and author of This Is the Place and
Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered.
Southwest Politics Brought into
Vivid Focus
A review of Warren Stucki’s Boy’s Pond (Sunstone
Press, 2002)
Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
A toadstool cloud rises from the Nevada desert
sand like an iniquitous Phoenix shaped from
flame and ashes. It imprints radioactive memories
in the mind of a young boy who would become a
doctor and later an author.
These recollections are the basis of a novel from
Warren Stucki called Boy’s Pond. In turn, the story
he wrote is a reminder in today’s turmoil that—in
77 Autumn 2003
spite of what we think we remember—life has not
always been simple. This novel reminds us that trust
can be lamentable rather than laudable, that faith
untempered by reason may very well be improvident.
Set in Saint George, Utah, in the 1950s, Boy’s
Pond is a coming-of-age story that explores inno-
cence in the literal shadow of a nuclear holocaust of
our own making. A group of boys’ youthful impru-
dence parallels the Machiavellian tactics of the
Atomic Energy Commission as they participate in
a cover-up never since equaled (to our knowledge)
by any government agency. While ignorance and
gullibility were their tools of trade, exuberance,
shame, and hormones-a-plenty discredit and deci-
mate the young men.
As an M.D. caring for the population in this iso-
lated corner of Utah, the author has seen the malig-
nant results of politics fueled by fear: twenty-six
nuclear devices set off above ground over a period
of twelve years. Test times were carefully selected
so that the large populations of Los Angeles, Las
Vegas, and Salt Lake City would not be downwind.
During that time and since, the malignant death
rate in the tiny red-rock communities that breathed
the easterly winds has doubled. Leukemia, lym-
phoma, and breast, pancreatic, lung, gastric, and
thyroid cancers continue to stalk the residents to
this day. The folk living in and near this rural com-
munity—Indians and Caucasians alike—were, it
seems, considered dispensable.
Sunstone Press specializes in publishing books
about the Southwest; they deserve applause for
bringing Warren Stucki’s first book to the public.
It is an original, satisfying story, a combination of
genres unlike any I’ve ever read.
Told in a straightforward Grisham-like narrative,
the book revolves around several young boys who,
tired of small-town life in the fifties, decide to light
a fire in the caldera of an extinct volcano that lies
just north of Saint George. The ensuing explosion
of light against the quiet night sky is a fine meta-
phor for the difficulties the boys and the town in
which they were raised are soon to encounter.
Boy’s Pond benefits from Stucki’s medical back-
ground as well as his intimate knowledge of the
area, its customs, its exquisite geography. Many
Autumn 2003
who are familiar with this corner may disagree with
some of the premises (there are several woven among
the plateaus and trails of this corner of Utah). Still,
they will be hard put to find errors in the history or
setting of the place and may be quite surprised at
much that is revealed about its past and the effect
that past has on the present.
Boy’s Pond is a book for its time. It examines an
event that, like 9/11, should never be forgotten.
Clean Tale for Teens
A review of Tamra Norton’s Molly Mormon? (Bon-
neville Books, 2002)
Reviewed by Katie Parker
T his was a fun book to read, and it has a good,
light tone for young adults. The first-person
narrator unfolds her story with an engaging style,
and she speaks to readers as if she were talking to a
good friend. Couple that with a clean story about
a girl who holds fast to her values and you’ve got a
winning combination for many readers.
The general premise of the story is simple. Molly
Chambers lives in a small LDS community in
Idaho, where several of the more popular kids make
fun of her for keeping LDS standards. But Molly
stays firm in her beliefs and soon wins the heart of
Brandon Mace, a popular LDS guy who has been
running with (and drinking with) this crowd but
has decided to change his ways. Molly even makes
friends with a girl who had formerly been her
avowed enemy. Meanwhile, Molly’s cousin and best
friend does not hold firm to her standards and
becomes pregnant by her nonmember boyfriend.
Given the story, the writing is good. Norton
makes it fun and makes it easy to care about the
characters. But the cut-and-dried feeling of it all
bothered me. In essence, it teaches the same mes-
sage that our youth have been getting for years: If
you live LDS standards, you will have wonderful
results and everything will go perfectly for you.
If you live the other way, then everything that
can possibly go wrong will. Not that there’s any-
thing wrong with presenting an undeviating mes-
sage to the youth. What’s wrong with this one is
that it isn’t true.
78 IRREANTUM
 Not everyone who mocks you for keeping your
standards will visibly repent for it later. Cute, nice
guys with Word of Wisdom problems don’t always
change their ways for girls who want to stay moral.
Not all nonmember boys will try to take advantage
of innocent girls. Not all careless acts result in preg-
nancy.
Not that this is really what this book is trying to
teach. Molly’s rewards for righteousness don’t come
without some faith and perseverance. But there’s
still the underlying message of “If you’re good, you’ll
get good things.” A common misconception is that
if we act the way we should, everyone around us
will eventually react the way they should. Unfortu-
nately, this is not always true. Sometimes our “good”
behavior will bring on more pain and persecution
than we ever dreamt possible. It’s these times that
make us strong and help us prove to ourselves who
we really are. We have to hold fast to our standards
and beliefs regardless of any consequence from other
people. If we’re going to teach our youth some-
thing, let’s teach them that being good isn’t always
easy, doesn’t always promise future earthly rewards,
and may not ever bring about specific desired results
in others.
Barring the underlying message, which many
readers will appreciate more than I do, I found this
book to be a fun read with likable characters and
situations that many young readers will identify
with. I do plan to read the sequel, Molly Married?,
because I came to care about the characters and I’d
like to see what happens to them. I’m sure Norton
has made it a fun journey as well. I plan on enjoy-
ing it.
Katie Parker graduated with a B.A. from the Univer-
sity of Oklahoma. She currently lives in Salt Lake
City with her husband and son, where she works as an
editor. Her work has appeared in The New Era and
Westview.
Honest and Poignant Story of
Divorce
A review of Kathryn Elizabeth Jones’s A River of
Stones (Bedside Books, 2002)
Reviewed by Charlene Hirschi
IRREANTUM
D ivorce. Unfortunately, a topic that many chil-
dren have to deal with these days. In A River
of Stone, we see divorce through the eyes of nine-
year-old Samantha, as she tries to understand the
secrecy that surrounds the disappearance of her
father and the death of her new stepbrother’s
mother. She is devastated by the loss of her father
and angry that she is not privy to the secrets. The
book deals with her efforts to cope with the secrets,
her mother’s new marriage, a new brother, and
most of all her father’s abandonment.
Jones’s characters are easy to relate to. There are
no caricatures here—these are real people feeling
real pain and experiencing the ups and downs of
real life. Samantha’s voice rings true and honest
throughout the book. Along with her sidekicks
June and Bruce, she manages to get into a fair
amount of trouble. Take for instance the vampire
incident. Angry with her brother, Luke, she and her
friends decide to punish him. Jones writes: “I was
mad at Luke—madder than I had ever been before.
For two weeks I’d worked through the words that I
would tell him. And I hadn’t crossed out the swear-
words.” Samantha’s cohorts manage to tie Luke up
and carry him kicking and struggling to the house
of Mr. Grant, an elderly man who, through deduc-
tive reasoning, they have decided is a vampire.
Forcing Luke down the outside stairs to the base-
ment, they turn the knob, which Samantha says
turned easily in my hand. Out through the
open door came the musty smell of something
that hadn’t see the light of day for a long time.
I was suddenly scared. […] Bruce nodded to
the coffin. It was near the back wall, sitting
white and steel-like in the corner. […] The
sound began as a quiet tapping on the base-
ment steps leading up to the door—the same
door we’d entered only moments before. The
sound continued as the door was opened
slowly, as the little light left outside crept into
the chilly basement of the vampire. Then a
voice pierced the darkness. “So children,
you’ve been caught at last.”
A first-time novelist who lives in West Valley
City, Utah, Jones deals with issues that are the real-
79 Autumn 2003
ity of many young people’s lives. Yet it is not a
depressing book. It is highly entertaining and
poignant in its honesty. Young people who have
experienced or are experiencing divorce will find
comfort in its pages. For those who have not expe-
rienced divorce, the book will give them insight
into the lives of their friends who have. There is a
light LDS theme at the end of the book, but that
should not deter others from reading it. A River of
Stones is available on-line at Amazon.com, or you
can preview sections of the book and order a copy
from the author at www.ariverofstones.com.
Upbeat Sequel That Teens Will
Love
A review of Susan Law Corpany’s Brotherly Love
(Hagoth Publishing)
Reviewed by Charlene Hirschi
T eens will love this upbeat book set at Utah
State University. Beverly Smithson has been
raised in Salt Lake City in a family of boys. When
she leaves for school in Logan, her life has included
a series of boyfriends, but she’s never had a serious
beau. Her dates have always considered her one of
the guys, perhaps because of her penchant for chal-
lenging and then beating them in arm wrestling,
among other things. And then she meets Steve, her
family home evening “brother.” A romance quickly
develops between them, but there is a problem.
Steve is waiting for a sister missionary, but he
doesn’t have the courage to tell Beverly. Combine
that with the conflicts between Beverly and her
roommates in the “Morm Dorms,” and this story
keeps the reader engaged from first page to last.
There are a few logistical problems in the book.
Local readers will be surprised to discover that
there is a Chick-Fil-A at Cache Valley Mall, and the
author gives the definite impression that Newton,
Utah, is hours away from Logan. But none of these
small glitches will detract from the enjoyment of
the story. Corpany has a gift for humor and pathos
that touches the reader on the emotional level. For
this reader, there was just the right mixture of tears
and belly laughs to make the book a winner. If you
Autumn 2003
liked the movie Singles Ward, you will probably
enjoy this tongue-in-cheek look at Mormon dorm
life at Utah State University.
Meet Tina, the rebellious bishop’s daughter who
whips the sisters into shape when she’s called to be
the visiting teacher coordinator; sweet, indecisive
Wendy, dubbed Molly Mormon by Tina; rich and
arrogant Denise, Beverly’s arch antagonist; and
Deborah, the organizer, “a take-charge kind of
woman who gets things done” and marks the level
on her milk jug each time she uses it.
Brotherly Love and the sequel, Unfinished Busi-
ness, are available on-line at LDSdirect.com or can
be ordered by mail from Hagoth Publishing Com-
pany, PO Box 6384, Hilo, HI 96720.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A review of The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1:
The Journey (2003)
Directed by Gary Rogers, produced by Gary Rogers
and David Hales, written by Gary Rogers and Craig
Clyde
Reviewed by D. Michael Martindale
B ack in the days when I was a young tyke (sev-
eral geological ages ago), huge epics of Bible
stories were being set to film, many by the flam-
boyant Cecil B. DeMille. King of Kings, Ben-Hur,
Sampson, The Bible: In the Beginning, and that
granddaddy of them all, The Ten Commandments.
Some were great, some were cheesy but fun, some
were not so good. But they were big, and they had
an appreciative audience in those days.
Now it’s the Book of Mormon’s turn.
This is a day Mormons have dreamed of for
about a zillion years. If the Bible can produce such
towering cinematic dramas under the caring hands
of the filmmaking greats of yesteryear, why not the
Book of Mormon?
Finally someone has done it. The dream is com-
ing true.
But have you ever had one of those dreams that
start out nice and pleasant, then suddenly swerve
into a nightmare? That’s what’s happened to this
dream.
80 IRREANTUM
 There are a number of people in the credits who
can be classified as filmmakers for this film, but a
quick perusal will show a single name popping up
over and over. Whoever else was involved in this
project, it’s apparent that this is the baby of Gary
Rogers.
This is important to realize, so we know who to
burn in effigy.
I won’t say that everything about this Book of
Mormon film is bad. In fact, I’d like to start with
the good things. I’ll start with them because they’ll
be quicker to enumerate.
About three dramatic scenes were filmed reason-
ably well with impressive special effects. One actu-
ally catches your breath, when an angel suddenly
appears to stop Laman from beating Nephi.
There were moments when good acting actually
rears its lovely head. Generally these moments are
when Nephi and Laman exchange nasty words
with each other. Of course, shouting anger is gen-
erally the easiest emotion to act, but let’s give credit
where credit is due.
The screenwriters displayed some interesting
creativity as they filled in the dramatic blanks of
the scriptural record with speculation on what the
members of Lehi’s family were doing or saying or
thinking that was not recorded in any reformed
Egyptian characters. They couldn’t write the scenes
well, but they did come up with some interesting
ideas.
Jacque Gray, still fresh in our minds as Sister
Fronk in God’s Army and an unfortunate corpse in
Brigham City, returns to the LDS silver screen as
Mrs. Nephi. We know she can act because she did
so for Richard Dutcher, and she does her profes-
sional best in this film with the material she’s given.
But that material . . .
Which brings us to the downside of The Book
of Mormon Movie. This list is going to take a little
longer.
Let’s start with the sets. You won’t find the gritty
realism of the Rome in The Gladiator. You won’t
see the sleek beauty of the bridge from Star Trek:
The Next Generation. You certainly won’t enjoy the
detail and craftsmanship of a lovingly and carefully
evoked Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings movies.
IRREANTUM
You’ll see a rinky-dink plaster-of-Paris Jerusalem
that looks more sterile than some community the-
ater sets I’ve witnessed.
Miniature longshots of Jerusalem or the Nephite
settlement in America are even worse. The construc-
tion team must have haunted numerous model train
hobby shops to gather up the materials for these
embarrassing sets in the film. I kept waiting to hear
the woo-woo of a train whistle as the camera panned
over these communities on a plywood slab.
The costumes fared no better. The armor of Laban’s
soldiers must have been rigged from Halloween
costumes. The wardrobe crew didn’t bother ironing
out the creases in the material they bought from
Wal-Mart before sewing together the standard-
issue prophet robes.
Makeup did okay when there was no challenge.
But the beard of Lehi and the late-appearing beard
of Nephi looked like they were made out of broom
straw stuck on with spirit gum, colored gray or
black depending on the age of the character. And
for some reason, whenever Nephi kissed Mrs. Nephi,
I kept expecting him to lick the layer of milk
chocolate off her face that was supposed to pass as
Native American skin complexion.
The choreography—what little there was of it—
was so incompetent that I literally burst out laugh-
ing at its bumbling idiocy. It looked like Primary
children trying to recreate dance scenes they’d viewed
in Bible movies on late night television. Not that
any of this matters, because even the most impres-
sive set and costume design, Rick Baker makeup, or
choreography by Gene Kelly himself couldn’t have
salvaged this movie.
Actors Noah Danby as Nephi and Mark Golla-
her as Laman, like Jacque Gray, did the best they
could with the material the script gave them, but
their best wasn’t good enough. The acting ability of
the women was irrelevant because the female char-
acters were the typical window dressing you get in
Biblical epics. Sariah had less to do in the movie
than she did in the book of First Nephi itself, and
the wife of Ishmael, after opening scenes that seem
to promise a sizable supporting role, all but disap-
peared. Mrs. Nephi was one-half of the obligatory
cinematic love interest, but it was a love interest the
81 Autumn 2003
writers grafted on with such monumental insincer-
ity that it was more embarrassing than touching.
All the other women were extras who stood around
to remind us the men in the story had wives and
sisters.
Lemuel played his dutiful role as Laman’s side-
kick. The writers couldn’t seem to decide whether
Sam should provide comedic relief or be a complete
nonentity. Laban, who should have been played
flamboyantly by someone like John Rhys-Davies,
was a tedious villain with no personality at all.
But the most resounding acting failure of the
movie was Lehi. I don’t know if Bryce Chamberlain
can act—with over fifty-five appearances in films,
you’d think so—but he bombed miserably as Lehi.
Maybe it was the directing, maybe it was the script,
maybe it was the idiotic beard. But I never envisioned
Lehi as a bumbling, wimpy Teddy bear whose
Spirit-inspired preaching to the city of Jerusalem
amounted to endless repetitions of “You don’t
understand. The city’s going to be destroyed”—
literally over and over again—while standing on
the sidewalk with half a dozen jeering citizens sur-
rounding him.
There were so many faux pas in this film that it
would be tiresome to list them all. The glorious
land of Bountiful was as barren and sagebrush-
laden as every other shot of Moab, Utah—excuse
me, the Arabian peninsula—in this film. When the
family of Lehi reaches the promised land, their ship
suddenly disappears, and they’re seen running to
shore with nothing but sea behind them, as if they’d
swum the Pacific Ocean.
The Liahona prop looked cool, but we never saw
them using it throughout the entire trip, except
once when Nephi decided to hold it like a crucifix
as he prayed for the typhoon to subside. When
Nephi, infused with the Spirit, shocks his brothers,
I thought a reel of the next Star Trek movie had
accidentally been mixed in and a transporter mal-
function was occurring. The special effect was cool
but completely out of place as a display of the
power of God.
Lehi seemed nowhere to be found on the ship
during their sea voyage, yet magically appears again
on the shores of the New World. For some reason,
Autumn 2003
as he dies, his beard—which had been unnaturally
stiff and straight throughout the movie—suddenly
looked soft and curly like a real beard should.
The dialogue veered between church-film stilted
and wisecracking modern. In the same sentence,
contractions were used and avoided willy-nilly. One
minute you thought you were reading the Book of
Mormon, the next you thought you were watching
Jerry Seinfeld.
But with all these problems with the film, the
greatest of them all is the fact that Gary Rogers, et
al, made no effort to do something special with the
story of Nephi. They went the same route all too
many movies based on scripture have done: an
approach that was the cinematic version of “This is
what happened, then this is what happened, then
this . . .” There was no attempt to give us complex
characterization that might reveal insights into the
family of Lehi. There were just good guys and bad
guys, missing only the white and black hats. The
good guys were good from beginning to end; the
bad guys were bad from beginning to end.
And the results were cinematically ugly.
The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1 was an
arrogant effort by people who overreached their
ability by orders of magnitude. Even the title dis-
plays arrogance: THE Book of Mormon Movie, as if
they were making the definitive movie of the book
rather than just telling a story from it. Not even the
great Cecil B. DeMille had the arrogance to call his
movie of Moses The Bible Movie, Volume 1: The
Exodus Years. And he had earned the right to be
arrogant.
The makers of this Book of Mormon movie were
simply not ready to make this epic. They arrogantly
jumped the gun rather than paying their dues by
practicing with smaller film projects. They had no
right to take on the big project they did—certainly
not with a topic that would mean so much to so
many millions.
The Book of Mormon is often abbreviated as
BOM. The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1: The
Journey deserves that same abbreviation. It truly is
a BOM.
82 IRREANTUM
A Playwright’s Tremendous Debut
A review of Mahonri Stewart’s play Farewell to Eden
Reviewed by Eric Samuelsen
F arewell to Eden is a debut play by a new, young
Mormon playwright named Mahonri Stewart.
It recently premiered at Utah Valley State College
in a fine production directed by James Arrington.
I had high expectations, which the play more than
lived up to. Mahonri Stewart: remember that name.
Farewell to Eden is a sort of cross between draw-
ing room comedy and melodrama. If I had to pick
one, I’d say it was very much in the tradition of
urban melodrama of the mid-nineteenth century.
That probably sounds like a put-down, but I don’t
mean it to be; I’m just trying to categorize it for
you. Fact is, there was a nineteenth-century tradi-
tion of urban melodrama focusing on social class,
in which we see upper-class people as having all the
power and money and therefore having ostensibly
good lives, but they’re actually all hypocrites and
are secretly miserable, while honest laboring folk are
fundamentally moral and happy and good, though
poor and lacking power.
It’s very interesting to me to see a Mormon play-
wright deal with those sorts of issues, because they
reflect Brigham Young’s own critique of class and
economics. Brigham Young served his mission in
England in the 1840s and was appalled by the class
structure he saw there. He was a firsthand observer
of the Industrial Revolution or, specifically, laissez
faire economics, both of which he saw as viciously
destructive. And of course, Brigham’s critique of
class echoes the Book of Mormon, which is cer-
tainly no fan of whatever cultural constructions of
class are implied by the term “kingmen” and which
consistently regards a failure to take care of the
poor as the defining characteristic of sinful pride.
So, structurally, looking at Stewart’s play, here’s
what’s going on: three siblings belonging to a
wealthy family named the Highetts (lovely Sheri-
danesque name, that one) have just lost their father.
They nonetheless pursue typical upper-class aims,
specifically marriage, romance, and literature.
They’re visited by Brigham Young and John Taylor,
IRREANTUM
who preach to them briefly but gain converts only
among their dressmakers. The humble dressmakers
join the Church, and their lives improve. Meanwhile,
the Highetts’ lives grow more and more wretched.
That’s basically the plot.
Expressed that baldly, the plot probably seems
overtly didactic and uninteresting. But it’s written
much more skillfully than I’ve suggested. There’s
genuine wit and bite in the dialogue, and the char-
acters are sharply drawn. I’ve focused on plot here,
because I’m pretty cheered by it. As someone who
is politically leftist, I see this not only as an inter-
esting play by a new Mormon writer but also as a
new play by another interesting leftist.
Were I conservative, however, I think there’d be
a lot to like in the play as well, especially if I were a
Mormon cultural conservative. After all, it’s a play
in which two prophets preach repentance to a vari-
ety of people. Some listen, repent, and are happier.
Others don’t listen, don’t repent, and are miserable.
Again, I’ve described the plot in reductive terms,
and that’s unfair; it’s a much more interestingly
subtle play than I’ve described. But my point is, I’m
a liberal, and I liked it, in part because I saw this as
an interestingly “liberal” play. But I have no idea if
Stewart sees himself as a “liberal” author at all. I
rather suspect he doesn’t. If I were a conservative,
I think I’d like it just as much.
The play is set in 1840, and the protagonist is a
woman named Georgiana Highett. She’s a writer
and a snob; she talks a lot about the “lower orders”
and how they’re here on earth to serve, well, her.
(She also mentions her friend Charlie Dickens, which
is a mistake; no close friend of Charles Dickens
would ever hold her views on class.) Anyway, she
rather rejects “high society” with its sexual intrigues
and dances, in part because she genuinely thinks
herself homely and unable to attract a man. And
then Stephen Lockhart, an old family friend, comes
to visit, and she finds herself very much wanting to
attract him, although he’s initially more interested
in Georgiana’s more attractive sister, Catherine.
Catherine is herself intrigued by a young man with
the delightfully NASCAR name of Darrell Freder-
icks, and so the first several scenes of the play are
drawing room comedy, with lots of intrigue and a
83 Autumn 2003
fun double love triangle. Georgiana likes Stephen,
who likes Catherine, who likes Darrell, who, it turns
out, isn’t entirely uninterested in Georgiana. And
hovering about them all like an absurdly overdressed
moth is the third Highett, brother to the girls, the
brainless fop Thomas. Anyway, Georgiana decides
to have a new dress made, in order to attract
Stephen, and hires two dressmaker sisters, Hannah
and Esther, to make it.
And then Brigham Young and John Taylor show
up. Georgiana archly dismisses them; Stephen seems
somewhat taken with them. Meanwhile, the two
missionaries insist on including the household staff
in their discussion, and Hannah and Esther are fas-
cinated. Mary, the gossipy Old Family Retainer
(former governess? maid-in-waiting? head cham-
bermaid?) drops in her own humorous asides, and
the whole thing felt very drawing room comedy.
(I’m wracking my brain to think of a playwright I
could suggest to Stewart as a model-British comic
playwright in the 1840s. Maybe the young Dion
Boucicault; I think London Assurance was about
1841. Or maybe Tom Robertson.) Stewart’s scenes
have wit and flair, and I really did want to know
which of the guys would end up with which of the
girls. (And yet, I also wasn’t disappointed when that
issue turned out to be something of a nonstarter.)
The drawing room comedy part of the play is
nicely written. We see a lot of Catherine and Geor-
giana’s relationship; Georgiana is waspish about
Catherine’s social ambitions, and Catherine affects
nonchalance; she’s pretty and popular, so who cares
what sis thinks? And yet, throughout the play, we
also get a real sense of family. Georgiana is a very
interesting character, very bright and yet insecure
and fragile emotionally. She may insult her sister,
but she’s also protective of her, and we see that the
sisters genuinely care for each other. Thomas may
be a brainless twit, but he’s charmingly naive about
things. He’s the one who invites the missionaries
up, as a lark.
And then the missionaries leave. (I really like the
idea of a play in which Brigham Young and John
Taylor are characters, in which they’re on-stage for
only about five minutes.) And the play shifts in tone,
and nasty character stuff is revealed. It becomes a
melodrama, though again, this isn’t a put-down.
Autumn 2003
For starters, we learn that Thomas, the gormless
fop, is actually nothing of the kind. He’s a crook,
and he’s wasting the family’s inheritance and trying
to cover it up through embezzlement. And Darrell
Fredericks is a slimy weasel who is blackmailing
Thomas and trying to marry one of Thomas’s sis-
ters, so he can also get his hands on the family
money. Catherine, it turns out, has not been as
primly chaste as she’s led us to believe. And each of
these explosions shocks Georgiana, who, for all her
intelligence, hasn’t ever suspected any of it. Geor-
giana has also really fallen in love with Stephen,
who, it turns out, is more interested in one, or
both, of the dressmakers. (I must say, when Young
and Taylor exit their short scene, two pretty dress-
makers in tow, I must confess to a certain unwor-
thy amusement. Those two guys, in 1840? Heh,
heh, heh.)
Georgiana goes off the deep end and ends up
stabbing (nonfatally, thank heavens) one of the
dressmakers. At the end of the play, Stephen reveals
that he’s decided to join the Church and join the
dressmakers in Nauvoo. Mary leaves the old family
manse, having been badly treated by Georgiana one
time too many. Thomas’s crimes are revealed and so
is Catherine’s folly, and Fredericks is finally
expelled from the home. At the end of the play, all
the family furniture has been sold to pay Thomas’s
debts, and Georgiana bids Stephen, and even the
house itself, good-bye.
The play’s biggest strength, and also its biggest
weakness, has to do with class. I love the idea of a
play set in the 1840s that reflects Brigham Young’s
ideas about class and wealth and laissez faire. I love
plugging into that specific melodramatic tradition.
Nowadays, when East Bench Mormons get the
prime seats at general conference and all Sunday
School lessons on Book of Mormon economics or
King Benjamin’s address have to include the oblig-
atory codicil that “wealth isn’t bad at all, we know
that—it just depends on what you do with it,” this
play points up some uncomfortable historical real-
ities. Laissez faire’s been tried. A prophet of God
saw it. He hated everything about it.
At the same time, class itself is something Amer-
ican playwrights generally struggle with. The
84 IRREANTUM
British class system, circa 1840, is something we
will really probably never completely understand.
Stewart does his best with it, and his best is pretty
darned good, but I kept noticing these little
anachronisms. Fredericks and Georgiana talk about
their school days together. The Highetts are sup-
posed to be upper class, but they don’t have a coun-
try estate, their father was a businessman, and his
best friend is a publisher. A lot of the play suggests
a writer who has read a whole lot of Jane Austen.
Good for him. But Jane Austen was a middle-class
writer, describing middle-class realities. They only
seem upper class to us because the clothes look so
cool and they have servants and, besides, we’re
Americans and really truly don’t get it.
Still and all, it’s a tremendous debut. I liked the
play a lot and am anxious to see what Stewart does
next. The UVSC production was very fine, espe-
cially Margie Johnson’s brittle, brilliant Georgiana
and Amber Jones’s moving and subtle subtextual
pain as Catherine, and Brandon West’s stunning
transformation from twit Thomas to snake Thomas.
I’m very impressed.
A professor of theater at Brigham Young University,
Eric Samuelsen writes and directs plays.
IRREANTUM
M O R M O N
L I T E R A R Y
S C E N E
Compiled by Christopher Bigelow
Books
• The International Reading Association awarded
its 2003 Children’s Book Award for Young Adult
Novels to BYU professor Christopher E. Crowe
for his historical novel Mississippi Trial, 1955
(Phyllis Fogelman Books, 2002). The novel is
based on the true story of Emmett Till, a young
black person who was murdered in 1955.
• Richard Paul Evans told the Deseret Morning
News that when he was 12 years old, his grandfa-
ther revealed to him in a blessing that he had a spe-
cific mission and would be known throughout the
world. “Every book I write is a revelation,” Evans
said. “There are times when I have pure inspira-
tion, like Joseph Smith described, when I feel I’ve
been given a gift of intellectual property. I don’t
know where it came from. It doesn’t happen a lot,
but it happens at crucial times.” Since the initial
success of The Christmas Box ten years ago, Evans
has written seven additional novels. His newest
book, A Perfect Day (Dutton), is the autobio-
graphical story of a writer “who gets so caught up
in his writing and book tours that he neglects his
family,” according to the Deseret Morning News.
Writing the story helped Evans “reinforce his values.”
• Reviewing Richard Paul Evans’s new novel
A Perfect Day, Deseret Morning News reviewer
Dennis Lythgoe noted that Evans no longer writes
with the awkward sentence construction of The
Christmas Box. “What is conspicuously lacking here
is characterization to flesh out a thin plot,” Lythgoe
said. “Although mostly predictable, the story takes
a couple of surprising turns toward the end, thus
making it slightly more palatable. But A Perfect
Day, filled with simplistic and superficial dialogue,
seems very long and tedious most of the time.” Salt
Lake Tribune reviewer Martin Naparsteck said the
novel doesn’t live up to its early promise of honestly
exploring the critical backlash and family strain that
85 Autumn 2003
Evans experienced in real life. “Part of what is wrong
in this novel, as in all of Evans’s novels, is epitomized
by how he handles religion,” Naparsteck wrote.
“Their religiosity is generic. So are the emotions of
the characters. They are not true characters—they
are types. All this is presented in a style cluttered
with hundreds of uninformative words.”
• Lael Littke’s new young adult novel Searching
for Selene (Deseret Book) “is well written and the
dialogue natural,” according to Deseret Morning
News reviewer Dennis Lythgoe. “The characters are
wholesome but believable—and there is a genuine
conflict borne out by the girl with two names.” The
story is about 16-year-old Selene, who discovers
she was kidnapped when she was three and later
adopted. With the help of a private detective, her
birth family finally locates her, and they fear
her adoptive Mormon family belongs to “a weird
cult who baptize dead people and wear weird cloth-
ing.” The story is about “how Selena deals with this
strange and scary identity crisis.”
• Lynn Gardner’s espionage thriller Rubies and
Rebels (Covenant) “tries to mix Mormonism,
Armenia, and al-Qaida in an unsteady story,” wrote
Deseret Morning News reviewer Dennis Lythgoe.
“This is a very long, unlikely, and complicated
plot that combines too many subjects in one. It’s
unbelievable that a Mormon couple is charged with
preventing al-Qaida from taking over Armenia. By
the way, Mormons and missionaries are threaded
awkwardly throughout the story.”
• With its themes of dealing with retirement and
a spouse’s unexpected death, Donald Smurthwaite’s
novel Letters by a Half-Moon (Deseret Book) is
reminiscent of the film About Schmidt, according to
Deseret Morning News reviewer Dennis Lythgoe.
The main character “tries to work through his grief
with the help of friends and relatives—and the
unfortunate pat phrases Mormons often use to try
to comfort one another in time of death, not real-
izing they are not comforting anyone.” Lythgoe
concluded, “This is a book that deals honestly with
a subject known to everyone—grief and loss.”
• The Salt Lake Tribune recently analyzed the
reasons for Utah’s high percentage of speculative
fiction writers and readers. “Links between the
Autumn 2003
church and science fiction can be traced largely to
one man and one LDS institution,” the reporter
wrote. “Marion ‘Doc’ Smith, a professor in the
English department at Brigham Young University,
taught a science-fiction writing class for years before
his death last year. That class produced many pub-
lished writers; a publication, Leading Edge; a science
fiction and fantasy club; and an annual sympo-
sium.” One of Smith’s BYU successors, Linda
Hunter Adams, said, “Philosophically, one reason
that Mormons do so well in science fiction is that,
I think, science fiction is one of the genres that has
the highest ethical standard. There are codes and
rules and honor that I think fit well with a believ-
ing people. A lot of things that seem fanciful to
other people don’t seem so out of the ordinary
to the LDS. As a Mormon, it’s not hard to believe
in something you can’t see and hear and touch right
now.” Author Orson Scott Card said, “We have no
qualms about the idea of life on other planets,
faster-than-light travel, ancient ‘lost’ civilizations,
supernatural events with natural explanations. We
view all problems as solvable and regard human
nature as being fundamentally good and humans as
capable of far more, intellectually and morally, than
we have yet seen in history. These are attributes of
mainstream science fiction, so Mormons are com-
fortable in that milieu. However, the reason is really
deeper than this. Science fiction allows writers to
deal with all the most powerful, troubling, and/or
difficult religious, moral, and cosmological issues.
Where else can you write apocalyptic, eschatologi-
cal, epistemological and redemptive fiction with
any kind of clarity?” Tracy Hickman, a novelist
who started out writing role-playing games such as
Dungeons & Dragons, said, “I was called out of
church one day by a member of the stake presi-
dency who asked me about my work, asked if there
was anything contrary to my beliefs. Everything I
ever wrote, I always made sure that it was a story of
ethics and a story that taught morality.”
• Gerald Grimmett’s latest novel, The Wives of
Short Creek (Limberlost Press), “has given us a
good, old-fashioned farce,” wrote Salt Lake Tribune
reviewer Martin Naparsteck. “His target, as the
title suggests (Short Creek is the former name of
86 IRREANTUM
Colorado City, the world’s most famous polygamist
community), is religious extremism. The plot of
the novel revolves around a claim by a community
member that he possesses the only copy of ‘the last
prophecy’ of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mor-
mon church, and an attempt by the publisher of
a Salt Lake City newspaper, the Courier & Mail,
to purchase it for $2 million.” While Naparsteck
applauded many of the book’s humorous aspects,
he concluded: “By the time, close to the end of the
book, we learn exactly what the final prophecy of
Joseph Smith says, some readers may be disap-
pointed because it’s not the least bit farcical. It’s
serious but certain to displease both devout mem-
bers of the Mormon church and residents of Col-
orado City.” Grimmett’s previous novel, The Ferry
Women, was a serious exploration of polygamy nar-
rated by a fictional wife of Mountain Meadows
Massacre scapegoat John D. Lee.
• LDS author Shelly Brady’s memoir Ten
Things I Learned from Bill Porter (New World
Library, 2002) reveals insights she gained from her
friend and former employer, a man with cerebral
palsy who sold household products door to door.
Soon after Brady’s book was published, actor
William H. Macy purchased the rights and made
Door to Door, a TV movie that won six Emmys in
2003. “Though the book is a biography of sorts, it
does not follow a chronological order,” wrote Rex
Goode on AML-List. “It delineates ten lessons the
author learned by observing and interacting with
her friend,” with chapter titles such as “Persistence
Pays Off ” and “If It Isn’t Broken, Don’t Fix It.” In
a chapter titled “Live Your Values,” Brady shows
how Bill Porter exemplifies each of the LDS
Church’s Young Women values. “The narrative is
prosaic, down to earth, and easy to read,” Goode
wrote. “It is also filled with emotion and innumer-
able tearful moments for the reader.”
• Mike Oborn’s novel Ghost between Us
(August Ink Publishing) “buries dark LDS Church
secrets beneath bad grammar and limp characters,”
according to a Salt Lake City Weekly reviewer.
“Reading this book is a bit like being in a karate
tournament. After a page or two, you feel like
you’ve been kicked in the head: dizzy, nauseated,
IRREANTUM
and disoriented. Perhaps Oborn fancied the subject
matter of his book so radical that it superseded
basic rules of grammar.” The plot is summarized as
follows: “The hero, Matthew Alcott, is a recovering
alcoholic with a wicked dichotomy of delusions of
grandeur and an inferiority complex. A returned
missionary, Alcott sought refuge in the bottle after
divorcing a powerful Mormon’s daughter and then
disappointing his parents by renouncing the
church. But before he left the fold, he worked in
the historical archives. The years spent in the
church’s library rewarded his diligence with evi-
dence that the LDS Church has its own gaggle of
skeletons in the closet. He writes a novel based on
his findings, sells it to a New York City publisher
just in time for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games,
and then finds out that the church wants to buy it
for $2 million—sort of like a kill fee.” A press
release implied that Oborn could get excommuni-
cated because the book is so controversial, but “it
didn’t tell me one thing that most folks who live in
Utah don’t already know,” wrote the reviewer.
• An out-of-court settlement has ended the four-
year legal battle between Bataan Death March sur-
vivor Gene Jacobsen and Deseret Book. Jacobsen
claimed that “author Dean Hughes stole from his
memoirs for use in Hughes’ Children of the Promise
series, which was published by Deseret Book,”
according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “Jacobsen, now
82, wrote about his experiences as a supply sergeant
during World War II, recording his company’s
attack from Japanese bombers in Manila and recall-
ing how he suffered through 31⁄ 2 years as a prisoner
of war. He said his wife typed up his manuscript in
1984 and they passed out copies to friends. Jacob-
sen also copyrighted his work and sent it in 1995
to Dew, who declined to publish it. However,
Hughes purportedly said he read a copy of the
work and interviewed Jacobsen about his experi-
ences. The Children of Promise series follows the
life of a character named Thomas as he serves an
LDS Church mission in Germany, joins the mili-
tary and is taken prisoner by Japanese troops.
Hughes always has maintained that Thomas is fic-
tional, but Jacobsen claimed that the character was
he. In 2000, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit,
87 Autumn 2003
ruling that historical events cannot be copyrighted.
However, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
reinstated the case last year.”
Film
• Moving beyond the financial disappointment
of Brigham City and some apparent earlier mis-
communication, filmmaker Richard Dutcher and
Utah businessman Larry H. Miller announced that
Miller would be a significant investor in two forth-
coming Dutcher film projects. God’s Army 2: States
of Grace will begin shooting in Los Angeles this
January, and The Prophet: The Story of Joseph
Smith is still not completely funded even with
Miller’s support. Dutcher said that God’s Army 2
will focus on the original film’s minor character of
Elder Sandoval, who will be unavoidably pulled
into a gang incident. Regarding The Prophet, Dutcher
said, “It’s going to cross over in a big way. Interest
may be greater outside the church than within it
because they aren’t already familiar with the story.
I think this film will appeal to religious people of
other faiths. Joseph Smith was a powerful and very
charismatic man. He lived in a very difficult and
even a violent time. I want to give this story the
treatment it deserves.” Dutcher said that actor Val
Kilmer has expressed interest in playing the role of
Joseph Smith, but the actor’s publicist claimed that
Kilmer will not take the part. Dutcher said that his
financing efforts were hindered by false rumors that
General Authorities had asked Miller to withdraw
his support and that President Gordon B. Hinckley
had asked Dutcher to drop the project. Salt Lake
Tribune film critic Sean Means expressed hope that
Miller’s “emphasis on strong content and his ability
to put real money behind projects” will help save
the Mormon film movement from “being run into
the ground by amateurism, an overload of nickel-
and-dime movies where the message, no matter
how uplifting, is buried under cheap production
values and community-theater acting.”
• Richard Dutcher announced that he has
founded a new nonprofit organization called the
Utah Filmmakers Alliance (UFA). According to a
press release, the UFA “is envisioned as an open
Autumn 2003
and nurturing artistic community that will foster
the arts in Utah, particularly filmmaking, and those
artists that inform, support, and sustain filmmaking,
such as actors, writers, musicians, designers, and
graphic artists, etc., as well as the technology
and science that helps create and distribute these
artists’ work. Although Dutcher is famous for cata-
pulting a ‘Mormon niche’ in film, the UFA is cre-
ated to support independent film of all types.”
Sterling Van Wagenen, cofounder of Sundance,
has agreed to serve for a term as one of the UFA’s
founding board members, along with Utah film-
makers such as Trent Harris, Lee Groberg, Bruce
Neibaur, and Blair Treu. Jongiorgi Enos serves as
the UFA’s managing director. More information
about the UFA, including membership fees and
benefits, is available at utahfilmalliance.org.
• The DVD release of The R.M. “validates the
law of diminishing returns,” according to Deseret
Morning News critic Chris Hicks. “If anything, the
Mormon stereotypes are even more exaggerated, but
the laughs are much more scattered. There are prob-
ably enough gags to have LDS viewers nodding
their heads (from a returned missionary being jilted
by the girl back home to last-minute home teach-
ing), but it’s a pretty weak skit film. (And the audio
commentary has too many voices talking over each
other; they’re having more fun than you will.)”
• The first of possibly several films based on Ger-
ald Lund’s best-selling series of Mormon history
novels has been announced. Financed by Larry
Miller with a $7.4 million budget, The Work and
the Glory: Pillar of Light will be adapted and
directed by Russ Holt, with completion expected in
late 2004 or early 2005. Deseret Book will market
and distribute the movie’s soundtrack and DVD
and VHS editions. Gerald Lund, who is currently
serving as an LDS Church General Authority in
England, will act as a consultant and retains script
approval rights.
• With The Work and the Story, “Mormon cin-
ema gets a possibly premature spoofing,” wrote
Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P. Means. The film’s
mockumentary premise “is that filmmaker Richard
Dutcher (who plays himself ), just after the success
of God’s Army, has disappeared without a trace and
88 IRREANTUM
is believed to be dead. Sensing a void, three young
filmmakers aim to assume Dutcher’s mantle as ‘the
Mormon Spielberg.’” The film “is an inside joke
about an inside joke. Sometimes that means the
jokes are so inside that nobody gets them, but
writer-director-star Nathan Smith Jones often shows
a knack for setting up genially loopy jokes about
the intersection of moviemaking and LDS culture.
He does succeed, in fits and starts, in making us
laugh about Mormon cinema.” Deseret Morning
News critic Jeff Vice said the film “does show a bet-
ter understanding of storytelling and features more
of a film ‘vocabulary’ than some of its recent cine-
matic brethren. That despite its being stuck with a
premise that can only go so far.”
• Regarding the forthcoming film Latter Days,
which is slated for theatrical release on January 30,
Entertainment Weekly reported: “Several Mormon
groups have petitioned to ban this indie drama, the
directorial debut of Sweet Home Alabama screen-
writer C. Jay Cox. It concerns a missionary who
falls for the boy next door, a Hollywood hunk
named Christian.”
• “Gorgeously shot and unapologetically whole-
some, The Legend of Johnny Lingo manages to
overcome its weaknesses—and its ancestry as a
famously cornball Brigham Young University–
produced short—with gentle humor and sweet-
ness,” wrote Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P. Means.
“The script, by New Zealand writer Riwia Brown
(Once Were Warriors), sometimes bogs down in its
own sap—and its gratuitous plugs for ‘the juice of
the noni’ (the manufacturer of Tahitian Noni fruit
drink is one of the movie’s backers).” Deseret Morn-
ing News critic Jeff Vice said the film “is so poorly
constructed that at times it feels like a series of
barely connected skits, only some of which work.
In attempting to expand the story, director Steven
Ramirez and screenwriter Riwia Brown have,
unfortunately, come up with some pretty tiresome
shtick and pointless story digressions. The young
performers here are attractive enough, but they do
have a hard time delivering convincing perform-
ances.” Johnny Lingo was produced by the team
that made the Mormon-missionary drama The
Other Side of Heaven.
IRREANTUM
• Gary Rogers’s film The Book of Mormon
Movie, Vol. 1: The Journey received mostly nega-
tive reviews. “You can forgive the micro-budget
production for its ever-shifting facial hair and
cheesy special effects, but Rogers directs as though
he would face excommunication if he ever actually
moved his camera,” wrote a Salt Lake City Weekly
reviewer. “He definitely won’t offend anyone—
unless it’s people who expect films, even films
about God, to be made with energy and humanity
as well as faith.” Film critic Eric D. Snider said
the screenplay “merely recreates all the events of the
first 66 pages of the Book of Mormon without any
regard for plotting, storytelling, or character devel-
opment. There is no climax, no clear narrative
path. The acting is uniformly bland, as if the actors
are merely reciting scripture (which they often are),
rather than portraying living, breathing people.”
The main character of Nephi “has no apparent
character flaws, even slight ones, and he doesn’t
change, learn or grow over the course of the film.
The dialogue “is an awkward mix of King James–
style scripture-talk—often direct quotes from the
Book of Mormon—and modern language.” Call-
ing the film “a low-budget epic that is more monot-
onous than momentous,” Salt Lake Tribune
reviewer Sean P. Means described it as “a plodding,
repetitive, ham-fisted attempt to create a Ten Com-
mandments–style epic without the resources or
bravado required to pull it off.” Deseret Morning
News critic Jeff Vice said, “It’s so slowly paced, so
flat-footed that it fails to engage on any level. But
you do have to credit Rogers for making the film
look as good as it does.” Columnist Jerry Johnston
called it “a large, sprawling film with a little movie
inside of it trying to get out. The movie wanted
to be epic, but its vision, writing and actors were
all warm, personable and intimate. I felt I was
watching the cast of Touched By an Angel perform-
ing Ben Hur.”
• Blue Collar Actor is a 56-minute, direct-to-
video, “highly personal, low budget, independent”
film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Profitt.
“The name of the church is not mentioned specifi-
cally, and the themes are more about the family and
the characters rather than specific religious
89 Autumn 2003
themes,” wrote film critic Preston Hunter. “Their
faith informs the story, but the main character’s
quest to become an actor (or simply to better his lot
in life) is universally understandable.” The film is
“interesting in its total independence from Utah as
a setting or influence. It was made entirely in New
Jersey and features New Jersey characters. These
Saints and their story evoke a spirituality and sense
of goodness similar to other LDS and good family
films, yet this film offers a glimpse at something
distinctly different. The blue collar vs. college-
educated background, the urban projects setting,
and even the never mentioned but visually evident
biracial makeup of the family all lend an authentic
freshness. More than any of these surface details,
however, Blue Collar Actor is different because of
the bleak, almost hopeless nature of the main char-
acters’ lives.” Hunter noted that the film’s flaws
include poor editing, a too-happy ending, and
other marks of an inexperienced filmmaker. The
film is distributed by LDS Video Store (www.lds
videostore.com).
• Calling Day of Defense “the single worst Mor-
mon-themed movie so far,” critic Eric D. Snider
said the film is “based on an unworkable premise,
written with an irredeemably bad ear for dialogue,
enacted by seemingly untalented performers, and
shot in many too-dark rooms on cheap-looking
digital video.” The film is based on a best-selling
Deseret Book novel written by A. Melvin McDon-
ald that “uses a courtroom setting to present a series
of basic arguments and refutations regarding LDS
doctrine.” Deseret Morning News critic Jeff Vice
said the film includes “seemingly endless scenes
filled with religious and theological pontificating”
and “may mark the low point of the recent glut of
LDS-specific filmmaking. Its message is hammered
home with such a lack of subtlety, and its charac-
ters are so unlikable, that you may wish for them to
fail in their efforts.” Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P.
Means said the film “delivers its message with all
the heavy-handedness of a Jack Webb anticommu-
nist propaganda film, handicapped by stilted dia-
logue, wooden acting, shoddy cinematography and
an oppressive power-ballad soundtrack. Even the
faithful may find it a long row to hoe.”
Autumn 2003
• An episode of the cartoon South Park airing
on Comedy Central on November 19 was described
as follows: “A Mormon kid moves to South Park
and Stan has to kick his butt. When Stan and his
dad meet their new Mormon neighbors, they
become fascinated with how genuinely nice they
are. While the other boys mock Stan relentlessly for
wimping out, the rest of the town starts to believe
that Mormons may not be so bad after all.”
According to Eric Dixon on AML-List, “It was a
pretty funny episode but took a very negative view
of early Mormon history—essentially saying that
everyone who believed Joseph Smith’s claims was
dumb, but skeptics like Martin Harris’s wife were
smart for doubting. Modern Mormons come off
looking pretty good, if you consider a preternatu-
rally nice, happy family as an accurate view of mod-
ern Mormons.”
• In December, HBO aired a $60-million adap-
tation of Tony Kushner’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize–
winning two-part play Angels in America, directed
by Mike Nichols and starring Al Pacino, Meryl
Streep, and Emma Thompson. Set in New York
City, the story interweaves the lives of several Mor-
mon and homosexual characters. “Angels in Amer-
ica isn’t for everyone,” wrote a Deseret Morning
News reviewer. “It’s full of R-rated language, brief
nudity and sexual situations, and LDS viewers may
be offended to see characters wearing temple gar-
ments. But it’s the sort of ambitious programming
television too often avoids. Working from an amaz-
ing script and brilliantly directed, acted, and pro-
duced, it’s a television event. And, whether you
agree with everything Kushner has to say or not, it’s
as thought-provoking today as when it was first
produced on stage more than a decade ago.” Accord-
ing to a Salt Lake Tribune reviewer, “While many
Utahns may wonder if Angels in America will be
offensive to Latter-day Saints, the film is not disre-
spectful. While it does take some shots at certain
cultural aspects, Kushner uses Mormonism to push
the message that faith and will can spur positive
change. By the end, Mormon mother Hannah
becomes one of the most enlightened characters in
the story.” Oskar Eustis, who directed the original
theatrical premieres, said: “Out of all of the religions
90 IRREANTUM
originating from American soil, the one that is
most purely American is Mormonism. One of the
inherent things [in Mormonism] is the belief you
can reinvent yourself, to engage in a direct dialogue
with the Divine and to become a different person.
That ongoing revelation in Mormonism is some-
thing Tony [Kushner] sees as a pure expression of
what is positive.” Brigham Young University theater
professor Megan Sanborn Jones said: “The Mormon-
ism in the play is being used in a very particular
way and in a positive way—that it’s an extraordi-
narily strong faith and that people have these beliefs.
It says it’s a belief to be respected, and it’s the whole
crux of the play.”
• Directed by Andrew Black, an award-winning
BYU film student from Scotland, Pride and Prej-
udice is a retelling of the Jane Austen novel with a
modern LDS setting and cultural backdrop. “The
movie works on a central conceit, that the dating
rules of Brigham Young University students are
close kin to mating rituals of Austen’s early 19th-
century England,” wrote Salt Lake Tribune reviewer
Sean P. Means. “With that simple shift, the plotline
transfers almost intact.” Means continued: “The
script—credited to Anne K. Black, Jason Faller and
Katherine Swigert—is light on the Mormon refer-
ences, to the point of never referring to BYU by
name. One exception is the returned missionary
Collins, a lummox who clumsily quotes the Ensign
as a form of courtship. Locals will appreciate the
scenery of Utah and Summit counties.” Means
concluded: “There are a few awkward pauses in the
early scenes, and it has a finale that attempts screw-
ball comedy but misses—minor problems com-
pared to some of the amateurish work seen in many
Mormon Cinema entries.” Calling the film “the
best of the recent slew of LDS-oriented comedies,”
Deseret Morning News critic Jeff Vice added, “but
that’s not much of a compliment. Most of the
others have been more akin to filmed ‘road shows’
than feature films.” Vice commented that the film
is “cuter than it is funny” and “probably won’t be
of much interest to those outside of its target audi-
ence,” and he said the script “is more concerned
with silly throwaway bits than it is with telling a
story.”
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Drama
• Utah Valley State College student Mahonri
Stewart’s new drama Farewell to Eden premiered
at the college in November and was selected as
UVSC’s entry in the American College Theatre
Festival competition. According to the Deseret
Morning News, the play is set in 1840 and “contains
historical LDS Church characters as it focuses on
the proselyting effort in Great Britain at the time.
The central characters are three recently orphaned,
but adult, siblings.” According to director James
Arrington, the play has “the same sensibility as
works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or Char-
lotte and Emily Brontë. This is an intelligently
plotted and sometimes jaw-dropping story with
lots of humor to carry it.”
• Smart Single Guys, a new play written by
Tony Gunn and directed by Eric Samuelsen, sold
out during its recent BYU production. According
to a Deseret Morning News reviewer, “Throughout
the night the audience is introduced to men and
women and their daily encounters, from the
botched online blind date to the ‘thanks for dating
me, but I think I’ll stay with my fiancé’ moment.
And the videos within the play are a great addition.
Along with the great cast is a talented instrumental
combo that adds musical entertainment before,
during, and after the show. The interaction with
the audience is also fun. Beware of water.” The
reviewer continued, “A few of the inside jokes may
go over the heads of some in the audience, but for
those who went there or are going to BYU, they are
hilarious.” Samuelsen commented, “A lot of Mor-
mon art is trying to be satirical, like Singles Ward.
But at the end it seems they feel a duty to give some
sanctimonious message, some preachifying. But
this show has none of that. It’s so nice to work
on a piece that stays satirical.” A BYU NewsNet
reviewer wrote, “For every clichéd and useless scene
in the show, there is a scene that is interesting and
even hilarious. The show carries a lot of dead weight
around, and the first act alone is at least ten min-
utes too long. It lacks focus and the kind of precise
writing that marks good theater. In the end, Smart
Single Guys is similar to Monty Python and the Holy
91 Autumn 2003
Grail. Wade through all the slow parts, and there
are some real gems that stick with you.”
• Ryan Taylor’s opera Abinadi was recently
produced at BYU with a cast of more than fifty,
accompanied by the BYU Philharmonic Orchestra.
According to the Deseret Morning News, Taylor
“chose the story of Abinadi because it had good
dramatic potential for the stage, including plenty
of conflict and a story of redemption. It also didn’t
hurt that, as an undergraduate at BYU, Taylor had
written a research paper on the chiastic structure of
this text in the Book of Mormon. That was helpful
in writing the libretto, which he also created him-
self. Although he tried to follow the original scrip-
ture closely, Taylor said there were a few things that
he had to add—women, for instance. ‘It’s half-fact,
half-fiction, but I tried to stay true to the message
of the story.’”
• Reviewing a recent Salt Lake City production
of bash, the trio of one-act monologues about
murderous Mormon characters for which LDS
playwright Neil LaBute was disfellowshipped, a
Salt Lake City Weekly critic said the play “should be
profoundly unsettling, except that its structure
undercuts its aims. It’s like a guy trying to sneak up
on you while wearing squeaky shoes and a huge
siren on his head. The parallel construction of the
three works—as well as the marketing—makes it
clear that each will begin with a simple life story
and end with a murder. It becomes harder to stay
in the moment of the three stories, since they
become elaborate setups for an ‘unexpected’ act
you know is just around the corner.” A Deseret
Morning News reviewer noted: “With ‘bash’ in the
title (followed by ‘latter-day plays’), you might
assume these three brief, one-act plays would be in
the ‘Mormon-bashing’ category. But you’d be
wrong. True, they’re quirky and edgy (and the char-
acters aren’t what most people would consider
‘mainstream’ members of the LDS Church), but
the issues being dealt with have very little to do
with the church itself.” Director Jeffrey Ingman
told the Salt Lake Tribune: “I don’t think anyone in
the audience would ever commit such heinous
crimes. But take away the crime, and you are left
with the psychology of a lot of people.”
Autumn 2003
• Provo Daily Herald staffer Eric D. Snider was
fired for allegedly manipulating a news story he was
covering. When Snider heard that a theater in
Pleasant Grove, Utah, was editing out the profanity
in Neil Simon’s play Rumors, Snider made inquiries
to a copyright agency. Subsequently, the produc-
tion had to be canceled because Simon would not
allow any edits. Snider claimed that the copyright
agency was aware of the situation before he called.
“Even though I thought my call was not relevant to
the news that occurred, I should have told my boss
up front,” he said. “Whether it’s worth being fired
over, I guess that’s the question. I get the sense that
it’s very hip to be fired for an ethics violation nowa-
days.” Snider’s column “Snide Remarks” often cre-
ated a stir in Utah County, and he remains a fixture
in the local comedy-performance scene. In fact, he
announced that, “in the spirit of brotherhood and
in the interest of making money,” he was booked to
perform a New Year’s Eve show at the same theater
where the controversy occurred.
• A comedienne named Elna Baker is finding
success with her one-hour standup comedy show
titled “I’m a Mexican Mormon.” Baker developed
the show while studying at New York University’s
Tisch School of the Arts. She recently performed it
at New York’s Don’t Tell Mama Theater, and she
plans to go on a national tour of college campuses,
including some in Utah. “Baker, from a multigen-
erational Mormon family, was raised in Seattle, Spain
and England,” wrote a Salt Lake Tribune reporter.
“She pokes fun at both sides of her family—Dad’s
Mexican, Mom’s Anglo. She uses hilarious material
culled from a lifetime of dinner table talk, mother’s
lectures, a Spanish-speaking grandma and social
climbing at the local LDS singles ward. But make
no mistake. This show is neither anti-Mormon
sneering nor insider LDS jokes. It is sophisticated
and urbane, sometimes even raw, appealing to
Mormon and NYU audiences. Sure, she deals in
stereotypes, but she explores universal themes of
identity, religion, ritual and, yes, the occasional
absurdity of belief. Not surprisingly, sex—or the
lack of it—is at the core of Baker’s comedy.”
92 IRREANTUM
 A M L - L I S T character addresses the very problems that have
H I G H L I G H T S
Compiled by Marny K. Parkin
AML-List provides an ongoing forum for broad-rang-
ing conversation and a stimulating exchange of opin-
ions related to LDS literature. Discussion during May,
June, and July included topics such as self-indulgent
authors, narrative choices, structuralism, Neil LaBute’s
work, authorial balance, Buffy and God, gender in
literature, Angels in America, and musicals and morals.
Read on for a sampling of the sentiment on some other
interesting topics. If you find yourself champing to
chime in, send an e-mail message to majordomo@
lists.xmission.com that reads: subscribe aml-list. A
confirmation request will be sent to your e-mail address;
follow the directions to complete your subscription.
AML-List is moderated by Jonathan Langford.
Flattening Effects of Story
Resolution
Katie Parker (July 14): One of the things I love
about the Harry Potter books is the characteriza-
tion. Each character has a distinct personality. Most
of them easily lend themselves to distinct voices
when reading aloud. But how any given scene will
turn out depends in large part on who’s present.
The insights and reactions of one character are
not the same as those that another character may
have. [. . .]
As far as LDS literature goes, Jack Weyland actu-
ally uses characterization very well in many
instances, but then his characters change as they
repent and they become standard “good guys.”
This is an oversimplification, but in so many cases
in popular LDS literature, the same thing hap-
pens—repentance makes a character lose his or her
unique personality.
Willard Gardner (July 16): This issue is a prob-
lem. It seems like characters have a tendency to flat-
ten as they grow toward—whatever the plot
demands they grow toward. I’m not convinced that
this is an issue only with LDS literature, but it is
certainly more of a problem with stories where a
IRREANTUM
defined them as a character, as many of this genre
do. I’d love to hear a good discussion about writing
characters that don’t turn to cardstock at the end of
the story.
Steve Perry (July 16): I don’t think characters
always flatten as they “grow toward whatever the
plot demands” unless the author has already prede-
termined the ending and has to force the character
into that preconceived mold no matter what shape
it’s morphed into in the meantime.
I’d love to see LDS literature that didn’t begin
with an author plotting the resolution to show the
character’s acceptance of the gospel or some princi-
ple therein. Sure, it might turn out that way, but I’d
prefer to follow the journey the character demands
rather than the character the principle demands.
Barbara Hume (July 17): I think that’s one rea-
son romance novels tend to end at the wedding. By
that time the tortured hero has resolved his emo-
tional trauma, or the man-hating heroine has come
to her senses, or whatever. Now they’re suitable to
become marriage partners—but how interesting
will they be? Some writers can handle it, but most
can’t—that’s why heroes of episodic TV are not
usually allowed to stay married. If you fall in love
with Little Joe Cartwright or Apollo or Captain Kirk,
everyone knows you’re toast.
In real life, people still have a lot of growing and
changing to do. But who wants to read “Will you
take out the garbage, dear?” “Of course, sweetheart.
As soon as the commercials come on.”
D. Michael Martindale (July 18): Seems to me
the way to avoid this problem is to develop your
character sufficiently so he isn’t defined only by the
problems that will be resolved. Then you’ll still
have a person after the problems go away. Come to
think of it, you’ll start out with a person too, not a
contrived cardboard character.
Mormon Horror
[Note: This thread began as a discussion about
D. Michael Martindale’s unpublished novel, Brother
Brigham.]
Kim Madsen (May 1): Ah, but Michael, the
denouement is “horrifying” and employs supernat-
ural beings trying to manipulate humans to behave
93 Autumn 2003
in ways they wouldn’t normally behave. You’ve used
classic elements of horror stories. Scary stuff—and
even scarier to me in Brother Brigham because it’s
so plausible given the belief structure I hold as a
Mormon.
I totally agree that it’s a character study—in fact,
I’d put it in the same category as Hitchcock’s stuff.
I think he wrote some dang fine horror stories. You
use the same slowly building tension of circum-
stance and character behavior.
Yup, it’s a Mormon horror story all right. And I
don’t know about anyone else, but it’s the first of its
kind I’ve run across, which is why I said you’ve
started a new genre. Anyone else know of fictional
Mormon horror? (I’m not counting such retellings
as the Hofmann murders and the Texas missionary
murders in the 1970s—those are horrifying, but
factual. True crime.)
Andrew Hall (May 5): Cooper, David Brandt (a
pseudonym), “Beyond a Certain Point,” a short
story in In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions,
edited by Robert Raleigh (Signature, 1998). A pretty
creepy story about a woman who slowly realizes
that a party held by the popular young couples in
the ward is a spouse-swapping event. I thought
it seemed like a kind of Mormon horror, and it
worked pretty well; it was one of the better stories
is this pretty mediocre anthology.
The story by Brian Evenson in this same collec-
tion, about a Mormon fundamentalist who tries to
dig up Ezra Taft Benson’s grave, may have been
creepy, but there was no sense of “horror.” He cer-
tainly can write horror stories, however, very liter-
ate ones. I’ve only really read “Altmann’s Tongue”
and a couple other stories, none of which had Mor-
mon themes. I haven’t read his stories that include
Mormon themes, which are:
Prophets and Brothers (Rodent Press, 1997).
A collection of stories, several of which had
appeared in Dialogue.
Father of Lies (Four Walls Eight Windows,
1998). A novel about a pedophile bishop.
Dark Property (Four Walls Eight Windows,
2002). A novel set in an apocalyptic future, with a
religious cult with some resemblances to the Mor-
mon Church.
Autumn 2003
Someone mentioned O. S. Card’s Lost Boys. He
also did a couple of horror novels in the mid-’90s,
Treasure Box and Homebody. Neither was particu-
larly horrific, and I thought they were among his
weakest novels. He did several horror short stories
early on, which are collected in The Changed Man
(Tor, 1992). Not all of them are really horror, but
several are. I still remember “Fat Farm” pretty well.
The original short story of “Lost Boys” is also in
this collection. Hey, those were great stories; I should
read them again.
Lisa Tait (May 9): A couple of thoughts about
why horror doesn’t appeal to me as a Mormon reader
(and maybe not to others) or in a Mormon context.
First, we believe that Satan only has as much
power as we give him. Most Mormons would see a
person “possessed” as someone who has chosen to
allow the devil to overpower him or her—not as a
victim of forces beyond his/her control, which is
often the case in horror stories.
Second, because we would see “possession” as a
result of choices and not victimization, we would
not tend to be as afraid of it. It seems to me that a
large part of the horror in horror stories is a sense
of fear, even doubt, about which force is stronger
and will prevail. Can good overcome evil? Mor-
mons think we already know the answer to that.
I think, by and large, we experience our religion
in a pedestrian way that doesn’t prompt us towards
much interest in the power of evil. We’re too busy
thinking about the pinewood derby and the monthly
home teaching report to give much thought to
whether there are people out there possessed by
spirits that can make them shoot fire from their
eyes. (Whether or not that is a fair characterization
of horror, I think it’s the general perception of the
genre.)
Now, the banality of our religiosity could pro-
vide a rich scenario for horror stories—what if the
person you home teach turns out to be possessed by
an evil spirit? And in Mormon theology what
would it really look like to be “possessed”? [. . .]
The problem with horror is that it seems to be
focused on the horror—the evil. There may be an
underlying theme or message that has an explicit
moral to it—faith is stronger than doubt—or it
94 IRREANTUM
may want to provoke us to think about matters of
faith—is my faith stronger than my doubt? But
horror also (and I might argue primarily) functions
to scare us—it’s after a certain effect. And I would
argue that the effect mostly negates the morality
underneath it. The morality is just an excuse to
help rationalize the effect, which is after all the pri-
mary goal.
Clark Goble (May 5): Although Orson Scott
Card has done a fairly good job selling [Mormon
horror], perhaps the problem is trying to sell it to a
purely Mormon audience (i.e. selling only through
Deseret Book or Seagull).
I think that there is an open field for Mormon
horror. In a way our cosmology and mythology are
much more ripe for such literature than even
Catholicism. (And you’ll note that Catholicism dis-
proportionately is represented in horror.) I’m sure
that if someone was to visit the folk story collection
at BYU they’d find that a disproportionate number
of such folk tales are basically horror stories.
Jongiorgi Enos (May 6): There is a difference
between a ghost story and a horror story. Or even a
story which acknowledges spirits and extranormal
events and a horror story. And OSC doesn’t write
Mormon horror. He’s a Mormon, and sometimes
he writes something which might be called horror
(although even Lost Boys is pretty tame compared
to some of the horror I’ve read).
It is a very good point to make that Mormon
cosmology is ripe for explorations of the supernat-
ural. This is perhaps why I have always been very
comfortable in my own explorations of the super-
natural. I’ve had some pretty bizarre encounters,
too. I’ve experienced some intense psychic phe-
nomena; I’ve been involved in exorcisms; I’ve had
experiences that would creep out the average Mor-
mon. Even though our cosmology is fully open to
such things, and explains their existence and their
limits and the uses and disguises to which the
Opposition puts such phenomenon to a fair degree
of depth, many still experience fear and confusion
when confronted with stories about such things.
My companion, who was with me when we were
involved in the excommunication of a Satan-
worshipping LDS witch, was so freaked out he was
IRREANTUM
shaking in his boots and could hardly function for
a couple of days, whereas I was not particularly
phased.
I am sure there are many others who would not
be phased, but I am more certain that the vastly
greater majority of Mormon audiences do not want
exposure to such subject matter in a forum which
they consider LDS literature. So when I write
supernatural stuff (I guess angels are “supernatural”
so I should use a different word)—when I write
horror or more darkly oriented paranormal experi-
ences, my gut tendency is to package such tales for
the mainstream market and diminish the LDS ele-
ment out of respect for the frailer elements of Mor-
mondom. And that’s not a satirical or insulting
label. We have to respect people’s limits to some
extent, even though, as artists, our gut impulse is
always to push the limits and strain the bounds of
our envelope.
The fact is that classic Catholicism takes their
role as soldiers of Christ in a war against the forces
of evil very seriously, in a way which we tend to
have forgotten or make light of. I have some Mor-
mon “confrontation-with-the-forces-of-evil” stories
which are true, but which I don’t necessarily con-
sider “horror,” nor have I ever attempted to pack-
age or sell them to any market; but it would certainly
take a lot of coaxing for me to ever consider pack-
aging it for specifically LDS readership. If I did so,
I would greatly diminish the sense of dark loathing,
and greatly emphasize the light of the priesthood in
such confrontations, changing the timber of the
story from a “horror” story to a “miracle” story: a
different genre altogether.
When I’m in the mood to be creeped out, I pick
up authors who I know are good at that, but I don’t
go looking at DB. When someone picks up an
OSC book (with a few exceptions) they are not
picking up “Mormon literature,” they are picking
up a sci-fi book or a horror book or an alternate
universe fantasy book. It’s in the packaging, it’s in
how it is sold.
My contention is that if I wrote a horrifying,
scary and inconclusively resolved (i.e., truly “hor-
ror” and not “miracle”) story about two LDS mis-
sionaries confronting satanic forces in a witch coven
95 Autumn 2003
in Lyon (which I certainly could do, and I wouldn’t
be making all of it up, either), I might get a bite
from one of the LDS magazines, and probably
could sell it to Signature, but DB, Covenant, etc.,
would probably never buy it, and if they did, their
consumers probably wouldn’t.
My other contention is that that’s okay. I don’t
want to cram something down anybody’s throat. I’d
much rather turn the LDS missionaries into a
Catholic priest and sell it to Random House nation-
wide than stick with haunted elders and get a
1,000-copy print run for Signature on the Wasatch
Front. Why limit yourself?
Scott Parkin (May 19): It seems to me that
Card actually started with something very much
like horror, though with a vaguely SF twist. Sto-
ries like “Closing the Timelid” and “Euminides in
the Fourth Floor Lavatory” and “Queitus” and
even “Thoughts of My Head” would qualify as a
sort of Weird Tales sort of horror.
Other stories, like his short story “Kingsmeat” or
his novel Wyrms certainly contain horrific elements,
though I would stop short of calling them horror in
the Dean Koontz vein.
What I haven’t seen a lot of are traditional hor-
ror stories from a Mormon standpoint. Unlike even
the Jews with their golems and other homunculi,
Mormonism doesn’t really have a “dark side” of
documented horrors. Yes, horrific stories of ordi-
narily horrible things happening to good people,
but not a lot of theologically supported monsters,
creatures, or ghouls, and no standard book of exor-
cism or counter spells to the dreaded seventh book
of Moses.
One could certainly speculate such things (we
had a discussion over on the LDSF list a few years
ago about clones being used as new homes for
Legion and his compatriots in subversion of the
correct order of things), but the lack of officially
defined nasty critters seems like a pretty substantial
hill to climb. It would require extraordinary imag-
ination and delivery. Difficult, but possible.
Clark Goble (May 23): I’m surprised you say
this. I think we have a rather robust set of “mon-
sters” that is, as I mentioned last week, well recorded
by folklorists. Without descending into the folklore
Autumn 2003
that only a few have possibly read, consider just
what is published by General Authorities.
We have the quaint tradition of Cain. The story
(probably false) reprinted in Miracle of Forgiveness
of David Patten meeting a hairy man who walked
along with his wagon generated the folk tradition
that Cain is Sasquatch. We thus have our own
“wandering Jew” or even variation of Faustus in
Cain. If that isn’t an interesting monster story equal
to all the Renaissance stories of golems gone awry,
I don’t know what is. Cain is marked not just
so that others around him won’t kill him, but so
that he won’t die. He becomes the evil (or pitiful)
doppelganger of the three Nephites or John the
Beloved.
We have an interesting variation on the old
Enoch legends of the Watchers in which the fallen
angels are actually a race of semisubstantial beings
living here on earth. It is a ghost story done one up.
For they hate humans and are in a conspiracy to
degrade humans. In a sense it is the story of X-Files
only with a far more sinister overtone. Once you
combine it with the remnant of John Birchers mix-
ing politics and religion in high priest lessons then
things get really interesting.
Given how many science fiction stories either
intentionally borrow from the Enoch legends or
unintentionally recreate it, it is interesting how our
“Watchers” are so much more interesting and
so tied to LDS conspiracy theories even in the
scriptures.
There are lots of other stories, such as the
Lamanite angels guarding the temple from sons of
perdition. (I forget which temple: either the SLC or
Logan.) There is the story of the angel of light on
the river in the D&C. Our “demons” are far more
crafty and interesting than those in most horror
stories. They are very intelligent and appear to
work by manipulation rather than the crude vio-
lence of most horror novels. (Actually far more
scary, in my mind.)
The notion of a devil in LDS thought always
makes me think of the father in Hamlet. You recall
the scene where the ghost of his father speaks to
Hamlet? Yet the words the ghost speaks to Hamlet
are in effect the parallel of the poison put in the
96 IRREANTUM
father’s ear by his brother. And in the play Hamlet’s
madness is partially faked but partially the result of
this intrigue that throws the castle into turmoil.
One can even speculate over whether the ghost is
even Hamlet’s father. Of course after leaving that
bit of “horror” the rest of the play is more tradi-
tional. But this notion of the “whisperer” or worm-
tongue is always prominent in literature, and
Mormonism has at least a few billion of them pur-
portedly here on earth right now.
If you want to change things around so the reli-
gious aspect isn’t quite so “obvious” then make it a
science fiction or fantasy story. What if there were
a billion aliens on the earth that no one could see.
Further, what if they were trapped and became,
over thousands of years, bitter towards the inhabi-
tants of the earth. What would that be like? There
are similar horror stories. Consider John Carpen-
ter’s They Live. Horrible movie in my opinion, but
a fairly similar setup.
The golem of Jewish Kabbalism became the
Frankenstein story which was the forerunner of
the robot gone out of control (HAL being one
famous modern example of the golem). The ulti-
mate moral of these stories is the danger of power
uncontrolled—the idea that technology can run
amok. What is the moral of Cain? Probably the
same as the wandering Jew legend or the Faustus.
One can’t help but remember Byron’s Cain and
wonder if it isn’t a mixing of the two stories.
Jacob Proffitt (May 25): Hmm. I can’t think of
many monsters that truly haunt Mormons. I’ve
heard a number of second-hand stories of exorcism,
of course. I’ve witnessed some semiscary things
firsthand. Nothing you could base an entire book,
movie, or play on, though. The trouble is, Mor-
mons aren’t terribly afraid of external spiritual
assailants. Kind of hard to be too frightened when
the first priesthood holder to arrive deals with the
problem in a relatively brief, even perfunctory way.
And I’ve never heard of one that persisted beyond
the first encounter. There’s not even a satisfying rit-
ual of exorcism involved. It’s tough because for
Mormons, we just don’t fear outside evil nearly as
much as we fear internal personal failure and exter-
nal human-based agents.
IRREANTUM
To make it work, you’d have to make a more
subtle villain. A lurker with subtle influence and
amazing persistence. Something that subtle would
be really hard to depict well, though it could poten-
tially be very scary. You’d have to build the dread
and horror up and you’d still face the problem that
any direct confrontation is pretty perfunctory—
come to think of it, though, build it up over time
and give it sufficient hubris, it could certainly bluff
enough to isolate an individual and make their life
miserable (and a kind of self-selecting misery, too).
And you could work all the ritual you want to into
it with the assumption that an evil entity would
delight in misleading you into thinking such things
worked (and instilling a false sense of security).
And I’ve always wondered if Christ’s retort when
accused of using Beelzebub’s power to cast out dev-
ils might not be what we assume—“If Satan cast
out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall
then his kingdom stand?” Well, Satan’s kingdom
won’t stand. Christ’s statement could as easily be
read as a taunt as it can as a proof that Satan can-
not cast out Satan.
Mormonism and Feminism
Amelia Parkin (June 10): i’ll try to contain
myself and be civil. :) jim, i must beg to differ with
your sweeping and stereotypically mormon defini-
tion of feminism. feminism most certainly is not
about continuing the idea that women are all vic-
tims and men are all rascals of the absolute worst
variety. sure, there are women, individuals within
the feminist movement who point at men and
scream foul (and there are plenty of men who do
this, too). but the vast majority of the women who
would call themselves feminists are not on a ram-
page to illustrate exactly how evil men are and
exactly how trod upon women are (that is only the
first step :) ). rather, they are on a quest to gain
equality and opportunity. they are seeking the pos-
sibility of pursuing excellence—in all spheres. they
demand that we look beyond the culture that most
of us (both male and female) tend to uphold in the
name of not disturbing the status quo. feminism
is about understanding the impact on women of
97 Autumn 2003
pervasive cultural beliefs and practices and then
going the next step: trying to change peacefully our
culture to allow more freedom for both men and
women. it’s about women being able to work their
way up the corporate ladder without having sex
with every exec higher than them. it’s about women
having the opportunity to develop the gifts god
gave them. and it’s about women being able to con-
trol their own property, be that property physical,
spiritual, or intellectual. and it’s about men being
able to explore all of their interests regardless of
whether those interests are “masculine” or “manly.”
ultimately, feminism is about freedom. it’s about
being able to be true to one’s self, about possessing
integrity. it’s about not allowing cultural expecta-
tion to deny any individual the opportunity to
allow their spirit and their soul to flourish.
feminism, as with any other -ism (including our
gospel), can very easily be perverted by individuals.
and it has been—both by men and by women, by
feminists and by non-feminists. i consider your
representation of what feminism is a gross perver-
sion. but the fact that a belief and a movement to
change the world can be perverted does not con-
demn it. if anything, it should indicate its power—
a power that could be used for either good or evil,
as with any power.
and if, as you suggest, feminism is merely an
exaggerated form of the victorian ideal that women
are inherently more moral than men, well then the
church has been infected and tainted for as long as
i’ve been alive and probably a lot longer. it is one of
the only institutions that i have encountered that
actually continues to hold tightly to this antiquated
and, IMO, incorrect belief.
i am continuously amazed at mormons’ reaction
to feminism. i remember sitting in my cold war his-
tory class at byu. we did very in-depth projects on
the civil rights movements of the ’60s and the right
to life movement of the ’80s in that class. i chose to
be a part of the group that focused on the feminist
movement (i covered the abortion rights issue). the
research was fascinating. and putting together our
presentation was very interesting (especially when a
woman on byu’s campus called the police on us for
having a pro-choice protest sign in the cougareat).
Autumn 2003
at the end of our 45-minute presentation we had a
question and answer session. during that session
our professor asked our class if any of us would call
ourselves a feminist. i immediately said yes. one
other woman in class responded yes, but more hes-
itantly than i did. most of the people around me
shifted a little uncomfortably in their seats. our
professor told us that in the five or so years he had
been teaching at byu, only a handful of people had
ever responded to that question affirmatively.
somehow we have this stigma attached to feminism
and i frankly do not understand it. perhaps it has
something to do with the ERA and the church’s
official opposition to that amendment. but mostly
i think it has to do with ignorance. with an unwill-
ingness to engage with this field of thought called
“feminism.” and with fear. as if being feminist and
mormon are mutually exclusive.
well i can say, speaking for myself, that it is dif-
ficult. sometimes it’s so difficult that i have to con-
tain my frustration and my desire to walk away
from what i see as backwards-thinking approaches
to sexuality, gender, and life in general. but i don’t
walk away. i forge my way through the difficulties
because at the heart of feminism i see the principle
values and beliefs of the gospel jesus taught. and at
the heart of the gospel jesus taught i see the objec-
tives that the feminists i know are trying to achieve.
i know inside myself that the teachings of christ are
true and the church is the best realization of those
teachings that i have seen. so while being feminist
and mormon is difficult, it is by no means mutu-
ally exclusive.
what i’d really like to see is some good mormon
literature by and about women who struggle with
the inequalities created by the church. i’m sure
there is some; i just don’t know where to look for it.
if you have suggestions, please share.
Melissa Proffitt (June 11): I want to respectfully
disagree with Amelia Parkin’s definition of femi-
nism—or possibly just to reflect upon it a bit. [. . .]
The reason I feel compelled to disagree is not
that I oppose her central point, but that most of
her characteristics are rooted in the understanding
that women are at a disadvantage, that change is
needed in society (and in the Church) and that
98 IRREANTUM
feminism is how people deal with that. But to me,
this is not what feminism is—it’s an approach to
being a feminist.
I grew up in places and neighborhoods where
nobody would ever have considered telling me I
couldn’t do something because I was a girl. The
priesthood was never held up as something that
made men superior to women. The one man who
ever pulled some misogynistic crap on me was
widely considered to be a nutcase and had no
power to make me feel less than I am. I speak up in
Sunday School and Relief Society, have no problem
directly contradicting someone who is wrong, and
am routinely asked doctrinal questions by others in
my ward. I bring all this up not because I want
everyone to bow down and worship my glory, but
because all of this happened without any conscious
effort on my part to fight the system. I didn’t have
people telling me to be ladylike or pretend I know
less than I know. I never was asked (or told) to
defer to someone just because he was a priesthood
authority. I didn’t even know this happened to
other women until I was eighteen or so.
Then, of course, I became a feminist with an axe
to grind. (Didn’t we all?)
But my reaction was never to change the system.
In my mind, I could not see how the system was at
fault if it had never reached out its tentacles to
restrict me. And having lived in a number of wards
all over the country, and having seen how the pecu-
liar beliefs of the local priesthood authority could
influence the culture of the ward, it seemed to me
that every member of the Church believed to some
extent that “the Church” was synonymous with
“my ward.” My solution was to change the individ-
uals—to set an example, to teach good principles,
and to occasionally lay the smack down on people
who needed a serious attitude adjustment. (They’re
mostly women, believe it or not.)
And yet I am also a feminist. The reason I don’t
tend to call myself one is that “feminist” is one of
those words that means a lot of different things,
and everyone “knows” what a feminist is. I got tired
of having to explain in detail what kind of feminist
I am. (It’s a little like ordering one of those fancy
coffees at Starbucks; you can’t just say “latte,” it’s
IRREANTUM
“triple-mocha-latte with a drop of vanilla and choco-
late shavings and put the brown sugar on the side,
please.”) I think this is as much a reason for people
refusing to identify themselves as feminists as some
unnamed stigma. Some of those feminists are the
strident Patricia Ireland types, and if you don’t agree
with her, why on earth would you want to be iden-
tified with her?
My point is that, ultimately, feminism does mean
freedom. Period. But where we get into trouble
is with all the different ways feminism can and is
expressed. Particularly in Mormon culture, I worry
about one group’s enthusiasm being translated into
some kind of imperative for all Mormon feminists
everywhere.
The thing is—and this does bother me—that
while I’ve always been careful to remember that not
everyone had the same experiences I did, I very
rarely get the same courtesy in return. Women who
would be offended beyond reason if I suggested
that they were weak or delusional over the slights
they’d received think nothing of talking about their
own problems as though every woman in the
Church is suffering in the same way. The thing is,
even when it’s institutional sexism (i.e., a bishop
teaching false doctrine about women’s place) it’s
not INSTITUTIONAL sexism. Not all bishops do that.
There’s no chapter in the handbook about keeping
women subservient so they won’t start speaking out
or, heaven forbid, start thinking. To me it seems
counterproductive to assume that some idiocy is
the result of the Church, or even of Church cul-
ture, rather than the fault of individuals. But I sup-
pose it bothers me because it feels like an
unintentional slight—like my experience is irrele-
vant because theirs is so much more important.
Speaking for myself, I am more of a feminist
because I am a Mormon. I was very fortunate to
have Cecilia Farr as a teacher at BYU; I learned a
lot about feminism and Mormonism from her
example, even if I ultimately chose a different path
than hers. I have found a great deal of freedom
within this church, even as my ward provides me
with amusement (and, as I get more crotchety with
age, not a little annoyance). I’m not as blissfully
innocent as I used to be, and I see more ways in
99 Autumn 2003
which certain influential members are setting up
their personal interpretations of doctrine or instruc-
tion as gospel truth. But overall I see this as a per-
version of how the truth is taught on an individual
level than as a flaw in the Church. It gives me com-
fort on the days when the Relief Society lesson has
been . . . less than comforting.
Preston Hunter (June 12): I agree that it is
wrong for there to be a stigma within the Church
attached to feminism. Joseph Smith was one of the
most radical, influential feminists in this nation’s
history. The Church today is one of the world’s most
successful organizations in the world in promoting
feminist ideals.
But these statements are only true if one thinks
of “feminism” in the terms Amelia Parkin described,
not in the preposterous way it has come to be
thought of when corrupted by many (but not all)
contemporary feminist organizations in the U.S.—
such as promoting the idea that “women are all vic-
tims and men are all rascals of the absolute worst
variety,” or attempting to ban acknowledgments of
differences between men and women or legalizing
prostitution or stigmatizing motherhood or ban-
ning the works of Thomas Paine or promoting
lesbianism to grade school children or equating
feminism with the promotion of abortion.
As [Amelia] described, true feminism is about
the “quest to gain equality and opportunity . . .
seeking the possibility of pursuing excellence . . .
women being able to work without having sex with
every exec higher than them . . . women having the
opportunity to develop the gifts god gave them . . .
allow[ing] their spirit and their soul to flourish.”
Put most simply, true feminism is about improving
the lives of women.
The reason there is a stigma about feminism in
the Church is for the most part not because of any
problems with the Church or its members, but
because the word “feminism” has been hijacked by
people with illogical, dishonest, and immoral agen-
das. Feminism is thus very much like Islam. It has
been “hijacked” and now stands, in the mind of
most people, for something different than what
many of its adherents believe in, or what its
founders meant for it to be.
Autumn 2003 100
Members of the Church (and any thinking, fair-
minded, moral people) are correct in rejecting the
extremist, counterproductive manifestations of
“feminism” which have so frequently come to rep-
resent this word. It would be nice to not reject the
word and the true ideals of feminism out of hand,
but to try to take back the word and recognize our
feminist heritage. And Church members who
embrace the word should recognize that when their
people express a disdain for “feminism,” they are
merely rejecting the extremist factions which have
perverted truly feminist ideals.
Jacob Proffitt (June 11): If [being feminist and
Mormon are] thought to be mutually exclusive, it’s
because the feminist movement left us. Utah had to
take the vote away from women in order to become
a state. The Relief Society is one of the oldest
women’s organizations in the world (formal organ-
izations, that is). And I’ve been reading The Relief
Society Magazine lately (piecemeal, not in any
earnest way), and I’m struck by the progressive
ideas presented in every issue I’ve perused and the
underlying assumption that comes through loud
and clear that women are as capable, intellectual,
knowledgeable, and deserving as men. We’ve been
decades ahead of our prevailing society since the
restoration and Joseph Smith. My generation of
Mormon men is, on the whole, light years ahead of
our contemporaries from other cultural traditions
in taking women seriously and changing discrimi-
natory traditions.
But we reject wholeheartedly the whole French-
school feminist movement, phallologocentrism,
male bashing, “all sex is rape,” and other extreme or
radical ideologies that have come to represent the
public face of feminism. No wonder we’re reluctant
to identify with the movement. I don’t think we’re
ignorant in rejecting “feminism.” If anything, I’d
throw the burden of ignorance the other direction.
Why on earth would I want to publicly associate
myself with people so wholly unfamiliar with me
and my ideological perspective? I’ll call myself a
feminist again when it no longer means being asso-
ciated with NOW, Patricia Ireland, or the vocal
academic feminist majority. Any movement that
disowns Camille Paglia and denigrates Condoleezza
Rice deserves what it gets.
IRREANTUM
 D. Michael Martindale (June 11): Why many
perceive [feminism and Mormonism] as mutually
exclusive seems pretty clear to me. Feminism took
the mother out of the home and put her in the
workplace. As a result, it also took the children out
of the home and put them into daycare. Feminism
also wants the woman to have the right to kill her
unborn child. Feminism is destroying the family.
As you say, most feminists may not be of the
male-bashing variety, but they are the silent major-
ity. The vocal minority is very much into male
bashing, and it’s the vocal members of a movement
who define the movement in the public’s eyes. There-
fore feminism attacks males, who are fathers and
grandfathers and brothers and sons and grandsons
of Mormons. Family members. Priesthood holders.
Feminism (as perceived by many) does all sorts
of damage. That’s why it’s considered mutually
exclusive with Mormonism.
Perception is reality. You can bemoan all day
how the perception is inaccurate, but that won’t
change things. The perception must be changed.
That can only happen through education. In my
opinion, the best way to educate a populace that
holds to a fallacious perception and does so with
great enthusiasm is through the guerrilla tactics of
literature.
We need LDS stories about feminists. We need
publishers who will publish stories about feminists.
We need authors who will write stories about
feminists, cast in a mold that will get published and
will get read. In other words, stories about femi-
nists that are not labeled feminist stories. We need
female protagonists that act like feminists without
having that label appear anywhere.
Rich Hammett (June 13): I’ve been alternately
amused and horrified by the way “feminism” has
been attacked here in the last few days. I am
absolutely certain that some of the list’s feminists
hold very strongly to some of the opinions that
have been denigrated as the “evils of feminist insti-
tutions.” I know this, because I am one of them.
I hope the others don’t feel silenced by the attacks.
A common theme in several attacks was the
crazy idea that women should be able to do any-
thing a man can do. Just the fact that someone here
IRREANTUM 101
would attack that idea makes me feel like we’re fifty
years further in the past than I thought we were.
I guess the idea is that women are different from
men. Not exactly a new statement, but what does it
mean? Does it mean that men are physically stronger
than women? Phrased so superficially, that state-
ment seems obvious, but does anybody think that
Woody Allen could take on Chyna in wrestling?
I don’t think even professional wrestling could get
away with that mismatch.
A couple of women said they had never experi-
enced institutional gender bias in the Church. I must
not understand what those words mean . . . or have
these women ever served as bishop? The current
setup enables leaders to think of “women’s issues”
as a subset of “Church issues.” And women are
always “them” to the Church leaders. It is by defi-
nition an institutional gender bias. But one that is
on its last legs, I think. I hope. Will Catholics or
Mormons make the jump first? Sounds like good
speculative fiction. Is there any of that in Mormon
feminist circles, or is that too subversive? [. . .]
I think there’s room for real feminism in Mormon-
ism and Mormon literature, not just the watered-
down version that some are espousing. There are
actually good arguments for decriminalizing prosti-
tution, and some of the other radical notions. And
I’m sure some of that has worked its way into even
Mormon pioneer novels . . . pioneer Utah (and
later) was lousy with brothels.
I will agree with the “anti-feminists” who said
that it was a mistake of some feminists to denigrate
motherhood. That is a critical function, and should
be open even as a career choice. But we can also
make laws to encourage allowing women to be a
mother, and still contribute in other ways to soci-
ety, and develop their other gifts. The ideal of uni-
versal motherhood as a calling is a mind-destroyer
and soul-killer. “Women” can do everything “men”
can do, and it’s up to us to find ways as a society to
make it possible for good motherhood to be a part
of that, and not an obstacle from it.
Does Intent Matter?
Kari Heber (May 4): I was on vacation when
the whole Chicago thread started, and rather that
Autumn 2003
sorting through all my old e-mail, I took the lazy
way out and deleted everything I missed and started
afresh (coming back to >400 messages was just too
much).
However, I was very interested in what I read of
the discussion of Chicago, particularly the following:
Susan Malmrose: “I don’t know how we missed
the satire, but we did. I usually find satire funny.
This I found appalling. Nothing funny about it
anywhere.”
Richard Dutcher: “I would argue that satire is
not exclusively a tool for comedy. You were sup-
posed to be appalled.”
This continued on as a discussion about whether
or not Chicago was more about celebrating our
debauchery and sinfulness than about anything
else, or if by being appalled we (the audience) are
supposed to reject the behavior presented to us.
(Sorry, I’m summarizing, having accidentally
deleted the string and still too lazy to sort through
the archives.)
All of the discussion leads me to ask the follow-
ing question (and I apologize if this has been discussed
before): Does intent of the author/playwright/
screenwriter/director/producer even matter when it
comes to interpreting the “message” of an artistic
endeavor?
It is my belief that it doesn’t. What matters is the
message and interpretation the audience gives to
the work. That is why Jongiorgi’s recent quotation
from Friends is so important. “Know your audi-
ence.” If your audience is disaffected Christians
and antireligious types, then maybe Piss Christ will
be interpreted the way you intend, but if your audi-
ence is active believing Christians (of any faith)
then with a crucifix in a bottle of urine or a pic-
ture of the Madonna made out of dung your
intended message is not likely one that will find
resonance. [. . .]
Having never seen Chicago, I can’t speak from
experience, but while Richard says we’re supposed
to be appalled by the behavior we see, it doesn’t
really matter that the playwright intended us to be
appalled, if this was really his intention. In our cur-
rent American culture most people will see this and
say, “That looks like it would have been a great
Autumn 2003 102
time to live.” Just like the average nineteen-year-old
marine sees Platoon and sees his life and training
glorified.
It doesn’t matter if Richard Paul Evans’s intent
was to tell a beautiful love story, the message that
some will get is that adultery is OK and there are
no real consequences to it.
It doesn’t matter if the future Mel Gibson movie
about the life of Christ is intended to be uplifting
and a testament to Him. What will matter to many
is how religious leaders of different faiths interpret
it, and how they give “their message” of it to their
followers.
It doesn’t matter if the Teletubbies are intended
to be good clean fun for preschool age children,
some will interpret a purple clad male with a purse,
and named Tinky-Winky, as promoting the “homo-
sexual lifestyle.”
However, Amelia Parkin spoke briefly in a sepa-
rate post that she came to a greater appreciation of
Angels in America after coming to a better under-
standing of Kushner’s intent. And others have said
similar things over the months I have
lurked/semiparticipated.
So, with that I come back to my original ques-
tion: Does the intended message of a work of art
make one iota of difference after that art as been
released for public consumption? And I don’t mean
in a large socio-political view (i.e., boycotting Mel
Gibson or the Teletubbies, protesting and outlaw-
ing the showing of Piss Christ, or not sell-
ing/distributing a book). As a consumer of art,
should I be concerned with the intended message,
or is it more important for me to explore my reac-
tion to it?
I believe the latter is ultimately more personally
fulfilling. Rather than asking how I was supposed
to feel after partaking, it is more interesting to dis-
cover what I felt and why I felt that way, and to
what capacity my beliefs and/or actions will change
(or not) afterwards.
Harlow Clark (May 6): Perhaps [intent doesn’t
matter], but that comes awfully close to saying the
author didn’t intend anything. Kari gives some good
examples of why intent doesn’t matter, though the
long quote from Swofford mostly reminds me of
IRREANTUM
Peter Thorpe’s jeremiad, Why Literature Is Bad for
You. Thorpe says that given the amount of time
and effort it takes to portray war or any other situ-
ation, the only thing art can do is approve. He says
this is particularly true of satire, for much the same
reason Swofford says it’s true of anti-war films (even
Cacoyannis’s The Trojan Women, I would suppose,
could be pornography for soldiers who dream of
the power expressed in bashing a baby’s head
against a wall). [. . .]
The point behind all [your] examples, though, is
not that intent doesn’t matter but that the author’s
intent doesn’t control our reactions to something.
We can use an idea, story, technology for things
outside what the author intended.
But let me contradict myself and suggest one
way in which the author’s intent does control our
reaction. I’m just finishing my second reading of
Luther’s translation, “Evangelium des Matthaeus.”
Earlier today I read where the high priests rip their
clothes and say, “This man has blasphemed God,
what need have we of further witnesses.” (A deeply
ironic passage, because even though they’ve adver-
tised for false witnesses, and many have come to
the trial, the high priests can’t find any who have
anything to say.)
There are people who believe that the man in
question, who was subsequently tortured to death,
was a blasphemer, and that given the laws of the
time he deserved the torture. But I have never
heard anyone argue that that is the message of
“Evangelium des Matthaeus.” Or of Markus,
Lukas, oder Johannes.
There are many, many different, even conflict-
ing, interpretations of all four works, but I know of
no one who has claimed that these four writers felt
that the rabbi whose life and death they chronicled
deserved such a vicious painful death.
If the author’s intent matters as little as Swofford
says, surely someone would be reading the Evange-
lists’ work as a celebration of Roman political power,
or to revel in the details of Roman torture. [. . .]
I found a useful concept in Reynolds Price’s
“A Single Meaning: Notes on the Origins and Life
of Narrative,” the introductory essay to his book of
Bible story translations, A Palpable God. He talks at
IRREANTUM 103
length about why he believes scriptural stories are
accounts of real events that happened to real people.
Discussing the story of Jacob’s wrestle at Penuel,
Price says, “A modern reader, religious or not, faced
with the final text, whatever its vicissitudes and ear-
lier forms, is likely to ask the central question
first—What does this story ask me to believe? Either
kind of reader would surely say, It asks me to believe
precisely what it says” (32).
Of course, Price is using a rhetorical device. He’s
well aware that many modern readers don’t ask
what the story wants them to believe, that there are
readers who accept the story as scripture but don’t
believe it records an actual event. He’s also well
aware that there are people who don’t believe the
story precisely because they recognize that it asks
them to believe that what is says happened hap-
pened. Asking what a story wants you to believe
allows Price to examine how Bible stories held him
(and millions more “over nearly four millennia”
[33]) in “helpless belief.” Which is the dream of
any storyteller, to give the readers the deep satisfac-
tion and comfort of belief in truth.
An interesting fictional treatment of this idea
that scripture makes certain demands on us is in
Robert A. Christmas’s “Another Angel” (in Levi
Peterson’s anthology, Greening Wheat, also in Dia-
logue 14:2 [1981], and in Christmas’s The Fiction).
It’s about a woman on her honeymoon, having
married one of her grad school profs who is sort of
running away from the Church. After hearing a bit
about the B of M she decides to trace all the sources
JS used to write it for her dissertation. Instead she
begins responding to the book’s message, very
upsetting to her husband.
I would also say that based on essays like Lionel
Trilling’s “On the Teaching of Modern Literature”
(in Beyond Culture) and John S. Tanner’s “Making
a Mormon Out of Milton” (BYU Studies 24:2
[1984]) that there are ethical and unethical read-
ings and uses of a work of art, and we ought to try
to treat works of art ethically.
Clark Goble (May 5): We have two competing
traditions. In the one, we recognize that we are to
judge according to the desires of one’s heart. In the
Autumn 2003
other we recognize that we are judged according to
our works. Summed up, we have the old maxim,
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
I think some artists wish to be judged according
to their intents and can’t understand when people
judge them according to their works. Further they
face the fact that works are interpreted according to
the norms of the community you live in. I could
proceed with a long linguistic explanation of why
this must be so. But I’ve done that all too often in
the past here. So let me just say that any artist who
is producing public art has to recognize the public
meaning of what they produce.
If you aren’t writing public art, then the rules are
different. If you are writing public art then you had
better be aware of your public. . . . I rather liked
Jongiorgi’s analogy from Friends in this regard.
Know your audience. [. . .]
Results alone are never the sole purview of the
professional or artist. To think that it ought to be
so to me highlights the huge disconnect between
some artists and the public they ostensibly serve.

Autumn 2003 104 IRREANTUM

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Order Form
( ) AML membership
Includes IRREANTUM subscription, a copy of the book-length AML Annual, discounts to
AML events, and support of AML efforts.
Annual dues: ( ) $25 regular
( ) $20 full-time students
( ) $100 contributing
( ) $250 sustaining
( ) IRREANTUM subscription without AML membership
Four issues: $16
( ) IRREANTUM back issues (prices include postage)
To view the complete table of contents for each issue, visit www.aml-online.org.
___ March 1999 ($3): Premiere issue
___ June 1999 ($3): Interview with Marvin Payne
___ Sept. 1999 ($3): Interview with Levi Peterson
___ Winter 1999–2000 ($3): Interview with Rachel Ann Nunes
___ Spring 2000 ($3): Interview with Margaret Young
___ Summer 2000 ($4): Interview with Dean Hughes
___ Autumn 2000 ($4): Interviews with Richard Dutcher, Robert Van Wagoner
___ Winter 2000–2001 ($4): Interviews with Dave Wolverton, Mary Clyde
___ Spring 2001 ($4): Interview with Robert Kirby
___ Summer 2001 ($4): Interviews with Anne Perry, Brian Evenson
___ Autumn 2001 ($5): Eugene England memorial
___ Winter 2001–2 ($5): Interview with Brady Udall
___ Spring 2002 ($5): Interview with Robert Smith
___ Summer 2002 ($5): Interview with Terry Tempest Williams
___ Aumumn 2002 ($5): Interviews with Douglas Thayer, Paul Edwards
___ Winter 2002–3 ($5): Interview with Rick Walton
___ Spring 2003 ($5): Interviews with Jana Reiss, Douglas Alder, Orson Scott Card
___ Summer 2003 ($5): Interviews with Anita Stansfield, Madeline Baker
( ) The AML is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so donations are tax deductible.
Total donation: ______
Total enclosed: ______
Make check payable to AML and mail to:
AML, P.O. Box 51364, Provo, UT 84605-1364.

Name __________________________________
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This form may be photocopied
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[outside back cover]