First, I am reading my short story, “The Mile High Club,” at the end of July at the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City, so while I am in town, I wanted to invite any writers, readers, and/or critics of Mormon literature who will be in the SLC area to join me for dinner on July 31 or August 1. If you are interested in this Gathering of the Tribes, please email me at robert.bennett@montana.edu, and we can work out the details.

Second, because I have been working on my story, I decided to take a month off from my Substack and repost an earlier post to celebrate Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s “Sister Wives” which just won the AML best short story award and deserves to be more widely read and discussed. I cannot recommend this story highly enough, and this post was one of my earliest, so many of you may not have read it yet. If you have already read it, then you can take a month off, too, or better yet, take this time to read the story. It is included in the bonus issue of Irreantum 22 (Eternities of Cats) which is available both as a (very inexpensive) ebook and as an (inexpensive) print copy. This collection was also nominated for the AML’s best short story collection of the year, so you will be getting two award contenders for the price of one.

The bonus issue of Irreantum 22 (Eternities of Cats) includes three works: (two previously published)—Michael Fillerup’s long story/short novella, “The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood,” and Melissa Leilani Larsen’s play, Pilot Program—and one new publication—Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s long story/short novella, “Sister Wives.” I will leave aside Fillerup’s piece since I intend to do a separate post on it when I review his larger collection of the same name in which it was first published. In addition, the other two works deserve shared consideration because they share a common theme of the—at least the last time I checked—fictional restoration of polygamy in the contemporary church. Fillerup’s story does as well, but with a conceptual twist that puts it in a slightly different category.

Since I can highly recommend both works as must reads—as in you aren’t in the cool kids’ club unless you have read them—I do not want to spoil their clever plot twists and brilliant details. So, this isn’t going to be an in the weeds Cliff Notes summary of their plots and characters. Both works are far too good for such reductive analysis. You really have to read them yourselves. Instead, this is a 30,000 foot overview of their central conceit: that polygamy could be restored either as a pilot program (Larsen) or as a general directive to the entire church (Rytting). While Larsen’s play was first performed a decade ago and Rytting’s story is first published in this issue, the clever pairing of the two works in this bonus issue suggests that this particular idea has perhaps been brewing and percolating—if Mormon texts are allowed to brew and percolate—in the recent Mormon literary zeitgeist.

I want to explore why this theme might be so important—at this particular moment—for a variety of literary, social, and theological reasons. Admittedly, this is an entirely speculative analysis told from the perspective of a reader not the writers themselves. I have not consulted either writer, so I cannot speak to their authorial intentions, but I am more simply trying to explain how these ideas strike me as one reader who is deeply interested in the question that these two writers raise of why polygamy and why now? Why might multiple writers choose to explore the restoration of polygamy in the contemporary church? Let me count the ways.

First, the idea is laugh out loud funny, and doubly so with Larsen’s suggestion that it could simply be rolled out as a pilot program. This is a simple matter of incongruity. For well over a century the church has been desperately attempting to disassociate itself from its polygamist past. Its leaders have cut their beards. Its policies have created uninhabitable no man’s land barriers between the Brighamite church and its polygamous offshoots. Its leaders deflect any mentions of polygamy from the pulpit or in the press. It is routinely whitewashed and glossed over in the church curriculum. It is the history which shall not be named. To think that the church would simply reverse a course that it has so relentlessly pursued for over a century is hysterical.

Moreover, these two texts not only suggest that the church could reverse course on this issue, but they more ridiculously suggest that it might be able to do so relatively smoothly and seamlessly. Another possible humorous plot line: that Mormons are such sheeple they might actually go along with anything their leaders suggest, including a second go-round with polygamy. Another definitely humorous plot line: reintroducing polygamy would create numerous humorously awkward day-to-day interactions between husbands and wives. Much of the pleasure of both narratives is the way they so cleverly and carefully explore these uncomfortable intimate interpersonal dynamics. Rytting, in particular, reveals her expertise as a Jane Austen scholar with her deft handling of the comedy of manners genre. Much comic hijinks ensue.

But second, the idea of reintroducing polygamy is no laughing matter at all. For all that the church has done to distance itself from polygamy, it has never quite cut the umbilical cord tying the contemporary church to its polygamous roots. It has never decanonized Section 132, for instance, or even denounced it as a false doctrine or a theological mistake. The Manifesto did, in fact, end polygamy as a practice, but not as a doctrine or a theology. The church has never explicitly stated whether polygamy might still be practiced (or perhaps even required) in the afterlife. It has continued to seal men to multiple women (living and dead) in its temples. It has current prophets and apostles who have set the example of being polygamously sealed to multiple women eternally. In short, it has (at least temporarily, at least sort of) ceased the practice of polygamy, but it has never cleaned up the hot theological mess that polygamy continues to cast over the church. What Carol Lynn Pearson calls The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy.

In the end, therefore, these two narratives are so funny precisely because they are not funny at all. The church may not be on the precipice of reintroducing polygamy anytime soon, but every Mormon woman faces the very real possibility that the minute she dies she could be instantly reintroduced to the principle. These texts may deflect that eternal reality into a temporal comedy, but they certainly suggest its possibility and explore its dynamics. The church has never claimed that this won’t happen. In fact, it has repeatedly hinted that it might. With Dallin H. Oaks even recently suggesting that we might have Mothers in Heaven, in the plural.

In short, the church wants to have its clean-cut Mitt Romney Mormonism cake and eat its polygamous history, too. It wants to claim that we would, of course, never practice polygamy today while still maintaining that its leaders were inspired to introduce and continue the practice for half a century. By suggesting that the contemporary church could reintroduce polygamy, these two stories highlight the fact that in crucial ways it has never entirely, altogether left the practice behind. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to reintroduce after all. All it takes is a few focus groups and a pilot program. And maybe 17.5 million sheeple.

Third, it makes for great literature and theater. As I have already suggested it makes for great comedy, sort of straddling the boundary between a comedy of manners and a comedy of errors. But even more so, it allows the writers to explore the fine details of the human comedy of manners. The multitude of subtle and nuanced ways that people act and interact in real life. And how actors and characters interact in fiction. If there is one compliment I can pay these writers, it is that they are not propogandists. They are not trying to score political or theological points. They are not concerned—or at least not primarily concerned—with making grand statements about the nature (let alone unmitigated evil) of polygamy. They are interested instead in exploring the many complex ways in which the interpersonal dynamics of polygamy might play out in life or in fiction. What makes these stories so compelling is the fine attention to detail that these writers pay to the human interactions in their texts. It is delightful to see them work through these dynamics without aggressively either condoning or condemning the practice or theology of polygamy.

Instead, they let the reader creatively imagine just what the dynamics of polygamy might actually feel like in the modern world. You just have three people on the stage or on the page trying to figure things out with their unique combinations of ingenuity and incompetence. If these stories depict anything, they depict the very real human struggle—the envies and affections, the slights and considerations—that polygamy was and would be. Comedy aside, these are masterful studies of the indomitable human spirit confronting an almost Sisyphean task. They are master sketches of what it means to be human and interact with other humans. Polygamy simply provides an exceptional setting for exploring the complex dynamics of human interactions, and both writers take full advantage of the possibilities this situation affords.

Finally, perhaps the most important reason these writers explore polygamy is to comment on contemporary gender relations in modern Mormon culture. These works are not just about the past of polygamy; they are equally about the now of Mormon gender roles and expectation. In this sense, they pair nicely with Fillerup’s story which also explores contemporary Mormon gender politics. If polygamy could slide so easily into the contemporary church, maybe this should give us all cause to pause to reconsider just how much today’s doctrine of gender complementarianism falls short of anything remotely resembling full-on gender equality.

Certainly, most Mormon men mean well, and if called by God would do their best to personally practice polygamy in as equitable a manner as possible. The problems with polygamy, however, are not simply personal inequalities, but rather structural ones. Suggesting that contemporary Mormon gender roles may still be—at least in some respects—closer to polygamy than to a feminist world in which women hold the priesthood—though Fillerup does explore that idea as well—certainly calls into question just how much men are still privileged over women in the church, from its beginnings to the present day and by all signs (pace Fillerup) well into the future as well.

Larsen and Rytting ask Mormon men just how much have they truly forsaken the gender inequalities of our polygamous past—and Mormon women just how far they are willing to tolerate these same inequalities. Larsen and Rytting’s polygamy may be a gentler, kinder polygamy, but at the end of the day they really are not suggesting that a polygamy 2.0 might be more tolerable than its predecessor; they are reminding us that we still have unfinished business. We must once and forever kill off the zombie-ghost that polygamy is: the not-quite-distant-enough past that seemingly resurrects itself in eerie and haunting ways. Their ghost of polygamy present may be genteel, but it is still polygamy, and it still needs a stake driven through its heart, or it may be coming to a pilot program near you.

Just a quick reminder that the AML (Association for Mormon Letters) awards are coming up on June 20^th from 3:00-6:00 mountain time, so you can look forward to several new posts on my substack about this year’s excellent short story nominees and winners in the upcoming months.

This month, to celebrate Pride, however, I’m completing my survey of the BIG 5 Mormon short story anthologies of the last couple decades, concluding with Johnny Townsend and Jeff Laver’s Latter-Gay Saints: An Anthology of Gay Mormon Fiction. I cannot emphasize enough how much I recommend it, but unfortunately it is also regrettably out of print and used copies are becoming increasingly hard to find. Luckily, however, I was able to procure a copy thanks to Jeff Laver, and in the spirit of the Perpetual Emigration Fund, I’d like to make it available to as many people as possible. I will send it for free to anyone who wants to read it. All I ask is that you read it in a reasonable amount of time after receiving it and mail it back to me (Robert Bennett / 1502 S. Black Ave. / Bozeman, MT 59715) after you have finished, so that I can pass it on to the next person. If you are interested in having a turn, just email me (robert.bennett@montana.edu), and I will add you to the list. It’s now required reading for any well-read Mormon short story afficionado (which I assume you all are if you are reading this substack)—and it’s free—so you have no excuse not to be au courant anymore.

When I took Eugene England out behind the woodshed last month in “The Shock of the New,” I was just having a little fun. It was just a couple of middling English professors sparring in some dive gym somewhere in North Philly. All just for laughs. The stuff of Saturday morning cartoons. Tom and Jerry. Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam. Road Runner and Coyote. Just a couple of frenemies bitching about literature. Mere words, words, words as someone wiser than I once put it. I’ll freely admit that I may have thrown a couple cheap shots, possibly even one or two punches below the belt. I may have even lost the fight for all that I care, but nobody can accuse me of going down without a fight. And certainly not of punching down. He’s Eugene England for heaven’s sake. His reputation can survive a couple rounds in the ring with anybody, and I’m just a nobody. But he’s the godfather of Mormon letters. The OG. The Mormon Shakespeare—or at least Mormonism’s answer to Harold Bloom. (Sorry. I just couldn’t resist one last cheap shot.)

But this month, my analysis of Johnny Townsend and Jeff Laver’s Latter-Gay Saints will tackle something far more important. This one is personal. This one matters. Viscerally and existentially. So, I apologize in advance if I run a little long—this will probably be the longest post that I will ever write on this substack, so bear with me on this one. It’s that important to me, and it probably should be to you, too. Because I have both dear friends and close family who live at the complex intersection between the LGBTQ and Mormon communities—often painfully so. And unless you have been living somewhere under a log for the past two decades, so do you.

This time, therefore, I write not merely as a literature professor, but also as an ally, as a friend, and as a father. So, buckle up!

Simply put, the time is far past when Mormons can afford to neglect latter-gay voices any longer, and the stories in this volume are a collective voice—whether from the dust or crying in the wilderness I haven’t decided—clamoring to be heard. I’m not addressing the church at large right now, but rather I speak specifically to the community of Mormon letters. The church may have its theology, its policies and handbooks, and even its Proclamation on the Family, which collectively limit its ability to even hear, let alone embrace and celebrate, LGBTQ voices. So be it.

But we, as writers and readers, are not beholden to the rigid strictures of ecclesiastical edicts and church discipline. The church may deny its LGBTQ members temple recommends, or even excommunicate them, but us people of the book are duty bound to, if nothing else, at least hear their voices and read their words. Every story matters! I’m not saying that you must agree with them, embrace their theology, or even empathize with their lives. (You can still be boorish or even bigoted if you really want to). But you don’t have to be a big tent Mormon to realize that, in the year of our Lord 2026, these latter-gay voices at least deserve a seat at the table of Mormon letters. If you don’t already believe me, read Langston Hughes “I, Too,” hang your head in shame, and correct the error of your ways.

But this immediately presents me with a dilemma. I have just claimed, in my last post no less, to have carved in stone my Mount Rushmore of Mormon short story anthologies, including—simply in chronological order—Eugene England’s Bright Angels and Familiars, Robert Perry Raleigh’s In Our Lovely Deseret, Angela Hallstrom’s Dispensations, and Andrew Hall and Raleigh’s The Path and the Gate. After reading Townsend and Laver’s anthology, however, I am absolutely, unequivocally, irrevocably convinced that one of these must go. A true Rushmore means four and only four (forget about it, Trump), and IMHO Latter-Gay Saints—on virtually any account imaginable—absolutely deserves to be one of them.

Maybe only Roosevelt in your book. I’ll leave it for you to decide which is who, and I’ll let you pick for yourselves which of the other four to discard. I don’t have a horse in those particular races today, but the voices of latter-gay saints simply can no longer be marginalized as just a niche subfield, let alone second-class citizens. These stories are now required reading on any serious syllabus of Mormon literature, and they will figure prominently on the final exam at the end of the semester because this anthology deserves—on its merits—a central place in the canon, a call-up to the major leagues, and a seat at the cool kids’ table. In short, its own face on Rushmore.

And I’m not just trying to be DEI politically correct or even generically multiculturally inclusive here. Issues of gender and sexuality are not something that simply belong to some minority LGBTQ community; they have become one of, if not the, central defining issue within Mormonism itself writ large for the entire Twenty-first Century. They have arguably provoked its most controversial musket fire sermons and ill-fated policies of exclusion, they have definitely fueled the church’s most disastrous public relations pyrrhic victory with Proposition 8 in California, they have probably caused the most resignations of church membership and the more diffuse PIMO(physically in, mentally out)-ization of its remaining members, and they have pervasively touched—when they haven’t outright devastated—virtually every single ward if not quite every family in the church. And personally, I don’t see these issues going away anywhere anytime soon. Even the most devout members must admit that issues of gender and sexuality are the central focal, and flash, point of the church’s single most, if not only, truly epoch-defining revelation—the Proclamation on the Family—since President Kimball’s reversal of the priesthood and temple ban half a century ago.

Simply put, to be a Mormon standing on the edge of the Twenty-first Century—whether you are gay, straight, or fluid; whether you find yourself in the center of the inside or on the far edges of the outside—is to take a stand on issues of gender and sexual identity. Period. Full stop. Because even if you are personally comfortable in your own personal church-approved identity, the church as an institution does not approve of the full expression of LGBTQ identities. It has drawn a line in the sand. It has taken a stand. It has chosen this hill to die on. So, if you choose to affiliate with the church either directly or obliquely, I think it is fair to expect that you have a well-thought-out and principled opinion about where you personally stand on these issues.

I believe, however, that it is simply irresponsible, this late in the game, to form such opinions without at least listening to the stories of those who have been most directly impacted by the church’s official theology and policies regarding gender and sexuality. I’m not even suggesting that you should not support official church policies on these matters. I am only insisting, as forcefully as I can, that no one can in good conscious unquestioningly defend the church’s party line on gender and sexuality with muskets—or even with trowels—anymore unless they have at least first listened to the voices of our own community of fellow latter-gay saints. And for a member of the community of Mormon Letters, there is no better place to start than reading Latter-Gay Saints.

* * *

That said, let me get one thing straight up front, this is not just an anthology about latter-gay sexuality, it is also an anthology of well-crafted fiction. Homosexuality is perhaps central to every story, but that doesn’t mean you can forget that these stories are also simply great literature that belongs in any literary anthology. Maybe no story reveals these dual gay and literary dimensions more clearly than Donna Banta’s “The Call”: a masterful mystery story about a Mormon missionary found “dangling behind the LDS mission home” with the words “fag hater” spray painted across his suit coat. Obviously a hate crime, the mission president explains to the detective on the case. Just more evidence that “Mormons have been persecuted for nearly two centuries.”

Like every superb mystery, however, this story is full of clever, even brilliant, twists and turns guided by some real hardboiled gumshoe footwork. Immediately on the surface, of course, homosexuality figures prominently in the story, but ultimately the careful construction of this story’s complex plot explores homosexuality in many more ways and in much more interesting ways than you might expect at first glance. And the story’s engagement with Mormonism also extends far beyond simply its relation to homosexuality to include at the very least mission rule-breaking, religious guilt, Mormonism’s persecution complex, and the sacred cow of protecting the good name of the church at all costs.

Consequently, this story is an intriguing exploration of homosexuality, a complex narrative about Mormonism, and also quite simply just a damn good detective story. It belongs side by side with James Goldberg’s “The Case of Frau K”—a nominee for the 2025 AML short story award—which tells a story where the missionaries are “detectives” trying to solve the surprising “mystery” of why an investigator is reluctant to come to church. Both are perfect stories that belong together in any collection of Mormon mystery stories. One just happens to involve homosexuality, as both a central theme and a compelling plot device, intricately interweaving its gayness with its literariness. You would have to be willfully ignorant, however, to not see how its clever and complex engagement with homosexuality—which is simply too good to give away—makes this story much better, not worse, even simply as a work of fiction, let alone as insightful social commentary.

Another popular Mormon genre is the day-in-the-life of a bishop story. Both Levi Peterson’s “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights” and Ryan Shoemaker’s “The Lord’s Sacred Funds” comically explore how one of a bishop’s fundamental quotidian duties is to care for the poor and needy. This is, after all, the fourth mission of the church. But outside of Townsend and Laver’s anthology—and maybe Walter Kirn’s occasionally maligned classic, “Planetarium”—few Mormon authors have really tackled one of a bishop’s other primary tasks: pastorally regulating youths’—or even adults’—sexuality. Drawing on Mark E. Peterson’s LOL infamous memorandum on masturbation, a little calendar marked off with black ink marks day by day, and a wrist tied to a bedframe, Rik Isensee’s “The Summer My Cousin Turned Mormon” similarly satirizes church leaders’ often over-the-top attempts to monitor young Mormons’ youthful explorations of masturbation. In M. Larsen’s “M.T.C. Interview,” an M.T.C. branch president hears the confession of a new Elder’s homosexual dalliance with a fellow Elder in the M.T.C. By the time we get to John Bennion’s “The Interview,” a soon to be not-newlywed gay man confesses that he can no longer go forward with his planned nuptials because of his deficient heterosexuality. All three stories tell distinct variations on the sexual confessional with different twists, but by the time we get to the third story about church leaders’ often deeply flawed attempts to exercise jurisdiction over their flocks’ sexuality, we might begin to wonder if there isn’t a fifth mission of the church: policing kids’ genitals.

The stories in this anthology may include specifically homosexual elements, but it’s the lock of the day to bet that your average Mormon youth, heterosexual or homosexual, can relate more to these stories of ecclesiastical sexual supervision on a more personal level than they can to Mormon fiction about almost any other topic. Once again, every Mormon youth experiences it, but many straight Mormon writers seem reticent to talk about it. Personally, I suspect that one reason why is because it is immediately obvious that Mormon leaders’ attempts to police sexuality are often highly problematic, and many more devotional writers shy away from such critical depictions of the church. It is refreshing to see writers address these issues so thoughtfully and candidly in homosexual contexts, but who is going to represent the experiences of our straight youth? They say a people without stories flounders. I think we are floundering. We probably need fundamental structural change, but even that can sometimes begin with compelling stories.

I’ve praised Ryan Shoemaker’s “Righteous Road” as a Good Samaritan level exploration of not just moral responsibility, in general, but more specifically the complexity of moral responsibility, in particular. In “M.T.C. Interview,” M. Larsen develops an equally biblical sense of the complexity of moral dilemmas. I won’t spoil this excellent story by telling you outright what that moral dilemma is but suffice it to say that the story demonstrates how sexuality involves much more than just body parts and bodily fluids. In this story, a simple gay indiscretion becomes the smithy in which is forged a powerful exploration of larger moral issues involving at the very least honesty, responsibility, selfishness, and integrity. If by devotional we simply mean literature that protects the good name of the church by always representing Mormonism in the most positive light, then this anthology may be found wanting. But if we mean a truly broader and deeper existential exploration of religious morality and human values at large, then this story, among several others in the anthology, stands head-to-head with any in the Mormon canon—even Shoemaker’s.

Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner’s “Strong Like Water” presents a particularly poignant variation on complex moral dilemmas as it explores the fraught situation of a man (Peter) awakening to his homosexuality and coming out to his wife (Karmine) years into their marriage—with kids—forcing them both to grapple with the difficult question of what to do in the face of daunting uncertainty: should he stay, or should he go? Will Peter’s infidelities even bring him the happiness and sexual freedom/integrity that he seeks, which even he himself is beginning to have second thoughts about? And at what cost? Is this really a price that he is willing to pay? Obviously, it is, or at least it has been, or he wouldn’t even find himself in this situation, but is this really a cost that he is willing to keep paying as well? And how will Karmine become collateral damage in the process? And the kids? (Emily January Petersen’s “I Love You No Matter What” explores this situation from a kid’s perspective.) These are all additional questions unto themselves. Once you come out of the closet, especially as a married person with children, there is often a whole house full of rooms, and existential quandaries, that you must now deal with as well.

Brilliantly focused as much, if not more, on Karmine as it is on Peter, this story, in particular, explores the often devastating impact that one person’s sexual choices have, especially when it involves infidelity—however rationalized or justified or not—on their partners and families who inevitably must also pay a high price for their decisions. Certainly, such complex existential questions offer no simple solutions—if they are even answerable at all. You can call it a cost benefit analysis if you want to, and it is, but it is also so much more than that. At least in part because there are so many uncertain and interdependent variables which so frequently place individuals in one Catch-22 or another.

Yet another thing that Van Wagoner cleverly does is remind the reader that issues of sexuality are not an island unto themselves. They do not happen in a vacuum but rather play themselves out amidst all the other multiple busy complexities of life. When the story’s brilliant first line says that the “same week Karmine discovers her husband is having an affair with a man, she takes her mother to a doctor, who finds a tiny patch of cancer on the tip of the old woman’s nose” this is only the beginning of her aging mother’s physical and mental problems which Karmine now must also balance with her own marital difficulties. Ultimately, it is hard to make one’s own personal choices while simultaneously trying to deal with the moving target of another person’s choices while you are also on a moving train, so to speak. And did I mention that the train is now also being shot at by bandits, too. Throughout this anthology, issues of gender and sexuality are frequently intertwined in complex ways with larger moral issues that extend far beyond simple sexuality itself.

I have also praised Shoemaker’s The Righteous Road for its charming sense of humor, and this anthology is funny, too, but often with a broader range of humor. Much of the humor is not LOL haha funny, but rather more serio-comic. Sometimes even dark. The kind of stuff that often makes you simultaneously want to both laugh and cry. There is the dark humor of Banta’s “The Call,” which ends with tragedies within tragedies, but you have to laugh—almost gleefully through tears—when the detectives finally serve the real criminals their comeuppance. There is also the hysterical image of Isensee’s teenage convert trying, at the behest of his spiritual leaders, to resist the urge to masturbate by tying his hand to the bedframe, but that’s not really funny. Nor is it funny when another missionary is advised by another leader to follow Elder Packer’s infamous advice to physically assault anyone who makes a homosexual advance toward him. Not funny either. Although Elder Packer did tell it as a punchline. So, is it funny after all? Probably just a bad joke. But are bad jokes actually funny? There is a lot in the gay Mormon experience at large, and within the stories in this anthology, in particular, that definitely lies in that no-man’s zone of the funny/not funny. This anthology as a whole may not be quite as ROFL funny as Neal Chandler’s hysterical benediction (in “Benediction”), but the range and complexity of its humor is arguably unmatched in Mormon short fiction.

If you want to read the one story where everything in this anthology all comes together in one place, however, I believe that it is in Johnny Townsend’s “Partying with St. Roch.” I’m not going to insist that every reader should find this the best story in the anthology, although I—both wearing my professional hat as a literature professor and lounging on a beach towel as a lay reader—personally do. And if you are new to all this, I’m certainly not going to suggest that this should be the first story that you read. On the contrary, you should probably break yourself in more gently and read the anthology starting from its proper beginning. This is a legitimately challenging story—as an exploration of sexuality, as a critique of Mormonism, and simply as a work of literature—but it is also the story where one finds the most creative and complete—the tastiest—combination of the anthology’s basic ingredients: the gay and the Mormon, the literary and the sexual, and the LOL funny with the this really isn’t a laughing matter anymore.

Let’s start with the funny/not funny. This story is chock full of comic incongruities. When the protagonist’s boyfriend, Dennis, is introduced as having a Coke problem, it is as in Coke the soda pop, not coke the illegal drug. Having been raised a caffeine teetotaler, however, he had never even drunk the beverage until his first trip to a gay bar. Arguably the most incongruous comic image—its set piece—is when the couple role plays a little gay sex wearing “missionary” name tags for “Elder Top” and “Elder Bottom” representing the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-gay Saints.” Hilarious for some. Not so funny for others. Just like the protagonist’s missionary story about having gay sex on his mission. Comic incongruity? Definitely. Funny/not funny? Humor is probably only in the eye of the beholder.

This anthology’s occasionally blasphemous and sacrilegious sense of humor may not be your cup of tea, but don’t you have to admit that this sexual roleplaying is at least a clever play on the “missionary” position even if you have recently become a staunch defender of the proper name of the church? The real unfunny—and poignant—incongruity, however, is when during this sexual roleplaying the protagonist notices his partner’s “large black Karposi’s lesions,” painful reminders of both his partner’s AIDS and the protagonist’s desire to “memorize every sexual encounter with him, so that I could replay them after he [is] gone.” Between the jokes then, this story is serious, very serious, even deadly serious about such significant issues as the tragic realities of AIDS and the protagonist’s recurring fears that he might be “going to hell” because the actual Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints goes “around spreading such a plague of hateful teachings in the first place.” Even if the protagonist occasionally makes a few jokes at the church’s expense, who really bears the greater blame here? Which is the greater sin? A little playful sacrilege, or outright damning a soul to hell in the name of the Almighty Jehovah? No matter how funny this story gets, however, it never leaves the complex liminal space of the serio-comic because its humorous punchlines are always quickly followed by serious knock-out punches.

This story’s gay/Mormon polarity is equally obvious and significant. Even though the gay couple now attend the Unitarian church, they are both immediately introduced as “excommunicated Mormons,” a constant reminder of the ever-present tension, even conflict, between their religious and their sexual identities. I’ve already mentioned the faux missionary nametags, another reminder that religion and sexuality travel hand in hand throughout this story, but religion and sexuality’s most dramatic confluence in this story occurs when the protagonist’s stake president “lovingly” warns him that he is “pray[ing] that God will give [him] AIDS, for [his] own good” to “help [him] repent.” What more needs to be said about Mormonism’s miserable and damaging “outreach” to the LGBTQ community? The church’s rhetoric may have softened over time, but it has never fundamentally changed its theology and practices in any truly meaningful way at least if we are talking about the full expression of LGBTQ identities. And who wants to only be a partial self? Have you taken vows of celibacy yourself recently?

Finally, the sexual and the literary. There are some, perhaps even many who, like Eugene England, will simply remain incapable of seeing past such a story’s angry—justifiably so—denunciation of the church to consider it good (or if you want to obfuscate and say ethical instead) literature. Nonetheless, this story in particular most certainly is great literature by any reasonable standard: the delightful humor, the careful pacing, the clever imagery, the poignant symbolism, the significant themes, the deliberate premise, the well-developed complex characterization, the sharp social commentary, the careful plot structure with an inciting incident, a climax, and a little denouement, etc., etc. It’s all there, all concisely packed into a simple six-page story, at least for those who have eyes to see, but I will only briefly mention what I believe to be the story’s climax and most significant and most literary line: “Could one be inoculated against the infection of self-doubt?”

Here Townsend brilliantly ties together the entire story, including at the very least—and here I’m going to deliberately craft an overly byzantine sentence to mirror the story’s own literary complexity, so hang on and stay with me—the characters’ initial excommunication and the protagonist’s stake president’s horrific curse which—in a clear act of unrighteous dominion—would plant the seeds of self-doubt in anyone; the protagonist’s continually recurring fears that God despises him or that his “fleeting” gay relationship is somehow simply a “poor substitute” for a “‘true’ eternal marriage”—the story’s real deeper theme not just its gay sex—with a clear reminder that the unjust cause of those self-doubts is unmistakably the stake president’s naked bigotry (which is by the way not an unfair stereotype of at least what the stake president may have thought if not quite said out loud back in his day—and some still do); a clever juxtaposition between the literal treatments for the disease of AIDS and the figurative inoculation against unhealthy religious manipulation; the very real, at times crippling, life-long damage caused by the church’s hateful theology and policies regarding homosexuality; a damning suggestion, even accusation—the stake president clearly deserves his comeuppance, and turnabout is fair play, after all—that religion may be just as much of a disease as AIDS (i.e. something that we need to inoculate ourselves against).

And I want to make one very crucial point here. GAY SAINTS ARE NOT THE ONLY SAINTS WHO SUFFER FROM RELIGIOUSLY INDUCED SELF-DOUBT. In fact, if you have lived your whole life in the church and never experienced religiously induced self-doubt, I would suggest that you weren’t exactly paying attention to the program—not to mention went through puberty or served a mission. And if you don’t believe me, and you haven’t personally experienced such self-doubt yourself, just consider the epidemic of missionaries leaving their missions early these days, therapists’ recommendations in hand, because they are suffering from crippling anxiety and depression. I’m certainly not laying all the blame entirely at the feet of the church. After all, this generation is broadly anxious across the board, and self-doubt is a universal experience, but I am suggesting, as forcefully as I can with a bullhorn on a soapbox, that the church is not entirely blameless either. Any sober and impartial observer must admit that at the very least the church has room for improvement, and straight saints also have much to learn from their gay co-religionists about, if nothing else, how religious teachings, especially about sexuality, can infect you with damaging self-doubt. I’m not saying this is your personal experience, but you don’t have to walk too far in other people’s shoes to find someone who has had this experience. You don’t have to like Townsend’s blasphemous sense of humor, but if you dismiss his spiritual diagnosis and metaphor altogether, you do so at your own peril. As Ralph Ellison so memorably put it, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

I could go on, but I fear that I may be losing my readers simply at the level of grammar, let alone critical analysis. Perhaps not every line in the story is quite as brilliant as this one, but I truly believe that pound for pound this line equals, if not exceeds, virtually any other line in the entire canon of Mormon short stories. Simply on its literary merit alone, let alone its penetrating, albeit admittedly and deliberately critical, analysis of Mormon theology and day-to-day religious practices. I’ll go to my grave on it. Taken in its entirety, however, the story is bold, daring, and inventive as a work of literature in general. Experimental, and possibly even avantgarde, as a Mormon short story specifically. A real highwire act with summersaults and cartwheels no less as a penetrating social critique.

But I could also say much the same thing about Michael Fillerup’s exceptional “The Seduction of H. Lyman Winger,” which should surprise no one given Fillerup’s widely anthologized and award-winning stories, including the AML-nominated collection, The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood and Other Stories. I would say much more about this story if I was not planning to write a separate piece focusing specifically on his overall collected work. Jeff Laver’s “Peter’s Mirror” and David Leavitt’s “The Term Paper Artist” tell very different stories about gay prostitution. This may be a bridge too far for some of my readers. Like I say, feel free to draw your own ethical boundaries, but don’t dismiss these stories as literature. They are thoughtful, even poignant, creative, and engaging, and both are real page-turners, also deserving of their own standalone analysis someday. Hugo Olaiz’s “The Birth of Tragedy” is a very short story primarily about a gay brother helping a young man navigate his family’s mixed-faith heritage, but it also has a nice brief comic mix-up between a lesbian and a thespian. And with very few exceptions, the rest of the stories are also consistently strong from beginning to end.

What I hope to be demonstrating here is that even though homosexuality features prominently in each of these stories, these stories can no longer be marginalized, let alone dismissed, simply as gay stories. Their narratives belong to and explore the entire range of Mormon experiences and fiction at large, and they find perfectly legitimate, even inescapable, comps across the board. These are obviously gay stories. They are also clearly and inescapably Mormon stories. Let’s just call them latter-gay stories in a way that includes everything. Big tent. Whitmanian multitudes. I may repeat these taglines ad nauseum, but hey, it’s my brand.

* * *

At the end of the day, Latter-Gay Saints is not simply good literature; it is also challenging literature that fundamentally reconfigures our larger understanding of Mormon letters in toto. To begin with, it reminds us that issues of gender and sexuality lie at the heart of our (contested) theology and (diverse) experiences—if not quite our literature yet. With the exception of Raleigh’s In Our Lovely Deseret, and maybe the occasional fellatio in a few of David G. Pace’s stories, this centrality of gender and sexuality has not often been directly and fully recognized in Mormon short storis. I mean get real. Gay saints are not the only Mormons who masturbate or get scolded by their bishops when they do. Or feel guilty about or explore their sexuality. Often far beyond their youth. But apparently, they seem to be largely the only ones brave enough to talk about it. If stories about gay sexuality make you uncomfortable, then write your own stories about straight sex. If stories about sexuality period make you uncomfortable, well then that’s a you problem. Sex has been around a long time. Oldest profession in the world, as they say. But if this anthology’s sex is too gay for your taste, I would simply remind you that not everyone prefers the Family Proclamation’s flavor du jour: vanilla.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, Latter-Gay fiction demonstrates powerfully that gays are not one of the so-called three enemies of the church. Pace Elder Packer. Homosexuality often exists in tension with, even conflict with, Mormon theology and practice, but that does not mean that homosexuals are simply showing up out of the blue with six-shooters at the OK Corral gunning for a fight for no reason at all. Clearly, these stories express ways in which Mormonism often hurts, and rarely helps, homosexuals, and they frequently show the church in a less than flattering light. But is that their problem or the church’s? Obviously, these stories attempt to clear a space for alternative voices that are not often heard, or at least not officially recognized and understood, by the institutional church.

But such voices exist in every ward and stake of Zion. To simply ignore them does a disservice not only to them but also to the church at large. If you read these stories generously, as every story (if not quite every critical essay) deserves to be read, I think that you will find that they are on the whole more generous to the church than they could have been. This is not a burn, baby, burn anthology trying to do some kind of no-holds-barred body-slam take down of the church. It is not even a gay manifesto, although it might not be opposed to one either. It is a much more expansive thoughtful and engaging conversation between gay and Mormon voices and experiences.

Its only demand is that everybody be given a seat at the table, and nobody be sent to eat in the kitchen, as Langston Hughes puts it, “when company comes.” I’m speaking directly to you President “don’t expect us . . . to deal with you in a public situation.” Mr. prophet, seer, and revelator. You know who you are. So, who’s the problem now? I don’t think that I’m being unreasonable to suggest that this question deserves much more serious discussion—with a healthy dose of greater institutional humility and many more seats at the table—and there is no better place to begin that discussion than by reading Latter-Gay Saints.

Third, and most importantly for a substack on Mormon short stories, these are simply some of the best Mormon short stories out there. Period. Full stop. I simply cannot say this forcefully enough: Come for the homosexuality; stay for the literature. Or vice versa. I don’t care. Just show up for class, do your assigned reading, and add your own verse to the conversation if you are so moved.

I know that it’s summer, so you aren’t even supposed to have homework anymore, but let me leave you with just one last small assignment: Read Allen Ginsberg’s “America” beginning to end and consider just how many lines of this poem roughly echo—at least on some lower frequency—what the voices in Latter-Gay Saints express about the church, starting with the first line, “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” How many latter-gay saints have felt this same sense of exhaustion, and what does that tell us about how well the church’s LGBTQ outreach is working? It’s an easy assignment, and there are no right or wrong answers, even if there might be a few obvious ones, such as Ginsberg’s ultimate resolution to put his “queer shoulder to the wheel,” an expression of queer Mormon joy so delightful that you would think that he must have grown up in the faith singing the hymn. But if Latter-Gay Saints can resonate line by line with one of the greatest American poems of the Twentieth Century—simply by replacing the word America with Mormonism (and maybe the occasional atom bomb with Family Proclamation, etc., etc.)—this anthology arguably deserves a place not only in the canon of Mormon literature, but also in the canon of American literature writ large. And how many other Mormon short story anthologies can say that? Can any?

This immediately raises the question, however: Is there a Word of Wisdom for Mormon fiction? Are there literary anathemas that simply lie beyond the pale not only of orthodoxy, but even of tribal membership? Are there apostate narrative heresies and blasphemies which must be disciplined or even punished? Is there a special place in hell (I mean outer darkness) reserved for writers who deny the Holy Ghost? Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but I’m also trying to raise a serious point: Just how faithful does literature need to be in order to be classified as Mormon? Can its characters drink coffee? Can they drink beer? Can they smoke weed? Can they “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and scream with joy” a la Allen Ginsberg? When does the edgy, the provocative, the I’m having a bit of a faith crisis, the non-temple worthy, the I might be gay, or even simply just the “it’s complicated” cross over the line into an excommunicable offense, let alone an unforgiveable transgression. When is a transgressive story no longer literature? Or Mormon? Or both?

There are, of course—to my knowledge—two canonical controversies in the history of the Mormon short story: Walter Kirn’s infamous reading of “Planetarium” in one of Eugene England’s literature classes and Brian Evenson’s fateful public reading of “Killing Cats” in the Maeser Building. AI tells me that there is “no verifiable public record” of Evenson reading “Killing Cats,” but I was there, or at least I remember being there unless my memory fails me. Chime in if you were there, too, and maybe we can collectively create a verifiable public record.

But controversial as these readings may have been, neither one actually rose to the level of outright scandal. Neither story was quite the Armory Show, let alone Duchamp’s Fountain, and the public outcry against them was clearly a hysterical overreaction—mere pearl clutching if not a latter-day Salem witch trial. No serious professor of literature, or even simply any well-read person, could have reasonably objected to either story. Either as literature. Or as Mormon. England may profess that he didn’t preapprove Kirn’s reading, but he didn’t stop it either. And even as a naïve returned missionary who hadn’t even read The Catcher in the Rye yet, I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would claim that Evenson’s story crossed some kind of imaginary line of moral rectitude. Even if you didn’t get its admittedly complex more profound meditations on the nature of violence, you would have to be willfully ignorant to think that Evenson was actually condoning, or even glamorizing, killing anything, let alone real kittens. But then again, not everyone really gets the point of literature: Some BYU students did literally start their own fight club after all.

But I’m not here today to re-adjudicate these two controversial, if not quite scandalous, stories whose canonical status has long since been vindicated by history. I am simply referring to what these stories are not in order to call attention to what In Our Lovely Deseret most certainly is: a true literary gauntlet, a Rubicon, an acid test. Legitimately a scandal. Or at the very least a clear, definitive line in the sand. You don’t have to get past the anthology’s first story, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner’s “Staying Away from Blake,” to encounter what Ian Dunlop’s study of modernist art describes as the “shock of the new.” I still have never read a Mormon story that was more shockingly new, and it is almost three decades old by now. Ahead of its time. Avantgarde. Pushing the envelope. All understatements. If Raleigh wanted to immediately set a provocative tone for his anthology, his first note was pitch perfect. This story’s plot twist, in fact, is so shocking that to even mention it obliquely would spoil the experience of encountering it firsthand, so I will leave it alone for you to read for yourself—aside from admitting that if someone wanted to declare it not only controversial, but even scandalous, I’m not going to try to stop them. However, if you want to take things a step further and declare it either not literature or not Mormon—or even categorically on the surface simply bad or unethical literature—I would have to stop you right there and point out that such charges are legitimately open to debate. Not that I would shut you down before letting you make your case, but I’d certainly want to add my own personal rebuttal.

In fact, one of the reasons why I wanted to analyze this anthology was precisely because I had heard that it provoked an open debate between dueling reviews: Eugene England’s “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction” in Dialogue 32.3 (Fall 1999) and Todd Peterson’s “In Our Lovely Deseret” in Sunstone (Dec. 1998). I will assume that even a cursory acquaintance with these reviews’ respective authors and venues of publication will immediately disclose who took the pro side and who took the con, but let me clarify the general parameters upfront. While Peterson praises the anthology as “vital for the development of a true and serious Mormon literature . . . because it lays the artistic and aesthetic groundwork for that first great Mormon novel when its day finally does arrive,” England pans it for its “in-your-face impiety.” When England adds only moments later that its stories are “aggressively, didactically, unmannerly, in-your-face, and yet sentimentally manipulative,” he just seems to be piling on. But his churlishness aside, he does set the stage for a real fight: the reigning heavyweight champion of Mormon literature in one corner, our upstart challenger (Nacho Libre) in the other.

But let’s call a spade a spade here. England is certainly doing a little pearl clutching and a lot of gate-keeping all with a whiff of hypocrisy. “Danger” is arguably too strong a word to describe any work of literature, mere words on a page. And England obviously has a vested interest in maintaining the preeminence of his own earlier anthology—with both its central texts and its literary sensibilities, including its devotional overtones—as the gold standard of contemporary Mormon short fiction. Methinks the professor doth protest too much at least in part because he—rightly so—feels that Raleigh’s anthology threatens his own authority. As it arguably should.

And I’ll throw in the charge of hypocrisy to boot because England and his anthology clearly fancied themselves as the latest word in contemporary Mormon letters. The au currant arbiter of the new. The progressive tastemaker of sophistication. It is more than a little ironic, therefore, that England hides behind the imprimatur of The New Yorker to elevate Virginia Sorenson’s 1953 story (about water rights disputes) in his own anthology only to trash on Walter Kirn’s 1997 New Yorker story, which is included in Raleigh’s anthology, because somehow now The New Yorker “ought to be ashamed” of itself for simply “bash[ing]” on Mormonism.

While perhaps no one other than Richard Cracroft was attacking England from the right, Raleigh’s anthology clearly left his left flank glaringly exposed. Perhaps England’s anthology genuinely tried to open up the gate for a broader range of new and more contemporary voices, but he also wanted it to have the last word and slam the gate behind him to lock out any rival parvenus. He had no intention of opening up a Pandora’s box which might unleash anarchy into the world of Mormon letters. And make no mistake about it. England made frequent, if perhaps at best only partially successful, efforts to police both the boundaries of literature and the boundaries of Mormonism. So, while Peterson’s grandiose claims may ultimately prove overly effusive—Raleigh’s anthology is probably closer to one small step for man than a giant leap for mankind—I’d certainly take England’s bitching and moaning with a grain of salt.

I don’t have the time or space—let alone the patience—to recount England’s arguments in full, other than to largely dismiss them as generally obvious self-justifications for his own largely conservative personal preferences rather than any kind of well thought out principled critical perspective. Simplifying to the extreme, however, aside from petty griping about stories not getting the intricacies of fly-fishing right, England’s arguments largely boil down to a fundamental complaint about the “in-your-face impiety” of Raleigh’s anthology. Guilty as charged. The anthology is both undeniably in-your-face and impious. Deliberately and self admittedly so, but does that alone make it bad, or what England’s diss track calls unethical, literature?

There are no stories about wandering immortal Amerindian Jews, bishops, pioneers, or missionaries. Or at least not straight ones. There is the same number of blow jobs as baptisms for the dead, and the lone baptism is a bit tongue and cheek—for and in behalf of Marilyn Monroe. The anthology is packed chock full of a motley crew of infidels: couples married outside the temple, illegitimate children, homosexual missionaries, beer drinking missionaries, divorcees, hormonal BYU coeds, a prostitute, a snarky teenager who claims to know more about church history—including its distortions and misinformation—than his youth leaders, and even a group of ward members who throw mysterious after parties that could quite possibly land them a major reality TV deal on Hulu. One guy even digs up the corpse of Ezra Taft Benson. I won’t tell you what he tries to do with it, but you can read Brian Evenson’s “The Prophets” to find out. And they thought “Killing Cats” had a macabre sense of humor.

It is not at all hard to imagine why the anthology gave England fits, but is that an it problem or a him problem? Maybe the anthology does depict bad Mormons, at least in Heather Gay’s clever reappropriation of the term, but is it really bad literature, or is it just not the particular flavor of devotional literature that England prefers? And aren’t bad Mormons, jack Mormons, and even apostate Mormons still Mormons? Is it too much to ask that America’s homegrown religion be large enough to contain Whitmanian multitudes? We are a vast and wild tribe with a complex past, a rapidly fraying present, and an uncertain future—not a cloistered monastery—after all.

I would argue that England simply, and simplistically, equates impiety with bad (or what he calls unethical) literature or at least bad Mormon literature. To be fair, England attacks both those on the left and on the right, but his reasoning essentially advocates that every story must be some variation on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Or to be more charitable, some idealization of the Golden Mean. Anything left—or right—of center is summarily dismissed. Anything too hot or too cold is declared unpalatable. Anything that paints Mormonism in anything less than a flattering light—such as a surly teenager perhaps poking fun at the idea that Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri—is decried as “vicious fun, through extreme caricature.”

Get a grip. And grow a pair. What England wants is a sermon not a short story. And a general conference address at that. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences, but England’s attempt to disparage impious literature simply for impiety’s sake—which at the end of the day is what I believe he’s doing—smacks me as mere ecclesiastical discipline rather than sound literary analysis. Nobody says that he has to like it personally, but his efforts to render his subjective opinions of impiety objectively valid as ethics entirely fall flat. At least for me.

So, leaving aside the specifics of England’s whining, let me return to his real issue. As a literature professor, I suspect that if you pinned England down, even he would admit that some literature can be impious. What really gets stuck in his craw is the idea that Mormon literature itself can be both impious and still Mormon. Like I suggested before, it is as if England believes that there is some kind of Word of Wisdom for literature which prohibits any kind of “negative stereotyping”—except perhaps as “irony” or to “reveal an unreliable narrator.” Because, of course, a truly reliable narrator would never see, let alone say, anything negative about the church, except maybe ironically. I say ironically, or perhaps to be more precise sarcastically, although I’m not sure that England really even understands, let alone fully appreciates, irony—not to mention sarcasm.

For example, he complains that Johnny Townsend’s “Almond Milk” depicts a “zone leader from hell, a one-dimensional Nazi Mormon” just because the zone leader orders the Elder to wash his hands before leaving the apartment. Obviously, Townsend was indeed suggesting that the zone leader was a little controlling and even condescending, but England is being a little too sensitive here. I wouldn’t exactly call this reasonable depiction of an overbearing missionary a Nazi. Sure, the details may have differed, and Townsend—like any good writer—takes some poetic license, but who didn’t have a zone leader from hell or two. I had a zone leader who literally spoke with a Bruce R. McConkie accent and another who insinuated that he had the gift of the visitation of angels. At least until my companion called him on his crap. I wish that they had only reminded me to wash my hands. Sure, mission leaders aren’t all like that, but that doesn’t mean that any negative portrayals of pretentious missionary leadership are extreme stereotyping, let alone that they offer nothing more than “didactic and ethically sterile conclusions.”

When Townsend’s gay elder, who legitimately seriously struggles to reconcile his homosexuality with his Mormonism throughout the story, finally expresses what England calls “direct and bitter denunciations” of church doctrines, England insists that this character has somehow lost all his “complexity,” turning into nothing more than an “ideological” reflection of the author’s personal beliefs. Why doesn’t he just come right out and say it: he projects the author’s gay lifestyle. Surely, England’s criticism here is some variation on the intentional fallacy, mistaking the biographical author for the literary character, not to mention arguably latently homophobic to boot. Does this mean that when the literal Three Nephites show up with johnny cakes in a story in England’s anthology that they are somehow complex and multi-dimensional? Why is it that anything direct, bitter, or denunciatory must somehow be inherently flawed? Or unethical?

Ultimately, I can draw no other conclusion than that England is simply incapable of allowing authors to truly legitimately criticize the church. Or if so, then only under carefully controlled and ultimately safe circumstances. What England is doing here is nothing less than trying to squash any Mormon literature that legitimately attempts to wrestle with the complexity of being a homosexual missionary—at least from the perspective of a gay missionary himself rather than from the perspective of the General Handbook of Instructions. I’m not going to call it a perfect story. After all, only Donald Barthelme’s “The School” is, but “Almond Milk” is certainly the best—the most complete, the most insightful, the most literary—story that I have yet read from the perspective of a gay missionary. And it’s thoughtful. And it’s funny. And it’s much more complex, even generous to the church, than England admits. It even has a little creative shock of the new, but you’ll have to read it to find out what that is exactly. Moreover, I would suggest that it was this story’s shock of the new rather than any kind of ethical lapse that really caused England to gag on this story.

And England’s specific complaints are entirely laughable. IMHO. One egregiously offending passage is that “the whole idea of the mission was to use other people, to baptize others to prove ourselves to God that we are worthy of the Celestial Kingdom.” I thought every missionary at least considered, if not lost sleep over, such thoughts at some point during their mission. Putting this concern into the mind of a missionary is hardly evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. The other offending comment: “I remembered my Sunday School teacher telling our class of fourteen-year-olds that if for no other reason, we should stay in the church and be good so we could have eternal sex. It was a way of keeping us in line sexually, to threaten to take sex away from us.” I mean my Sunday School teacher may not have used those precise words, and certainly no general authority has ever put it quite so bluntly over the pulpit, but I have a hard time believing that I and Townsend’s character are the only people who ever got the vague impression that this was essentially Mormon doctrine more or less. Or at least an implied threat to keep our hands—and our genitals—in the right place.

If this is what England takes as in-your-face impiety—and I’m being serious here and not just trying to stomp on the man’s grave—what business does he have teaching literature? Let alone policing Mormonism. Let our bishops and stake presidents determine who is temple worthy, but when it comes to the Mormon experience at large, and especially Mormon literature in particular, let us make more of an effort to develop some kind of big tent Mormonism that includes the entire range of Mormon experiences. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The faithful and the faithless. The pious and the heretical. The polite and, shall we say, the snarky alike. Both ironic and unironic negativity. Let all be alike unto God. Or at least Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

After all, church leaders can excommunicate anyone they want from the church, but only you can excommunicate yourself from the tribe. And the canon of Mormon literature should be at least as wide as the tribe itself. Or what’s a canon for? Even the Association for Mormon Letters defines Mormon literature as literature “by, for, and about” Mormons without trying to police whether those Mormons, either in real life or in literature, are worthy to hold temple recommends.

So, if you’re keeping score, score one point for Raleigh and Peterson. Simply put, it is possible to write good literature, even good Mormon literature, that is impious. Even aggressively impious. It may not be England’s preferred beverage of choice, but as far as I am concerned England’s review of Raleigh’s anthology is just throwing around a lot of hot air about ethics, ideology, and artistry, when he is really just stating a personal preference about his ultimate religious beliefs and desire for what I would call essentially a devotional literature. Nothing wrong with that, but let the real debate be between devotion and impiety instead of trying to hide behind misleading accusations about ethical blindness and sophisticated aesthetics.

Tamayto, Tamahto. Let England choose his own flavor of pie, but his flailing attempt to police the boundaries of Mormon literature really is childish. Ultimately, England’s anthology is far superior to his attempt to defend it—by denigrating Raleigh’s. Let the canon be wide enough to include both anthologies, and let each reader have their own take on their individual stories, but England’s criticism qua criticism is deeply flawed. Even embarrassing. Certainly passé. Definitely neither shocking nor new.

And if you want to fill in the rest of the box score, everyone needs to call their own balls and strikes. England and Peterson—or even myself—can only provide an entry point into what needs to be a much wider conversation. But if I’m behind the plate, the stories in Raleigh’s anthology—pound for pound—are certainly as well written, even as religiously thoughtful, albeit certainly not as orthodox, as anything in England’s. Personally, I found three exceptional stories that interest me enough that I would be willing to write about them in England’s anthology, while I found five in Raleigh’s. Both anthologies have a very solid Indian Placement story. The prostitute story in Raleigh’s anthology is more emotionally developed than the one in England’s. I’d say that not including a Three Nephite story, or at least a simply straightforward and non-ironic one, goes in Raleigh’s column, too. I do like Virginia Sorenson’s New Yorker story in England’s anthology, but I like Kirn’s New Yorker story in Raleigh’s much more. It is almost a half century more current after all. Peterson is probably correct that Raleigh’s anthology perhaps leans too far into sexuality as a dominant motif, but England’s is almost entirely sexless. You can call it a toss up if you want to, but it is hard to overstate the centrality of sexuality to Mormon theology and practice, England’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. England’s anthology does have several truly remarkable stories about Sunday School lessons and ward talent shows, but nothing that is going to land you a Hulu series. There is even an occasional modernist shock of the new in Raleigh’s, but none in England’s, aside from perhaps Chandler’s benediction if I’m being charitable.

With a gun to my head, I’d probably give the nod to Raleigh, but maybe neither fighter really throws a knockout punch either. I’d let the anthologies go the full twelve rounds at any rate, but I would never let England judge the fight. He simply is not impartial enough to see his own blind spots. I’m not going to pretend to have the final say about these anthologies either, and I certainly encourage everyone to weigh in in the comments. I’d much prefer to start a conversation here than to claim some kind of infallibility. But we all have to call them as we see them, England included. He’s said his piece; I just don’t buy it. I do believe, however, that he could have been a little more upfront that what he was doing was merely stating a preference rather than policing the ethical boundaries of literature. And if you want to point out my own blind spots have at it. I welcome all comers, and we all have them.

I do have a final exploratory comment about Raleigh’s anthology in particular and perhaps even about the future of impious Mormon short stories at large. For all that I defend Raleigh’s anthology as an important, even very important, branch of the tree of Mormon literary history, I believe that it still remains the road less traveled. If we compare England’s anthology, Angela Hallstrom’s Dispensation, and Andrew Hall and Raleigh’s The Path and the Gate together with Raleigh’s anthology, Raleigh’s is clearly the odd one out. The other three form a very coherent whole, with notable, perhaps even predictable, evolution over time, but largely following a common trajectory. Raleigh’s anthology, however, really explores something more like terra incognita for the Mormon short story. Possibly even what might be better called the ex-Mormon or post-Mormon story if you still, this late in the game, feel the need to police the boundaries of the tribe or insist on doctrinal purity or even piety. Raleigh’s anthology is certainly the redheaded stepchild, the black swan, and the outlier several standard deviations from the mean. Even nearly three decades later.

But I wonder why. Have critical and disaffected Mormons simply left the tribe and finally left behind the religion that they have long since left, losing interest in Mormonism altogether? Or have they simply stopped writing literature and taken up other hobbies? Podcasting comes to mind. There is certainly no shortage of podcasts—or reality tv shows and docuseries—that would make perfectly fine bedfellows with Raleigh’s anthology. Or are these writers simply lying dormant, biding their time until another impious anthology of the future is eventually published? Which it inevitably will be someday.

What makes this question particularly interesting to me is that by far the two most successful works of Mormon literature—Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s the Book of Mormon musical and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—align much more comfortably with Raleigh’s impious anthology than with the other three more devout ones. So, why is it that non-Mormon writers have been so much more successful at writing Mormon-themed works than Mormon or even ex-Mormon writers have ever been, and how has their easy access to impiety itself influenced, or perhaps even enabled, their success? Is the world hungry for a more impious Mormon literature? Are Mormon or even ex-Mormon writers up for this task, or will it simply be left to those outside the faith altogether? Is Peterson ultimately correct that Raleigh’s anthology will one day prove to be the first stepping stone to the Great Mormon novel? Or at least to one hell of a great short story.

I’m not at all trying to suggest that Raleigh’s in-your-face impiety is the only path forward for Mormon short fiction. In fact, I am at least at some level suggesting that it has been something of a dead end—at least for Mormon anthologies if not quite for Mormon letters in toto. Certainly, it may not have (yet) led to Peterson’s prophesied Great Mormon novel. Moreover, both my religious and literary sensibilities may self-admittedly lean toward the new, at times even the shockingly new, but at the end of the day I am a firm believer that in my Father’s house are many mansions and that all paths eventually lead to Rome. Ultimately, I really have nothing damning to say about any of the other three more traditionally Mormon anthologies—aside from maybe that England’s anthology was perhaps not quite as new as he thought it was or at least not as new as it very easily could have been, even simply by substituting a single story. I just believe that Raleigh’s anthology—different as it may be as the odd one out—deserves its own spot on the Mount Rushmore of Mormon short story anthologies. If for no other reason than that a true Mount Rushmore needs a fourth face. Call it Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, or Roosevelt. Just don’t call it Trump.

In conclusion, Kirn’s “Mormon Eden,” the last story included in Raleigh’s anthology, may not be the literary equivalent of the Second Coming of the Messiah, but to call it “the worst offender in the kind of surface inaccuracy and bald didacticism that undermines the possibility of ethical insight” says a lot more about England—and his thin skin, his lack of a sense of humor, his deep need to claim final authority, and his crippling conservative devotional bent—than it does about Kirn’s story. And if you compare this Kirn story directly with the Kirn story that England himself also included as the final story in his own anthology—on virtually any literary count imaginable—I would be hard pressed to call it anything less than a knockout punch. Only in the final round perhaps, but a knockout nonetheless.

I give this book my simplest and most unqualified review: if you read only one collection of Mormon short stories this year, it should be Shoemaker’s The Righteous Road. And if you can only bring yourself to read one Mormon short story period, well then what in the hell are you doing reading this substack for starters? Go read a book. Or at least another story, since apparently you aren’t much of a reader, but you should start with this collection’s title story, “The Righteous Road.”

It is about as close as it gets to a canonical Mormon short story, and it is readily available. Not only is it published in this collection, but it was previously published in Shoemaker’s earlier collection, Beyond the Lights, and before that in Dialogue (48.3), so it’s even available for free. That means that you have no excuses to not read it. Since Shoemaker’s collection was so recently released, I will go particularly light on the spoilers, but if you haven’t at least read the title story go read it before you read this post. It is both a much better read and a better promo for the larger collection than I can ever write.

Riffing on Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis’ review of “Sheena is a Punk Rocker,” however, I will simply say that I will go to my grave saying if I had to choose one Mormon short story, at 24 pages, to say this is what this literature is about, “The Righteous Road” is the story. It is impossible to read this and not be moved. If you read this and you do not like it, well you do not like Mormon short stories. With all due respect, go listen to some jazz or something.

As the story’s title implies, it—like so many of Shoemaker’s best, or at least most serious, stories—fundamentally explores the concept of righteousness, not as a fixed given or even as a simple variable, but rather as some more complex nonlinear regression. Perhaps even a Gordian knot. Typically, his characters are driven by the righteous impulses that motivate missionaries to wander the streets of Italy searching for new converts (“Light Departure”) or inspire a young idealist teacher in a blighted urban high school to reach out to an underprivileged, but talented, student (“In That Classroom”). But these high-minded idealists inevitably hit a moral snag which forces them to confront various ethical conundrums. Or in Mormon parlance, these stories explore what it means to choose the right. Not in a Primary class, but in difficult and complex real-life grownup scenarios without easy solutions. And as these scenarios inevitably grow more complicated, so do these stories’ explorations of the meaning and practice of righteousness, ultimately depicting righteousness more as a difficult road that must be continually and precariously traveled than as some kind of relaxing final destination at the end of the Covenant Path.

Or in the case of “The Righteous Road”—and this is only one element that makes this story, in particular, so dynamic—Shoemaker depicts a pair of friends (Derrick and Reed) with gradually diverging senses of righteousness. The story begins with these two idealistic late teens initially sharing a common vision of righteously changing the world, hoping “to do something about all [its] misery and devastation.” More specifically, they want to “do something more than” the “ridiculously inconsequential” tasks routinely assigned to Mormon youth: “just praying for the sick and afflicted or cleaning out flower vases at Mountain View Cemetery for church service projects.” Instead, they prefer to go the extra mile, burning with the Jeremiadic righteousness of activist-prophets who “march, block sidewalk traffic, and loudly upbraid” the less committed. Or, after taking things up a notch, even go full-on Fight Club, “spray paint[ing] butcher shops and furriers with pithy slogans” to defend animal rights.

To the traditional Mormon, the cause of protecting animal rights, let alone the open lawlessness Shoemaker’s characters use to defend them, may not seem like righteousness at all, especially given that these late teens’ idea of church is simply “a shared sacrament for nature’s children meant to enlighten the mind,” which includes partaking of “a thick joint and a jug of wine.” The fact that Phish is playing in the background adds a nice touch of 1980s verisimilitude, and when the story later goes on to quote Mario Savio it firmly establishes its bona fides as an authentic exploration of throwback 1960s idealism. Nice touches both; not to be missed. I’m not going to go out on a limb and declare Phish prophetic or anything like that, but I will take a stand for Savio’s Sproul Hall address. I’m also prepared to go to my grave defending Savio’s fiery rhetoric as the most righteous speech in American history since Lincoln’s at Gettysburg. If this is the company that Shoemaker’s characters keep, they may be countercultural, even a touch anarchistic, but there is no denying their righteous street cred no matter how misguided it may seem to traditional Mormon eyes.

Not surprisingly, therefore, even the more conservative Derrick’s sense of righteousness initially diverges from his “parents’ conservative politics. My parents bored me. No hobbies, no friends they went out with, no interest in music or art. If that was righteousness, I didn’t want it.” Meanwhile, the more radical Reed positively chafes at the “naïve and narrow-minded strictures of Mormonism,” openly embracing “anti-religious sentiments” which reduce religion, in general, and possibly Mormonism, in particular, to a “mental illness” and the “opium of the masses.” Consequently, Reed and Derrick’s sense of righteousness may not be the one we are expecting in a Mormon story, but Shoemaker immediately forces the reader to confront the very real possibility that it might even be a superior one to its milquetoast Mormon alternative, at least if you consider saving the world from tyranny, or even whales from extinction, more consequential than cleaning out flower vases.

While these two characters initially share the same “grandiose plans,” Shoemaker ultimately sends them down starkly diverging paths, and this is what makes the story much more interesting than just some simple paean to the radical 1960s. Reed takes the prophet-activist’s road less traveled, even if it involves widely traveling the world to “Istanbul, Mumbai, Munich,” and a “squalid open market in Jerusalem,” among other locales, always in search of idealistic causes. In sharp contrast, Derrick settles down, ultimately serving a mission, going to BYU, and doing most of, if not quite all of, what follows predictably from there. He may even still send a periodic check to Amnesty International, but he is clearly not exactly on the front lines anymore.

After depicting these two distinctly different senses of righteousness, the story could simply end there, sending its co-protagonists each down their respective roads. Tomayto, Tomahto. Two characters. Two lives. Two paths. Two different senses of righteousness, with the reader simply being left to choose one or the other according to the dictates of their own consciousness, as they say. Shoemaker could even develop each character’s life in rich detail with thick descriptions of their respective worlds and worldviews. He might even give one character or the other the nod, possibly even the more radical one, suggesting at least tentatively that his road is the righteous one. Or at least the more righteous one.

To some degree this is perhaps the story’s general outline, but it does not simply end there. The rest of the story goes on to place these two different characters, with their respective senses of righteousness, in a series of complex juxtapositions in unique situations and circumstances, challenging the reader to view each character’s worldview from a variety of different angles and perspectives. Ultimately, the characters may follow different paths, but those paths crisscross and zigzag in creative and interesting ways to develop a rich and unpredictable narrative arc—not to mention a profound philosophical meditation on the meaning of righteousness and the many roads that lead both toward and away from it.

What makes this story—like so many of Shoemaker’s stories—so vibrant, then, is that it is not simply a depiction of, but rather a much deeper and more complex interrogation of, the concept of righteousness. “The Righteous Road” does not explain righteousness, but instead asks questions about it, starting with the most fundamental question: What even is righteousness? Is it what we think, or even can imagine, it is? Does it have higher and lower forms? Is it fundamentally religious and devotional or secular and political? Is it conservative or progressive? Or might it possibly carve out some new third middle way? Does it even need to be legal? Is it Mormon, or at least how might Mormonism help us achieve it? Is it anti-Mormon, or how does Mormonism actively impede our quest for it? Can the pursuit of righteousness have unintended consequences? Does it have limits? Are some versions of righteousness simply faux inconsequential rule following and box checking, even mere middle-class complacency, or conversely just some kind of pie-in-the-sky Peter Pan “perpetual adolescence,” if not outright irresponsible recklessness? And perhaps most importantly: Is there one righteous road or many? Or better still: Which one will you personally chose or perhaps invent and imagine sui generis for yourself? And even with this lengthy list, I am simply suggesting a starting point for considering, not trying to make an exhaustive account of, all the complex questions Shoemaker’s stories raise about the ultimate meaning of righteousness.

I may have lightheartedly invoked the Ramones to praise Shoemaker earlier, but here I make a more serious comp to Anton Chekov who famously suggested that the role of great art is not to “solve a problem,” but rather to “correctly pose a question.” And that is exactly what Shoemaker’s stories do with their often open-ended, ambiguous, or surprising endings. They pose righteousness as a question without any simple answers, and they pose this question correctly in such a way as to promote genuine ethical inquiry, to cause the reader to interrogate their own often limited, or at least incomplete, sense of righteousness, and to encourage a broader range of ways of considering its complex possibilities. At times, I’ve been known to be critical—okay outright mocking—of the Cult of Levinas that engulfed the BYU philosophy department back in the day—and probably still does for all I know—but at least it promoted genuine exploration of our ethical responsibilities toward others. Given my druthers, however, I’d much rather read a Shoemaker story than another volume by Levinas, and I will go to my grave yet again defending the claim that pound for pound his stories can teach at least as much about ethical responsibility as anything Levinas has ever written.

In this sense, Shoemaker’s other comp is perhaps the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story which perhaps more than any other story in the Bible, if not literature itself, brilliantly interrogates the concept of righteousness, turning it on its head, if not exploding it altogether. After reading “The Righteous Road,” you will think twice about which side of the Road to Jericho you are traveling on and whether or not you have been a good neighbor, whether or not you could be a better one, or even simply the Master’s ultimate question: Who is my neighbor and what are my ethical responsibilities to them? We all know that this is a question that can never be asked enough.

But Shoemaker is also something of a Swiss army knife with tremendous range. In fact, this breadth of voice and style within a single writer is perhaps his most defining and significant contribution to Mormon literature. If “The Righteous Road,” “Light Departure,” and “In That Classroom” do the heavy lifting of promoting true profound ethical introspection, “Adam and Lilith. And Eve,” Barry Dudson,” Parley Young,” “The Lord’s Sacred Funds,” and “Come as You Are” all tackle the still more daunting, even Sisyphean, task of making us laugh. Not that these stories are entirely without serious, or even ethical, moments, but they definitely skew more to the comic than the tragic. And they are LOL, ROTFL, and LMFAO funny. If Mormon literature can be FA anything.

Obviously, I don’t have space to tackle all these stories, and I have already commented on “Barry Dodson” in my first substack post, “Mormon Speculative Short Fiction,” so I will kind of pick my shots here. I would be doing you all a disservice, however, if I did not comment on Shoemaker’s comic brilliance. And there is no place that it shines brighter than in “Adam and Lilith. And Eve,” a Barthelmean or Saundersian retelling of the Garden of Eden story. If I make too frequent reference to Barthelme and Saunders in my analyses, please take this as a kind of superlative compliment—even if it is perhaps also an indictment of the narrowness of my reading—and as an attempt to claim, even promote, the fulfillment of my own prophecy that Mormon letters needs its Barthelmes and Saunderses as much as it needs its Shakespeares and Miltons.

I’m not going to spoil any of the plot, but I will outline in broad strokes a couple of the most obvious comedic techniques that Shoemaker uses in this story. To begin with, he retells the story in the colloquial vernacular instead of the elevated stuffy KJV English. The KJV’s “it was good,” is instantly replaced with Shoemaker’s “You’re going to love this! God said,” as if God were a real estate agent showing off a local California Ranch or Mid-century Modern. Obviously, no one—not even Barthelme this time—has ever done it better than Bob Dylan’s, “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ God say, ‘No.’ Abe say, ‘What?’” But Shoemaker comes close, real close, and Dylan did win a Nobel Prize, after all. Within the first paragraph, Shoemaker follows this up with “And look at the hills and the forests and the meadows, all for you.” Again, the setup is in the vernacular, but it’s the punchline, “What do you think?” that puts this story over the top. Once again, God not only is trying to sell the place, but Shoemaker’s diminutive god meets his creations on their own level, actively seeking their approval like a teenage girl showing off her prom dress for the first time.

Next, Shoemaker comically undermines the gravitas of both God and His creations by having his Eve, who rejects Adam’s suggested nomenclature and choses her own name, Lilith, subtly critique the “strong, authoritative, grand” names of God’s creations—such as the Gihon or Hiddekel Rivers—as perhaps too “masculine,” before giving Him further advice that the “overwhelming” greenness of his grassy knolls could maybe use a “touch of red and yellow? Maybe some wild flowers?” By the end of her monologue, she has also suggested “more light,” “boulders for sitting,” and “running water [which] really calms the mind.” In Shoemaker’s Eden, God’s creations may not only be flawed, but it is not even clear that God Himself is even in control as Lilith stomps around with her own plans about how to redecorate the place. In classic comic fashion, Shoemaker takes the proud and mighty, even God Himself, down a notch, presenting us instead with a god who might better be described with only a lower-case g.

After Lilith renames herself, it should come as no surprise that Shoemaker also introduces a little comic feminism into his tale. When God tells Adam that it is “his world,” so he can name its creations as he pleases, Lilith immediately and predictably protests, “His world?” But it is her “two fisted hands suddenly planted on her naked hips” that registers her outrage in a clever telling detail. It only takes moments for Lilith’s pushback to even clear the decks entirely as God “clear[s] his throat. ‘Wow, look at the time,’ he said, tapping the gold watch on his thick wrist. ‘I’d love to stay and chat, but I have to talk to my oldest son about his role as Savior of mankind.” Shoemaker’s henpecked God is small, indecisive, and timid instead of omnipotent like He usually is. And Adam fares no better. When God commands Adam to “multiply and replenish the earth” with a wink and a nudge, Lilith simply “close[s] her eyes and ma[kes] wet kissing noises” before “doubling over in laughter.” It is pretty clear who wears the pants in this Garden.

And Shoemaker adorns this colloquial, diminutive, feminist garden paradise with lush comedic brilliance. There is comic misdirection, incongruity, escalation, eclectic banter, pacing, and one-liners here in spades. There is one laugh, even zinger, followed quickly after another in what is better described as a literary fun house than a spiritual paradise, a stand-up comedy routine than scripture, and raucous Dionysian laughter than sober and solemn mythological truths. And I haven’t gotten past the first page yet, so I’ll leave you the rest to enjoy for yourself.

If Shoemaker makes even Elohim Himself bow down to the gods of comedy, then certainly Bruce Horkley, a bishop with his own minor god-complex, isn’t going to fare any better in “The Lord’s Sacred Funds.” This starched suit, if not outright scribe and pharisee, wants the “timbre of his voice [to] sound solemn and apostolic” so that “his delivery of the weekly announcements [will] be flawless and spiritually evocative.” If you can’t already see the satire coming on only three sentences in, then maybe you should stop reading your Book of Mormon so much and go see the musical instead for a change.

When the bishop recalls negotiating whether the ward should stop paying poor old Sister Peterson’s premium cable bill, you might suspect that Shoemaker is giving us his variation on Levi Peterson’s “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights”—another story about a bishop trying to assist a poor woman in his ward—and you wouldn’t be wrong. That said, knowing Shoemaker’s work no one should be surprised that his variation is much more than a sequel, let alone a knock-off. Initially, Sister Peterson may be Shoemaker’s Rendella Kranpitz, but his story quickly escalates to a second mendicant, a “bearded man” dressed in “sandals” and a “white robe.” Bishop Horkley immediately sizes the man up and determines that he is “obviously homeless and certainly insane and no doubt sniffing around for a few bucks.”

With a hockey assist from Peterson, Shoemaker is setting up the pattern for an obvious rule of three. We have already read the plight of Peterson’s Sister Kranpitz, Shoemaker himself has given us his own Sister Peterson (note the name? is it a coincidence?), now we should brace ourselves for the misdirection. Shoemaker’s mendicant isn’t Sister Kranpitz 3.0, however, but rather in a decidedly comic incongruity the resurrected Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Himself. Perhaps the beard and sandals—or at least the robe—should have given it away, but maybe you were just expecting a slightly more eccentric Sister Kranpitz. Like I’ve mentioned in several of my substack posts before, however, a good humorist never misses the opportunity to escalate. I just wonder if Shoemaker has left future writers any more room to keep ratcheting up this bit.

After Jesus suggests that he might attend the bishop’s ward, the bishop gets a little tongue tied, but not because his flock isn’t prepared to meet Jesus. After all, the bishop has already “come down with an iron fist over the last month, really pound[ing] into the members the need for reverence, punctuality, and modesty, daily scripture study and prayer—otherwise they’ll face damnation.” Looks like the bishop has done his job all right. The problem is whether the Lord Himself is ready to meet the bishop’s flock, after all he could use a shave, so as not to unduly influence the Aaronic priesthood, and a tie, to move Jesus “just a baby step into the twenty-first century.” Once this setup is delivered, after that it’s all downhill: more comic misdirection, incongruity, escalation, eclectic banter, pacing, and one-liners in spades.

At this point, I could go on writing all day about Shoemaker’s engaging and captivating comedic wit, but alas I fear that I may be enjoying writing this more than you are reading it, so I will go to my grave one last time—albeit perhaps this time only provisionally. Hands down, The Righteous Road is my favorite collection of Mormon short stories yet written, and one of its main rivals is actually Shoemaker’s other collection, Beyond the Lights, which includes the brilliant satire, “I Reject Your Rejection Letter.” A must read for any writer who has received a rejection letter. And “A Letter to Daniel LaRusso, the Karate Kid,” another must read for us children of the 1980s. At this point, it might even be tempting to suggest that Shoemaker is sort of simply playing chess against himself, trying to outdo his own unparalleled work volume after volume.

But the truth is much murkier and more optimistic. With the daily increasing quality and quantity of recent Mormon short stories—and the list is rapidly growing far too long to mention in a mere aside—it is certainly more accurate to say more modestly that The Righteous Road may perhaps be the leader of the pack (IMHO), but that it is a rapidly growing pack which is fiercely beginning to nip at its heels. But to quote the inimitable David Letterman: “This is only an exhibition. It is not a competition. No wagering, please.” So, at the end of the day, analysis requires much more than some simple AML Top 25 ranking of Mormon short stories, so it is probably best, therefore, to simply describe The Righteous Road as another small, albeit consequential, step in Shoemaker’s hopefully only beginning career rather than some kind of epoch-defining giant leap moonshot for Mormon letters in toto. If it defines such an epoch, it is not because it stands alone and above, or even simply on the backs of giants, but also now alongside them in an emerging Golden Age of Mormon short story writing at large.

Nothing would make me happier, therefore, than to be proven wrong and be forced to recant my opinion that The Righteous Road is the Mormon short story collection of the year. New Mormon short stories seem to be coming out of the woodwork every day, and it is beginning to look like the sky’s the limit for what is possible in the genre. After all, even The Righteous Road itself looked like it was going to be just another Godot for a while, and you never know if perhaps tomorrow or the day after or the day after that some new unexpected Godot may actually show up. And here’s the thing about Godots: no one knows what they are going to look like, or where they will come from, or what they will write. Certainly, nobody knows when to expect them.

Let us always make room, therefore, for the unpredictable and the unknown, the stranger and the mendicant among us. Who knows where Mormon letters next Savior will come from? Or the one after that. In the meantime, we openly welcome every new addition to the tribe, of whatever color or stripe they may be. We are vast. We contain multitudes. But while you’re patiently waiting for the next surprising and unexpected rough beast to slouch over the horizon, today is a day for celebration, so go out and buy The Righteous Road—pretend it’s an early Christmas present to yourself—read it, and comment below.

First, I’d like to get a group of us to propose a panel—The Secret Lives of Mormon Writers—for the 2027 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference in Chicago March 17-20. I have never been to this conference and know very little about what such a proposal entails, so I’m open to any suggestions from interested co-conspirators, especially ones with experience at AWP. I envision some combination of maybe a short reading, position statements about questions of faith and orthodoxy, personal experiences about writing to a specific minority subculture, speculations about the market for Mormon publishing, etc. If you are interested, email me at robert.bennett@montana.edu, and I would be happy to entertain any suggestions no matter how ordinary or outrageous. Feel free to pass on the word to anyone else who you think might also be interested.

Second, I normally don’t directly do promos for books, aside from indirectly writing about them, but I do want to announce the recent publication of Ryan Shoemaker’s new collection of short stories The Righteous Road. It is a book that I have personally been looking forward to, and I announce it principally because I plan to write a post about it at the beginning of April, so I wanted to give you a chance to purchase and read the book in advance—which you should do anyway. I have tried to include a post/restack of BCC Press’s announcement below, so hopefully it will work.

Finally, in a moment of shameless self-promotion, I also want to mention that I am writing a review of Ryan Habermeyer’s new novel Necronauts for an upcoming issue of Dialogue. I try not to dabble in novels, to keep my focus narrow and specific, but I made an exception because Dialogue asked me and Habermeyer also writes excellent short stories, so I at least consider him part of the tribe. I wanted to post a link to his novel as well, but it looks like I have an advanced copy and it isn’t in print yet. But keep an eye out for it. Some people are even calling it the Great Postmodern Mormon Novel.

BCC Press

The Righteous Road

Two teenagers with rockstar ambitions get the thrill of a lifetime when they rescue Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain from a crowd of rabid fans. A high school math teacher convinces his brightest student to escape the poverty and violence of the inner city by enlisting in the army. A pious bishop receives an unexpected visit from Jesus. With equal parts hum…

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4 months ago · 1 like · Cecelia Proffit

Obviously, we should expect to see some clear throughlines. For starters, each anthology has a well-developed science fiction story—a longtime staple of Mormon fiction—and I personally believe that these three stories continue to get better as they evolve from Orson Scott Card’s “The Fringe” (BAF) through Lee Allred’s “The Hymnal” (D) to Danny Nelson’s “Narrow is the Gate” (PG). This is perhaps the simplest example of a step-by-step progression of a specific genre across the three anthologies. This is the kind of continuous methodical development that we should expect.

Similarly, there are also stories by Phyllis Barber in all three anthologies, but in my opinion these stories decline in quality over time. This is probably not because any of the later stories are particularly bad, but rather just because I especially like her story in England’s anthology. There are perhaps even some who might even embrace this declension narrative for the anthologies as a whole, but I am not one of them. Overall, I see a clear and steady development over time with the final anthology standing head and shoulders above the other two.

Moreover, Dispensation also marks a significant advancement in representations of the international church. M. Shayne Bell’s “Dry Niger,” in Bright Angels is set in Niger, but it arguably has more to do with prostitutes than Mormonism. Dispensation, however, opens in medias res—in Paul Rawlins’s “The Garden”—with a missionary hiding from an angry mob in the back alleys of a Black township in South Africa, while Todd Robert Peterson’s “Quietly” depicts an African convert dedicating a grave for a church member who has been killed by Hutus in Rwanda. Dispensation, therefore, builds a solid foundation for later representations of the international church in The Path and the Gate’s “Missionary Weekly Report, Mumbai First Branch” by Mattathias Singh and the well-traveled transnational Mormon couple in “Sister Carvalho’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson” by Steven L. Peck. In this respect, Dispensation probably represents something closer to a decisive turning point rather than simply a mere throughline.

In other cases, Dispensation also reveals some almost inevitable dead ends for Mormon short fiction. For example, Indian Placement stories—which are represented in both Bright Angels and Dispensation as well as Robert Raleigh’s anthology In Our Lovely Deseret (1998)—predictably disappear in The Path and the Gate, having more or less run their course in Dispensation. I’m not going to prophesy that we will never see another one, but I’ll bet cold hard cash that they will never return to being the predictable growth industry that they once were.

Similarly, stories about Utah’s rural, agrarian, and pioneer past in general quickly exit stage left after their starring role in Bright Angels, with Dispensation all but driving the final nail in their coffin. In fact, Phyllis Barber’s polygamy era story, “Bread for Gunnar,” is about all that remains of this pioneer, or even rural, heritage in Dispensation, and the only real historical story in The Path and the Gate, Theric Jepson’s “Curse,” merely uses a frame story that goes back generations largely as a set-up for the punchline to a story specifically set during the presidency of Russell M. Nelson. Jepson’s story may have tendrils stretching back in time, but its narrative thrust clearly focuses on the present. Once again, rural, agrarian, and pioneer Mormon stories may not be quite dead yet, but they have clearly become passé. Dispensation helped pave the way for this change.

In at least one case, Dispensation even presents something more like a lacuna. In Bright Angels Neal Chandler’s “Benediction”—perhaps with a hockey assist from Levi S. Peterson’s “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights”—puts the confrontational church lesson story firmly on the map. In The Path and the Gate, Chandler’s story finds an obvious and equally accomplished avatar in Steven L. Peck’s “Sister Carvalho’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson.” Dispensation, however, does not have a story in this genre. A regrettable omission because this has always been one of my favorite—and I would add one of the most quintessentially Mormon—genres.

So, certainly in some sense Dispensation provides some kind of evolutionary missing link between Bright Angels and The Path and the Gate, but this does not mean that it can simply be reduced to some kind of Goldilocks and the Three Bears middle ground between the old and the new. As I have tried to suggest already, the evolutionary record is complex and multi-dimensional with new species constantly emerging, evolving, and disappearing in fits and starts, making Dispensation perhaps an essential data point in the history of the Mormon short story but not necessarily on a linear graph. While we are often accustomed to see history, including literary history, as a relatively smooth flow in time, gradually evolving and gently developing through some slow, steady process always inching toward inevitable progress, history also includes dramatic upheavals and unusual detours, backsliding and reversals, and lost ages and dark times. For Walter Benjamin, in fact, history is little more than a continual trainwreck.

Without altogether dismissing the conventional view of Dispensation as one small, perhaps even predictable, step forward for the Mormon short story, I also want to consider how it simultaneously functions as a giant leap for Mormon letters in its own right. Dispensation is not simply the often-neglected middling middle child, who can claim neither to be the first original voice of the tradition nor the latest advance of its avantgarde. Instead, it is also a kind of radical sui generis middle that stands on its own unique merits and stakes claims to its own peculiar literary territories.

In my opinion, if there is one story in Dispensation that marks something closer to a bold mutation in, rather than just a simple evolution of, the Mormon short story it is clearly Jack Harrell’s “Calling and Election.” If I didn’t find this story the most unique and compelling story in the anthology, I might even be tempted to try to steer clear of trying to analyze it for several reasons.

First, it is the most difficult story in the anthology to paraphrase, and it is the hardest story to discuss without giving away too many spoilers. I’ll do my best to paraphrase what is even paraphrasable without spoiling what deserves to be left unspoiled. The story opens with Jerry Sangood, a seminary teacher in Southern Idaho, being invited to a mysterious meeting with Brother Lucy, “a representative of the prophet,” who—true to the story’s title—extends to Jerry the opportunity to have his calling and election made sure, but not before requiring him to sign a letter to the prophet acknowledging that he accepts the “weighty charge that comes with this high and holy calling.”

This much is paraphrasable and predictably implied in the title, but the rest of the story is a wild goose chase of completely unexpected twists and turns, beginning with Brother Lucy’s warning that “each case is different” when he “caution[s]” Jerry after signing the letter. Then immediately after signing, Jerry unexpectedly feels the impending “gloom” of “dozens of devilish fiends, encircling him, entering his thoughts, taunting and tempting, blaspheming his faith.” Finally, Jerry wakes up the next morning mysteriously soaking wet in his backyard and then changes his clothes to go to work only to find “hundreds” of pornographic “images from the internet—grainy, explicit, hardcore—cover[ing] the walls and cabinets of his classroom.”

That’s only the basic premise, which is already enough to make your head spin, but how Jerry—and his class, and the town, and the authorities, and the church, and his wife—respond to this unexpected turn of events proceeds to take the reader on a roller coaster ride that is clearly not implied in the title. This is definitely not the way that the highest and holiest ordinance in the church is supposed to unfold, but as the Dude himself says, this is a story with “a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous.” I won’t pretend that I can paraphrase them all, and I’m certainly not going to spoil them, but I hope that I have enticed you enough to read it yourself. The story is both in Dispensation and in Harrell’s collection, A Sense of Order and Other Stories, and both are immediately available as e-books, so it is easily accessible,

While I’m not about to claim that Cleanth Brooks is the last word on all matters literary, his “Heresy of Paraphrase” makes a compelling argument that the meanderings and even the seeming irrelevancies of a work of art—those which most resist paraphrase—are precisely its most essential parts. I would be hard pressed to find a better explanation of what makes Harrell’s story so fascinating. It is just so damn unparaphrasable. There are so many story lines, so many unpredictable twists, so many ambiguities, so many detours, and so many gaps for the reader to fill in merely implied or even missing details. It is truly what Umberto Eco refers to as an open rather than a closed work. It requires the acute attention of an actively engaged reader open to playful uncertainty and distrustful of easy answers. Or, as the kids say, this story will simply blow your mind.

Second, “Calling and Election” is also the most difficult story to classify. I’ve used the Center for Latter-day Art’s term the “Mormon Weird” to describe some of William Morris’s writing, but that term came into use in 2023. This makes Harrell’s story a full decade avant la lettre, and I would argue that what Harrell is doing here is more eccentric and perhaps even more disturbing than merely weird. I am tempted to give this story an even stronger label of the Mormon Grotesque. It has all the elements of the strange, unnatural, ugly, bizarre, frightening, and comically absurd, and it has them in spades.

If this story, which is quite different from most of Harrell’s other stories, has any comp at all in Mormon letters, it is probably only in the work of Brian Evenson who has made something of a cottage industry of grotesque literature. And yet, in Harrell’s story there is also an incongruous linking of all these grotesque elements back to an inherently sacred ordinance, a devout man, and a special dispensation from the prophet himself that renders this story more complex and multi-faceted than anything that I have yet read in my admittedly limited reading of Evenson. It is precisely this unique mix of the legitimately sacred and the obviously grotesque, rather than simply the grotesque per se, that I find most compelling in this story.

If you make even a quick comparison between “Calling and Election” and Evenson’s “The Prophets” in Raleigh’s anthology In Our Lovely Deseret, it is clear that Harrell’s story is still struggling to get at some kind of deeper spiritual, if perhaps ultimately ineffable, message about what it means to sacrifice everything—perhaps even goodness itself—in the service of God, whereas Evenson’s grotesquerie serves as little more than the punchline to a joke. A very good, twisted, dark joke perhaps, but simply a joke, nonetheless. I might add, however, if only parenthetically, that Harrell’s more spiritually inclined Mormon grotesque seems to have provided fertile ground for further development in a story like Ryan Habermyer’s “We’re Going to Need a Second Baptism,” a story about baptism and a sex doll in The Path and the Gate.

Finally, “Calling and Election” is simply so brazenly creative, inventive, and clever in its specific details. Since I don’t want to give away too much, I’ll limit myself simply to two examples from early in the story. First, Jerry has recently discovered that he has a brain tumor, so the story implies that he may have done this whole inexplicable deed because he was driven into madness by his tumor. This accomplishes two aesthetic goals in one blow. First, it provides just enough plausible motivation for the pornographic pictures which otherwise seem at least highly improbable if not outright preposterous. This keeps the reader invested in the story as something other than simply ridiculous. In addition, the tumor also provides ambiguity to the story because it never fully resolves whether or not the tumor is responsible for Jerry’s actions. This possibility always remains in the back of the reader’s mind, but it is never definitively either confirmed or denied.

The second detail that delights me in this story is that Brother Lucy makes Jerry sign a letter acknowledging acceptance of the consequences of his decision to have his calling and election made sure. This is a very small, seemingly insignificant, detail in the story, and yet—to my very limited understanding of the Second Anointing—it is a fictional literary device rather than a realistic account of the actual ritual. This significantly complicates the story for me, however, especially given the chaos that results immediately afterword. I can’t help but see this scene as the classic Faustian bargain where an individual signs a deed to their soul to the devil. Harrell may not intend this explicitly, but whether intended deliberately or not, the story does at least insinuate—if for no other reason than the resulting events—that Brother Lucy’s presence is possibly sinister, even devilish.

This in turn provides yet another plausible, albeit also ambiguous, reason for the pornography in Jerry’s classroom. A tumor, a pact with the devil, a trial of his faith, or some other kind of madness all circulate wildly in the story as plausible, yet inconclusive, explanations for Jerry’s fall from grace. Taken collectively, however, these small details matter and add weight and complexity to what is already a clever tale. Like a trail of breadcrumbs, these small, yet ingenious, details lead the reader through to the end of a compelling, albeit confusing, story.

The other story that I wish to comment on is Orson Scott Card’s “Christmas at Helaman’s House”—a very different, almost diametrically opposed, kind of story, which I also believe more or less creates a new, much more easily defined, genre almost ex nihilo. If Harrell helps pioneer the Mormon Grotesque, I can only call Card’s story the most brazen articulation of what I would define as the Suburban Mormon short story. Obviously, there have been many other Mormon stories, both before and since, that have been passively situated in suburbia, but I have never read one whose characters, plot, theme, and moralism are so aggressively suburban, focusing primarily on Helaman Willkie who got his “new house built and the family moved in before Christmas.” Even though he is “exhausted from the move,” his family still manages to “find all the Christmas decorations and get them in place” just in time for Santa. Meanwhile, Helaman’s wife, Lucille, “squeal[s] in delight” when she sees the kitchen and “kiss[es] all the appliances.” The whole story, top to bottom, is as suburban as Home Alone, if not The Graduate or even American Beauty.

If I am being charitable, however, I might point out that at some level Card’s story is also about the international church given that the story’s central inciting incident, and the most interesting moment in the story, is set in motion when Helaman’s daughter, Trudy, starts to develop a crush on a returned missionary who served in Medellín, Columbia. Upon seeing Helaman’s vast and ornate suburban McMansion, however, Trudy’s new beau suddenly tearfully realizes that he just doesn’t “belong” here in “America” anymore not simply because everybody “here has so much,” but more specifically because they “keep it all for [them]selves.” Only the “mafia” has such homes in Colombia, he quips.

This might have been the starting point for an interesting discussion about how missionaries’ experiences abroad reshape their moral compasses, if Card’s protagonist had bothered to listen to this missionary even for one minute, but instead Helaman immediately turns away from this missionary’s personal experiences, let alone the lives of real Colombians, to make the story all about himself and the guilt he feels because of his own fragile upper-middle class white suburban privilege.

Initially, Helaman quickly retreats into defensiveness, even “rage,” that anyone would “unfair[ly] insult” his self-earned prosperity, but of course, Card’s story isn’t simply a sendup of suburban arrogance, so Helaman’s initial bluster is just a straw man moral plot twist. Obviously, even Helaman cannot possibly be so boorish, so he all too quickly and simplistically does a moral 180 and contritely asks, “What am I doing here, living in one of these houses” because now he himself will also “never see this house again without imagining [some] poor Colombian family, standing outside in the cold.” With only a moment’s introspection, Helaman entirely appropriates the missionary’s experience and perspective, let alone an entire nation’s, turning it all into his own personal moral crisis. Mea culpa! Mea magna culpa! Mea magna suburban culpa!

Even this might have been a starting point for genuine moral introspection, but instead Helaman simply rattles off a series of highly suburban self-justifications: he built this big house only to show his family how much he loves them, he can’t possibly sell the house now because others will speculate that he is having financial troubles, and ultimately he built this house only for the “best motives” of just wanting to serve God and family. But even this is ultimately all just another smoke screen for Helaman’s still more profound dark night of the soul when he excruciatingly probes his personal morality to its suburban depths, deciding to give away his house in his “heart” and live in it “as if it weren’t [his] own.” This way he can “consecrate this house” and “covenant” to “always treat this house as if others have as much right to use it as we do.” He even vows to take in the homeless off the street and anyone in the stake who needs shelter, promising to circumvent single-family zoning laws if necessary. This way he will teach his children good Christian “values.” When Helaman finally dedicates his new home, he even “consecrate[s] it as the Lord’s property” and envisions gathering his family around the “table with their visitors, and there was food enough for all, and all were satisfied.” All that is missing is Tiny Tim.

Admittedly, Helaman does sincerely try to do some good with his wealth, perhaps even more than most do, but I ultimately find this conclusion—both as a moral philosophy and as a literary ending, let alone as some kind of attempt to escape the dead end cul de sac logic of suburbia—deeply unsatisfying and almost absurd. Helaman’s self-justifications are so couched in some kind of hyper-religious variation on the law of consecration—as opposed to Jesus’s more simple “sell all that thou hath and give to the poor”—that they ultimately read to me as little more than shallow self-deceptions and obvious rationalizations deeply entwined in the cultural and moral logic of Mormon suburbia.

They remind me of all the suburban Mormon families in my youth who repeatedly protested that they bought such big homes so they could hold firesides for the youth or installed a pool so the young women would have somewhere to swim modestly. I’m not even arguing that Helaman’s reasoning here is morally unsound—to each his own—I am just pointing out that his reasoning is so desperately suburban. Maybe Card is just being ironic and purposefully means for Helaman’s moral reasoning to come off as vapidly suburban, but the story is articulated with such moralistic sincerity, and so temple-coded, not to mention without even a hint of sarcasm, that it is hard for me to read this as satire.

If it is, God bless his soul. He fooled me. If it’s not, God help him. He’s just fooling himself. Either way, however, whether ultimately shallow or profound, realistic or satirical, moral or self-deceived—read it however you want to yourself personally—but the story is simply so dreadfully suburban that I feel compelled to describe it as a new genre of the Suburban Mormon story. Perhaps it can be read in different ways with certain nuances and subtleties, some of them probably more against the grain than with it, but it simply cannot be read outside the context of suburbia—and Mormon suburbia at that.

As a morality tale, some may find this story meaningful, even instructive, and even I will admit that it may inspire many people to live more charitable lives, but at the end of the day I personally find its moral reasoning too self-serving: more moralistic, even moral grandstanding, than moral. Moreover, as a work of literature I find it little more than a tale of shallow narcissism and white middle class fragility—however couched in faux moral introspection. But hey, that may just be me. Not every story works for every reader, and I certainly welcome others to disagree with me in the comments. And I openly admit that I myself have lived a privileged life in suburbia my whole life, too. I’m just not quite so morally melodramatic about it. So, I’m not trying to throw stones or claim any kind of moral superiority myself. I’m just suggesting that if it walks like Wally Beaver and talks like Wally Beaver, then it just may be Wally Beaver—no matter how consecrated it may claim to be.

But give the man credit where it is due, at least he tried to confront the moral logic of Mormon suburbia head on, even if it may have ultimately gotten the best of him. I just hope that his story doesn’t prove to be the last word on Mormon suburbia, let alone some kind of final solution, although I have yet to see another Mormon writer take up suburbia so directly. And make no mistake about it, Mormon suburbia needs to be more directly engaged in literature. It is a moral and religious conundrum, even Gordian knot, that Card’s story only barely scratches the surface of. If your keeping score then, score one point for Card: His story is a valiant, albeit perhaps ultimately only Sisyphean, effort.

At the end of the day, Dispensation will inevitably probably always be seen, to one degree or another, as some kind of stepping-stone between its two “companion” anthologies, but I hope that I can persuade you that even if this is perhaps ultimately at least partially true, it is still valuable to consider the evolution of literary history as more complex than a simple linear path. In addition to providing some kind of simple transition from the old to the new, Dispensation also marks decisive turning points, new interventions, dead ends, lacunae and even sui generis innovations.

Not only is there a complex diversity between these three anthologies, therefore, but there is also notable diversity within Dispensation (and the other anthologies) as well. For me, the broad continuum between the Mormon grotesque of the anthology’s most experimental story—Harrell’s “Calling and Election”— at one end, and the suburban moralism (ironic or not) of its most conservative, yet nonetheless still innovative, story—Card’s “Christmas at Helaman’s House”—at the other, suggests that Dispensation remains an important landmark in its own right, providing fertile ground for the development of new genres and styles, producing new central texts in the expanding and constantly changing—as opposed to simply evolving—canon, and expressing a wide range of diverse new voices.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/2026/02/21/letter-modest-proposal-help-end/

I started my substack with a couple posts about Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh’s anthology The Path and the Gate, arguably, if not inarguably, the most recent landmark anthology of Mormon short stories. I did this in part because my interest lies not just in Mormon short stories in general, but more specifically in what we might call the new or the modern (or even the postmodern or proto-postmodern if you want to go there) Mormon short story. So, I started at the end of the road where we find ourselves today in the present moment, in the now, essentially asking the quintessential Mormon question: why am I here? Or maybe even, where am I?

In this post, however, I want to approach this question of the new from the other direction, asking instead the other quintessential Mormon question, where do I come from? Or how did I get here? Consequently, I am turning backward to try to locate what we might call the origins or the ur-anthology of the new Mormon short story. I had always assumed that Eugene England’s Bright Angels & Familiars was the motherlode, but when I sat down to re-read it to write this post, I suddenly started second-guessing myself. I had only barely cracked the first pages before I instantly began asking if what I was reading really was modern. Or new? Or how new? Or was it simply a continuation of a by now clearly traditional if not exhausted canon of days long gone by. Good writing to be sure. Even a story published in The New Yorker (albeit in 1953), but didn’t these stories still somehow belong more to the past than to the present, let alone the new? The anthology is undoubtedly a classic, but is it just a classic? More tradition than the individual talent, as T. S. Eliot might have put it. Not quite the avantgarde. Certainly, not anymore.

Obviously, the answer to this question lies somewhere in the middle given that this anthology stretches both backwards and forwards in its sensibilities. Deliberately. As a kind of balancing act, or possibly even a display of well-honed juggling skills. As the two recent books about Eugene England—Terryl Givens’s Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism and Kristine Haglund’s Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal­—have demonstrated, England himself, his relationship to liberalism/modernity, and his relationship to the church often inclined more to the middle than the extremes. Perhaps more left of center than dead center, but he was not exactly a revolutionary with a manifesto in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other either. Professor, I served with Che Guevara, I knew Che Guevara, Che Guevara was a friend of mine. Professor, you are no Che Guevara. To riff on Lloyd Bentsen’s famous quip to Dan Quayle. It should come as no surprise then that England’s attitude toward Mormon literature might be no different. In fact, it is perhaps to be expected, if not utterly predictable.

Upon further inspection, however, as far as acid tests of the new are concerned, England’s anthology pretty much limps out of the gate. The reader is instantly bombarded with water rights disputes, johnny cakes, deer hunts, sheep camps, and intricate—how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—philosophical debates about the difference between a manure fork and a barley fork. In short, it reeks of a Mormonism—bishops, missionaries, pioneers, and even the Three Nephites—deeply rooted, possibly even inextricably entrenched, in a parochial, agrarian, rural Utah past with its generally predictable orthodox religious traditions and practices. One story does cleverly poke fun at the patriarchal order by suggesting when God doled out the sayso and sense men got the former while women got the latter. When it comes to the church, it may be hard to argue against that, but even this clever insight hardly constitutes a feminist manifesto. And maybe one character does take what she describes as a pretty wild and crazy weekend trip to California (spoiler alert: it was really neither particularly wild nor crazy), but at least initially, that’s about as modern as the anthology gets. Not quite The Hangover in Vegas. Although, it’s not like you good temple-recommend holding members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should be watching movies like that anyway.

And yet England’s own Introduction insists repeatedly that these stories are contemporary. Sure, this anthology is already three decades old, so the contemporary may have looked different back then. And to be generous, maybe England means contemporary in perspective or even form, more than contemporary in theme and setting, but from where I sit today, the anthology certainly doesn’t feel very contemporary to me—even in form—until I am nine or ten stories in when Darrell Spencer (indisputably a new Mormon writer) in his characteristically postmodern rambling narration finally claims that “Los Angeles is not the end of the world, Francois. Orem is.” And even then, his paean to Vin Scully and Tommy Lasorda perhaps ultimately dates him—and me—more than it announces some kind of imminent shock of the new. His character’s occasional beers notwithstanding.

But if we really can relegate large swaths of this anthology to the dustbin of the classical tradition of an age long gone, how/where does the anthology also promote something that we still might recognize as decisively new? There are certainly bits and pieces scattered here and there slouching toward Bethlehem, starting with Spencer’s love affair with the Dodgers and continuing through a little poker, a prostitute, a water reclamation project in Niger, some snarky teenagers, brief flirtations with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and even some speculative fiction about a bishop gone rogue. Certainly, there is enough material here to begin working with. To begin crafting a distinctively new tradition. It may not quite be Huxleyan brave new world new, but at least it isn’t just stale old Homerian old either.

If we want to talk about where the new intersects with the Mormon short story most dramatically, however, I would focus primarily on three delightful stories that all depict what happens inside the hallowed halls of Mormon meeting houses: Neal Chandler’s “Benediction,” Levi Peterson’s “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights,” and Phyllis Barber’s “At the Talent Show.” These stories are all deeply Mormon, but they also depict Mormonism in distinctively new—at least complex, arguably surprisingly critical, and often comically irreverent—ways. They may not outright wreck, but they at least creatively deconstruct, orthodox Mormonism.

I will quickly dispatch with the first two. Chandler’s story is a creative account of an epic OK Corral-level showdown between a liberal ex Sunday School teacher and his conservative replacement. We have all been there before. IYKYK. And this piece, worthy of its title, ends with arguably the best benediction in all Mormon literature—new or otherwise. And Peterson’s story about a bishop’s commendable, if not entirely successful, attempt to bring an impoverished and cantankerous, but simultaneously witty and wise, lost sheep back to the fold is so exemplary of the new Mormon short story that it is already widely read, recirculated, and known. So, I leave these stories for the moment not because they are unworthy of further analysis, but rather because I plan to eventually review Chandler’s in more depth when I write about his larger collection, with the same title, in which it is included. Peterson’s story has become so canonical, in fact, that it perhaps even deserves an entire stand-alone analysis itself.

So, let me turn our attention then to Barber’s delightfully comic portrayal of a ward talent show. A bit of a spoiler here. The talent show is in three acts: first, a nine-year-old boy accompanies three musical acts with varying degrees of talent; next, three teenage girls perform a campy version of “Chiquita Banana” (is there a non-campy version?); and finally, a bishop does a camp-for-camp’s-sake hula dance. On the surface, Barber’s story initially seems to be just a comic version of an unusually humorous ward talent show, albeit a slightly hyperbolic one. But for me it is the slight difference between the comic (with its laugh out loud jokes) and the camp (with its culturally subversive overtones)—together with Barber’s occasional overt jabs at Mormon cultural values and practices—that really distinguishes this story.

Of course, Barber begins with a classic comic juxtaposition when she makes her nine-year-old a musical prodigy, but isn’t this just slight exaggeration? After all, Mormonism is famous for its kid wonders, especially when it comes to music. Nine? Doubtful. But twelve? Maybe fourteen? Now that’s a real possibility. At least in certain wards where true helicopter parents are already hard at work on their children’s college applications.

The next two acts, however, transition the story away from the merely comic to the more provocatively campy. While in the previous act Barber comically juxtaposes the nine-year old with his musical hat trick, the boy’s—and the other musicians’—talents are still taken seriously. This is a talent show that showcases real talent—imperfect and nascent as those talents may be. The Chiquita girls’ campy performance, however, does not showcase talent so much as it actively subverts it. Garishly costumed and made-up, their act is so over-the-top theatrical—not to mention LOL funny and under-rehearsed—that they can barely, if at all, contain their own laughter which is also widely shared by the audience. The laughter is so loud, in fact, that it becomes subversively contagious.

But the line that catches my attention here is when Barber explicitly notes that in this act “there is no investment in perfection.” Not only no perfection, but not even investment in it. With this line, Barber subtly inverts the talent show into an anti-talent show. This is not even some kind of talented comedy performance; this is a campy inversion of the very principle of talent itself—both God given and otherwise. Here is where Barber takes the Mormon short story in new directions. There have inevitably been comic Mormon stories before. No culture, even our staid general conference, is without its humor, after all. Even if we are a particularly sober and serious—often largely humorless—tribe.

But Barber is not just making a joke. She is striking at the heart of core Mormon values: developing our talents (hence the child prodigies) and striving for perfection (the so-called teleological end-all be-all of Mormon morality or even theology). Consequently, Barber’s story isn’t just funny; it is a deceptively simple, yet profound commentary on—even critique of—Mormonism, if not quite in toto than at least at large. A call to not take ourselves so seriously or always strive, even over-strive, so earnestly for perfection. Arguably two of Mormonism’s tragic flaws. Barber’s “talent” show is even a rallying cry for lightmindedness and loud laughter. Things Mormons actively, even solemnly, forswear in our sacred temples. Or at least we used to. This isn’t just a funny story; it is a trickster-like inversion of fundamental core Mormon values: perfection and seriousness first and foremost among them.

Obviously, the heart of the story, however, lies in the fact that it is the bishop, the supreme authority figure in the ward, who is the campiest of all. In an over-the-over-the-top luau act (shirtless and gaudily made-up in a grass skirt with two half coconuts covering his nipples and in a solid deadpan), the bishop steals the show from the teenagers who only moments before stole the show themselves. To thunderous applause, he is greeted afterward by an adoring Sister Palmer who boldly proclaims his act “the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” The conquering camp hero, Bishop Moore is hailed not only as a stand-up comedian but even as a trickster god like Loki.

This ever-escalating humor, important as it is to the story’s claim that “you can never laugh too much” (itself already a dubious claim according to mainstream Mormonism)—however, isn’t the story’s final coup de grâce. Instead, in a whiplash inducing final plot twist, the musical prodigy, the bishop’s son himself, calls his own father to repentance for his pride. You’ll have to read the story to find out why. I can’t give everything away. Now bewaring of pridefulness is indeed a core Mormon virtue—at least since Ezra Taft Benson’s famous conference address—but in this story the warning comes out of the mouth of babes, thereby inverting both the patriarchal and ecclesiastical order of things. In short, the kid simultaneously schools both his father and the bishop.

While Barber may not be the first writer to point out a bishop’s—or a father’s—flaws, she does so here with a sense of humor and cultural vertigo that plays with Mormon cultural values more than affirming them, and this strikes me as if not outright new, then at least moving towards the new. In several ways then, Barber complicates and questions Mormon values and authority in ways that reflect a decisively post-devotional turn in the Mormon short story. The story isn’t without a moral or two, but what morals it has are decisively counterintuitive, if not countercultural, for such a sober patriarchal crowd, and it studiously avoids even the whiff of traditional moralism.

But the final story I want to comment on is Walter Kirn’s “Whole Other Bodies,” the anthology’s concluding story. Here is where I see the conservative bent of the anthology most forcefully. To begin with, it is a relatively straightforward story about how missionaries convert a family to the church, and how their conversion again more or less straightforwardly improves their lives. While I have nothing against conversion stories per se, or even against stories about the benefits of Mormonism, this story simply comes across as too simplistic, too sentimental and clichéd even, to exemplify anything that I would want to call the new Mormon short story. I do like how the kid opens his eyes during the prayer at the baptism. It is a nice touch in what I consider to be an otherwise mostly forgettable story, but I say this not to disparage Kirn as a writer, only this particular story which he happens to have written. Possibly, his worst. Certainly, not his best. But hey, even LeBron James has an off night.

My real complaint about this story, however, is not that it was included in the anthology, but rather that another story, “Planetarium,” from Kirn’s same collection, My Hard Bargain, wasn’t included instead. Now obviously, Kirn may have chosen this story himself, or there might have been publication rights issues, or there could be any number of other considerations that went into this choice, including perhaps the editor’s or publisher’s unwillingness to really embrace the new. Nevertheless, I find it an unfortunate choice. “Planetarium,” a humorous, satirical story about the church’s problematic approach to teaching young men about masturbation, virtually screams newness, breathing a whirlwind of fresh air into its genre—let alone the church’s stale heavy-handed approach to sexual purity.

It is also the first Mormon short story that I ever read, perusing it in the bargain bin in the BYU bookstore of all places. It was a real revelation about how someone could actually think critically and creatively about the church without necessarily just becoming an angry young Mormon determined to leave the cult but never leave it alone. Instead, this story examines the church’s fault lines and chipped edges. It explores its confusions and contradictions. And in a very clever and entertaining—even lighthearted and comical—manner. Satire, but not biting. Mere lightmindedness. Not quite loud laughter. Looking back, I’m surprised it didn’t inspire me right then and there to become a Mormon short story writer. But alas, I had just returned from a mission and was mistakenly addicted to those sad apologetic mimeographed F.A.R.M.S. reprints. In retrospect, I should have immediately demanded a trade, or at least flirted with free agency.

To refer to Eliot again, England’s anthology misses a real opportunity here to end with a bang instead of a whimper. To choose fire instead of ice. To reject tradition and embrace individual—even new—talent. The anthology may hint at a dam about to break or a fault line beginning to slip, but it only inches open the door of the new instead of throwing wide open a Pandora’s box of innovation. It may be a landmark, even a Mount Rushmore, contribution to the new Mormon short story, but it still leaves me wondering what could have been. What other possibilities were left on the cutting room floor.

I won’t presume to pass final judgment on the man, the myth, and the legend—let alone his anthology—other than to say that, whatever its other flaws may be, it certainly helps move, push, or maybe only inch forward the future of the new Mormon short story. Consequently, it remains an indisputable, if uneven, starting point for discussion about this new emerging canon, and it introduces some of its enduring central texts. After all, where would we be without Chandler’s, Peterson’s, and Barber’s stories? Possibly still waiting for Steven Peck’s incredible “Sister Carvalho’s Excellent Relief Society Lesson” (in The Path and the Gate).

But go read “Planetarium” in Kirn’s My Hard Bargain right now. It is required reading. I hope to eventually write a whole stand-alone piece about it. Although, this does mean that I have just committed myself to three new essays in my last 3,000 words. “Planetarium” is a Mount Rushmore level landmark in the history of the new Mormon short story. But you can skip “Whole Other Bodies,” which also means that even if you should read England’s anthology, you really don’t need to read it all the way to the end. Bruce McConkie might have even described “Whole Other Bodies” as just a barking dog snapping at travelers’ heels as the caravan moves on. Much of Kirn’s other writing, however, is revolutionary, and it just keeps getting better. Once you finish “Planetarium,” read Kirn’s “Mormon Eden” in Robert Raleigh’s anthology, In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions. There is nothing sentimental or clichéd about that one. It is all fire, no ice.

Well, let’s start with the Mormon part. Admittedly, Pace is a former Mormon, a fact that I normally wouldn’t speculate upon except that it is plastered across the blurb on the book’s back cover, so it is apparently something he isn’t shy about. But it perhaps gives us some initial insight into the larger collection: maybe his distance from his former faith allows his writing to go certain places that perhaps more orthodox writers are unable, or at least unwilling, to go, such as fellatio.

And apparently go again even. I won’t tell you the second story that returns to this theme, so you will have to read the whole collection to find out. I will warn you in advance that this theme’s second appearance isn’t as lighthearted and comic as its first, suggesting even further evidence that disaffected exmormon writers may be starting to explore if not quite terra incognita, then at least roads less traveled, for the Mormon short story. Before you change the channel, however, remember that this collection did win an award from the Association for Mormon Letters. So, it can’t be R-rated. Can it?

In neither story, however, is the sex itself the real focus. Pace isn’t just titillating us with simple scandalous sexual exploits let alone trying to write some kind of erotic thriller. This isn’t exactly Heated Rivalry. (If you don’t get the reference, ask your kids. Or if your kids are on missions, ask their LGBTQ friends.) What makes “Lana Turner” so delightful is not the sex, but the way in which Pace weaves the sex into a larger story that begins: “‘How was the temple?’ asked Gloria. Her husband Don had just spent the afternoon dressed in white and saving the dead.” So no one can really blame you if you didn’t see the sex part coming, but they say it’s not the destination, but the journey that counts, apparently even with fellatio. Or at least that’s the way it is in a carefully crafted story.

So how does Pace, in so few pages, get from the temple doors to the bedroom? Spoiler alert! But hey you have to mention something in the story to even talk about it. Pace segues via a visit to the hair salon where Gloria the beautician gives Sister Bodell a “pretty darn sexy” hair styling as she calls it in her supposedly “spiked” language. Only to have Sister Bodell, a grandmother to thirty-two, reply that her “only regret” since her husband’s passing was that she refused “to suck on his penis the way he always wanted me to.” Why not? Of course, because the bishop gave her an explicit lecture against it, comparing it to being a pole dancer. So, this really isn’t an erotic thriller about fellatio after all. It’s a Sunday School lesson about withholding it. Of course, Pace has been around the block enough to know that he is referencing the widely reported 1982 “internal communication” (I guess that makes it policy not doctrine?) instructing bishops to give just such advice. Advice which is equally widely reported to have been rescinded quicker than the policy of exclusion. Yet, somehow Pace finds the scandal in Mormon vanilla sex by suggesting that is only a thinly veiled cover for grandmothers’ (and grandfathers’) much wilder imaginations. It’s sort of a clever, not particularly lurid and certainly not gratuitous, back-handed exploration of the secret lives of Mormon grandmothers. And it is a brilliant comic juxtaposition of sex/grandmothers/bishops’ offices. Pace may no longer practice Mormonism, but he still gets its inside baseball spot on and has a good-spirited laugh at it in the process.

But this is just one brief clever, but passing, moment in “Lana Turner” which shows how a former Mormon writer might be able to get away with a few things that your local stake president can’t. Not that all that many writers are called into stake presidencies these days anyway. But the larger story here is perhaps the more interesting one. Connecting the Lana Turner from the title to the temple-going husband Don, the larger arc of the story explores characters speculating wildly about going “through the temple for a famous person.” It’s not quite oral sex edgy, but it is a little comedy of errors in the house of the lord edgy. Borderline sacrilege. Lightmindedness, at least, if not quite loud laughter. I’ll let you read for yourself how this particular comic conceit plays out in the story, but let’s just say that redeeming the Hollywood dead may not be the least righteous excuse for renewing your temple recommend.

Let’s return, however, to the title story to see just how much Pace’s bold imagination is untethered from the constraints of Mormon orthodoxy. Pace’s American Trinity—as any good Mormon should be able to guess—are, of course, the Three Nephites. Already a clever way to reference three wandering Amerindian Jews, Pace goes much further in his representation of these three Book of Mormon legends. What sets Pace’s story apart from previous Three Nephite stories, however, is the creative way in which he reimagines, complicates, and deepens the reader’s conception of what it might be like to actually live as one of the three Nephites, especially as untethered from orthodox stereotypes and predictable presuppositions.

One of his Nephites, Kumen, is something of a stock figure: the beloved guardian angel of Mormon lore who changes tires, brings food in times of need, and miraculously heals the wounded. The one who performs “textbook miracles” and is the stereotypical hero of many a Mormon urban legend. Kumen’s ministry is acknowledged as a small part of the story, but his Nephite do-goodery is not Pace’s focus like it is for so many previous stories, such as Maurine Whipple’s “They Did Go Forth.” Instead, Kumen represents only one possibility of three Nephite-ness, and the least interesting one at that. Jonas, the second Nephite in the story is perhaps less stereotypical. He likes to frequent scenes with lots of “pretty ladies” and “covets the world’s beautiful artifacts,” but he is still primarily just a minor character. A straight man. A foil to the main character, the narrator Zed, who is Pace’s most complex prolonged meditation on the possibilities opened up by the three Nephites’ immortality.

If you have read Cleanth Brooks’s “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” you are halfway to understanding Zed. Zed is the meandering, complicated, loosely defined, constantly changing, impossible to pin down image of the possibilities of Three Nephiteness as it might be imagined by perhaps Samuel Beckett or Tom Stoppard. Not quite outright theater of the absurd, but certainly deeply existential. Zed asks big philosophical and literary questions about what he is really doing and what really is the legacy of Nephite civilization, and especially its sacred record. He is a bit of a writer himself or even a poet more deeply concerned with the writing of sacred narratives than merely changing tires. He is perhaps something of a Matthew McConaughey plays Hamlet playing a Nephite. He really is something of a mind trip, and it is both an artistic and a philosophical treat to follow his complex journey not just through historical time but through his own mind and its complex wanderings and musings.

There is no way to do justice to or paraphrase this character’s Joycean stream of consciousness as it reflects upon the passage of a once great civilization, and especially on the significance of its sacred record. Zed’s claim to fame, however, is not feeding some famished pioneer widow crossing the plains, but rather personally helping to preserve a particular passage of scripture in the Nephite record. You will have to read the story to find out which one. Zed may have “lost the spirit of the assignment” somewhat, and by the end he isn’t even sure that he is still a believer, certainly not in the same sense as his colleagues are at any rate, but he does still believe in the power of words and in caring deeply about them and exploring how and why we arrange them in the ways that we do. If you are willing to allow the theoretical jargon, he is the ultimate meta-Nephite.

While these two stories are perhaps the collection’s magnum opuses (IMHO), the rest of the stories are far from mere filler. There is plenty of action in “Robomaid,” a clever second-person story about your mano a mano O.K. Corral showdown with a meter maid. “Caliban Revels Now Ended” nicely pairs a quotation from the Bard’s Tempest with a quotation from the Mormons’ Book to explore the boundaries between orthodoxy and disbelief. “Dreamcatcher” interweaves a mysterious owl with a warehouse full of equally mysterious Mormon relics which may or may not prove the church is true—all set against the backdrop of Mark Hofmann’s Salamander Letters and pipe bombs. “Angels in Utah: A Flood Fantasia on Mormon Themes” plays on the title, if not quite the substance of Tony Kushner’s highly successful Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. More confined to local events, however, it relates a thinly-veiled, if veiled at all, account of the real historic 1983 flooding in Salt Lake City when the Saints were called to leave church to sandbag. These devastating ox-in-the-mire floods threaten, albeit only in the spirit of a counterfactual fantasia, another real treasure trove of Mormon records.

So, Pace plays a little with fact and fiction throughout, but he always gets his Mormonism spot on: “There is no such thing as a conversation with one’s bishop. Only an interview, even (especially) when it is masked as a conversation.” You don’t have to take Pace’s frequently scattered comments on Mormonism literally, and you can even take them with a grain of salt, but don’t take them lightly. IYKYK. Other stories describe a backsliding teen who has “Stairway to Heaven” played at his funeral, a backsliding airline attendant who increasingly dalliances first with a fellow Jewess attendant and later gradually with an ever-widening crowd, and a widower general authority who faces pressure from his superiors to remarry. This last “backslider” is perhaps safely ensconced in the church hierarchy, but isn’t he still unfaithful to church expectations among his brethren, if not quite official doctrine, in his own small way—even if it is ultimately his attempt to remain faithful to his deceased wife instead of dating around at his advanced age.

Through it all, Pace reflects thoughtfully, even if perhaps a little heterodoxically, on both the small minutiae of everyday Mormon life—from working on the welfare farm to hiding your cup of joe from your bishop—and on its larger questions of orthodoxy, faith (both orthodox and not), salvation, and theology. It asks questions about whether an unobservant teen who dies young is still worthy to serve a mission in the afterlife, whether a saint should be allowed to have his post-second Manifesto polygamous ancestor officially acknowledged by a church that barely acknowledges post-first Manifesto polygamy, and whether a backsliding flight attendant can still feel like a “bishop” in some metaphorical sense to the people in his own personal community. These are real meaningful questions that really aren’t even addressed in general conference, let alone answered in the General Handbook of Instructions. For the moment then, I suppose that we will have to be content to let poets remain Shelley’s unacknowledged theologians of God’s kingdom. Let them rush in where the more orthodox may fear to tread. And if they have already left the faith anyway, it’s not like they can really still be excommunicated. Can they?

But that’s not always the way it works. Sometimes seeing the movie can encourage, even compel, you to read the book. Especially if you are new to reading, and let’s face it and don’t try to kid yourselves: How many people really read Mormon short stories? It’s a pretty niche genre even among the well-read, so I suppose it can’t hurt to try to prime the pump a little and drum up a little interest in reading Mormon short stories more widely. After all, if it works for the New York Review of Books then maybe it can work for the Compass Gallery crowd in Provo, too.

But I try to tread carefully and not reveal too much about the stories I review. I try to find that sweet spot where I pique my readers’ interest just enough without spoiling the show by giving away the ending. Or even just the jump scares. With such a limitation, it is difficult to sustain a decent-length blog post by just talking about one story at a time without going into too many details and specifics. Taking on a small batch of stories all at once allows me to talk more generally about the works. Or often even not about the works themselves so much as about the broader concept or conceit that they share—at a slight remove from the texts themselves. It is on only the very, very rare occasion, therefore, that I will venture to review one single story at a time, and I will only do it for a very, very good reason.

Today is such a day, and my reason is that James Goldberg’s “The Church History Museum’s Avant-Garde Wing: A Review,” published in his collection, Remember the Revolution: Stories and Essays, was my first inspiration for writing Mormon short stories. While we have never met, I consider James a friend and a mentor since he has graciously helped me work on a few stories of my own. Once again, there is absolutely no valid reason why you shouldn’t read this story. And right away. After all, it is free online in Issue 16.1 (Fall/Winter 2018) of Irreantum. (Though I also highly recommend buying the rest of Remember the Revolution. After all a Mormon referencing revolution is only one step removed from the most significant reference to Mormons in all of world literature: James Joyce’s “A Mormon. Anarchist.” in Ulysses.) Goldberg’s story is also reasonably short, brilliantly written, and LOL funny. So, Stop. Drop. and Read. As they taught you in elementary school. Or at least they should have.

So, how and why did Goldberg’s story shape my embryonic beginnings as a Mormon short story writer? Let me first take a step backwards and provide a little context. Before I wrote short stories I was a failed novelist. Having had two full-blown psychotic mental breakdowns both shortly before (two months) and shortly after (one week) entering the M.T.C., I wanted to tell my rather unusual personal story while simultaneously exploring the all-too-often experience of missionaries’ struggles with mental health issues, so I tried to write a novel Elder Lithium. New to the game, the novel was very uneven and not even worth a rewrite, so I abandoned it. I could have left it at that, but then I read Goldberg’s story and had an epiphany. Even a series of them.

First, Goldberg’s story suggested to me that maybe if I worked on short stories before I attempted a full-length novel, then I could learn how to be a better writer and improve my craft before I took on the more difficult task of a novel which I was clearly not yet up to.

Second, it showed me that a short story, even a Mormon short story, can be brilliantly written just like the novels and poetry that I was more accustomed to reading and teaching. I had taught university literature classes for twenty years at that point, and I can count on one hand the number of short story writers that I had taught. I believe it had been Sherman Alexie and Jhumpa Lahiri. Maybe “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In Goldberg’s story I saw instantly that a short story could be clever, insightful, and thought-provoking. That it could raise significant questions about history, culture, and the nature of art. That it could explore my own cultural tradition and history as a Mormon which up to that point in my life I had never considered through the lens of literature. Not as a teacher or even a reader. Certainly not as a writer. At least not as a successful one.

Finally, it didn’t exactly give me a voice, but it did inspire me to believe that the voice I was seeking for was possible. I had been working on finding my own voice in my novel, and to a certain degree I had at least begun to find it: comical, inquisitive, curious, gently critical. Maybe even a little snarky and absurdist at times. When I read Goldberg’s story, I saw for the first time that a Mormon short story could speak with a voice that interested me and talked about issues which I considered significant. In short, I found if not quite a brother, then at least a distant cousin a couple times removed. Someone who at least belonged within my artistic pedigree. The difference between my writing and Goldberg’s was primarily that his was good, even excellent, and mine simply sucked. But it was this story, in particular, that showed me that if not I, then at least someone, could accomplish what I wanted to do as a Mormon short story writer. I have since found numerous worthy mentors, representing a wide array of voices, but this was the story that jumpstarted my journey as a Mormon short story writer.

So, that explains why the story matters to me personally and in a very visceral way. Now, I want to turn attention to why it should matter to you—as a reader and/or writer—interested in the larger cosmos of Mormon short stories. I could say much more about this story. I could go on and on, but let me limit myself to my three most salient insights.

But first, a SPOILER ALERT: This is one of the rare occasions where I will openly discuss some of the most important and significant details of a story in my review. After all, I have already told you where you can get the story for free, so if you haven’t already read it proceed at your own peril of diminishing your reading experience by reading this review of Goldberg’s “Review” before you read the original text itself.

Now to begin with, “The Church History Museum’s Avant-Garde Wing: A Review,” is Mormonism’s answer to Donald Barthelme’s “The School.” And I’ve already mentioned how much I like “The School” when comparing it to William Morris’s “The Ward Organist.” But that comparison was vague and general, a certain sense of banter and absurdist-esque humor. Here the comparison is deep and structural, and the comparison is so strong that it feels to me like Goldberg couldn’t even have written this piece, or at least I could never have written it, without explicitly modeling the story after Barthelme’s. Of course, I have not consulted Goldberg about this, so there may be no influence whatsoever, and I would never underestimate Goldberg’s ability to invent his own story in his own original voice absent some direct influence beyond the basic maxim that writers ultimately learn how to write by reading other writers in general. The comparison then exists primarily for me as a reader independent of whatever Goldberg’s actual influences were or were not.

When I talk about the structural similarity I am referring first and foremost to the plot escalation. And here I will leave behind explicit comparisons to Barthelme—except to alert the reader that they exist—and simply describe Goldberg’s story itself. Goldberg’s story starts by first simply dipping its toe in the water with the first exhibit: “pioneer children treadmills where you just walk and walk and walk.” The idea is simply so funny, and doubly so in the context of the patent absurdity of an avant-garde wing of anything Mormon—except for perhaps the Center for Latter-day Saint Art—and certainly not of anything officially sanctioned and church-approved through correlation. Right out of the gate, however, you feel like you have already reached the acme of comic humor, only to have each new exhibit ratchet up the absurdity: “dolls made out of carved apples and potatoes,” a “hyper-realistic . . . immersive theater” that replays on loop a four-hour reenactment of Joseph’s last four hours in Liberty Jail, and then just when you think it can’t get any funnier he hits you with an “experimental Greg Olsen series of landscapes without Christ.”

Where does one go from there? Surely, you think Goldberg has shot his wad and played his best hand one round too soon. And yet, Goldberg soldiers on through the children’s section where kids “reenact [in building blocks] the 1850 tornado that knocked down” the north wall of the Nauvoo temple and ultimately to a “video monitor of the pioneer trail landscape,” and get this: from Iowa to the Salt Lake Valley. This obviously “monotonous” feature film is found by some to be “soothing” with the “first view of the Salt Lake Valley . . . immensely satisfying.” In terms of craft, this is simply rising action brilliantly building step-by-step until culminating in a climactic reveal, and isn’t it fitting that the climax is the first view of the Salt Lake Valley? But what is so thrilling about this story is the way in which each joke initially seems to be the climax—you think that there is no way that the next joke can get any funnier—only to be pleasantly surprised again and again when Goldberg always has one more comic magic trick up his sleeve. It is like a James Bond film, only the non-stop, ever-escalating action is simply pure comedic gold. It’s a one-man show that gets better with each joke until you are ROFL—if not LMFAO. See what I just did? That’s the way that Goldberg always steps it up one joke at a time, pummeling you first with comedic jabs followed by wild lefts and rights before the ultimate knockout punch.

In addition to this brilliant rising comedic action, Goldberg is also the master of the over-the-top hilarious comic juxtaposition. The initial stark contradiction starts the train in motion: Avant-garde/Church museum. But at each stop along the track he places another comic landmine: pioneer children endlessly walking/treadmill, dolls made out of carved apples and potatoes/dried and desiccated to look like they were actually made in the 19^th century, will Hyrum soon pick up the Book of Mormon to read the passage in Ether/has he already read it maybe an hour before, the complete mundane boredom of a four hour video loop/the unsettling sense that something terrible is coming, avant-garde wing/children’s section, cubist sculptures/children’s scripture stories, and my personal favorite a triple whammy: experimental/Greg Olsen/landscapes without Christ. From beginning to end, it is not simply that the exhibits are so funny, but also that what makes them funny is the tried-and-true comedic technique of unexpected and irregular juxtapositions.

But what gets me the most, at the most visceral gut-wrenching level—at least if we are reading this story as Mormon short fiction—is the deeply-entrenched Mormonism of it all. All of Goldberg’s jokes land, especially to a Mormon audience, because they are so grounded in the daily life and culture, the broad complex history, and the bold iconography of Mormonism. From top to bottom the Mormon references are spot on: the pioneer children walking and walking, hair wreaths, Hyrum Smith turning down the page after his final reading from the Book of Mormon, the common musical composition of Praise to the Man and Scotland the Brave, Greg Olsen landscapes, and the 1850 tornado that knocked down the north—not the south—wall of the Nauvoo temple. Goldberg knows and uses his Mormonism both down to the smallest details and up to the most iconic gestures. And he consistently uses this insider baseball to great comedic effect. The jokes land because they are our jokes, and it is okay to laugh at ourselves, at our own jokes, in ways that it can be uncomfortable when others are laughing at, not with, us. Goldberg’s jokes bring you into that inner circle of the tribe and help you feel like you belong to a peculiar people no matter how quirky, tacky, contradictory, laughable, ridiculous, or mundane your people can be. Well, they may not be all that much, but at least they are yours.

But master of comedy that Goldberg is, he ultimately reminds us that for all its quirks and eccentricities, Mormon History is ultimately no laughing matter. After the last echo of the last joke fades into the sunset—and I won’t reveal the ultimate surprising climax of Goldberg’s story—Goldberg once again uses juxtaposition to place all his comedy against the broader backdrop of real serious Mormon history, reminding us that after the last laugh we are still a people with an all-too-real, often unfunny, and deeply tragic history. One so tragic that you either have to laugh about it or cry about it, but Goldberg ultimately reminds us that at the end of the day sometimes you have to do both.

as Orson F. Whitney hoped, “Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” It isn’t interested in mass accessibility, normalcy, or cultural approval. The Mormon Weird is unashamed. It is the voice of those who disagree with the streamlining, the watering-down, and the Church’s 20^th-century conservative appeasement strategies. Simultaneously, Weird Mormon Art embraces destabilizing perspectives on the Church, questioning “fundamental” elements and encouraging reimaginings.

Or, as I prefer to put it, with perhaps a little more pith: It’s Mormon Art from Austin—home of SXSW, the Cathedral of Junk, and literally the Museum of the Weird itself—rather than Salt Lake City—home of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. And, of course, also the Utah Jazz. Viva Stockton and Malone!

Mormon literature, in general, and Mormon short fiction, in particular, have undeniably been swept up in this new movement, and the article specifically identifies—and correctly I would concur—William Morris as one of this aesthetic’s foremost practitioners. Let me attempt to explain why, starting simply with how the subtitle of his recent book, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, openly engages not just the Strange itself—an obvious synonym for the Weird—but more specifically the immediate juxtaposition of the Mormon with the Strange as a central identifying marker of his work.

Now, let’s turn to subject matter. Morris’s work immediately explores the gamut of Mormon experiences, chronicling tales of missionaries, home teachers, bishops, church historians, BYU study abroad students, Mormon graduate students. and even Emma Smith and Brigham Young. He even has a story about Mormon pass-along cards. What can be more Mormon than that?

But Morris approaches this perhaps predictably Mormon subject matter from a wide array of diverse angles that are invariably often aslant, frequently askew, and at times downright akimbo. In short, the subject matter of many of his stories is not just Mormon, but more specifically Mormon Weird—in Bushman and Perkins terms—or at least Strange Mormon—in his own. For example, in “Emma Travels West” Emma travels West to visit Brigham is an imaginative history of events that never happened. This isn’t historical fiction—a literary imagining of real events; it is downright deliberately counterfactual history. That’s a little weird. “Strait is the Way” involves a middle-aged Mormon mother who befriends a punk band. And a straightedge hardcore punk band at that. She may not be quite weird outright, but she is at least what I call—in another Substack post—an unconventional Mormon. I don’t want to completely spoil the story, but a member of the band himself converts to the church, and writes a memoir about it, eventually evolving into another brand of unconventional Mormon. As these unusual characters start piling up, the merely unconventional starts gradually evolving toward the weird. Throw in a little soft time travel and voila: you have full on weird. In “The Darkest Abyss in America,” Morris’s punk band is itself Mormon. And Japanese. And their pre-concert prayers sound like temple dedications. What punk band prays like that before a concert—even if they are Mormon—unless they are unconventional bordering on weird?

In “There Wrestled a Man in Parowan,” the bishop is unconventionally also a wrestler with an impressive winning streak. In “Last Tuesday,” a mysterious fuzzy cherub, already weird, has strange, bordering on supernatural, musical abilities. “Ghosts of Salt and Spirit” mixes Marxism with the United Order to create a strange amalgam of the two. “The Dark Watch” is out and out futuristic science fiction in a world where Mormonism has weirded itself into something only vaguely recognizable through some kind of connection to polygamy and some hazy sense of Mormons as the remnant of a peculiar people. In “Conference,” a graduate student at the MLA conference chooses to spend the evening entertaining a pair of missionaries in the lobby of the conference hotel instead of going out dancing or dissertating with any of her diverse groups of grad school friends. Now that’s weird! Taken collectively, these stories range widely from the merely unconventional to the obviously strange to even the outright weird.

But the weird doesn’t have to always verge into science fiction, the counterfactual, or the supernatural. Sometimes, especially in Morris’s deft hand, the weird is simply the dramatically quirky or eccentric peculiarities of what not only makes Mormons a peculiar people as a group but also what makes particular Mormons uniquely peculiar as individuals. One of my favorite Morris stories is “The Elder Who Wouldn’t Stop…” But wouldn’t stop what? Picking his nose? Crying while bearing his testimony? Masturbating? None of the above. It’s drumming, of course, and only Morris could have imagined it so. What a quirky, eccentric obsessive habit for an Elder to have, and Morris brilliantly describes how this Elder simply cannot stop drumming:

During breakfast, lunch and dinner; phone calls, visits, and discussions. With his fingers, his fists, his feet, his knees, his mouth. With forks and spoons, pens and pencils, pamphlets and notebooks, twigs and breadsticks. On the bus and on the metro; on the table and on the counter; on the elevator and on the stairs. On his chest and legs and arms. On his scriptures, on his dinner plate, on his backpack, on his bed. On every door frame, every handrail, every seat back, every street sign. And even sometimes on Elder Russell.

Obviously, this is unconventional. Certainly, it is strange. And arguably, it is just simply flat-out weird. Even if it does sort of, kind of bring back certain vague mission memories that you had largely forgotten if not outright actively repressed.

But I think that I have already proven Morris’s bona fides as a champion, and a heavyweight champion at that, of the Mormon Weird. So, I want to change course here briefly to address another issue. Simply put, Morris is straight-up a damn good writer. In the hands of a lesser talent, the conceit of a drumming Elder might have gotten a good laugh or two, but Morris’s ability to describe this Elder in breathtaking prose is simply astounding. I have long maintained that one of the best paragraphs is modern American literature is Jack Kerouac’s description of Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) as a parking lot attendant in On the Road. I won’t reproduce it here, but you can read the novel. After all, the passage is only a few pages in. In Morris, however, Kerouac has met his match. The parallels are obvious. The two passages share the same ecstatic manic energy. They employ a similar crisp, sharp, twisting prose. Or to put it with pith uncharacteristic of a literature professor, they simply kick ass. Of course, the rest of Morris’s story unravels cleverly and delightfully, but this paragraph alone is worth the price of admission. This story is also the only story published in both Morris’s The Dark Watch and his The Darkest Abyss. So, you can purchase either book and still get the story. You can’t go wrong.

To finish on the same theme of Morris’s excellent writing, I will conclude by mentioning Morris’s prize-winning story in Dialogue, “The Ward Organist” (55.4 Winter 2022). And you have no excuse for not reading this one because you don’t even have to pay for it. And in my own personal opinion, which may not be worth all that much, I believe that pound for pound, word for word, this is both Morris’s best story and his best writing. (Feel free to disagree. After all, even I could easily make the argument myself for several other pieces as well.) But here I will give you my comps up front.

I believe that two of the greatest short stories that I have ever read are Donald Barthelme’s “The School” and George Saunders’s “The Moron Factory.” Drop what you are doing now and read them both. Together with Morris’s “The Ward Organist,” too, of course, because all three belong together, and believe me when I say that I don’t lightly mention any author in the same sentence as Barthelme and Saunders. But give Mormonism our Barthelmes and Saunderses—rather than our Shakespeares and Miltons—is perhaps the rallying, or even war, cry of the Mormon Weird.

If you are able to read all three stories, I am confident that you will instantly agree with me that they all share the same slightly-rambling, banter-heavy, delightfully-comic, slightly-absurdist style. It may not be your cup of tea. It’s not everybody’s perhaps, but if it is, as it is for me, then you are in for a real treat. Of course, since I have just given you the assignment to read the story yourself, I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, so I will go light on my analysis, but I think it is safe enough to simply quote the opening lines:

Never learn to play the organ, the old woman told me. I should call her Sister something, but I don’t remember her last name. Never learn to play, she told me. Once you do, your stuck.

I don’t remember what I replied. Probably said something like, it doesn’t sound so bad. Said there were worse things to be.

I was in my mid-twenties. I was unmarried and working as a database manager for a small nonprofit, so I guess they thought I had the time to learn.

They weren’t wrong.

But pay careful attention to the details. “They weren’t wrong” instead of they were right, now there is a double negative that your high school English teacher shouldn’t have tried to beat out of you. It brilliantly captures the just slightly offbeat pacing of the banter. As does “I don’t remember her last name” or “what I replied.” What a story where what you forget matters as much as what you remember. And “they thought that I had time to learn” instead of I had time to learn. Says as much about the nature of Mormon church callings as does “never learn to play the organ” or you’ll get “stuck.” Every paragraph, every sentence, every word is chosen precisely with the acute ear of a master wordsmith. Certainly, one of the, if not the, best opening of any Mormon short story in my book.

I will leave the rest of the story for you to read for yourself, but suffice it to say that this story is one of the most imaginative and probing explorations of the nature and intricacies of church callings that I have ever read. Who makes them? Who gets them? Why do they get them? How long do they hold them? Do you really want them? Do we even get a real choice whether to accept or leave them? Will I have to sit on the stand? What if I mess up on my callings? Will they strengthen or weaken my testimony? How much time will they take. And, last of all: Will I ever get released from them. About the only question that Morris doesn’t explore—or perhaps only does so obliquely—is whether the calling of ward organist will follow you clear on into the afterlife. They say once a bishop always a bishop. But that just means that you are still a bishop after you inevitably get released. Once a ward organist always a ward organist means more ominously that you may always be an organist precisely because you may never get released. Either here in mortality or perhaps even into the eternities hereafter.

Since I can highly recommend both works as must reads—as in you aren’t in the cool kids’ club unless you have read them—I do not want to spoil their clever plot twists and brilliant details. So, this isn’t going to be an in the weeds Cliff Notes summary of the plot and characters. Both works are far too good for such reductive analysis. You really have to read them yourselves. Instead, this is a 30,000 foot overview of their central conceit: that polygamy could be restored either as a pilot program (Larsen) or as a general directive to the entire church (Rytting). While Larsen’s play was first performed a decade ago and Rytting’s story is first published in this issue, the clever pairing of the two works in this bonus issue suggests that this particular idea has perhaps been brewing and percolating—if Mormon texts are allowed to brew and percolate—in the recent Mormon literary zeitgeist. I want to explore why this theme might be so important—at this particular moment—for a variety of literary, social, and theological reasons. Admittedly, this is an entirely speculative analysis told from the perspective of a reader not the writers themselves. I have not consulted either writer, so I cannot speak to their authorial intentions, but I am more simply trying to explain how these ideas strike me as one reader who is deeply interested in the question that these two writers raise of why polygamy and why now? Why might multiple writers choose to explore the restoration of polygamy in the contemporary church? Let me count the ways.

First, the idea is laugh out loud funny, and doubly so with Larsen’s suggestion that it could simply be rolled out as a pilot program. This is a simple matter of incongruity. For well over a century the church has been desperately attempting to disassociate itself from its polygamist past. Its leaders have cut their beards. Its policies have created uninhabitable no man’s land barriers between the Brighamite church and its polygamous offshoots. Its leaders deflect any mentions of polygamy from the pulpit or in the press. It is routinely whitewashed and glossed over in the church curriculum. It is the history which shall not be named. To think that the church would simply reverse a course that it has so relentlessly pursued for over a century is hysterical. Moreover, these two texts not only suggest that the church could reverse course on this issue, but they more ridiculously suggest that it might be able to do so relatively smoothly and seamlessly. Another possible humorous plot line: that Mormons are such sheeple they might actually go along with anything their leaders suggest, including a second go-round with polygamy. Another definitely humorous plot line: reintroducing polygamy would create numerous humorously awkward day-to-day interactions between husbands and wives. Much of the pleasure of both narratives is the way they so cleverly and carefully explore these uncomfortable intimate interpersonal dynamics. Rytting, in particular, reveals her expertise as a Jane Austen scholar with her deft handling of the comedy of manners genre. Much comic hijinks ensue.

But second, the idea of reintroducing polygamy is no laughing matter at all. For all that the church has done to distance itself from polygamy, it has never quite cut the umbilical cord tying the contemporary church to its polygamous roots. It has never decanonized Section 132, for instance, or even denounced it as a false doctrine or a theological mistake. The Manifesto did, in fact, end polygamy as a practice, but not as a doctrine or a theology. The church has never explicitly stated whether polygamy might still be practiced (or perhaps even required) in the afterlife. It has continued to seal men to multiple women (living and dead) in its temples. It has current prophets and apostles who have set the example of being polygamously sealed to multiple women eternally. In short, it has (at least temporarily, at least sort of) ceased the practice of polygamy, but it has never cleaned up the hot theological mess that polygamy continues to cast over the church. What Carol Lynn Pearson calls The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy. In the end, these two narratives are so funny precisely because they are not funny at all. The church may not be on the precipice of reintroducing polygamy anytime soon, but every Mormon woman faces the very real possibility that the minute she dies she could be instantly reintroduced to the principle. These texts may deflect that eternal reality into a temporal comedy, but they certainly suggest its possibility and explore its dynamics. The church has never claimed that this won’t happen. In fact, it has repeatedly hinted that it might. With Dallin H. Oaks even recently suggesting that we might have Mothers in Heaven, in the plural. In short, the church wants to have its clean-cut Mitt Romney Mormonism cake and eat its polygamous history, too. It wants to claim that we would, of course, never practice polygamy today while still maintaining that its leaders were inspired to introduce and continue the practice for half a century. By suggesting that the contemporary church could reintroduce polygamy, these two stories highlight the fact that in crucial ways it has never entirely, altogether left the practice behind. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to reintroduce after all. All it takes is a few focus groups and a pilot program. And maybe 17.5 million sheeple.

Third, it makes for great literature and theater. As I have already suggested it makes for great comedy, sort of straddling the boundary between a comedy of manners and a comedy of errors. But even more so, it allows the writers to explore the fine details of the human comedy of manners. The multitude of subtle and nuanced ways that people act and interact in real life. And how actors and characters interact in fiction. If there is one compliment I can pay these writers, it is that they are not propogandists. They are not trying to score political or theological points. They are not concerned—or at least not primarily concerned—with making grand statements about the nature (let alone unmitigated evil) of polygamy. They are interested instead in exploring the many complex ways in which the interpersonal dynamics of polygamy might play out in life or in fiction. What makes these stories so compelling is the fine attention to detail that these writers pay to the human interactions in their texts. It is delightful to see them work through these dynamics without aggressively either condoning or condemning the practice or theology of polygamy. Instead, they let the reader creatively imagine just what the dynamics of polygamy might actually feel like in the modern world. You just have three people on the stage or on the page trying to figure things out with their unique combinations of ingenuity and incompetence. If these stories depict anything, they depict the very real human struggle—the envies and affections, the slights and considerations—that polygamy was and would be. Comedy aside, these are masterful studies of the indomitable human spirit confronting an almost Sisyphean task. They are master sketches of what it means to be human and interact with other humans. Polygamy simply provides an exceptional setting for exploring the complex dynamics of human interactions, and both writers take full advantage of the possibilities this situation affords.

Finally, perhaps the most important reason these writers explore polygamy is to comment on contemporary gender relations in modern Mormon culture. These works are not just about the past of polygamy; they are equally about the now of Mormon gender roles and expectation. In this sense, they pair nicely with Fillerup’s story which also explores contemporary Mormon gender politics. If polygamy could slide so easily into the contemporary church, maybe this should give us all cause to pause to reconsider just how much today’s doctrine of gender complementarianism falls short of anything remotely resembling full-on gender equality. Certainly, most Mormon men mean well, and if called by God would do their best to personally practice polygamy in as equitable a manner as possible. The problem is that polygamy does not result from personal inequalities, but from structural ones. Suggesting that contemporary Mormon gender roles may still be—at least in some respects—closer to polygamy than to a feminist world in which women hold the priesthood—though Fillerup does explore that idea as well—certainly calls into question just how much men are still privileged over women in the church, from its beginnings to the present day and by all signs (pace Fillerup) well into the future as well. Larsen and Rytting ask Mormon men just how much have they truly forsaken the gender inequalities of our polygamous past—and Mormon women just how far they are willing to tolerate these same inequalities. Larsen and Rytting’s polygamy may be a gentler, kinder polygamy; but at the end of the day they really are not suggesting that a polygamy 2.0 might be more tolerable than it’s predecessor; they are reminding that we still have unfinished business. We must once and forever kill off the zombie-ghost that polygamy is: the not-quite-distant-enough past that seemingly resurrects itself in eerie and haunting ways. Their ghost of polygamy present may be genteel, but it is still polygamy, and it still needs a stake driven through its heart, or it may be coming to a pilot program near you.

This may be above all true for Mormon literature as demonstrated by what is indisputably a, if not the, ur-text of contemporary Mormon fiction: Levi Peterson’s The Backslider. While the entire novel, like much of the best Mormon fiction, explores both the inherent and the accidental tensions within Mormon life and culture, its iconic image of the cowboy Jesus provides one of Mormon literature’s most memorable images of these paradoxes and incongruities. Consequently, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is not exploring terra incognita as much as it might purport to be, but rather simply adding to a long tradition of unorthodox figures in Mormon and Mormon adjacent culture. Jack Harrell’s heavy metal hitchhiking Jesus, Tony Kushner’s Joe Pitt, and the delightfully eccentric characters in James Goldberg’s Tales of the Chelm Ward are only the first, and themselves widely diverse, characters that pop into my mind. Art is always a medium for exploring ambiguity, and Mormon culture has provided it with a perhaps unexpected mother lode. The entire history of cultural representations of unconventional Mormons, from both inside and outside the faith, is a topic worthy of a dissertation or two.

With that large backdrop in mind, my current discussion, at least initially, focuses more narrowly on two stories again from Hall and Raleigh’s seminal anthology The Path and the Gate: Joe Plicka’s “Natural Causes” and Annette Haws’s “Planting Iris.” As with all my analyses, I highly recommend that you read the stories themselves before you read my analysis, but with these two stories, in particular, I want to talk about them in very general terms because the specific details of their climactic moments really spoil the joy of the stories if revealed in advance. Like with much art, the pleasure of these texts lies in the intricate specificity of their central conflicts. In vague, general terms, however, Plicka’s story depicts a high-ranking Mormon breaking a common rule that a Mormon of his standing is supposed to be above, while Haws’s story depicts an unexpected agitator rebelling against standard Mormon protocols and authority. In both cases, the figure of the disobedient saint, whether through transgression or rebellion, strikes the reader’s fancy because of the character’s unexpected behavior and how it reverberates throughout the community. While such unstereotypical behavior is often seen as uncharacteristic of Mormonism, Plicka and Haws remind us that it is much more common and plays a much more significant role in the larger dynamics of Mormon life than we generally acknowledge. It is part and parcel of the Mormon experience which is what makes these unconventional Mormon characters and situations fit entirely within the conventions of Mormon literature.

But why are such contradictory characters, like Hulu’s wives, so appealing when presented in a specifically Mormon context? I would suggest that the first reason is because of Mormonism’s seemingly ironclad homogeneity. Like Malvina Reynolds’s little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes all the same, modern Mormonism emerged out of the crucible of the 1950s culture of corporate men in their grey flannel suits, their dutiful stay at home wives, and their leave-it-to-Beaver children combined with a strong dose of nostalgia for the conservative Reagan 80s, all the while trying as hard as possible to keep its nose clean of the radical 60s or Generation X’s grunge ethos, let alone today’s post-Obergefell LGBTQ identity politics. Arguably, today’s ur-text of this homogeneity is the opening Hello set piece from the Book of Mormon musical. With its dozen identical youthful white male missionaries, dressed in identical white shirts, black ties, and black nametags, holding identical copies of the Book of Mormon, and repeating the identical refrain hello—not to mention the not-so-subtle subtext that these missionaries are essentially salesmen for the Mormon religion—this scene represents Mormon culture at its apex homogeneity. The figure of the unconventional Mormon only works artistically or culturally because it is situated, either explicitly or implicitly, against this homogeneous background like the secret Mormon wives repeatedly depicted against the backdrop of Mormonism’s iconic temples. The juxtaposition depends on the always already accessible image of widespread bland conformity, and both Plicka’s and Haws’s stories follow this same pattern by developing a series of scenes and characters drawn from a relatively calm, comfortable Mormon world before their protagonists suddenly break the mold. The narrative technique is ultimately a kind of bait and switch, or simply put a plot twist, but it depends upon having a strong bait or plot from which to switch or twist. Mormonism, perhaps a shade shy of ultraorthodox Judaism, provides that uniform cultural background in spades.

But the figure of the unconventional Mormon likewise depends on the very real cultural diversity of big tent Mormonism. The bait and switch wouldn’t work, or at least wouldn’t feel compelling or even artistic, if we didn’t all already know our fair share of secret Mormon wives, sinful saints (in ways both big and small), and outspoken Mormon rebels challenging the church’s protocols from within. It seems as if every ward has its fair share of token Sunstone or Dialogue or Exponent II liberals, clandestine marital affairs or at least coffee drinkers, PIMO lurkers on the margins attending just to make a spouse or parents happy, multiply-pierced and tattooed teenagers (if not adults), LGBTQ saints, and simply lovable Chelm-level eccentric fools of every stripe. The unconventional Mormon appeals because he or she or they are very real, perhaps even ubiquitous, or at least far more prevalent than the stereotype suggests. So, when an artist depicts the unconventional Mormon, he or she or they give voice to the cacophony of voices of real lived Mormon experience. You may love them or hate them, but no one can deny that these misfit Mormons readily exist within Mormonism both openly and secretly. They may not outnumber the more mainstay orthodox members who line the pews, but they at least occasionally anchor the ward basketball team or even become stealth Gospel Doctrine teachers. I’ve personally even known at least one bishop in Birkenstocks.

The real heresy of Secret Lives is that its Mormon Wives are perhaps just as stereotypical as their orthodox counterparts, standing as comfortably outside the faith as their Molly Mormon sisters stand within it. Arguably, the real unconventional Mormons—equally unconventional and Mormon—are more liminal figures, straddling uncomfortably between the lines rather than simply drawing them in black-and-white chiaroscuro and choosing between them. Once again, this liminality is brilliantly depicted in the Book of Mormon musical because its two protagonists, Elder Price and Elder Cunningham, simultaneously couldn’t be more similar (both identical Hello singing missionaries holding identical copies of the faith’s signature scripture) at the same time that they couldn’t be more different in personality and approach to proselytizing, let alone their divergent understandings of the restored gospel’s relationship to Star Wars. Obviously, given the rigid confines of mission life, there are natural limits to their diversity, but what makes the show successful is neither its representation of black nametag homogeneity nor its representation of Lord of the Rings-inspired diversity taken in isolation, but rather the clever way in which it juxtaposes sameness and diversity within the same narrative. Those most attuned to Mormon culture, and especially its artists, have always been keenly aware of the presence of both polarities within the same culture and the productive—and at times destructive—tension created by placing them in close proximity to each other.

A simple case in point is your average fast and testimony meeting. What could be more homogeneous than every member’s monotonous monthly rote repetition of the faith’s central tenets: I know the church is true, I know that President So and So is a prophet, and I love my family. And yet, the testimonies that are actually remembered longest by individual members are the ones that go off script: I’m thankful that the church has saved me from a life of prostitution, I know that Bo Gritz is a true American patriot, I think I’ll sing my testimony for you today. This granular eccentric diversity within what is usually experienced as a tight-knit unity is both more interesting and more Mormon than any soft swinging scandal. Or to be more precise, what makes the swinging scandal so interesting is that it emerges straight out of a bunch of Mormon influencers’ MomTok culture. What attracts viewers to the show is neither the swinging nor the MomTok in isolation, but the close connection between these opposing forces.

To return to Plitka’s and Haws’s stories, again without giving too much away, both embody this granular tension between the orthodox and the heterodox. Obviously, the opposing poles in these stories are not as widely disparate as they are in Secret Lives, but the deftness with which each author weaves a narrative that crosses these boundaries is much more skillful and precise. And it is precisely this granular attention to detail that most distinguishes reality television from literary fiction. The broad contrast between Utah Mormonism and soft swinging is perhaps interesting as a conceptual paradox, but the granular details of how these two narratives are juxtaposed in the television series are generally sloppy and haphazard, though admittedly occasionally entertaining for all their garishness. In short, the story is perhaps interesting at some level, but it is told without much artistry or even imagination really. Plitka’s and Haws’s stories, however, repeatedly and carefully work and rework this tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy with a soft touch throughout their stories, teeter-tottering precariously between events and characters that move back and forth seamlessly from one side to the other. Their ultimate acts of transgression and rebellion are dramatically less dramatic than soft swinging, and yet they somehow depict both the homogeneity of Mormon culture (its strict prohibitions against sins so much more minor than swinging, the shocking audaciousness of even the most seemingly tepid opposition to church authority) and also the diversity within that culture (that even the most seemingly faithful saints ultimately transgress or rebel at least on occasion).

Plitka’s and Haws’s stories are not the only explorations of the unconventional Mormon in the anthology, but they are some of the most clever and well-crafted. Obviously, the short story works on a smaller scale than the novel, but both stories depict characters with the ring of truth of Peterson’s Cowboy Jesus more than the chaotic clamor of Secret Lives—even though both protagonists live secret Mormon lives in their own unique ways, and perhaps even remind us that in the end every life, even a Mormon one, is in some sense secret. Ultimately, however, both stories remind us that representations of the unconventional Mormon may be one of the most tried and true conventions of Mormon and Mormon adjacent literature. After all, who wants to write little stories made of ticky-tacky?

First, I want to focus on the three stories that interest me the most personally: Todd Robert Petersen’s “The Investigator,” Danny Nelson’s “Narrow is the Gate,” and Ryan Shoemaker’s “Barry Dudson: The God Journals.” It is not even necessarily that I find these the three best stories in the collection, though they are certainly among them, but rather that they share a thematic or generic similarity that I believe deserves more serious consideration. Unlike most of the stories in the anthology, or in Mormon short stories in general, they stand out because they are explicitly non-realist. In fact, they could loosely be described as speculative fiction in that they deliberately venture beyond the confines of everyday reality in ways that do not even attempt to present a remotely realistic narrative. They could even be described as genre fiction, representing horror, science fiction, and fantasy respectively, and we could simply end our analysis there.

And yet, I want to argue that all three of these stories are a kind of speculative fiction that is not strictly speaking, or at least not merely, genre fiction. Petersen’s story is clearly a postapocalyptic zombie story, but it does little to really develop the horror aspect of the zombie figure or depict gory showdowns between humans and zombies. The post-apocalypse is certainly its setting, but not exactly its raison d’ȇtre. Similarly, Nelson’s story is inescapably an alien invasion story, but its primary focus is not to depict a detailed picture of aliens or their spacecraft or weapons or other advanced technology, let alone some kind of all-out military conflict between species. Finally, Shoemaker’s story explores the creation of another world, but its primary focus seems to be on the mind creating that world, and the choices it must make to do so, rather than on simply depicting an alternative reality. It may ultimately explore aspects of fantastical world-making, but it is in no sense merely an example of the fantasy genre as traditionally understood. In short, all three stories are in some sense genre fiction, but none of them are specifically, or at least solely, focused on world-building their respective genres. They use those genres, and do so effectively, but for other ends, or at least not as ends unto themselves. In this sense they are more properly understood as speculative (beyond realism) but not solely genre-based or at least not genre-bound.

More specifically, especially from the perspective of Mormon fiction, each story complicates its speculative or genre fiction from a decisively Mormon angle. For Petersen, the central conceit of his story, and what makes it so original and delightful, is that it focuses not on zombies, or even on a post-apocalyptic world per se, but rather on the discovery of a “Stake Map” and the value it might have in locating supplies of food stockpiled by Mormons in such a post-apocalyptic world. Similarly, Nelson’s story is not simply about aliens, but more specifically about aliens who are determined to converse with the Mormon prophet about certain aspects of Mormon theology. The primary focus of the story is on that transplanetary theological conversation not on the aliens themselves. Finally, Shoemaker’s new world is not simply a generic fantasy world, but rather a world created specifically by a recently exalted human, now a God, who has completed Celestial Kingdom University and begun creating his own world. In short, each mode of genre fiction is used specifically to explore a fundamentally Mormon theme: food storage, prophesy/theology, and deification. In each case, the Mormon element is foregrounded as central and primary to the logic of the story, while the speculative genre is perhaps more incidental or mere background setting, or at the very least creatively reimagined through an engagement with Mormon tropes or issues. This, I believe, represents the best, or at least to me the most interesting, kind of Mormon speculative fiction because it allows Mormonism to fundamentally alter narrative and generic conventions while simultaneously using the genre of speculative fiction to really explore and reconceptualize Mormonism itself from a highly unconventional and unpredictable perspective. These three stories, perhaps more so than any others in the anthology, simultaneously reconceptualize both literature and Mormonism.

Let me now propose a more granular analysis of each story individually. Peterson’s story (also published in Dialogue 57.1) is perhaps the story that most fully explores its genre as a horror, or at least a post-apocalyptic, story. Substantial effort is devoted to world-building the specific details of its post-apocalyptic setting, but in many ways this is something of a red herring or even a bait and switch because Peterson draws the reader into the prototypical elements of this genre only to surprise them with a crucial plot twist that seems completely out of place in a zombie story: the discovery of a “Stake Map.” What makes this twist so delightful is that this map is simultaneously so foreign to a zombie story and yet so unpredictably relevant. What could be more useful in a zombie apocalypse than a map to all the houses that have stockpiled a year’s supply of food and possibly other useful items? And yet who has ever thought of the usefulness of such an artifact in a post-apocalyptic story? Maybe a stake map is so useful that it should even become a stock staple of zombie narratives. And from a Mormon perspective this story asks if we really know why we are stockpiling a year’s supply of food and other necessities anyway? Is it possibly for a zombie apocalypse or some other radically unpredictable event other than what we expect it to be? It is this confluence of the speculative and the Mormon that makes this such an interesting story. Without the map, it is just another run-of-the-mill zombie story. Without the zombies, it might be a realistic story about the need for food storage in case of unemployment or maybe even nuclear war, but a story that envisions food storage in the predictable manner for which we think we are stockpiling it. When you combine the zombies with the food storage, however, you get a fascinating speculation on both what might really come in handy in a zombie apocalypse (maybe a stake map more than guns or maybe a stake map is the best way to find guns in some locales) and for what purposes food storage itself might come in handy (if not a zombie apocalypse then maybe an unforeseen pandemic like COVID-19 rather than nuclear war). Are Mormons really stockpiling the right stuff for the right disaster (say N-95 masks and toilet paper rather than 25-pound cans of wheat)? In both cases the story makes us think more seriously and more creatively about both zombie narratives and Mormonism from unpredictable, original, and creative perspectives.

In contrast, Nelson’s story perhaps develops its genre narrative the least. The story obviously engages the inescapably science fiction genre of an alien invasion, but it spends little time exploring exactly who aliens are and what they do, except for apparently travel across the galaxy not to invade another planet but to converse with the Mormon prophet. Consequently, the Mormon angle quickly takes center stage to the exclusion of anything specifically or dramatically alien. But once again, the Mormon element is a bait and switch, since the last thing we expect aliens to do is to seek a theological détente with the Mormon prophet. With this surprise twist, this isn’t really an alien story after all. Instead, Nelson turns the science fiction genre story into a fun and clever meditation on two core deep doctrines in Mormonism. First, every Mormon knows that modern revelation reveals that God has created other planets, but absolutely nothing has ever been remotely revealed about those planets—except maybe that Kolob is the planet closest to the throne of God. (Joseph Smith’s alleged prediction of Quaker-like inhabitants on the moon didn’t age too well.) Nelson’s story, however, speculates on what inhabitants of those other planets might be doing, and whether we might ever have contact with each other, which in turn brings us to the story’s second deep dive into Mormon doctrine: what is the relationship between the theological histories of diverse planets? Mormons love to speculate on whether Jesus’s atonement applies just to our own planet or in a transplanetary cosmic sense, and they have genuine opinions about whether our planet is the only planet evil enough to kill its Savior. Ultimately, Nelson’s story raises the question about whether other theological principles from our planet might apply to other planets—and vice versa. Once again, however, it is the speculative genre of science fiction which enables this unconventional exploration of Mormon theology, albeit on sort of the deep-dive theological fringes. And it is the core Mormon elements that make this alien invasion story so unlike any other. While several Mormon science fiction writers have explored the Mormon doctrine of other planets, Nelson’s delightful final twist on what specific theological questions the aliens want to address with the prophet is not revealed until the end of the story, so I will leave it to the reader to discover.

Finally, Shoemaker’s story develops perhaps the most profound and far-reaching speculative engagement with Mormonism. After all, food storage is a practical but not exactly theological principle of Mormonism. Meanwhile, the existence of other planets and our relationship to them are interesting but perhaps fringe theological doctrines. Shoemaker’s story, however, directly speculates on what is really an almost completely unexamined but core element of Mormon theology. Mormons certainly believe in an afterlife, but they have a very thin description of what it might actually be like. After decades of church instruction, all I have basically learned is that we will live with our families, do missionary work, bear and raise children, and create planets. The first three activities, however, are essentially simple extensions of some of the most basic tasks that Mormons already do every day here on earth. It is only the last one that involves anything not only new but unfathomably different from any earthly activity imaginable. And yet, there is absolutely no revelation whatsoever about what this might actually entail beyond maybe the first two chapters of Genesis, which aren’t much help at all as far as specifics. This is supposedly the grand purpose of our entire destiny (as gods no less), and yet nobody has really ever even imagined, let alone revealed, what this really means. I’m not going to pretend that Shoemaker’s story does anything like reveal the true nature of what it means to create and populate planets, nor does it pretend to, but it at least begins to ask the question of what creating planets might be like and explore its possible answers. While its creative and imaginative narrative isn’t at all intended to be realistic, even in a heavenly sense, it does seriously engage a wide range of questions, predicaments, and practical realities that a would-be creator might face. It provides perhaps a first sketch rough draft of what it actually might mean to create planets, as an omnipotent being, while simultaneously offering a cautionary tale that it may not be quite as simple as we often portray it. As such, this story does something that only fiction can do—at least at present: truly speculate on some of our most profound Mormon doctrines. That it does so with a profound sense of humor and playfulness only adds to its charm. The Maxwell Institute can publish all the speculative theological interpretations of scripture that it wants, but none of these works can even begin to consider what gods really do in creating planets because there are no scriptures that even address such subjects to interpret. The only real avenue for such theology is fiction and speculative fiction at that, since it is clearly—by definition—beyond the confines of both everyday reality and current revelation. Could fiction writers more seriously and collectively explore what our most profound theological concept of deification really means, even if only in a speculative and fictional sense? As Shelley might have asked, are poets the theologians of the cosmos?