Cross-posted at A Motley Vision website.
I was over at Amazon.com the other day, trying to figure out someplace to post about my book in the Mormon community. I mean, I was able to find a couple of places to post in the Gay etc. community. Surely there ought to be a place to post in the Mormon community
Below is the text I had prepared for a panel at last summer’s Sunstone symposium on (you guessed it) Mormonism’s impact on me as a writer (slightly edited). Headings toward the bottom in bold below are taken in part from the panel description in the program. I no longer remember how much resemblance what I said bore to what’s written below, but I rather liked what I came up with to say, so…
It’s always interesting seeing what non-Mormon readers of No Going Back have to say about the book. For one thing, it includes an awful lot of Mormon detail. Since I never imagined that it might have a large non-Mormon audience, I didn’t go to any trouble to explain that detail. No real accommodations for any readers who don’t happen to be Mormon.
At a more basic level, I’ve wondered if non-Mormons would even be able to identify with the characters and their motivations. Sure, there’s a lot of universality to the basic conflicts in the book. Every teenager struggles with issues of identity and peer pressure. Every married couple struggles with issues of communication and priorities. But that doesn’t necessarily make the particulars of one person’s conflict easy to identify with on the part of readers whose lives are very different.
Cross-posted from the AML blog.
There’s a certain sense of validation, in our commercial culture, that comes with being paid for one’s work. This is at least as true in literature as elsewhere. Anyone (or so the thinking goes) can write a novel. The real test is whether you can get someone (not yourself) to pay money to publish it.
Several years ago, prompted by a non-Mormon friend, I read Angels in America, a set of two plays set in New York City in the mid-1980s, written and performed in the early 1990s, that won multiple awards (including a Pulitzer). The play is largely about homosexuality, AIDS, and political conservatism. Several of the characters are Mormons, though Tony Kushner (the playwright) is not.
My reaction (which I initially posted on AML-List, and which was later published in more polished and expanded form in Irreantum, the journal of the Association for Mormon Letters) was that despite the Mormon characters and some Mormon iconic symbology, I didn’t really feel that the play was about Mormons or Mormonism in any meaningful way. At the time I wrote my reaction (2003), that was a perspective I didn’t see reflected or even much addressed in discussions of the work — bafflingly so, considering that 3 out of 9 main characters are supposedly Mormon.
So I wrote my response, which I’ve decided to repost below, in the hopes that perhaps this will prompt a little more discussion or at least awareness on this issue.
I am extremely pleased to announce that No Going Back is a finalist in the Best General Fiction category for the Whitney Awards, an awards program for novels by LDS authors.
I got word a few days ago that a new blog sponsored by the Association for Mormon Letters has now gone “live” over at http://blog.mormonletters.org. I have to say, I’ve seen the lineup of authors for December (I’m down as a potential occasional contributor), and I’m excited. It looks really good — like the kinds of conversations we used to have once upon a time at AML-List, the email discussion list sponsored by the Association for Mormon Letters. (AML-List technically continues, but for a variety of reasons has fallen onto hard times.)