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 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.)
Annette Lyon: NGB Avoids “Didactic Landmine”
Monday, January 18th, 2010I was reading a post over at the AML blog by Annette Lyon, an author of six LDS novels, when I started to get nervous. She was talking about the importance of not writing didactically, where the message drives the story. I was wondering what she would think of my novel, when I encountered the following:
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Tags: Annette Lyon, Association for Mormon Letters, blogging, Jonathan Langford, Mormon, No Going Back, preachiness, reader comments, realism, Reviews of No Going Back, writing process
Posted in Reviews of No Going Back | 3 Comments »