Information about The Association for Mormon Letters
1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994
Awards for this first year were nominated from among items published 1975-77. Subsequent awards have been given only to works published during the preceding year.
Fiction:
Poetry:
Poetry:
Criticism:
Noting that "either story alone would qualify for the prize," the prize committee commented that "both stories achieve added dimensions of meaning from the submerged yet constantly present conversion patterns alluded to in the titles, the recurring tension between wilderness and the disciplines of Mormon community, and the movingly realized ambiguities of loss and gain."
The committee cited "Hit the Frolicking, Rippling Brooks" as "a rich, witty, and sophisticated story of contemporary Mormon life, an appreciation of the ordinary which avoids easy affirmations and easy negations alike' with 'technical maturity and control."
Judges called this collection "the present and doubtless temporary culmination of Clinton Larson's poetic effort; a case of vintage Larson, with all the traits that baffle, irritate, delight, and enlarge his readers." The award also acknowledged his "long and gigantically productive" writing career "which has made him a huge, potent paternal presence on the imaginative horizons of younger Mormon writers."
"God's Plenty" was cited as "an example of humane and disciplined Mormon imagination searching and shaping the hard element of personal experience."
In their evaluation of "Grandmother," the judges noted its "lean and austere grace" and singled it out as "witnessing one way the sources of Mormon tradition can nourish contemporary Mormon poetry."
The judges awarded the prize for the essay's contribution, among other things, "for probing the relationship of autobiography and history" and "for analyzing some literary possibilities offered by the genre."
"The year 1979 was unusually fruitful for Mormon letters. Beyond the growing production of popular Mormon romances, Deseret book and Bookcraft published their first novels. There appeared, in addition, a collection of short stories, two volumes of poetry, a saga, and even an epic poem. If we add to these the impressive number of poems, stories, critical pieces, and plays published in 1979, we have perhaps a larger body of creative work by LDS authors than has appeared in any previous year. Much of this deserves recognition--work by Stephen Taylor, Randall Hall, Kristie Guynn, Emma Lou Thayne, Linda Sillitoe, Ann Best, Stephen Gould, Michael Fillerup, Dennis Clark, Iris Corry, Bruce Jorgensen, Clifton Jolley, Edward Geary, and others. Four works, however, have particular significance and were chosen for citation by the awards committee of the Association.
The judges stated, "At a time when Wasatch-front Mormons find themselves an ever-smaller minority in the expanding Church, the work of Bela Petsco is a sign of the future among us." This collection, a series of linked stories featuring a central character, Mih ly Agyar, an ethnic Hungarian from New York, is significant "not only because it is refreshing and insightful in its own right, but also because it is the first of its kind--an important modern fictional work by and about a Latter-day Saint reared outside of the Wasatch-front cultural tradition."
The judges stated that this collection of poems "impresses as a reflective exploration of the most Mormon of topics, the relationship of family and religious experience. The energy of the poems lies in their gentle co-mingling of dark profundity and engagingly informed naivete. Through them Clark has taught us that form indeed liberates, and that sonship may bristle at times with anger and cry out in pain, yet resolve in awe and celebration."
According to the awards committee, "To Utah is a bringing together of forty years of poetic exploration. Hart's 'tribute and gift to those he loves becomes a tribute to his understanding of and devotion to the elements of his existence. Out of To Utah and his portrayal of the destruction caused by human frailty rises his sympathy for the pain of living and his faith in our ultimate success.' His 'reverence for the Word' resounds throughout To Utah, a book that 'spans his years and illuminates ours.'"
The awards committee felt that Larsen's essay "embodies the important virtues of our discipline: solid scholarship, an excellent grasp of subject matter, and the careful workings of a keen analytical mind." "This critically perceptive survey of early Mormon poets makes an important contribution to Mormon literary history and is especially noteworthy as a model of undergraduate scholarship."
This historical romance was named "the best work of fiction on a Mormon theme." Ms. Brown, a Provo poet and novelist, the citation continued, had written "both an informative history of the settlement of Provo, and a full, rich novel about a sensitive and strong woman."
The citation noted that the book invites "the reader to travel from the daily experience of the tourist into the perceptive observations of a humanitarian and into the imagination of a poet. Always there is the movement from the present of daily concern into the past of scripture. Always there is the need to understand coupled with the pleasure of knowing and identifying with Israel and its people."
The citation for this award stated, "This essay pointed out new trends: 'women writing about women, seeking identification with a Heavenly Mother, and portraying marriage realistically' in 'new voices of individuality and humanness.'"
According to the judges, "J. Reuben Clark: The Public Years is a biography that moves 'beyond the adventure of the pioneer epic into the institutionalism of the twentieth century, beyond the isolation of the Great Basin into the coexistence with a nation of pluralities, beyond eulogy into candor. All this is done in clear but elegant language, creating a new classic in Mormon literature.'"
The judges stated that this short story is "a masterfully written story which explores with delicate tact the ambivalence of apostasy and the subtle appeal of faith to the nonbeliever."
"Gilead" is described as "a psalm of praise which, by invoking and extending both scriptural and literary tradition, celebrates the providential unity of the world and time under the figure of the living tree."
In making this award, the prize committee called Sillitoe's work "a finely crafted sonnet and a mature short story which portray the tenderness and terror of Mormon women's experience with acute insight and feeling, and which together demonstrate remarkable literary versatility."
The awards committee felt that this essay "continues the ongoing project of literary interpretation of Latter-day Saint scripture by unfolding further dimensions of typology in the Book of Mormon and thus showing its close structure and thematic connections with the Bible."
The judges stated, "In this important work Thayer traces the confrontation of Owe, an unusually devout sixteen year old Mormon boy, with a usually hostile spiritual environment, and achieves, en route to Owen's humanizing, a refreshing human universality and reaffirmation of life and the necessity of 'opposition in all things'--all without lapsing into the didacticism which has so often plagued Mormon fiction. We commend Mr. Thayer, not only for his careful craftsmanship, the expectation for which he established in his collection of short stories, Under the Cottonwoods, but also for his imaginative and creative examination of Mormon themes which consistently strike universal chords."
In awarding this prize, the judges said, "Peterson demonstrates in these six stories an artistic versatility ranging from the profoundly symbolic to the delightfully comic. Peterson sets his stories in a moral Mormon universe in which his characters often struggle with their Mormon vision, cope sensitively with their guilt, and seek for redemption. With this brilliant collection, Peterson has raised the Mormon short story to a new level of artistic excellence and sophistication."
According to the awards committee, "All of these plays center on two fundamental themes: 'the consequences of unrighteous dominion and our concomitant need for what the Romans called "filial piety."' Rogers's characters confront the necessity of making strong moral choices which, when made, will forever after alter relationships with individuals and institutions. Posing difficult questions and challenges, Rogers unshrinkingly probes the consequences of standing for Truth in a world of ambiguities. In offering these plays, Rogers's contribution to Mormon letters is inestimable, and he joins therewith a small group of distinguished LDS playwrights in offering to thoughtful Latter-day Saints moral dramas which resound more with the echoes of Gethsemane and Carthage Jail than those of Added Upon and the Ward Road Show tradition. In this volume, Rogers has stirred Mormon drama to a giant leap forward."
The judges stated, "In this remarkable sequence of outstanding poems, Larson displays poetic versatility and power in portraying deeply Christian faith in a variety of styles. Throughout this tapestry, Larson carefully weaves the Rose of Christ in styles ranging from Dante and Spenser to Herrick and Milton; he captures their styles brilliantly, yet adds his own touches, shaped by profound faith in the Word and the Word made flesh. These ten poems, brilliantly conceived and executed, are but the more recent publications in Larson's ever-growing corpus of fine poems which assure his position as the premier Mormon poet."
The awards committee stated, "In these poems this gifted young poet writes of simple but significant human experience in a controlled style which is vibrant with color and humor and joy. We commend her for these auspicious beginnings and, echoing the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, we greet her at the beginning of a bright and promising literary career."
In awarding this citation, the awards committee stated, "Speaking as one having authority and not of the scribes, England outlines, in this landmark article, the significant accomplishments of Mormon literature through three distinctive periods and suggests, if not a credo, the a near-credo for writers--and readers--of Mormon literature; and his attached bibliography has become a point of departure for all who would be knowledgeable in Mormon literary scholarship and England's article is a milestone in Mormon literary scholarship and yet another milestone in his career of major contributions to Mormon literature, a career which has thus far led him from founding and editing Dialogue to the presidency of the Association for Mormon Letters and his profession as a teacher of Mormon letters at Brigham Young University. In this article, as in so many of his works, England again reminds us why his name has become synonymous with Mormon literature."
Discussing these three volumes, the awards committee stated, "Expressively drawn, wonderfully incisive, and always witty, Grondahl's cartoons graphically surpass Mark Twain's criteria for humor: They do not 'professedly teach,' nor do they 'professedly preach,' but in their inimitable way they teach and preach, as must all good humor, and thus are instructive to Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons alike about Mormon culture and society. Mr. Grondahl points a gentle, sympathetic, but probing finger at individual and institutional Mormon foibles, conceits, fancies, flaws, and sacred cows, and thus illuminates the gap between magnificent LDS aspirations and often-bumbling Mormon realities. In his work, which is a remarkable contribution to Mormon Americana, Grondahl performs a great service and thereby awakens among all of us a restorative and therapeutic laughter."
The judges stated, "Jolley's well-written, lighthearted, yet serious sequel to Eugene England's earlier article "Blessing the Chevrolet" demonstrates the power of humorous writing in reinforcing and promoting the Mormon world view. Positing a purposeful, God-centered universe, Jolley, whose delightful column in the Deseret News has gathered a large and appreciative audience, plays in this article on the incongruity between skepticism and faith--and refreshingly allows skepticism to take it on the chin from an unassuming but confident (and surprised) faith."
The awards committee said, "This collection goes far toward proving Peterson's thesis that 'good stories are appearing among the Mormons, greening like wheat in a Utah spring.' Centering in what Peterson has called 'the possibility of wrong behavior,' these stories variously examine the tension between Sainthood as fact and Sainthood as aspiration, between belief and doubt, and between expected blessings and the traumas of reality. Peterson has performed an important service for Mormon letters by collecting 'an abundant sampling of [Mormon] experience--comedy and tragedy, ecstasy and disillusionment, restraint and sensuality, heroism and failure, romance and defiance.' The Association for Mormon Letters commends Levi S. Peterson for making thee hitherto generally inaccessible stories available to a larger LDS and non-LDS audience."
Speaking of his contribution to Mormon literature, the awards committee stated, "Weyland's gift for lively narrative, his ability to touch the lives and hearts of young readers, and his skill at subordinating a good moral to good prose and an exciting story have long delighted young and old readers of The New Era. And such novels as Charly, Sam, The Reunion, and Pepper Tide, as well a collection of short stories, have kept young people reading his work, which has thus supplanted or at least supplemented the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, sci fi, and even television. Jack Weyland has blessed a generation with good stories well told, set in a real world peopled with the good and not-so-good but fathered by and centered in a caring God. Many of our young people are cutting their literary teeth on Weyland--and we should all be grateful."
To honor the tenth anniversary of the founding of the journal, the judges acknowledge this publication: "In an era in which Latter-day Saint women have been seeking to redefine their relationships with their church, Exponent II has blessed a generation of Mormon women with the opportunity to read and write, from within a framework of faith and the desire to believe, for and about the Latter-day Saint woman. Though the journal has opened its pages to a variety of excellent expression from across the whole gamut of faith, its editors have deftly reminded it readers, through selection and encouragement, of the necessity of sustained commitment to self-improvement centered in gospel principles fostered by the Restoration. Exponent II has thus remained an exponent not only of women, and particularly Mormon women, but of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We commend the several editors and their associates not only for keeping the torch lit, but for keeping it brightly fueled and well-passed over a significant decade which has meant so much to the growth of women within the Church and thus to the moral and spiritual refinement of the Church itself."
An excerpt from this citation stated, "Elder Maxwell, of the Quorum of the Twelve, is endowed with an exceptional ability to translate personal inspiration and revelation into sermons which in turn evoke such inspiration and revelation in the lives of his listeners. Perhaps it is not the duty of laymen to differentiate publicly among the clearly inspired sermons of the General Authorities or others, but it cannot be considered as speaking ill of the Lord's anointed to applaud and commend the sustained sensitivity and inspired excellence of Elder Maxwell's addresses to the Saints through his career as the Church Commissioner of Education, as a General Authority, and as an Apostle. His sermons, always carefully crafted, soar from their grounding in the Standard Works on images and cadences which reach out and move the whole range of Latter-day Saints as he teaches them concepts often taught but ne'er so well expressed."
This award is given "for [Kenney's] outstanding efforts in fostering the publication of Mormon literature. His willingness to risk publication and republication of fine literary works, despite the likelihood of lower sales, has heartened many authors and readers alike."
Carol Lynn Pearson received a special award "for her sustained and distinguished contributions, over two decades, to a variety of genres--the novel, the short story, poetry, drama and musical drama, humor, and the essay, all of which reflect the ethos of a thoughtful and committed Latter-day Saint."
The citation for this award states, "This is the first fully contemporary Mormon novel: the first novel of substantial fictive skill and moral weight to deal, in the immediate present, with a substantial contemporary problem, abandonment and single parenthood, that afflicts Mormons in unique as well as universal ways. It confronts, in anguished and anguishing detail, the central paradox, the fundamental opposition, that we are forever separate individuals but forever dependent on relationships and commitments for individual fulfillment and joy. Women who read this novel say they cannot stop reading until they have lived through Megan's pilgrimage with her. Perhaps more men will be saying the same thing."
The judges stated, "This collection of eleven stories--a set of virtuoso improvisations by a writer with exceptional technical skill, a keen ear for speech, and an irrepressible delight in language for its own sake--presents us with a problematic case: that of a Mormon writer of serious short fiction who does not obviously write about Mormon characters or (except peripherally) the Mormon milieu. These stories test the powers and limits of a contemporary perilous terrain for the Mormon imagination, a planet of genuine surprise. They enter this terrain by an investment of loving but unintrusive moral imagination that shows their kinship with the family of classic short stories from Chekhov to Raymond Carver: they think speak, and feel 'in keeping with [the] spirit' of their characters, and they ask the reader for an equally risky investment."
An excerpt from this citation states, "The culmination of Mary Bradford's twenty years as an indefatigable practitioner and promoter of the personal essay, Leaving Home could with equal appropriateness be titled Going Home. The twenty-two essays treat from a distinctive point of view the universal experiences of growing up, moving out, and growing older, of losing parents and gaining children and seeing those children leaving home in their turn. Informed throughout by the author's characteristic insight, humor, and directness, Leaving Home is a significant contribution to Mormon letters."
According to the awards committee, "this article advances the thesis that Thayer both adapts the Romantic lyric as a usable part of his literary heritage and at the same time subverts it because of his Mormon heritage; the critic skillfully and gracefully proceeds to demonstrate this thesis using two stories: "Under the Cottonwoods" and "Opening Day." This distinguished article not only provides a profound perspective on the contribution of the writer of the stories, Douglas Thayer, but also offers a powerful paradigm for further critical examination of Mormon literature. In doing so, Bruce Jorgensen's article makes a significant breakthrough in Mormon criticism and our understanding of the Mormon literary imagination."
Reviewing this novel, the awards committee stated, "In this novel the protagonist's journey from the Mormonism and Utah of her childhood into the perplexities and shifting alliances of the larger West is rendered with sensitivity and sympathy."
Judges stated, "Discovering the voice of these splendid stories is like finding an arrowhead, so carefully formed that it seems an aspect of nature, as rough and flint-hard as reality."
In awarding this prize, the awards committee said, "This poet reworks the world we knew we know and makes it ours to speak, of giving us the challenge of a new world, formed after the old one where we used to live."
Of this collection, the judges said, "These sixteen meditations on housekeeping and homemaking evoke an intensely lived life in a simple yet richly suggestive style."
The citation for this award stated, "In this first scholarly narrative of Mormon music, the style rings with passion and poetry and the conclusions challenge, probe, and provoke."
Judges felt that "These four essays offer a remarkable review of contemporary poetry by Mormon writers that is at once enthusiastic, very knowledgeable, informative, and balanced."
In giving this award, the judges stated, "As the only publication regularly printing Mormon drama, Sunstone performs a valuable service. For this heroic and unremunerative undertaking, the AML wishes to honor the magazine and its editors, Scott Kenney, Allen Roberts, Peggy Fletcher, and Elbert Peck, themselves characters in the continuing drama of Mormon literature."
The awards committee stated, "Over the years Signature books has been a strong and generous friend to the AML by donating to the AML's awards and by publishing so many books to which those awards have gone--and more, a friend to all writers and readers of all forms of Mormon literature, by publishing and reprinting much, if not most, of the best we now have."
According to the awards committee, "Bones skillfully weaves numerous colorful narrative strands into an intriguing whole. In Lorin Hood, Franklin Fisher has created a complicated protagonist with a rich mystical, sensual, and artistic spirituality that meshes only uneasily with traditional Mormonism. His character develops sympathetically and deeply as he moves from adolescent doubt through phases of faith and self-discovery. This complexity is illustrated in descriptions of Lorin's paintings, such as this one of a crowded pod of peas: 'The peas themselves were of various densities. Some were solid and rough, with irregular bumps and knobs like asteroids, others were hard and smooth like pool balls, still others were shimmery and indistinct, and occupied the same spaces with the solid ones, overlapping like a double exposure. It had been an experiment in mixing modes of reality--how many peas from how many planes of existence could cohabit in the same canvas, much less the same pod?--and he made it an experiment in simultaneous perspectives as well' (243).
"The narrative starkly contrasts passages of straightforward description of common objects and events with dreams and visions that render all experiences uncommon. Fisher also succeeds in juxtaposing different emotional and intellectual approaches to Mormonism and in creating characters with varying levels of maturity in encounters with issues of universal spiritual significance. The novel is splashed with evocations of Mormon culture and folklore that are both frankly comic and insightful, as when Lorin sees himself as a thirteen-year-old Joseph Smith: '. . . he watched himself creep down the wooden steps with their curls of green paint, cross the yard and push open the wagon wheel gate and follow the dirt path up past the stock-dam, and then he joined himself. He was looking for a quiet place to pray for a revelation' (218). Lorin Hood's rites of passage as an artist, a Mormon, a sensualist, and a mystic are fascinating, controversial, disturbing and rewarding."
The citation for this award states, "In Walter Kirn's debut collection, My Hard Bargain, his stories come of age in ways that are unique in Mormon literature--they simply sail boldly toward the edge of the know world and refuse to drop off. Because of this daring, they cannot be ignored. They are stories about falling away and falling toward--about the adolescent whose sexual sins marked out on his bishop's chart shine radiantly like the stars in a planetarium (they resist the object of the object lesson); they are stories about conversion, where the violence of domestic life is suddenly mellowed by the gospel beyond all the gospel clich‚s; and they are stories about the healing maternal touch of Vicks VapoRub.
"Neither moralizing or 'de'moralizing, each story transcends conventional expectation because Kirn carefully fashions detail, but always relinquishes authorship to the reader at just the right moment. Indeed, it is the story that matters, not Kirn's long-standing personal view, pet peeves, or convictions. He gives himself up to whim, the moment of story, the telling. One time he is a bankrupt farmer, preparing his bankrupt farmer speech. At another, he is the keeper of deadman's curve, waiting for wrecks so that he can make his living on the salvaging of used parts. Walter Kirn's stories are about being alive in a world where 'being human' is neither an excuse or a revelation, but a wonderful fact. He is a master of the modern short story where fiction is multi-textured, variegated, and hard to pin down. He is someone the rest of us will have to deal with, literarily speaking, for some time."
The award states, "In an impressive year for published verse by Mormons--a great deal of it, all of it at least competent, much of it more than that--Loretta Randall Sharp is a very impressive winner of this award. Her voice is clear, individual and very direct; the confidence with which she controls it is the confidence of having something needful, something both timeless and contemporary, to say. It is a woman's voice addressing women's concerns so that we are all involved men and women. She lives entirely in the contemporary world and her language and her landscape are those of our time. Yet--in "The Slow Way Home" for example--she is completely at ease in the old, unhurried world of India, her compassion and understanding wide enough to acknowledge the ancient customs of that land, aware of the presence of the old and necessary gods. And "Going Home," which I think the finest of this group of striking poems, exhibits a daughter's love and understanding for a sick father, with a lack of sentimentality at once healing and refreshing. It allows the poet to create a poem which shows we can all be 'caught / by fear palpable as salt brine, each / yielding to the inexorable season of love.'"
Discussing this collection of essays, the awards committee states, "As Elouise Bell explains it: 'The title of this collection . . . comes . . . from the old story about a man who had been run through with a large spear. When asked if it hurt terribly, he replied, "only when I laugh." Sometimes it hurts whether we laugh or not.' Reading these essays, I wept, I wailed, I gnashed my teeth. But mostly I laughed.
"For many years, Elouise Bell has explored the range of the personal essay, trying it on like a body-suit, finding where it bends, where it stretches, where it fits best, where it's a bit loose and wrinkled. most of these trials have been undertaken for Network magazine. To it, for its deadlines, we owe an immense debt of gratitude; without them, the tongue of this Bell might never have rung so many changes on the form.
"And such changes! There is the voice of "When Nice Ain't so Nice" warning us of the danger to our society of suppressing our feelings, especially anger. There is the backward unmasking of our Sunday rituals in "The Meeting," loosing a friction of nervous laughter that scrubs away the local anaesthetic which lest us sleep through Sacrament (and other meetings). There is the clever update of one-upmanship in "Power Ploys" lingering like a message on an answering machine, to remind us each time we take it up how phony are our pretensions. (And a reminder in "Three for the Holidays" of how empty our post-tensions are.)
"In all these essays--wry, funny, sly, outrageous, clever, witty, dry-eyed, in memoriam--Elouise Bell releases the tensions that we all feel, sometimes with gales of raucous laughter, sometimes with punctures to our pride, sometimes with a clean surgical swipe. The tickling we feel in the aftermath is the itch of healing, the healing of the wound made by that large spear."
An excerpt from the citation states, "Bert Wilson has stories to tell. He tells stories well. And they are our stories (even, and perhaps most especially, when they are his own). Missionary stories. Stories of Relief Society presidents and bishops. Three Nephite stories. Trickster tales. Serious stories of humor. Farming stories. Outlaw stories. Theological stories. Personal narratives. His mother's stories of Riddyville, a town that now exists only in stories.
"His--our--stories are celebratory, healing, human stories. Stories that help us build a sense of community and then deal with the pressures that community imposes. Stories without which we have no selves. Stories that shape our lives as we shape them. He doesn't teach us to tell stories (for he seems to think of us as natural geniuses), but he does hep us to value them, to study them, to recognize our humanity in them, to feel again the power of our own good fictions, the joy of our divine capacity to create."
Discussing this novel, the awards committee stated, "Flannery O'Connor once pointed out that 'It makes a great difference the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God,' and 'whether [the author] believes that our wills are free, or bound.' Elsewhere she affirmed, 'I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.' Sheldon Sachs has argued that novelists of integrity will inevitably reveal 'the shape' of their belief 'in the myriad judgments' that must be made on every page. We honor Xenocide as a first-rate novel that reveals on each page the shape of Card's orthodox Mormon Christian faith.
"Card began to establish what is now a world-class reputation in science fiction with work that contained no obvious clues that his own culture and beliefs were Mormon, and his work was appreciated and honored mainly outside Mormon culture. But when he began publishing his Tales of Alvin Maker series (1987), though these too were honored and read mainly by a growing national audience, it became clear to Mormon readers, who were able to see the parallels between Alvin and Joseph Smith, that he was moving toward more direct exploration of his own faith and heritage. The exploration became quite open in Folk of the Fringe (1989), a collection of science fiction stories centered in the life of Mormons after a future nuclear war. Michael Collings and other critics began to look again at the early work and to find there, certainly in the second Enders novel, Speaker for the Dead, and even in the first, Enders Game, a focus on savior figures and the process of redemption.
"Xenocide continues to improve on Card's earlier contributions to science fiction by creating a genuine novel of complex point of view and densely detailed individual and family and group life, centered in the continuing issues of violence, redemption, and the possibility of peace, even love, between very different species of life (including rodents that metamorphose into trees, and insects that create reality from imagination, and a wholly computer-contained intelligence). But here Card adds such directly Mormon matter as intense examination of religious self-delusion and self-abuse (we watch the "People of the Path" with bemused self-recognition, then horror, then compassion), as well as fascinating explorations of such theological matters as the possibility of free-will and the nature of Godhood and creation."
The awards committee honored this novel, stating, "Benard DeVoto, Utah's first nationally prominent writer, once joked that his Mormon novel was by far the best book he was never going to write: God, the best storyteller, had made a better story out of Joseph Smith and the Mormon journeys than fiction could ever equal. Gerald Lund has not been daunted by DeVoto's warning, nor William Mulder's advice that we deal with Mormon experience on a smaller canvas; nor has he been dissuaded by the numerous failure of many who have tried to turn Mormonism's epic history into novels. In fact, he has set for himself the unprecedented task of a multi-volume set of novels, The Work and the Glory, covering the entire sage of the Restoration from 1820 to the present, focussed in the lives of early converts Mary Ann and Benjamin Steed and their descendants. Now that the second volume has been published, we can assess Lund's success--and we affirm with this award that is has been remarkable.
Like Pillar of Fire, the first volume of the series, the novel here honored is straightforward in approach and clear in purpose and effect: Lund writes in his introduction to Like a Fire is Burning: 'If the reader becomes swept up in the grandeur of the work of the Restoration, let it be remembered that it is God's work and his glory that is described in this story.' Lund has done careful research in religious and political history and in the relevant social and material culture and has created an interesting diverse, and constantly developing fictional family that is believably close to the great events and figures of early Church history and thus able to give us a fresh and moving view of those well-known events and people. The Steeds are diverse, from the uneasily yoked parents to the passionate sinners and passionate saints among their children, and Lund moves us with their own drama as it is both provoked and healed by the developing, dramatic demands and powers of the Mormon faith. The first two volumes are gripping and moving in large part because they are grounded in what most readers believe--or hope--are real and terribly important events, involving divine appearances, revealed scriptures, and restored power to save us from sin. In Like a Fire is Burning Lund takes us, believably, with the Steeds into the center of the Pentecostal experiences at the Kirtland Temple dedication. We wish him well as he takes us on into the tragedies of Kirtland and Nauvoo and the costly crossings--to the Great Basin and into the twentieth century."
The awards committee stated, "Michael Fillerup's stories are often about Mormonism in that direct way that subverts probity with good intention--or would, if the writing were any less wary than his, or any less open to complication, ambush, or misgiving. A kind of home teaching perhaps, but here set fobiddingly far from home. His characters are often profound loners, people twice estranged. They find themselves marginalized in a culture--for them--already marginal, where what they do and are is sustained by religious commitment, and religious commitment is imperiled precisely by what they find themselves doing and what, in fact, they have become. Faith in these stories, is a terrible gift.
"'Lost and Found,' published in a Christmas anthology of mostly far-too-well-intentioned writing, is just such a story, a kind of counter-Christmas tale, in which a painfully unwise man is called on a starless Christmas Eve to bring his foreign gift, not to mark the miracle virgin birth, but to find something not unlike miracle in the long-deflowered ordinariness of death. As in Fillerup's other work, the story plunges along with seeming artlessness where careful shaping would surely not seem to take, and all the while it draws us deftly on with urgency and realism. It is a hard=nosed, rawly detailed, icily coercive read. And ends however improbably still quite believably in magic. In revelation.
"With 'Lost and Found,' Michael Fillerup has braved a labyrinth of sentiment, all the more treacherous for its familiarity, to achieve a story whose probity might even make the world safe again, if only momentarily, for Christmas. That too is a terrible gift."
An excerpt from the citation: "'When Uncle Willy left, I was Susan Smith. Now, ten years later, I am Sus5an Smith. The 5 is silent. It's a silence that drives certain members of my family up the wall, but I figure if you're going to have the last name of Smith, then your first name should be more exotic than susan or Sue or even Sioux.' Thus we meet one of the most delightful characters in young adult literature. Her life-long attachment to Uncle Willy, known only briefly as her Aunt Marianne's husband, is a mystery to one and all. To Sus5an, Uncle Willy represents exotic places and a kindred spirit in the arts. He appreciated the 'way the elm trees arch over our street, and the way the hollyhocks grown thick next to the garage. He appreciated the junebugs flitting about the yellow light of the porch. Willy say it. He saw the magic of it.' And didn't he send her a silver necklace on her eighth birthday?
"Springville, Utah, is hardly the place for a true (seventeen-year-old) artist to pursue art, in spite of the fact that it is called 'Art City.' Every time Sus5an paints a member of her family, they seem disappointed. Even angry. This year, for the student art show, Sus5an is painting an entire family portrait, including Aunt Marianne's fiance Heber and the long gone Uncle Willy. But she keeps the bedroom door locked because she doesn't want to hear 'questions like, "Why are you putting that S.O.B. Willy Gerard into a family portrait?" And [she] especially [doesn't] want to hear, "Why are Grandma and Grandpa Schroeder's faces distorted on one side?"' But, of course, at the show those are the very questions. The prize she won only embarrasses her family.
"And that is why, after graduation, she goes to Boston to live with Aunt Libby, unmarried, un-Springville and able to introduce her to a world where real art exists. Sus5an quickly befriends the eccentric old woman, Grace, in the apartment next door, finds a job in a movie theater with Savatore as her boss, and meets a promising young artist, Thomas Roods. She also realizes her heart's desire and finds Willy.
"We laugh and cry with Sus5an as she learns to see Willy, herself, and even boring old Springville through more adult eyes. At the end of a very long summer, Susan tells her family she is going back to Boston to pursue her art education, this time with her vision a little more clear.
"Louis Plummer never intrudes into the novel, never preaches. Susan and her family are LDS but not obtrusively so. Her dad's store is closed on Sunday and he goes to church with them and naps in the afternoon. Susan values human beings as individuals, evidenced by her friendship with Grace and her unflagging if ill-placed trust in Willy. Her values and her family's are ones the Mormon audience will identify with but not cringe over. This delightful book won first place in the Utah Arts Council contest for young adult fiction and is listed among the School Library Journal's December 1991 list of 'Best Books 1991.' We are proud to add our award to the list of recognitions given to My Name is Sus5an Smith. The 5 is Silent.
Discussing the award for poetry, the judges stated, "When one is confronted with selecting the best poetry among an impressive collection, inevitably one poem or set of poems will surface, demanding the judge to take notice, so that essentially the poems do the choosing rather than the judge. At least, that is what I like to think happened when Philip White's poems "Island Spring" and "The Perseids" emerged as the winners of the 1992 Association of Mormon Letters poetry award. More than simply impressions, White's poems are informed with ideas. This thought, combined with deft imagery, careful line breaks, and subtle lyricism, give us poetry that fuses craftsmanship with emotion and intellect in the appropriate proportions.
"White's language is not haphazard or arbitrary, but forms a synthesis of sound and metaphor. In each poem a sense of unity is created by these overlapping images. For example, in "Island Spring," several images are woven together to convey the vulnerability of the child as her dark, rustling world seems to almost overwhelm her tenuous existence: 'A child, she steps / below such slashing, eyes bright / with fear flashing. . . . / where the moon's tatters lie / strewn across thick, bladed shadow. . . . / Always I will see / her so, meager of body and singing / in the knife-ridden dark . . .
"Island Spring" is exotic and mysterious, yet in some ways "The Perseids" is even more complex and mysterious, despite the familiar undertone of death. The poem is poignant in its quiet grief and austerity. Many poems on death use the contrast between light and dark. The light referred to in the poem's title is intriguing--a meteor shower, a cluster of lights that are individually extinguished. This image is mirrored with a later one: 'You were always steady, dying / the way you did, cell / by cell.'
"Both poems reveal a poet who listens and observes carefully. These qualities do not pertain merely to his own experience but to the writing of poetry as well. The poems convey an implicit craftsmanship; one appreciates how effortlessly the poems appear to have been created (although one knows otherwise). This alone is a quality any poet hopes to achieve."
Of Refuge, the awards committee said, "With this book, Terry Tempest Williams--writer, naturalist, peace activist--defines a new rhetoric for healing. In this beautifully understated and poignant memoir/nature essay, she has woven the story of the rising of the Great Salt Lake, its natural and political ramifications, into the story of her mother's death from cancer in 1987. The author of several previous works of natural history, Terry Tempest Williams here gives voice to a deeply personal side of herself, a gift of passion and integrity both unique in its details and structure, and universal in its messages: that human beings are often devastatingly careless in their use of resources, and must learn not to be; that we can heal from such carelessness when we invest ourselves in nature; and that healing sometimes means accepting death.
"Throughout this book we are privileged to experience the vision of a woman of unusually enlightened consciousness. She reports the problems and mistakes of the state of Utah and its people as pointedly and as accurately as she records birdflight and nesting patterns, showing us that each deserves our careful attention, for different but equally important reasons. She shares conversations with her wise and intelligent mother and grandmother, myths and stories from the Utah desert's Fremont Indian past, and many private rituals, both causal and formal, performed with family and friends in the process of dealing with the destruction this book describes. By honoring the strengths of her Mormon heritage as well as the truths of her experience as a naturalist and an artist, she creates a way of seeing that honors and enlarges the caring best in each of us. We are lucky to have her among us. She and this exquisitely crafted book are cutting-edge.
Discussing this award, the judges stated, "Although A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has already received numerous biography and history awards, this book most deserving of an award based on literary quality and style. The success of this endeavor is based on the artful crafting of a story surrounding bits, pieces, and notes of journal entries. By utilizing complementary sources, Ulrich has skillfully drawn readers into an amazing woman's story. The literary creativity makes this story engrossing and unforgettable. Martha Ballard's contribution to American history is documented by an intelligent blending of primary documents into a readable text. Sentences are beautifully cadenced, words carefully chosen. For its style, its metaphor, its basic literary brilliance, the Association of Mormon Letters recognizes and honors A Midwife's Tale."
The awards committee gave this award, stating, "In a year of important fine writing by Mormons about the pain Latter-day saints experience when their choices go against institutional prescription (e.g. the entire Exponent II issue on abortion), this book is a landmark. Ron Schow, Wayne Schow, and Marybeth Raynes have performed a major service in collecting these thirty-six essays and three listings of resource materials on the issue of same-sex orientation in and out of the Church.
"Intelligent and up-to-date information fills this volume. Its underlying principle is that same-sex orientation is not chosen and therefore in and of itself does not require repentance, although official Church statements have declared otherwise. Nineteen persona essays by men and women who have had to make difficult choices concerning their lives and lifestyles, and by family members or ecclesiastical counselors of these people, open our eyes to the fundamental truth that each is a suffering, desiring human being, heir to God's love and deserving o f compassion. The remaining seventeen essays detail views on same-sex orientation from the biological and social sciences and from a moral standpoint. Guidance for therapists as well as for families and for people of same-sex orientation make this an enlightening, thorough, and highly readable book, one that fills a need no other work has yet acknowledged so candidly and so provocatively. We are indebted to the editors for putting this book together, to instruct and, it is to be hoped, to help begin to heal all of us concerned about this issue in the Church."
Anne Perry's Victorian mystery The Sins of the Wolf calls out for a fireplace, a long winter's night, and a reader with the pleasure of time. The matriarch of a prominent Edinburgh family has been poisoned and her nurse charged. But it soon becomes clear that mother has been murdered by one of her own children, or one of their spouses. This is then a novel about family values, albeit with an unsettling twist. With invention and skill, Perry leads her reader along the convoluted path to truth, revealing at each turn the myriad secrets and evasions around which this extended family is structured. Near the novel's end, the nurse heroine and her detective friend find themselves literally locked in a secret room hidden within the family's publishing establishment, the center of a lawless and deceiving enterprise guarded by the family's aloof and respectable public face.No easy, happy view of family life here, but neither a picture without parallel moments of grace and dignity and love. All this good, if harrowing, fun served up against the richly-drawn backdrop of Victorian London and Edinburgh (complete with testimony at the sensational trial by Florence Nightingale). And throughout, Perry weaves in lures about earlier stories and future prospects for nurse and detective. Closing the pages of The Sins of the Wolf, a reader can only find herself on the way to the bookstore and more Anne Perry.
Marriage plays a central role in Mormon culture and religion, yet the complexities of marital union remain relatively unexplored in contemporary Mormon letters. Wayne Jorgensen charts new literary territory in his poignant, playful depiction of married love, "Who Jane, Who Tarzan." Told from the perspective of Jensen, a forty-ish academic with a buxom wife--Broad Bottom Betty Barrett--the story narrates Jensen's jealousy of Betty's handsome cowboy kissing-cousin. Jorgensen masterfully creates a narrator's voice that races, halts, sputters and tumbles on, mimicking the workings of Jensen's own consciousness as he wrestles with self-doubt and sexual desire. Mormon fiction involving sex--what little there is of it--typically focuses on illicit desire and congress; Jorgensen, conversely, details the perplexities and allure of lawful intercourse. Sensuous in its imagery, frankly carnal in its themes, "Who Jane, Who Tarzan" celebrates "immortal beauty's bodily moment" within a conventional Mormon marriage. Jorgensen, in perfectly controlled prose, returns the corporeal body to its rightful--its central--place within our chaste culture and in so doing champions husbands and wives as lovers, no small achievement for a Mormon writer.
On the frontier where Mormon ideals meet the everyday world of men and women, all of us need a place to stay or go, retreat to or take a stand. But Eric Samuelsen knows that borders can be confusing and densely populated. They teem with competing individuals, emotions, values, and spirits--in circumstances as profound and common as birth and death, with drives as crass but inescapable as greed and lust--that infringe upon, thwart, or even displace us in our quest for some sanctuary. "Accommodations" presents a compelling dramatic story crafted with characters and forms we comfortably recognize and can relate to. A carefully constructed, masterfully worded prose-poetic meditation on embattled spaces unfolds, replete with symbolic touchstone diction, references, and events: real estate developments, hotel rooms, a progressively more cluttered set, old rooms, others' rooms, and no room--as well as, more ominously, burglaries, powerlifting machines, courtrooms, broken fences and shattered vows. In a place where love and brutality must co-exist, what compromises are acceptable, even essential, and at what point do they become manipulations or betrayals of ourselves or others? "Accommodations" unflinchingly confronts these dilemmas, "warning" us (in Samuelsen's word) of dangers, hinting at possibilities, and, wisely, despite a hopeful ending, guaranteeing no solutions.
Books for young readers fall mostly into one of two categories: those which adults love and think children should love; and those which children actually love. That leaves a special category of books that charm both children and adults. The Trophy belongs in this group. Ten-year-old Danny Williams is in his first year on the basketball team. As he works hard to improve his game, he hopes that his father will notice and approve. Long ago, Danny's father won a gold trophy for playing basketball, but that was before he started drinking. Now he is an alcoholic mechanic who spends more time nurturing his roses than his sons.From the beginning, when Danny plays his first minutes for the Bulldogs, children will feel the tension in Hughes's vivid, fast-aced basketball scenes. Children will also believe through his characterization--the realistic dialogue and honest childlike perceptions--that Danny could be their neighbor or friend. At the conclusion of the story, as Danny and his father begin a tentative new relationship, children will be touched by Hughes's hopeful ending. Adults will appreciate these same qualities in this book--but for different reasons. They'll enjoy his taut storytelling style apparent in the carefully-constructed action scenes. They'll value his multi-faceted characters. Finally, adults will applaud his poignant conclusion--a hopeful yet realistic ending with no promise of permanent change. In The Trophy, Dean Hughes creates a fine story for young readers, one that adults will choose for children, one that children will choose for themselves.
Pamela Hamblin combines an easy-flowing vernacular diction with common images, the language of everyday speech with figures so commonplace that they seem to rise of their own accord from the subject. But by the end of her poem "Magi" they build up to an uncommon and surprisingly acute penetration into an interpretation we had not thought of, had not seen coming--and yet one so apt and true that we berate ourselves for not having seen it from the start, because the clues were in plain sight like signboards. The conclusion comes truly with "The Shock of Recognition"; we know it is true when confronted with it, but lacked the courage to face the wrenching needed to pry us out of our pleasant ruts. The poem hammers home that out of the familiar story of the birth at Bethlehem and the death at Calvary springs a painful and unfamiliar birth and death for each of us: the death of an old and sterile way of life and the birth of a new way that demands a contrition that "will break our hearts" (the words the poem ends with). The poem has an easiness of tone that leads us comfortably to a density that is shockingly uncomfortable. "Magi" is all that a poem should be.
In early 1994 the distinguished career of Richard D. Poll, historian, professor, writer, husband and friend, came full circle. His Liahona/Iron-rod dichotomy, borrowed from the Book of Mormon, had entered the lexicon of Mormon thought almost 30 years earlier in his landmark essay "What the Church Means to People Like Me" (Dialogue 2:4, Winter 1967). His "Pillars of My Faith" sermon in Sunstone called for committed LDS worshipers and writers to join a mighty Christian chorus "in which almost all the singers hear the dissonant sounds of the alternate voices as polyphonic enrichment of the message of the gospel music." For people like him, "neither dogmatic fundamentalism nor dogmatic humanism provides convincing answers to life's most basic questions." He defined history as "human strivings to discover divine realities." Like Paul, Richard Poll lived his life as part of the leaven that "leaveneth the whole lump" (Galatians 5:9), offering his Liahona questioning in the spirit of "charity, humility, persistence." In a time when men and women are being called sinners for a word (or many words); when the terms "alternate" and "dissident" are being redefined as sinister; when some seek apostasy, while others have apostasy thrust upon them, Richard Poll's calm, reasoned, compassionate voice rings with a clarity that will live on in our hearts and minds.
Passion for the question of whether there is a Mormon literature has been easy to engender. Sometimes it has been accompanied by intelligence and wit. In "Towards a Mormon Criticism: Should We Ask 'Is This Mormon Literature?'" Gideon Burton makes a major, restorative contribution to the discussion, an intelligent, witty, and impassioned contribution. Gideon's gift is to have gone between the horns of the dilemma articulated by Richard Cracroft and Bruce Jorgensen and felt by all concerned for a long time. By shifting the discussion of Latter-day Saint criticism from its focus on the content of literature to the way in which literature is conceived and received, Gideon makes us stop, take stock, and begin again. Because of his essay, we see the problem differently. For Gideon Burton, Restoration--the act of Restoration--is the heart of Mormon literature, and the eye of Mormon criticism.
My Best for the Kingdom, William G. Hartley's recent biography of Mormon convert John Lowe Butler (1808-1860), has all the trappings of historical treatise: forty-nine pages of notes, an index, and over five hundred items of bibliography. But it differs from the historical norm in its text: with verve and dash, Hartley bodies forth one of Mormonism's ordinary men living an extraordinary life. His lively, almost colloquial style, matching the never-quiet life of an unexceptional pioneer, makes us participants in the everyday pioneer Mormon experience. For this he deserves a prize in life writing. Writing a life is an impossibility comprised half of documentary evidence, half of intuition, and half of devil-may-care daring with words. Quoting generously from a ninety-nine page handwritten autobiography, Hartley brings his subject into our world, lets us know him, his fears, hopes, disappointments, failings, and faith. When near the end of his short life Butler proclaims "I have done my best to help roll forth the Kingdom of God," we understand what that meant, and mourn his untimely death. Hartley has made him our neighbor, friend, brother. We applaud his achievement.
Please send your updates, corrections, or comments to Gideon Burton:
MormonLit@byu.edu