Archive

Hello! This is the last email of AMV Deep Dive Season 1. Thanks for sticking with me!

Before I get into Liberating Form, some links related to my story collection The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories:

1. I talked about the King Follett discourse and eternal individuation and vampire children with Theric and Aaron on their Face in Hat podcast.
2. I talk about the amazing Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle with Liz and and emeritus AMV blogger Ivan Wolfe on the Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree podcast.
3. One of the stories in my collection “A Ring Set Not with Garnet but Sardius” was 20 years in the making. I share that story and some of my notes on A Motley Vision (yes, I actually blogged!)
4. A virtual AMV Book Club on my story collection takes place at 7 pm MST this Sunday, Nov. 20, on Zoom. I will be making an appearance for the Q&A. Join us! You can do so even if you haven’t read the collection. And feel free to lurk if you’re shy. For details, reply to this email for the link to join—or direct message the AML on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

FIVE-QUESTION SURVEY:

SUBJECT: AMV Deep Dive–Graduation! To What?

BODY COPY:

Welcome to the sixteenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover the final essay in the collection: “Graduation! To What?”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Welcome to the fifteenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “Whose Yoke is Easy?”

After this, we only have one more essay and the postword to go! Thanks for sticking with me.

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark relates some troubling conversations and observations he has had (especially with BYU studentes and professors) that suggests that Mormons are falling for prosperity gospel-style justified actions and attitudes aimed at making money. He parallels that to the widespread consumption of Mormon art that he sees as kitsch and general anti-intellectual attitudes among the Saints. He then lays out an alternative approach to moving through and learning from mortal experience than focusing on easy money and easy culture which is the idea of Christ’s yoke as being both easy and light. He makes the for this approach as the correct one for both education and art.

Welcome to the fourteenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “In the Midst of Miracle—So What?”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark compares the way language, and more specifically, art can communicate between a writer and a reader to a miracle. He notes that in order for any miracle to happen, you often need to put in most of the work. And he suggests that a good way to find your way into a literary work is to ask yourself three questions: What? Why? So What?

Best Lines: [on why poets write poetry as a response to some experience, thought, emotion] “They want to explore its meaning, deepen their experience (having learned long ago that the process of writing is the process of exploring, discovering, defining, deepening), they want to share their experience, to create art, they want, I suppose, to make a difference. Where something was not they want something to be” (197).

Welcome to the thirteenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “The Virtue of ‘Virtue’: A Sermon”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark quotes and analyzes three poems—“Virtue” by George Herbert; “The Burning Babe” by Robert Southwell, and “I Knew A Woman” by Theodore Roethke—and relates varying students reactions to them. He argues for an expansive Mormon definition of virtue, as positive energy and a creative force—as power. He calls for a “vision of wholeness” (179) that involves losing ourselves in order to find our whole, virtue-full selves.

Best Lines: “We do not want, I have to argue, to scare ourselves into goodness or even virtue. What I would want for us is so deep an awareness of the virtue of virtue, so full a sense of the positive energy, so strong a drive both external and especially internal from that positive energy, that the negative forces would carry no enticement…” (174).

Welcome to the twelfth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “Toward a More Perfect Order Within: Being the Confessions of an Unregenerate But Not Unrepentant Mistruster of Mormon Literature”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark explains the environment in which he became an academic scholar, why that made him afraid of looking provincial and thus mistrustful of Mormon literature, how that mistrust began to change, and what his vision for Mormon literature is.

Best Lines: “Whatever else, they helped me to know again, and know more deeply, how radically linguistic our lives are, how much of experience is defined by, even determined by, language, hence how deep at the core of our experience language really is.” (153)

Welcome to the eleventh email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “Paradox and Tragedy in Mormonism”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot:

Best Lines: “[T]hough Mormonism is fundamentally a religion of divine comedy, both its theology and its practices are permeated with paradox, the very stuff of tragedy. A corollary to this is that Mormonsm has a high potential for tragedy. A second corollary is that Mormon playwrights, fiction writers and poets have a full and flowing vein of tragic materials to tap” (131).

Welcome to the tenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “Zion and the Arts: What Will Really Matter?”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark posits that Zion will be a place where we know things with our whole body, mind, and spirit and that to exist both in Zion and in a way here that will lead us to Zion requires a committing to a life of the spirit that involves communion with Deity and connection with and understanding of our community. And that one of the best ways to experience that, to grow the capacity for that, is the arts. Maybe even Mormon art—even thought the Mormonism of Clark’s time (and ours, to be honest) doesn’t seem to find much value in art.

Best Lines: “I am arguing that the tools of art have fashioned and continue to fashion the best vehicles available to use. The vehicles are already there, marvelous vehicles, more than we can ever use, to pull us, to stretch us, toward life … But these vehicles are useless—lifeless—if we leave them empty, if we don’t give them life by taking life from them” (124-125)

Hello.

Due to preparations for the AML conference and me getting sick (not COVID, which is great, but also now I really don’t want to get it while my immune system is already on high alert), the Marden J. Clark Liberating Form deep dive is taking a break. It will resume in two weeks.

That doesn’t mean you don’t get a dose of Mormon literature goodness, though.

First, here are three items to read (or re-read) in advance of or along with the AML conference, which will have panels this evening, Friday evening, and throughout the day Saturday.

Welcome to the eighth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “The New Mormon Mysticism”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark discusses a turn in Mormon discourse during his life towards more of a focus on the Holy Spirit and letting it guide your life. He interrogates and teases out the “series of fascinating paradoxes” as well as some “serious questions” and “significant strengths” that result from a “theological/spiritual emphasis on the Spirit.”

Best Lines: We Mormons have always gloried in our individuality (as distinguished from individualism). Yes, we are all sons and daughters of God. We sing in the joy of relationship. But we also glorify whatever it is that makes us different from one another, differences that we trace back through eternities and forward into eternities: we have always had our separate and unique personalities, and we will always have them. (110)

Welcome to the seventh email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “We Have Our Standards (For Mormon Writers)”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark discusses the continuum of literary standards—from “an inferno of absolute dishonesty” to “a paradise of absolute integrity” (89)—and situates recent (to him) Mormon literary/publishing trends along that continuum. He calls out cynically writing for the market (to make money), the “refusal or failure to treat our materials honestly” (92), sentimentality, and other issues he sees. He nods to the complexity of writing within a community and calls for and offers hope for future Mormon literary excellence.

Best Lines: “I have great faith, I hope not just a naive one, in the power of the excellent to get people to rise to it, and in the power of people to rise to it if they have it always available. That is our burden: to create the excellent on whatever level and for whatever purpose we are writing. I think we can trust our audience to rise to it. But even if they don’t we will have had our reward, in the very fact of our having create excellence…” (101)

Welcome to the sixth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover “Science, Religion, and the Humanities: The Profounder Challenge.”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: This essay is mis-titled. It’s not really about science and religion or science and the humanities—or about all three. Instead, it’s mostly a defense of the representation of darkness in art because it leads us to experience truths about life and the world around us and, ultimately, takes us on a journey that brings us closer to God. Thus, darkness in art is not to be feared or spurned, but rather approached with a certain cautious openness that increases our understanding and love.

Best Line(s): “Perhaps we have lingered too long in these chambers of the sea. Perhaps I feel the pull (of the infernal) too strongly” (76).

Welcome to the fifth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover “The Mormon Commitment to Education.”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark expands upon the notions of creativity and human freedom explored in the previous essay and claims that not only is education—and higher education in the liberal arts and sciences, in particular—not damaging to testimonies, but also that Mormons should be committed fully to it, including things like the scientific method and academic freedom and rigorous research and real, actual learning rather than getting a degree just so you have a piece of paper that you hope will unlock job opportunities.

Best Line(s): “But surely a testimony, like education and freedom and creativity, is self-creative, is inwardly dynamic and alive, is something to be invested like talents. No hot-house plant, it needs exposure to wind and rain and cold to give it toughness, resilience, endurance. It too responds to opposition in all things. It is not meant for a static life—if such a thing were possible” (67)

Welcome to the fourth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover “Some Implications of Human Freedom.”

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Keeping in mind that he’s not a philosopher, Clark discusses why he thinks humans do have freedom—mostly by invoking Mormon ideas about a limited God, co-eternal beings, and the primacy of agency—and what that means for how we approach prayer, education, politics and society, and, most especially creativity. Because human freedom exists, those of us who are human must embrace the creativity that comes with it and use it for the purpose of expressing—and helping others express—their freedom.

Best Lines: “We cannot, at least at this stage or our being, be gods. But we can participate on our level with our capacities (nearly always much greater than we let them be, or force them to be) in His [God’s] most vital attribute: His creativity.” (49)

Welcome to the third email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover chapter three: Art, Religion, and the Market Place.

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark argues that by distrusting each other art and religion have weakened their ability to combat the encroachment and dominance of the market place in our lives. He calls for art and religion to be rescued from the market place and not only set aside the distrust they’ve held for each other (in the post-romantic, modernist, and post-modernist eras) but also re-merge together. He also clarifies that his is not a call for didacticism. Rather it’s that it’s only by reinvigorating each other that art and religion can help our souls experience the complexity, depth, and “airy heights” (31) that the marketplace can never approach—that the marketplace actively keeps us from so we keep turning it to feel our emptiness.

Best Lines: “Art and religion share a common end and a common enemy. The common end is the enrichment of the life of the spirit; the common enemy is the market place.” (17)

Welcome to the second email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. This email focuses on the essay that establishes the core theme of the collection, and the only essay that’s printed out of the order it was written/presented: Chapter 1, Liberating Form.

As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of this email and the discussion post for it can be found on AMV.

Snapshot: Clark presents the key theme of his collection—form is liberating, whether that’s in art or the LDS Church, and that the liberation of form allows us to create better works of art and, hopefully, richer, better lives than if it didn’t exist. He does this by relating two personal anecdotes and analyzing two works of literature. He also notes that form is not enough. We must provide energy and meaning to the form.

Best Lines: (after explaining how no form can “liberate energy not available to it”) “This again is the burden of both Christ and freedom (I see the two as closely related): We supply the energy.” (11)

Welcome to the first email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover the Foreword.

As a reminder, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV, but first:

Snapshot: In the Foreword, Clark discusses how the essays in the collection deal with the tension between his love of the humanities and his love of his Mormon religion; notes that theme of “liberating form” and the “unifying quest for unity” are the main themes of the collection; and asks readers to approach each essay as “a tentative excursion” (xii, xiii).

Best Line: The essays in the collection “have grown out of my struggle to come to terms with the complex, sometimes delicate, sometimes exasperating, and always challenging tensions between my professing of humane letters and my professing of my Mormon religion” (xi)

Hello. This is William Morris. You’re receiving this email because you signed up at one point for a quarterly newsletter from A Motley Vision, the Mormon literature and culture blog.

As it turned out, doing a quarterly email on bits and bobs related to Mormon literature wasn’t something I was able to deliver on.

So here’s what I’m going to do instead: a one season deep dive on a specific Mormon literature topic.

Oddly enough, an ongoing quarterly commitment didn’t work for me. But a limited series is something I can do.