Alternative titles for the first four books in the Book of Mormon

A good friend recently got me thinking about Book of Mormon summaries. Most summaries of the Book of Mormon focus on what happens in the book, just like summaries of novels focus on the plot. But because the Book of Mormon isn't a novel, the "plot" is both a) hopelessly complicated and b) periodically abandoned for sections of the book where nothing really happens.

So how might a person usefully describe the shapes of the Nephites' books? I've given it a shot for the first four by coming up with alternate titles:


1 Nephi: The Book of the Visionary

1 Nephi is a book with plenty of events to describe. But if you describe them according to modern sensibilities, you'll probably focus on the journeys rather than on the visions.

But the book isn't a travelogue or a simple diary. It's structured according to the visions Lehi and Nephi receive--and especially on the aftermath of each vision. Again and again, the pattern is vision, action, obstacle, action, expanded vision. It's best to read the book not as a report on how Lehi's family got to the ocean, but rather as a sort of handbook on being a visionary. A systematic record of the joy, burdens, and techniques that come with following a revelatory God.

2 Nephi: The Book of Deathbed Blessings

Most plot summaries of the Book of Mormon are 50% made out of summarized events from 1st Nephi, usually followed by a sentence or two on the war cycles of Alma-Mormon and a sentence or two on the appearance of Jesus in 3rd Nephi. Even though it's longer than 1st Nephi, 2nd Nephi doesn't contribute much because very little happens: it's a book where four prophets (Lehi, Nephi, Jacob, and Isaiah) just talk.

That may explain why so many people struggle to get through 2nd Nephi--if you're reading for plot, it's pretty boring.

But if you look carefully, it seems clear to me that 2nd Nephi has just as clear a structure and purpose as 1st Nephi. After the book of visions, we have a book of blessings--the blessing of two dying patriarchs.

Most people recognize Lehi's blessings and warnings easily since they only take up a few chapters and are so clearly reminiscent of Genesis 49. But it may be harder to notice that from chapter 6 on, Nephi is probably dying. And so he gives the people a new prophet (ch. 6-11), an old prophet (ch. 12-24), and his own personal blessings and warnings to conclude the book.  

Jacob: The Book of the Exile

There are far more tragic events in the Book of Mormon than the handful of incidents mentioned in Jacob, but not many sadder narrators. At the end of his book (7:26), Jacob talks directly about his feelings of exile and alienation, but indirect evidence of those feelings permeates the whole text. Jacob doesn't just write down whatever happens: his book is built around the tensions of emigration. There's evidence in the book of a significant generation gap between Jacob himself and his new-world-raised relatives, who have their own values and priorities. There's a large passage devoted to the allegory of the olive tree, which describes the quiet background relationship between Jacob's descendents and the land/people they came from. It's a book, in the end, about exile and the long (but confident) wait for redemption.

Enos: Prayer of the Native Son

Part of the structure of Enos is obvious to most readers: it's a book about a prayer. What may not be as obvious is that it's also the first book about someone who grew up in the Americas. If you look carefully at Enos, I think you'll see how that shift is also an important part of the book.

Two Weeks Left for Mormon Lit Blitz Submissions

Writers have two weeks left to submit poems, comics, very short stories or essays, or other short writing for the 2nd Annual Mormon Lit Blitz. Basically, we want works under 1,000 words and of specific interest to Mormon readers to be emailed to everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com by April 27th. We will then choose six to twelve finalists to compete for the Grand Prize of a Kindle and a small library of Mormon literary eBooks. Read the complete Call for Submissions for more details.

Unfortunately, the Everyday Mormon Writer website, where we'd planned to post the finalists, has been infected with a difficult-to-root-out virus. In the event that we're unable to resolve the website's issues by the start of the Lit Blitz on May 13th, we'll publish the finalists on this blog instead.

Please help us spread the word about the contest. The gospel is great no matter what we do, but Mormon culture is only as good as we make it. Take the time to develop and share your talents and invite friends to do the same.

Happy writing and good luck!

Book of Mormon Girl and Robert Bly's The Sibling Society

You can now listen to an audio file of my AML Conference presentation on "Jesus in Joanna Brooks's Book of Mormon Girl." I'm ashamed to say I went two minutes over my time limit, so it's a full 17 minute commitment to hear what I have to say. (Also: I've only listened to about the first thirty seconds of the recording, so I can't make any promises about sound quality throughout. Let me know if there are any problems.)

While 17 minutes of amateur recording of a scholarly conference presentation is not exactly most people's idea of fun, I think this presentation may be worth your time because in thinking about Book of Mormon Girl, I realized that Robert Bly's commentary on a "sibling society" cultural shift in America might help explain the fuel behind many of the debates Mormons have today about the church. That is to say: the ideas in my presentation don't just apply to one book. The patterns and absences I noticed in the book are probably instances of a larger cultural rift.

If you do listen, you'll hear me reference a handout a few times during my presentation. I am including the text below, with one slight addition: after giving the presentation, it occurred to me to look up the frequency of references to Marie Osmond.

Word search:

Instances of Mormon: 100
Instances of Marie (Osmond): 72
Instances of California: 52
Instances of Orange: 43
Instances of Jesus: 29
Instances of Christ: 9
Instances of Savior: 1
Messiah: 0
Atonement: 0
Salvation: 7

Breakdown of 29 references to Jesus:
First vision: 1
Name of the church: 4
Communist fears and related apocalyptic hopes: 5
Mormon racism: 1
Excuses the Three Nephites and Bigfoot/Cain from death: 1
Mormon fixation with Marie Osmond/perfection*: 1
Rivalry with born-agains*: 10
Rejection of intellectuals*: 1
Rejected-feeling Joanna admires an Episcopal crucifix*: 2
Prop 8 overshadows Jesus: 3

*Excluding church name, 14/25 references clearly deal with rejection/acceptance dynamics

Breakdown of 9 references to Christ:

Name of church: 4
Apocalypse: 3
Rivalry with born-agains: 1
Rejection of intellectuals: 1

Breakdown of 7 references to Salvation:

Chapter name: 2
Excerpt about belonging: 2
Rivalry with born-agains: 1
Rejection of intellectuals: 1
Tempting nostalgia of childhood simplicity: 1

Brooks on Belonging/Affirmation as Salvation (p. 10):

"What was there to compare to this feeling, of belonging to one another, [...] safe from the mocking and fashionable faceless crowds, safe where no one would say your books of scripture are all made up, or the sacred undergarments you promised to wear every day are funny, or your afghan is too ugly, or old woman there is nothing in you the world loves anymore."

Brooks on Keeping Score (p. 187)

"I try to distract myself by checking my text messages, then I start keeping score. Fifteen minutes into the lesson: Stories relating to Proposition 8 or anti-Mormon sentiment resulting from Proposition 8, 5; stories relating to Jesus, 0."

Robert Bly in The Sibling Society (pp. xi-xii):

"It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements [...] For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, punishment is swift and thorough. Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. Once that moment is over, and universal love has not poured over our heads following the program, we fall still farther."

In any case, I hope the presentation gives you something valuable to think about. I'm happy to hear your thoughts, questions, and constructive criticism (especially since I'm supposed to write a paper based on this for publication)--but please only if you listened to the whole presentation.

Thank you.  

A Passover Poem

The Passover story has numerous points of crisis and decision where people have to take significant risks to side with the Lord. There were Shiprah and Puah, who quietly disobeyed the Pharaoh. Moses' mother and his sister Miryam who took great risks to keep him alive and keep involved in his life.

Moses himself, of course, had plenty of chances to live comfortably in Egypt. And the people didn't have to accept him as a prophet when he returned from the desert--they knew full well there was a significant risk involved and went back and forth for years on whether it had been a good idea to trust him.

My aunt once pointed out that if the children of Israel had put blood on their doors and not been delivered, an Egyptian mob wouldn't have had any trouble going from home to home against them. And there are great stories about the parting of the sea--like a tradition that the waters didn't part until the first Jews to walk forward on Moses' counsel were chin-deep in them.

I wrote a poem for Passover this year with a related question: what might a person have thought while walking through the bottom of the sea? It was a miracle, yes, but wouldn't the awe of the event have been mixed with some degree of awareness that walls of water which rise up can also come back down? Wouldn't there have been a few people who wondered whether they'd really live to see the other shore?



Prayer on the Red Sea Shore

If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.

And let me praise you with my final breath
for lending me his mad, prophetic dream
for letting me wander out past the edge of this world
beside a man who could see all the glory of Egypt
and still say that it wasn't enough

If these walls of water fall, O Lord,
let me drown with Moses.
Yes, let me die with the same fire in my eyes
Moses saw in a desert bush.

AML Conference Tomorrow

The Association for Mormon Letters Conference will take place at the UVU library tomorrow. A few cool things for anyone interested in dropping by during the free event:

1) There will be two scholarly presentations about my novel The Five Books of Jesus (which is free today through Friday on the Kindle) during the 11:30 session.

One, by teacher and poet Jonathon Penny, will also talk about paintings by J. Kirk Richards and may take a detour into how Richards and I are using familiar genres in unfamiliar ways in ways that remind Penny of what Donne and Milton did with form and content in their time. The other, by my brother Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood, will talk about the role of the Old Testament in my text, not only in direct quotations of scripture but also in the way the narrative itself is told.

2) Erin Jackson, Emily Harris Adams and I will be reading depictions of Jesus in our own works in a panel at 4 pm at the conference.

Erin Jackson has a short story about a shark and Jesus which I found both quite funny and extremely thought-provoking. I understand that a comic story about a shark and Jesus doesn't fit into everyone's sensibilities, but if you're up to it there are some valuable questions about agency and maybe even what it means to deny the Holy Ghost. Erin is a smart, engaging writer and it's a great piece.

Emily Harris Adams is one of my favorite young Mormon writers. She'll be sharing three poems which deal with Jesus in different ways. She's really a master of indirect portrayals of the Savior, showing in verse how traces of him appear at times in unexpected places. Also: Thomas S. Monson has quoted her poetry in Conference before. Pretty awesome.

3) During the same 11:30 a.m. session as my brother's presentation on my book, I will be presenting on "Jesus in Joanna Brooks' Book of Mormon Girl."

I got the idea for my presentation when a friend who knew I had Book of Mormon Girl on my Kindle asked me to look up references to Jesus for some informal research she was doing. I was immediately struck by the results: the handful of passages with references to Jesus were almost all stories of conflict--between children and parents, Mormons and Evangelicals, the "institutional church" and independent thinkers, Prop 8 supporters and opponents--in which Jesus was used as a weapon between sides to indict each other.

And yet there was very little detail as to what exactly Jesus meant to Brooks. It's possible, of course, that this is simply a narrative omission: Brooks didn't want to go into detail about her view of Jesus because it's tangential to the book's rhetorical purpose. On the other hand, I wonder what Jesus would look like set against the sorts of questions, assumptions, and values that permeate Book of Mormon Girl. How might a person reconcile the gospels' Jesus with the book's distaste for apocalyptic thinking, move from a sin/repentance model for wrong and right in favor of an injustice/activism model, and skepticism about the church's authority to call people to discipleship?
 

In any case--sorry for the late notice, but be sure to say hi if you come to the AML Conference tomorrow. Sorry also for not blogging here much lately (though many of my readers here might be interested in the "Toward Marriage Clarity" post on my other blog).

Mormon Lit Blitz Call for Submissions

Now announcing the Second Annual Mormon Lit Blitz Writing Contest. Send up to three submissions by 27 April 2013 to everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com for a chance to win a Kindle and more.

What we want:
Short work for Mormons to be published and read online.

The details:
“Short” means under 1,000 words.
“Work” means creative writing in any genre, from literary realism to far future science fiction, and in any form: fiction, essay, poetry, comics, playlet, etc. Give us a tiny, polished gem we can show off to people who love Mormonism and love great writing but “know not where to find” a place where the two meet.
“For Mormons” means for committed Latter-day Saints. Yes, that’s an extremely diverse audience (see the “I’m a Mormon” campaign—and your ward members), but it’s also an audience with distinctive shared values and history that don’t often get attention in creative work. We want you to write something that will appeal to us as people who believe in the sacred, who have ridiculous numbers of brothers and sisters we see every week, who worry about being good and faithful servants no matter what our day jobs are and wonder what it will be like to meet our grandparents’ grandparents in heaven. We don’t need your pieces to preach to us. We do need them to combine your creativity and religious commitment in a way that excites us and gives us something cool to talk about with our Mormon friends.
“To be published and read online” means we’re going to post six to twelve finalists’ pieces on Everyday Mormon Writer (everydaymormonwriter.com) and then ask readers to vote on their favorites. [Update 4/13: we've been having problems with the Everyday Mormon Writer website and so will post finalists here if we're unable to fix it.]
One catch: since even 1,000 words can be intimidating on a screen, your piece needs a strong hook of no more than 120 words (or eight lines for poetry) to be visible on the main blog page. Mark the end of your hook with [MORE]. Even our editors will only read further if you’ve piqued their interest.

Submission Guidelines:
Submissions must have fewer than 1,000 words (or 30 lines for poetry) with a hook no longer than 120 words (or eight lines for poetry). Submissions must be engaging to Latter-day Saints and engage with their Mormon identity in some way.
Authors may submit up to three works. Each submission must be attached to an email as a .doc or .pdf file. The selection process is blind, so the author’s name should not appear on the document.
Email any questions and your submissions to everydaymormonwriter@gmail.com. Submission emails should contain the author’s name, the titles of each submission, and contact information (telephone number or email address).
By submitting, authors give us the one-time rights to publish their work electronically. Previously published work is OK if you still have the rights to the piece and if it meets the above contest requirements (don’t forget to add a [MORE] tag to the end of your hook).

The prize:
The contest editors will select six to twelve finalists. All finalists will have their short works published online in May 2013 and actively promoted across the LDS blogosphere by the Mormon Lit Blitz team.
After all pieces have been published, readers will vote on a single Grand Prize Winner, who will receive a Kindle and a small library with LDS literary works in eBook format, including Parley P. Pratt’s classic short “A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil,” Peculiar Pages’ recent Monsters & Mormons anthology, Zarahemla Books’ Dispensation: Latter-day Fictions, the poetry anthology Fire in the Pasture, and James Goldberg’s The Five Books of Jesus.

A couplet

What does the cloud-mist think of the river before it falls down as rain?
Before we came down from heaven, what did we think of pain?