[xi] Both Mormonism and the short story, as Bruce Jorgensen has noted,¹ were revealed and invented in the same few years, about 1820 to 1835. It may in fact be more than mere coincidence that the short, lyrical form of prose narrative and an extremely practical, personal, and narrative-oriented world religion were both created during the height of the Romantic movement, that watershed in human history whose consequences we are still living out.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began with a book, the Book of Mormon, which people who are not LDS consider to be fiction. Many Mormons themselves recognize the personal shaping and influence of point of view on this ancient history as it was edited and translated. However, the first of what could be called Mormon fiction was actually written by Parley P. Pratt in the 1840s. Sections of Pratt's Autobiography, though edited by others and published in the 1880s, are personal narratives shaped and self-conscious in precisely the way good fiction is, while his "Dialogue Between Joe Smith and the Devil" (New York Herald, 1843) is the first Mormon short story. It is witty, imaginative in setting and dialogue and, though clearly pro-Mormon, aimed at a non-Mormon audience. [xii] Like much other early Mormon literature, it is a combination of apologetic and satire, committed to a perfect Zion and fiercely critical of the perishing Babylon everywhere else.

For the first fifty years of Mormonism, well into the settled Utah period when nationally published novels from classics to popular trash became increasingly available, all fiction was distrusted as at best inferior to "the truth" in history, biography, and sermons. In the 1880s Orson F. Whitney determined to combat the influences of non-Mormon literature and philosophy (especially Christian Science) and spearheaded a movement to produce at home in Utah uplifting fiction and poetry by, for, and in defense of the Saints—what he called "home literature." Josephine Spencer, Susa Young Gates, and Nephi Anderson produced a large quantity of such home-consumed fiction based more in dogma than experience. However, it was often, as Edward Geary has noted, even in its distinctive Mormon characteristics "only skin deep, masking an underlying vision which is as foreign to the gospel as it is to real life.²

Of this literature only Anderson's Added Upon continued to be read well into the twentieth century. However, works true to the movement's ideals and purposes, and thus also known to Mormon literary scholarship as "home literature," have continued as the mainstay of the most popular Mormon reading: didactic and sentimental stories published in official church publications or by official or semi-official presses.

Beginning with Vardis Fisher's Children of God in 1939 and continuing with Maurine Whipple, Virginia Sorensen, Samuel Taylor, and a number of others, a new kind of fiction began to be written by and about Mormons and published and praised nationally. These authors have been identified by Geary as Mormondom's "lost generation."³ They were similar to the American "lost generation" twenty years earlier in their impatience with their culture and expatriation from their people, and they were largely lost to Mormon audiences and as an influence on Mormon writers.

But not entirely lost. Geary himself remembers as a young student finding Virginia Sorensen on the Mormon fiction shelf of the library at Brigham Young University, being amazed by the first [xiii] good literature he had read that spoke to his own Mormon and rural Utah experience, and then reading down the shelves through the lost treasure of similar writers of the 1940s and 1950s.

The following collection begins with part of that treasure, short works by Sorensen and Whipple that are among the first Mormon stories that can be called contemporary. Sorensen's "Where Nothing Is Long Ago" (a fictionalized murder over water rights) was published in the New Yorker in 1953 and is a perfect example of the critical but nostalgic and loving stance of the best of lost generation work. Whipple's "They Did Go Forth," recently discovered along with a number of her other unpublished stories, is, in its affirmative retelling of a "Three Nephite" folktale, closer than either Sorensen's work or Whipple's own The Giant Joshua to the spirit of "home literature." But both stories belong in this collection because they reflect the skills of the two most influential among the "lost" pioneers of the Mormon fiction which continues to best challenge and move readers and inspire writers.

Coming about twenty years later, Douglas Thayer and Donald R. Marshall were the pioneers of a second generation. As Jorgensen discovered,⁴ there were a number of "late expatriates" besides Sorensen publishing Mormon stories in a variety of national and regional publications from about 1940 to 1965, including Ray B. West, Jr., Wayne Carver, and most notably David L. Wright. Wright produced excellent poetry and drama and published five stories in literary quarterlies before his sudden death at age forty-five in 1967. None of these writers is included here. None gained a Mormon readership or influenced younger Mormon writers as did Thayer and Marshall, mainly because there were no Mormon outlets for the new fiction. Such outlets were provided in the 1960s with the founding of Brigham Young University Studies and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Thayer and Marshall benefitted in their pioneering efforts from two separate influences: they studied modern British and American writers, such as Joyce, Hemingway, Porter, and Flannery O'Connor, and they learned new approaches to Mormon history and culture from the nationally published writers of the lost generation. [xiv] They also had access to a Mormon audience, critics, and outlets in an expanding intellectual community. They benefitted especially from Clinton Larson, a poet and dramatist who in the 1950s and 1960s became the first Mormon writer to combine excellent contemporary training and natural talent with an informed and passionate faith that he made central to his work.

With The Rummage Sale (1973) Marshall produced a collection of stories which took rural Mormon culture for granted as a context for apparently humorous but also deeply serious examinations of religious and moral conflicts. "The Week-end," published here, shows his skill with point-of-view, perhaps the fiction writer's chief formal tool.

Thayer did not publish his first collection, Under the Cottonwoods, until 1977, but he started writing his unique Mormon stories earlier than Marshall, in the early 1960s, and his influence on other Mormon writers has been perhaps wider and continued longer. As John Bennion has said, "He was the first to solve the major problem. He taught us how to explore the interior life, with its conflicts of doubt and faith, goodness and evil, of a believing Mormon." Here I have chosen a story from his first collection, "Opening Day," which shows Thayer's characteristic strategy of an extended journey of the mind based on experience in nature.

Jorgensen has shown that Thayer's strategy both follows closely that of the Romantic poets' "Great Odes" and also undermines Romantic assumptions.⁵ "Opening Day" and all of the stories in Thayer's recent collection, Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone, especially ''The Redtail Hawk," confront in a uniquely Mormon way the basic Romantic anxiety: their heartfelt attraction to life in, even union with, nature—which conflicts with their moral understanding that pursuing such union is only possible in unconsciousness, loss of language, and even death.⁶

Others were learning from Marshall and Thayer and from the best contemporary American writers. Karen Rosenbaum studied at Stanford University in the 1960s with Wallace Stegner and has regularly published wry, delicate stories of relationships complicated by the quest for faith. Bruce Jorgensen (who uses his middle name, [xv] Wayne, for his fiction) studied at Brigham Young University and Cornell University and has written a few meticulously-crafted stories based firmly in his Mormon experience.

Lewis Horne, raised in Arizona and settled in mid-Canada, began writing stories about his Mormon youth and has been published nationally and honored in Best American Short Stories, 1974 and Prize Stories, 1987: The O. Henry Awards. Eileen Gibbons Kump wrote a connected series of stories about a second-generation pioneer woman (Bread and Milk, 1979), which shows remarkable psychological and historical insight. "Sayso or Sense," included here, is perhaps the first Mormon story to deal directly with feminist issues. Meanwhile Gladys Farmer (Elders and Sisters, 1977) and Bela Petsco (Nothing Very Important and Other Stories, 1979) produced collections of missionary stories, which like Kump's were connected into a longer narrative by common central characters.

In the 1980s these beginnings produced a cascade of individual works and then collections, published through the independent Mormon and regional publications and presses and increasingly through national outlets as well. Among a group of what Jorgensen in 1983 called "Up-and-Comers," Levi S. Peterson achieved the major breakthrough, becoming the first of this second generation of contemporary Mormon writers to publish a collection nationally (The Canyons of Grace, in the prestigious University of Illinois short fiction series, 1982). He continued Thayer's work on interior Mormon male landscape and used Thayer's sophisticated first-person narration, which played the moral and spiritual naivete of the young protagonist against his more mature narrating self, and he also took on major Mormon theological and historical issues. Peterson has continued Marshall's use of rural Mormonism for humor and pathos but, in a story like "The Christianizing of Coburn Heights," took Mormon humor into new realms of pain and despair. In his latest collection, Night Soil (1990), Peterson has secured his place as the most prolific author of high-quality contemporary Mormon short fiction.

But he has close competition. In the 1970s a young Mormon [xvi] playwright, Orson Scott Card, left the Mormon literary scene to become one of America's most widely read and critically acclaimed science fiction writers. He first won the top two prizes, the Hugo and Nebula, for Ender's Game (1985), then made an unprecedented second sweep of the same prizes the next year with Speaker for the Dead. Meanwhile he began writing Mormon science fiction stories (collected in The Folk of the Fringe, 1989) and Mormon fantasy. His "Alvin Maker" series is based on a figure much like Joseph Smith, growing up to be a prophet in an imaginary alternative America (the first novel's first section, "Hatrack River," was published as a story in 1987 and won the World Fantasy Award).

Pauline Mortensen has used the rural Mormon stereotype to make witty, hip, exquisitely vocalized tales (especially "Woman Talking to a Cow," included here, from Back Before the World Turned Nasty, 1989). Neal Chandler (Benediction, 1989) writes about Mormon experience outside the traditional Wasatch front, which tends to be overshadowed by ghosts of pioneer history and present authority. Like Levi Peterson he has pioneered the use of humor ("Benediction") and folk mythology ("The Last Nephite").

Darrell Spencer, at Brigham Young University, is the contemporary Mormon writer perhaps least focused on Mormon characters and culture. He writes post-modernist, occasionally minimalist, stories, published widely in prestigious "little" magazines and collected in A Woman Packing a Pistol (1987). He shows what this approach can do within a Mormon context in "I am Buzz Gaulter, Left-hander." Phyllis Barber has also made her reputation mainly outside Mormon literary circles, with The School of Love (1990) and And the Desert Shall Blossom (1991). How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir won the Associated Writing Programs prize in 1991 and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1992.

Judith Freeman grew up in Utah and has written stories about female characters who live there, as in Family Attractions: Stories (1987) or, as in her novel, The Chinchilla Farm (1989), begin their odysseys there. She has a particularly understated, affecting style, evident in her story here and especially in her novel Set for Life (1991), which takes place in Southern Idaho. Michael Fillerup has [xvii] explored in a number of stories (see Visions and Other Stories, 1990) the relationship of Mormonism to native American peoples (such as "Lost and Found" in this volume). Linda Sillitoe has tended to focus (in Windows on the Sea and Other Stories, 1989) on the interior life of contemporary Mormon women. But Fillerup in "The Renovation of Marsha Fletcher" has written persuasively from a Mormon woman's perspective, and Sillitoe in "Coyote Tracks" has written persuasively of the confrontation of Mormon anglo and native American world views.

Most of the writers included in this collection that I have discussed to this point were born before 1950 and all are now established—by virtue of their influence, their published collections which continue to be read, or their consistent output of contributions to Mormon letters—as part of a developing canon of Mormon fiction. I have also chosen from a younger group in order to show some new directions contemporary Mormon fiction is taking.

One of the youngest, Walter Kim, has already in his late twenties achieved remarkable success nationally with his first collection, My Hard Bargain (1990). A convert to Mormonism, Kim writes about growing up in the church ("Whole Other Bodies" is based on his family's conversion) and more general stories about life on farms in Wisconsin. Kim began publishing in national magazines such as Esquire (whose editors thought his Mormon stories had to be changed to a Utah setting to be believable). John Bennion, who studied under contemporary masters such as Donald Barthelme at Houston, recently published his first collection, Breeding Leah and Other Stories (1991), from which I have chosen "Dust," a story written in a fashionable contemporary style that is also intriguingly Mormon. Margaret Young has published two novels and is beginning to publish stories nationally as well as in the independent Mormon press (her first collection Elegies and Lovesongs, from which I have chosen "Outsiders," appeared in 1992).

M. Shayne Bell, much influenced by Orson Scott Card, spent 1991-92 on a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, writing science fiction stories. Stories such as the one included here, "Dry Niger," are Mormon in no overt way but are recognizably so in [xviii] their moral values and vision concerning the last days of the earth. Sibyl Johnston has been working, supported by a Fellowship in Literature at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, on an experimental, nearly autobiographical novel, part of which, "Iris Holmes," was published as a story in the anthology Hot Type (1988) and is included here.

So what makes these stories recognizably Mormon as well as contemporary? And what does it matter? It matters, I think, because Mormonism is a new religious tradition with a unique theology and a powerful ethnic identity and mythic vision of the kind that should produce good and characteristic literature. Writers reveal their fundamental values and beliefs, their integrity and compassion or meanness and blindness, as well as their way of seeing the world, in all the decisions, small and large, that go into form and content and finally make the novel or story or essay believable and moving.⁷ Flannery O'Connor put the case this way: "It makes a great difference to 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, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals."⁸

I believe authors' beliefs, inevitably affecting the nature and quality of their writing, also make a great deal of difference to readers—to what we are able to get out of a story. So I have chosen stories that are not only valuable because they are skillful, the product of natural gifts, careful training or apprenticeship, and good understanding of the traditions of classic short stories and contemporary innovations. They are also valuable because they are written by people with a recognizably Mormon background which leads them through their stories to express, reveal, develop, and challenge the shape of Mormon beliefs.

Mormonism holds that individual identity is uncreated and indestructible, that free choice is absolutely necessary if we are to develop human potential, and that yielding one's individuality to the [xix] sociality of marriage and larger communities is equally essential. Furthermore Mormonism insists that divinity continues to reveal such things to prophets and further understanding of them to all people. One crucial way such insight can come, I believe, is through the telling of stories, and the stories here are such revelations.

How can these stories be revelations, some might ask, if they describe doubt, despair, failure, and sin? Morality—and faith—in fiction are not a matter simply of content nor even a question of whether a matter is presented in a "balanced" way. They have much more to do with the shape of the author's own belief and moral vision, which inevitably show through to a careful reader. The stories I have chosen occasionally describe, in precise and relevant language, troubled thoughts and human frailties which are necessary parts of a whole picture. In each case, that picture is a new vision of life, filtered and energized through a believing, moral intelligence as well as a gifted and disciplined artistic sensibility.

Mormonism integrates an almost materialistic affirmation of worldly realities with a yearning to reach beyond the world. We make our homes here and imagine heaven as much like this place—but constantly sense that our true home is elsewhere. Most of these stories are exceptionally accurate and thorough in describing the surfaces of the world we know. Many also evoke visions and epiphanies which seem related to another world of the spirit. Thus the title reminds us that the best Mormon fiction concerns both bright angels of spiritual reality and the familiar, beautiful world in which we live and create our being.

This collection, of course, is indebted to the pioneering work in Mormon letters of earlier anthologists and critics. In the very first anthology of Mormon literature, A Believing People (1974), editors Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert, who had also begun, at Brigham Young University, the first classes in Mormon literature, provided an excellent sampling of nineteenth-century fiction and the best work of the lost generation—as well as samples of the early work of Thayer and Marshall and Kump. That same year they produced a look at the future in Twenty-Two Young Mormon Writers.

Then, just as the explosion of the 1980s was getting under way, [xx] Levi Peterson edited a collection, Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Stories (1983), of newly written works that revealed the range that was developing in the second generation—fifteen excellent and mature writers when ten years before there had only been two or three. Now, less than another ten years along, the growth has continued, requiring difficult selection from among dozens of good writers, many of whom are increasingly published nationally as well as in the growing number of selective independent Mormon and regional periodicals like Brigham Young University Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Exponent II, Sunstone, and Wasatch Review International, which is devoted entirely to Mormon literature; and presses like Aspen Books, Bookcraft, Covenant Communications, Deseret Book, Signature Books, and the University of Utah Press. I regret that all the fine contemporary Mormon story writers could not be included here. Look for them in the list of "Other Notable Mormon Stories" at the end of this book (which Bruce Jorgensen helped to compile) and in future periodicals and press catalogues.

2. Edward Geary, "The Poetics of Provincialism: Mormon Regional Fiction," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Summer 1978): 15.

3. Edward Geary, "Mormondom's Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s," Brigham Young University Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 89.

4. Jorgensen, "A 'Smaller Canvas,''' 12-14.

5. Bruce W. Jorgensen, "Romantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer," Western American Literature 22 (May 1987): 43-47.

6. See Eugene England, "Thayer's Ode to the Redtail Hawk," Mormon Letters Annual, 1983, 42-53.

7. Bruce W. Jorgensen, '''Herself Moving Beside Herself, Out There Alone': The Shape of Mormon Belief in Virginia Sorensen's The Evening and the Morning," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Fall 1980): 45-47.

8. Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 156-57.