Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022 

I first learned about Wovoka in Our History is Our Future by Nick Estes and was moved to learn of a Paiute prophet so central to Native American history, because the Paiute are particularly marginalized and humiliated in Native American history. Sold to the Spanish as slaves by both the Utes and Dine, they weren’t particularly renowned for their military skills. Their own original story pokes fun at this hierarchy, humbly and humorously claiming their people were brown because they were made out of shit. I’m drawn to Wovoka’s story because it gives Paiutes a pretty central role in US Native history. Charles Rivers Editors did an excellent job contextualizing Wovoka’s teachings within a global indigenous context, drawing parallels in Africa and the Pacific. Essentially, in the face of genocide and a dramatic change of lifestyle, there’s a strain of indigenous thought that conservatively retreats into tradition, claiming that if indigenous folks dig their heels into their spiritual practice, the gods will vanquish their colonizers for them. In Wovoka’s case, this is the spirit dance and ceremony. The spirit dance promised a decolonized future, where the relationship between humans and nature were restored and white men were wiped off the face of the earth. The stomps in the spirit dance were sometimes literally supposed to be stomping the white man under the earth. The spirit dance inspired Natives across North America facing genocide and gave them the hope to continue resisting, rather than dying and/or assimilating. This contribution changes the course of US Native history in two dramatic ways: 1) First, it inspires the resistance of the Lakota Sioux, one of the most resistant indigenous nations of North America, who interpreted Wovoka’s teachings in a way that inspired violent resistance. The book does an excellent job here delineating between Wovoka’s teachings and differing between varying Paiute, Lakota, and federal white man interpretations of them. The Lakota Sioux popularized the spirit dance the most and led a resistance movement to be crushed but not vanquished at Wounded Knee. 2) Because the dance was associated with anticolonial indigenous movements, the US government outlawed all Native dance, ceremonial, and religious practices. The US also anglicized the name as the Ghost Dance to give it a spookier, more terrorist edge. These are two pivotal moments of North American native history where Wovoka played a critical role! On top of all that, there is some speculation that Wovoka’s teachings were somewhat inspired by Mormonism. Wovoka incorporated Christian theology into his teachings in ways that aren’t entirely clear to me, but Wovoka clearly occupies a similar mystic and revelatory lineage of the era, which includes Joseph Smith. The LDS (Mormon) teaching that Jesus visited the Americas and that Natives are a Jewish, Biblical people was apparently sometimes interpreted by some Natives to mean Jesus was Native and some went as far to identify Wovoka with a reincarnation of Jesus. I wish I could talk about this history with my former students in Cedar City, as there’s a lot of layers here. If folks have recommendations on more reads relevant to Wovoka, please let me know. 5/5 

SUFFRAGE / Jenifer Nii / 2013

Suffrage / Jenifer Nii / 2013

It is absolutely wild to me that a non-Mormon Asian woman who didn’t even grow up in Utah managed to write one of the strongest, most compassionate portrayals I’ve ever seen of polygamist women. While Utah culture paints polygamists as backward outcasts, while the LDS church dodges and distorts its polygamist history, frequently throwing once-faithful LDS polygamists under the bus, Jenifer Nii manages to dramatize the tensions and tenderness between sister wives at a critical point in history. Unfolding during the suffragist movement, during Utah’s vying for statehood, and most significantly during the LDS church’s transition from a polygamist to sort of monogamous culture, SUFFRAGE tells the story of Ruth and Frances.

Ruth, in her 20s, is the 4th wife in the family. A natural outspoken leader she butts heads not only with the patriarchal culture of Utah and the US at large, but also with Frances, the second wife of the family, who is in her late 30s it seems. Frances and Ruth function as perfect foils. While Ruth spends her time busy politically organizing and fighting for women’s rights, Frances troubles herself most over the well-being of her family, criticizing Ruth’s idealism in favor of practicality—and survival. Without Frances, the children would have likely starved. While contemporary culture would likely view polygamous women with the same myopic lens it views hijabi women, SUFFRAGE does a great job of illustrating the power these women had and how they chose to wield it.

A two-person play, I was stunned by Nii’s ability to craft archaic dialogue so seamlessly. The language bounces like it’s alive, moving the plot forward. Never does it feel like a stale philosophical conversation between two opposed concepts. Every word builds the tension, reveals an important piece of the character. Craft-wise, I was most impressed and engulfed by the parallel scenes Nii constructed. That is, two separate scenes Ruth and Frances act out simultaneously. The dialogue from the scenes would intermix, like a contrapuntal, creating powerful juxtapositions and connections in distinct narratives. These juxtaposition helped build the tension between the two characters, between their religion, and between men and women.

If you’re interested in viewing an excellent live reading of the play, along with a Q&A with the author, the original cast, and historian Lindsay Hansen Park, please follow this link.

I recommend this play to anyone interested in Mormonism, Asian American literature, minimalistic theatre, feminism, monologues, and Utah history.

The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History / Darren Parry / 2019

Did you know that the largest massacre of Native Americans in the United States happened in Idaho? If you, like me, answered no to that question, you should pick up The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History by Darren Parry. This book is a palpable act of love and an attempt to heal a Utah still suffering from the aftermath of this massacre.

Parry begins with a chapter about his grandmother Mae Timbimboo Parry, a Shoshone historian who instilled in young Darren the importance of their cultural heritage and implanted in him the stories he shares in this book. Those wanting a critical scholarly historiography of the events should turn elsewhere. Parry’s style is much more akin to a testimony meeting than an academic essay. A six-generation Shoshone-Latter-Day-Saint, his particular perspective is both a boon and a burden to the narrative. It provides an intimacy with the material and a moral authority very few can deliver. At times, however, Parry’s own gentleness and Christlike turning of the other cheek is suffocating to someone as young and angry as me. My suspicion is that this gentleness is perfect for coaxing the fragility of non-natives and conservatives, as they grapple with the blatant injustice experienced by the Shoshone. Published by Common Consent Press, a non-profit publisher dedicated to producing affordable, high-quality books that help define and shape the Latter-day Saint experience, I hope the book finds an audience of non-native latter-day-saints ready to wrestle with the legacy of white supremacy and settler colonialism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. The book is extraordinarily kind to the non-native (or culturally assimilated native) reader, providing a whole chapter on what amounts to Shoshone anthropology. As a bonus at the end, Parry even includes his grandmother’s notes on traditional Shoshone food sources and uses, complete with handwritten descriptions and drawings of plants! The book strives to not just provide readers with a historical account of the Bear River Massacre, but an overview of the plight and condition of the Northwestern Shoshone. I would compare it most to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois in that regard. Teachers, please, this book is begging to be used as an educational text!

A hunter-gatherer civilization, the Northwestern Shoshone were largely peaceful in their interactions with the encroaching latter-day-saint settlers. Scuffles between other Shoshones/native peoples and the white settlers, however, blew back on the Northwestern Shoshone, including a November 25, 1863 attack that left two Natives and two white men dead, which served as a pretense for the massacre because racist white people can’t tell people of color apart. Even the gun-shy, Darren Parry notes, “Again, the Indian men involved were not from the Northwestern Band, but to the white authorities and settlers, Indians were Indians, and there was not much inclination to distinguish between the local Natives and those from other bands” (42). This attack, among others, led Patrick Edward Connor to eventually massacre at least 400 of the men, women, and children of the Northwestern Shoshone. Connor was a Northern commander in the Civil War sent to Utah to “protect overland routes from attacks by the Indians and quell a possible Mormon uprising” (35). Parry gives the impression that Connor was restless, eager to put his skills to use subduing Southern rebels, rather than “babysitting” the latter-day-saints. Whatever the case, because of Connor, Parry and his people were raised with stories of the massacre, of family members escaping by ingenious methods, of babies suffocated to prevent giving away their location, of many other heartrending tales Parry graciously provides.

Following the devastation of the massacre, Chief Sagwitch chooses to attempt to assimilate his people into the latter-day-saint way of life. Parry closely follows the perspective of Chief Sagwitch, the Shoshone chief responsible for converting most of his community to the LDS faith and bridging the cultural divide between latter-day-saints and Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. So the story goes, Sagwitch received the revelation that:

“There was a time when our Father who lived above the clouds loved our fathers who lived long ago. His face shone bright upon them and their skins were white like the white man. Then they were wise and wrote books and the Father above the clouds talked with them. But after a while our people would not hear him and they quarreled and stole and fought until the Great Father got mad and turned his back on them. By doing this, He caused a shade to come over them and their skins turned black. And now we cannot see as the white man sees, because the Great Fathers face is towards him and His back is towards us. But after a while, the Great Father will quit being mad and He will turn his face towards us. Then our skins will become white.” (58-59)

Parry offers this story with surprisingly little commentary to unpack the internalized racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy in this revelation, other than pointing out that this story fits cleanly with others from the Book of Mormon. I’m not sure what to do with this positionality yet. It is clear from Parry’s accounting that there were other voices in the Northwestern Shoshone community that felt like the Book of Mormon was only for white men (58), but their perspectives are marginalized in the text. Surely, there must be another path to the Northwestern Shoshone to remain faithful to their chosen latter-day-saint faith and still reckon with the racist attitudes of their forefathers. Thanks to Sagwitch’s leadership, however, most of the Northwestern Shoshone converted to mormonism, even if the syncretized their practices, as is common with many natives who converted to some form of Christianity.

What followed were several collaborations by native and white latter-day-saints to build a native settlement, working hard to convert a hunter-gatherer culture to an agricultural one. There are many obvious challenges to this, one of which seems to be the mismanagement by white leaders of their settlements. Parry notes that “often the Indians were only paid through food and supplies,” which usually is referred to as slavery (74). For many reasons, these settlements largely failed, harboring resentment in native communities. Despite that, natives still donated over 1000 hours to the building of the Logan temple, a fact Parry belabors in the book, and eventually built a successful community in Washakie.

In Washakie, however, the Northwestern Shoshone faced another monumental setback as after a while white latter-day-saints received orders to burn down the houses of their native neighbors while they were gone visiting family or running other errands. In the appendices, Parry includes the testimonies of many natives who lost their property, including sacred belongings in the fire. These acts of arson form another psychic wound on the Shoshone imagination that informs their current positions and outlooks.

As Parry narrates how these histories impact the present, he balances holding the church accountable with being optimistic about the ways assimilation has impacted his people. On one hand, he states, “things cannot be made right, although we should continue to [try]” (89). Lines like these show his understanding of how acute and permanent some of the damage has been. On the the other hand, he states, “Through assimilation, we have been blessed.” This quote follows another anti-black quote about God making native skins dark because of their sin (90).

My own indigenous Salvadoran ancestors likely took the route of cultural assimilation as well, after La Matanza of 1932, where over 30,000 indigenous peasants were massacred. After the killings, indigenous peoples frequently abandoned their traditional ways of dressing and their language. The pain of these massacres is still palpable in the Salvadoran cultural imagination and is one of the many factors leading to the Salvadoran Civil War. I mention this because I want to be clear in stating that I am not judging Sagwitch or his community for making the decisions they needed to in order to survive. The duty of the surviving generation, however, is to heal and reckon with the full weight of the past. The Bear River Massacre is a great first step in that direction that will hopefully open the door to more radical and diverse perspectives within the Native community.

On page 53, Parry includes (and critiques) the text of a plaque that still stands in Franklin County monument site that reads, “Attacks by the Indians on the peaceful inhabitants of this vicinity led to the final battle here on January 29, 1863….” Such a disgusting revision of history still lives in many Utah schools and communities. May Perry’s book bring us a step closer to listening to the voices of those murdered that January day.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Native American history, American history, and creative non-fiction.

The Poet and The Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery

The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery / Simon Worrall / 2002

Sometime in fall of 2019, I became fascinated with the story of Mark Hofmann, a Mormon forger and murderer whose work blurred the line between truth and fiction, between history and fantasy. The story of Mark Hofmann should be a key part of any Mormon or historian’s education. Briefly, the story goes like this: a young bibliophile and rare books dealer forges dozens of historical documents, fooling both historians and the leadership of the LDS church. In his forgeries, he provided “evidence” that Joseph Smith dabbled in folk magic (which is ultimately true) and necromancy (which is true if you consider baptisms for the dead necromancy, but not true any other way). His strategy was to sell these embarrassing “historical” documents to the church for large sums of money (tens of thousands of dollars) so they may suppress them, then leak their contents to the press to embarrass the church. Hofmann ultimately forged the handwriting of 129 different historical characters, including Martin Harris, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and others!

Hofmann, however, bit off more than he could chew. He churned out so many rare, impossible documents he was bound to get caught eventually. His problem is that he kept going for more and more ambitious forgeries. As the scrutinizing eyes of his debt collectors and manuscript dealers began to close in on him, he went on a bombing spree that resulted in the deaths of two people. He eventually confessed to his forgeries, although scholars and the public alike are suspicious. Can we trust a pathological liar to tell us about all his forgeries? What if he’s lying about how much he forged to brag and bolster his legend? Hofmann sold both legitimate and illegitimate documents, so just because Hofmann touched an artifact doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a counterfeit. My heart breaks for all the poor historians whose work got mangled by his crimes.

For those interested in learning more about Hofmann and his crimes, The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrall might be a good place to start.

Be warned, Worrall is not an excellent writer. Sometimes, he mangles his sentences. Other times, he revels in inappropriate allusions and similes, both of which are connected to other blind spots in his work. Check out this bizarre comparison, for example: “Among some African tribes boys are separated from their mothers at the age of fourteen and sent into the bush, where they learn to become warriors. Similarly, young Mormon men are taken from their families and sent out into the world to become warriors for God”. Not only are these two rites of passage extremely dissimilar, Worrall’s depiction of a generic African tribal society reduces a culturally specific practice to a stereotype.

Worrall’s treatment of Mormon history is thorough, but dismally biased. This particular comparison Worrall utilized will show you what I mean: “These local community organizations are the eyes and ears of the Church, funneling reports of disobedience and dissent up through the system in much the same way that local party officials in Communist China keep tabs on local neighborhoods.” This claim is made too flippantly and does little to reveal the true nature of church organization. Instead, it relies on the reader’s xenophobia and fear of communism to villainize the church. At another point, Worrall writes, “Mormons also learns from a young age to recognize each other by means of a series of signs and symbols known only to them.” This line made me laugh out loud. As someone raised Mormon, I was surprised to hear so.

Unfortunately, like many books in the true crime genre, Worrall also ultimately romanticizes Hofmann, and once again, Worrall’s similes provide a few clear examples. When describing Hofmann’s forays into hypnosis, Worrall writes, “like a Zen master, Hofmann would eventually gain almost total control of his mind and emotions. It was these extraordinary psychic powers that enabled him to control and manipulate others.” Comparing a sociopath to a Zen master is simply inappropriate. Moves like this happen throughout the text.

Where the book succeeds and what makes it worthwhile is its contextualizing of Hofmann’s work within a tradition of Mormon forgery. Once I learned of Hofmann’s story, I was struck with its parallels to Joseph Smith’s life. Early church leaders, including Joseph Smith, forged money or worked closely with Mormon forgers like David McKenzie and Peter Haws. Worrall succeeds in showing how Hofmann is a particularly Mormon villain who in some ways is just like Joseph Smith—that is, a brilliant, charismatic con man who knew how to make people believe what he was saying. Ultimately, I found The Poet and the Murderer satisfying because it did a great job highlighting this tradition and Hofmann’s parallels with Joseph.

Worrall also provides snappy narration about aspects of Emily Dickinson’s life, the story of the poor librarian who fundraised 24k to unwittingly purchase Hofmann’s forgery of a Dickinson poem, and the larger history of forgery in general. The text is sprawling and a reader will definitely feel bumps in the road between chapters, as Worrall awkwardly dances between Hofmann’s story and Dickinson’s. That said, it was an enjoyable enough read.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in forgery or Mormon history.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson

As someone whose ancestors survived the middle passage and the genocides of smallpox and European imperialism, as someone whose living ancestors survived warfare and migration, I sometimes pray to my ancestors for strength and wisdom. This is a common practice for many people of color I know. We pray to those who sacrificed everything so that one day their descendants could know something more than mere survival. If we romanticize our ancestors, it is only to balance the grotesque stereotypes of them popular in American culture. In writing prompts, it is common to ask young writers of color to reflect on their lineages and share their histories of survival.

That same writing prompt lands differently when given to a white person.

When white people romanticize their histories and feel proud about their ancestors, it’s complicated. American bootstraps narratives and manifest destiny abound, frequently blithely turning the eye away from the masses of enslaved Black bodies, massacred Indigenous bodies, and silenced Queer bodies left in their wake.

When people of color turn to their ancestors for strength, there is something holy, even if simplistic. When white people turn to their ancestors, there is sometimes a reckoning, the dance of positionality has more chances for missteps.

As a teacher, I have wrestled with how to best teach my students how to reckon with their heritages. For my students of color, there is often the need to validate, to empower, to bring to light; for students of color farther along their identity development, I challenge them to complicate their histories, to stop performing their histories cleanly for white people. There are plenty of models I can point my students towards to develop their writing in this way. In the past, however, I have been somewhat at a loss for how to best direct my white students when wrestling with their cultural legacies. Books by white people that reckon with the weight of the legacies of racism and imperialism in ethically satisfying ways are harder to come by perhaps or they have somehow escaped my attention. Too often, the conversation ends with How to Kill a Mockingbird.

I was excited to read Before Us Like a Land of Dreams by Karin Anderson, because it seems like one of the few books by white people that strives to find a way to ethically narrate and thereby define a spiritual relationship with white history. By chance, I read Anderson alongside William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reviewers of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams are fond of comparing Anderson’s novel to As I Lay Dying. The obvious connection is the shifting first-person perspectives in which the novels are narrated, as well as the authors’ shared ambition in encapsulating a region’s history and culture. The obvious connections end there. While Faulkner’s novel is driven by a clear conflict—the Bundren family’s desire to bury their mother in a faraway town—the conflict in Anderson’s novel is less clear. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams covers five different sets of characters from distinct generations, whose conflicts don’t necessarily interact with one another. In this sense, Before Us Like a Land of Dreams more closely approximates The Glory Field by Walter Dean Myers than As I Lay Dying. The impetus for Anderson’s novel seems to be derived from the author’s mid-life crisis after a divorce—from a husband and a religious history. Like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the novel starts with non-fiction and ends in the imagination: Anderson moves from narrating a mid-life crisis to voicing the stories of her ancestors as a way of finding herself anew in the world. While Anderson compassionately retraces the family histories of several branches of her family tree, Faulkner exposes his characters for the amusement and derision of his readers. Reading As I Lay Dying is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. With this in mind, both novels perhaps offer two contrasting ways of engaging the legacy of whiteness: by Anderson’s approach, compassionately humanize the ancestor in all their flaws and shortcomings, tracing the limits of their strength and desire; Or by Faulkner’s approach, expose the callousness and depravity of your kin without erasing the ache that makes them human. I don’t think it’s fair to call Anderson’s approach redemptive. Rather, much like the Matthew Arnold poem from which the novel takes its name, Anderson seems to nod to the fact that much of the love and light in the romanticized narratives of Mormon history are an illusion.

In Faulkner, we find a fiercely poetic prose with descriptions and moments that will steal your breath. The slim narrative hits you like a bunch of knife jabs. Anderson’s novel is much more sprawling and unfocused. Each voice in Faulkner’s novel clearly pushes along the narrative arc. Each voice in Anderson feels like the beginning of a new novel. Both novels beg for rereading in order to fully appreciate the rich switches in voice. Reading these novels side-by-side is miserably dizzying, although rewarding.

I first engaged with Anderson’s novel in a panel at Southern Utah University. What captivated me the most then was the novel’s attempt to compassionately narrate unspoken parts of Mormon history, such as the forced removal of indigenous peoples from Mountain West, queer figures like Julian Eltinge, and so forth. I am deeply grateful this novel exists, because it narrates the stories of a Utah concealed from the public. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams is a solid counterpoint to all the romanticized stories about pioneers young Mormons are fed in church and public school. A large part of our conversation in that panel was a discussion about how to best represent marginalized stories in Mormon history without losing the ears of our devout community members. I have mixed feelings about how successful Anderson was in that count. There are moments where the autobiographical narrator’s callousness towards the religion makes her seem a tad biased and I can imagine that offending the devout. When the same callousness comes in the voices of the ancestors, it feels more acceptable to me. It’s harder to lay blame on the dead.

On a formal level, Anderson’s novel is worth reading for the explosions of brilliance scattered throughout the novel. There is an absolutely fantastic four-or-so page scene where circus elephants leap off a cliff and into a river—and survive! Equally impressive is the story of a drag performance in rural Idaho that wins the hearts of the conservative community. Then, there’s the story of the white boy who helped Natives steal a herd of farm animals. Time and time again, Anderson narrates these unlikely stories in a way that makes them utterly believable.

I recommend Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to anyone interested in studying perspective in fiction. I recommend Anderson’s Before Us Like a Land of Dreams to anyone interested in Mormon Studies, history of the American West, perspective in fiction.

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile

We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile / Edited by Kalani Tonga and Joanna Brooks / Feminist Mormon Housewives / 2019

In a recent interview with RadioActive on KRCL, I was asked the gigantic question: how do you define poetry? After a few minutes of scribbling, I came up with this: prayer and blessing through story and song. Prayer I believe points to desire and to an attempt to access greatness. Blessing is product of my own goodwill, as a poem can certainly be a curse. In either case, it is a wish to transform the other. Story points to the need for meaning. Song points to the need for meaning beyond the literal words.

We Hold Your Name is an open mic, a hearth of women gathered in vigil, a collection of poetry written largely by unpublished and non-professional poets. If what you’re looking for is mind-blowing imagery or deft line breaks, this collection is not for you. What you may find, instead, is a home, a community to weather with you your doubt and exile.

Gina Colvin

The collection was written and gathered in preparation for Gina Colvin’s December 2018 excommunication court. For months, it looked like Colvin, a prominent and fierce Mormon feminist personality, was going to go down the same route as other Mormon intellectual icons and critics of the past decades and be excommunicated. Colvin’s community, the international coalition of women she helped organize, nurture, and connect to Heavenly Mother, came through for her with letters of support to Colvin’s bishop and poems to help strengthen Colvin during her difficult trial. The poems they sent were collected and presented in We Hold Your Name. For those unfamiliar with Colvin’s work, this interview is pretty good.

The poems range widely in tone and purpose, a reflection of the breadth of Colvin’s Mormon community, even a reflection of how wide and varied the Mormon experience is in the 21st century. There are sharp little barbs, like Kate Kelly’s poem, “Fuck the Patriarchy, A Poem”:

F

u

c

k

t

h

e

p

a

t

r

i

a

r

c

h

y.

Amen.

There are priesthood blessings like Kathryn Elizabeth Shields, which opens with the snarky and touching lines mimicking and inverting LDS priesthood blessings: “O Woman, / having been given no authority, / Neither from on high or by man, / I give you a name and a blessing.” There are also simple offerings of peace, such as Jami Kimball Baayd’s poem, which describes a sacred space Baayd has visited, one where Colvin would never be excommunicated from for speaking her truth.

The power of We Hold Your Name is its ability to represent, and thereby create, alternative ways of being Mormon with different relationships to the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There’s a chance that if I had known of the Mormon Feminist Housewives and the intellectual class of Mormon thinkers in my teenage years, I would have found a path for staying inside the church. Because leaving the church did require letting a believing part of myself shrivel up, these poems offered a profound relief for that choked limb, allowing it to feel the blood of love and the possibility of belonging again. I found myself so moved in my first sitting with the collection that I read through more than half in one sitting. The poems read easily and won’t belabor you in search of their meaning. That’s not the intention of this collection. Rather, it’s to create a community in the absence of approval and acceptance from those with the so-called authority. As Sara Hughes-Zabawa put it in her poem, “…it is in our un-belonging we found you, and that has been the greatest gift. Following your insight, it was the map to belonging to ourselves for the very first time.”

The act of empowering and comforting a silenced community is poetry at its finest.

A close friend asked me today, “Do you think you’ll keep up this relationship with Mormonism your whole life?”—this relationship where I keep returning to its literatures, histories, and scriptures, wrestling with their meaning. The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know I believe in the literary power of Mormonism, in the ability of its metaphors, imagery, and histories to reveal profound truths about human nature and the divine. That is enough for me for now.

I recommend this collection for anyone interested in feminism, religion, and Mormon studies.