Irreantum Fiction Contest Winners

The Association for Mormon Letters is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Irreantum fiction contest. A committee of judges considered 91 entries and awarded three cash prizes and two honorable mentions. More...

The following is adapted from something I wrote several years ago for a writer friend of mine, and I thought it might be interesting to post here.

As analogies go, it may or may not work for everyone, but what the heck?

A certain publisher has a contract available to anyone who wants to agree to it.  This contract offers a thousand-figure payment for a book that has to have very specific things in it.  Anyone, no matter how little talent or writing skill, may write a book and submit it according to this contract, and as long as those things are in the book, and the author did the very best he or she could, the book will be accepted. More...

As a deal lawyer, I have written, argued about, revised and finalized contracts for a living for the last 22 years. The irony is, the more experience I have, the greater my fear of making a mistake. I'm afraid of typographical errors. What if I write 1.00% instead of 10.00%, as the interest rate, especially when hurried by a bank client to get a deal closed with some last minute changes?  Another thing I dread is to leave out a certain paragraph that is supposed to be in a particular kind of deal. I have bolted out of bed at 3:00 in the morning, gone downstairs and hooked up remotely to the office just to make sure I remembered to put in a promissory note signed just the day before a certain sentence that the bank needed to protect itself against some future harm. Perhaps the worst anxiety I have is I'll make a more subtle mistake, that I'll write something that everyone at the time thought was clear, but that 2 years later, read cold on a Monday morning in the bright light of day, is, well, not so clear, but in fact ambiguous in light of a recent event that this contract provision was supposed to cover.  I've come to believe that the written word is born in its own kind of original sin, that it is prone to waywardness and corruption, often regardless of our best intentions. More...

I'm a firm believer that to be a good writer, you must read, and read a lot. I don't read nearly as fast as many people do, but I manage to get in 60 - 70 books a year. 

Sometimes people ask what I read. Other times they assume what I read. Whenever I answer either side of the question, the person on the other side seems surprised. 

Some people assume I read only LDS fiction. That one surprises me. Why would I read only this market? Sure, there's a lot of great stuff in it, and a variety of genres, but I'm not sure why they think I don't read other things just because I publish in this market. More...

At some point, we all have to come to grips with the fact that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies sold 100 million copies--and we didn't write it. Such is the lot of the creative writer in the era of the mashup, when concept is king. You and I have to sleep nights despite the persistent feeling that each random, insane idea we've casually discarded might actually have been worth a fortune, especially if said insane idea involved plagiarizing one or more public domain works.

I must admit that I've resorted to snobbery to protect my fragile ego. "Sure," I tell myself, "I don't have a half-plagiarized work gracing the displays of most major bookstores. But I didn't want to be rich and famous anyway" (beep beep goes thelie detector, but I ignore it and press on) "I want to write something really important and moving, something that says a lot more than you can say with a dead British woman's words and a little B-movie make-up."

But oh! how my comfort has been shattered since I picked up Plagues & Prejudice (& Zombies), a graphic novel by B. M. Brar which retells the Exodus with upperclass British zombies as the Egyptians. More...

Annette and I have this show we like to watch--the Inspector Lynley mysteries.  I gather it was popular on PBS a couple of years back, but we discovered it via Netflix.  It's about a British aristocrat-turned-detective, Inspector Lynley, and his lower class partner, Sgt. Barbara Havers. So there's all this British class system stuff, the nuances of which probably escape us. Nathaniel Parker plays Lynley, and we honestly don't like him that much, especially in the third season, when he got a new hair style that somehow made him act like a total prat, instead of just looking like one.  But we love Sharon Small, who plays Havers. More...

I just finished reading well over 100 entries to Irreantum's fiction and creative nonfiction contests, narrowing them down to a set of semifinalists over which our contest committee can wrangle.  Reading all those stories and essays can be a bit of a slog, it's true.  But it's also one of my favorite things to do as Irreantum's editor.  (In fact, I like to do it so much that I'm staying on as Irreantum's contest coordinator after stepping down as editor at the end of this year.)

One of the reasons I enjoy it is because I'm a great lover of stories---stories of both the true and made up variety---and it thrills me to see story after story after story, each one original in its own way, being made about Mormon experience.  Some of these stories are better told than others, it's true, but even the most amateur entry contains a kernel of a tale.  And the best stories?  (And there are some really good ones this year, I'm pleased to say.)  The best ones kept me glued to my computer screen, had me wiping away tears, helped me yearn or thrill or discover right along with the protagonist. More...

Louise Plummer talks about how lists can provide inspiration for writers, and has exercises and mini-workshops in which list-making is the focus.

My mother told me every so often that the great thing about lists is when you can check things off of them.  It gives such a feeling of accomplishment.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812, is an eye-opening read about a diary that is essentially a list.  The diary has been known to historians for years, but until Ulrich looked at it in a different way, it was considered uninteresting to say the least.

So can lists really be considered literature?  I submit that they can certainly be considered a means of insight into culture, even if it is only the one-person culture of the list-maker. More...

Yesterday my family painted two newly finished rooms in our basement (one a bedroom, the other my new office). More...

Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (TLP) left me in a love conundrum. More...