Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
Étienne’s ex-father-in-law: “I have faith in you, Étienne. You can fix anything. I would like to see my two favorite people together again. And building. You become gods when you build together.”
Oui. Gods. They most certainly had been.
Once.
Jennie Hansen is a respected reviewer/writer in Mormon fiction. She reviews at Meridian Magazine and (I believe) is a judge for the Whitney Awards.
She is also a LIAR.
![Review of my book MAGDALENE by Jennie Hansen. Text: “Disjointed, sloppy writing. Lacks real knowledge of Mormons and leadership in the Church. Too much vulgarity for vulgarities [sic] sake makes this story crude and amateurish.”](https://moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/20130910_hansengr.jpg)
I have been very unhappily mostly silent about this for two years now, but one of her latest blog posts, “A Reviewer’s Confession,” has me seeing red and I’ll be damned if I sit silent any longer.
In this confession, she said:
Only once did I give a book a one star rating and that was because the language was filthy and the author hadn’t researched LDS policy. (The author came unglued over my rating!)
Oh, Jennie. Honey. You haven’t seen unglued yet.
Why? Because you gave me that rating not actually having read the book. How do I know this? Because this:
the author hadn’t researched LDS policy
is patently untrue.
If you had read past the one-page prologue you would know that.
My journalism training had qualified me as a critic …
Apparently you didn’t learn how to check your facts (or other reviews) before opening your mouth.
You also probably don’t grok that part of the temple recommend interview where the bishop asks you if you’ve been honest with your fellow man. Or else you were honest and you don’t have a temple recommend.
I don’t know if you were part of the judging panel for the Whitney Award committee or not, but if you were, that adds another layer of fraud to your pattern of behavior for this book—and is the catalyst for my having come unglued at your “review.”
You lied about reading my book.
In church vernacular, then, I challenge you to:
1) actually read the book and rescind your lie
OR
2) declare publicly that you read the entirety of Magdalene. Anywhere will do: your blog, Goodreads, my blog, Meridian magazine.
But before you attempt #2, I want to direct your attention to Scott Hales’s review [dead link] (he who is also a respected scholar of Mormon literature), the Exponent II review, and the Publisher’s Weekly review, all of which refute your claim that I did not research church policy.
You lied about reading that book, Jennie. That by itself is dishonorable and worthy of contempt. If you were assigned to read it for the Whitneys, you also tarnished the integrity of the awards.
Own it and confess.
For an author, a Publisher’s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It’s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (“Hi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.”). I’ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be “I love this book and I want to buy it, but I can’t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and/or 3.” What I have never dared aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher’s Weekly at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened:
And you know what? I’m kinda proud because I had some goals with this book and, at least for this reviewer, I hit some of them. Later I received an email from the senior editor of reviews at PW passing along some more remarks the reviewer made, which made me believe that I accomplished almost all of my goals with the book.
But there is one I want to talk about because it’s not one that’s obvious. And it’s not obvious because I set this challenge for my own benefit, not for the reader’s.
In 2008, my editor for Monsters & Mormons, Wm Morris, wrote this piece at A Motley Vision (a Mormon lit blog): “Stephenie Meyer’s Mormonism and the ‘erotics of abstinence.’” The erotics of abstinence. Well, that’s an intriguing little idea. He was springboarding from this Time piece: “Stephenie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?”, wherein the author says this:
But it is the rare vampire novel that isn’t about sex on some level, and the Twilight books are no exception. What makes Meyer’s books so distinctive is that they’re about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There’s a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella’s exposed neck. “Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,” he says. “You have a very floral smell, like lavender … or freesia.” He barely touches her, but there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter.
I, like Wm (and pretty much everybody else who read the book), was intrigued by that idea.
In 2008, Mitch and Cassie were a bare glimmer in my mind. I had mentioned Mitch’s name a couple of times in The Proviso with absolutely no intention of following up on that. Cassie didn’t even exist when I wrote the sketch with a nameless unreliable and unlikeable narrator in the style of “Snuff.” I like to do those sometimes, usually because something catches my attention and I’m restless and haven’t written for a while and though I only have a few words in me, they must come out. That 250-word monologue was in my head when I started thinking about Mitch’s role in Sebastian’s life. The two disparate ideas simply wound in and around each other like different streams of smoke drifting on the same breeze, tickling my mind with vague possibilities.
I was still in the planning stages of Magdalene, trying to figure out if I would or would not have my bishop succumb to temptation. I will tell you: I didn’t want him to, because that wasn’t who he was and besides that, I’d already gone down that road with Giselle. But how was I going to do this? I didn’t think I could write sexual tension, didn’t think I could carry abstinence too far and still make it seem legitimate. (We Mormons have all sorts of ways to justify our celibacy, but nobody outside our culture buys a word of it.)
Then I stumbled upon the “erotics of abstinence.” Stephenie Meyer had to go to paranormal lengths to justify abstinence until marriage. I don’t write paranormal, so I didn’t want to do that. She also had teenagers, which is its own justification. I don’t write teenagers, so that was out of the question.
I wanted to do that. With adults. Who weren’t vegetarian vampires. Plausibly.
I wanted to do it better.
So I did.
[[07/15/2025: This’ll teach me to use an embed plugin instead of screenshots, and also not to put in the text.]]
So this morning around 10:13 a.m., I read a piece in HuffPo about a possible alternative chronology to the New Testament that puts a new spin on things. I thought it was an interesting concept. I RTd the link, though I forgot from whom I lifted it.
My friend replied: [deleted tweet]
Another friend replied: [deleted tweet]
We had a nice little chat about that that lasted all of about 1/2 hour. Then I had to go do grownup things like work and take care of the gas leak I had and arrange for a plumber and new water heater.
And then this guy shows up six hours later: [deleted tweet]
And that’s where he started the fight without bothering to ask us to define our terms first. (First rule of Twitter when butting into a convo you want to involve yourself in: ask for clarification from the participants first. You’ll probably get a nice response and a welcome to the convo so long as you can keep it civil, even if you disagree.) Regrettably, we engaged for about three tweets each before we figured out he had no home training and blocked him.
But before I did, I did a little preliminary snoopage, as per SOP when strangers with an attitude butt into my convo six hours after said convo has been put to bed. Matthew Reeves is 20. He writes YA. How sweet of him. How … 20 years old of him.
I was 20 once. It was a nice year. I had fun. And yeah, I thought I knew everything, too.
So! He’s blocked and I go back to harrassing @mikecane, as per usual, interspersed with some time spent making my son do manual labor, and Matthew Reeves continues to rant at us, but who cares, right? Because we can’t see it and there are soooo many more interesting people on Twitter who really can school us on something.
But apparently Matthew Reeves needs to broadcast his point of view to the world, so without further ado, and because I’m occasionally a nice mommy to my own know-it-all son, I’m going to assist him in this endeavor:
Dude, I’m A Historian (but not in the subject being discussed). [dead link]
Bless his heart, picking a fight with two people he doesn’t know who are old enough to have shot him out of our vaginas, and is now mad because we won’t pay him any mind. Precious. Just precious.
And now he’s disillusioned: [deleted tweet]
Sadness.
Go away, kid. Ya bother me.
I have a lot of fun with my imaginary friends, thinking of them as if they’re real, telling my tax deductions about mommy’s imaginary friends and laughing about what they do with Dude, talking about them to other writers who like to talk about what their imaginary friends do, too.
We talk about them as if we have no control over them, as if they’re driving the train. In a review of Stay, reviewer Julie Weight said,
When you read Jovan’s books, you just know these characters are like real people to her. She knows them like she knows her own family. Actually, she knows them better than her own family, since she knows their motives and what they’re thinking. If you get her talking about them, you’ll forget that they are just the imaginary people who live in her head. She makes them real, however and wherever she presents them. And because of that, she also agonizes over their lives – to the point where sometimes it seems like she forgets that she’s the one in charge of their lives! All of this familiarity and love for these people comes out in the writing and the story. Because she believes in them, you will start to believe in them. She writes the characters and the stories so well that you, the reader, will become wrapped up in their lives and care deeply about what is going to happen to them. [Emphasis mine.]
Here’s the thing: All that’s true. It’s really the subconscious doing the heavy lifting—we all know this. We let it do its thing and we talk to our imaginary friends and let them dictate their lives to us because we are their scribes, but …
Then they stop talking.
What do you do then?
I didn’t realize that this can get into scary territory until I was talking to another n00bish writer who speaks in the “Character X told me to do this” vernacular. It’s cute. I like knowing I’m not the only crazy person on the planet.
Then I realized … He wasn’t taking any responsibility for the words on the page, and it drew me up sharp. He didn’t know what to do when his characters/subconscious stopped. He didn’t have any confidence in the work of the conscious mind. Worse, he wasn’t sure it was even necessary to employ the conscious mind (i.e., himself) because he had himself convinced he couldn’t write without channeling the imaginary friends and taking their dictation.
My subconscious comes up with some amazing shit. Seriously amazing. Stuff my conscious mind would have had to work for decades to come up with. People are amazed when I say I don’t outline, but I don’t. At least, not in any recognizable fashion and certainly not the way I was taught in fifth grade. (I always had to write the paper first and backward engineer the outline; it was a pain.) Things tie together in ways I don’t know how it happens, and I seem to write by serendipity. It seems automatic.
But then the free-flow stops.
At some point, the writer has to take responsibility for who these people are, what they do, what they say, how the story winds out. It’s all fun and games while the subconscious is doing its thing and the writer can pretend these people are real and are simply giving dictation.
But the subconscious is notoriously unreliable and sporadic. What do you do when it takes a break and you can’t?
You start putting words down on paper.
Conscious words, words you choose and arrange, laboriously.
You take responsibility for those words.
And for all the ones you wrote when you were taking dictation, because it doesn’t matter that nobody knows how the subconscious works, what you wrote is still from you.
All you.
There are no imaginary friends.
I’ve been pondering a weighty topic for the last week or so, wondering why a couple of Christian concepts seem to be mutually exclusive, and, moreover, how shall I reconcile those?
No, I’m not telling you what they are. I ran across a passage in a book that spoke to my questions (although didn’t answer them, precisely). So I’m just going to post the passage. Character names are left out, as I want it to stand on its own without any preconceived notions.
[The man] smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss [ … ]?” He pointed around the room.
“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like … You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”
[ … ]
“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked [another], “what would you want to say to them?”
“Just … just ‘hello,’ I guess.”
“That’s not all,” said [he]. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time” —he pointed to [a third man]— “and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss [ … ], you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’”
So for those of you not up on your New Testament or Christianity or Jesus or anything like that, our micro Sunday school lesson text comes from Matthew 25:1-12.
Ten virgins are going to a wedding and they bring their little oil lamps for light. Five of the virgins bring extra oil and the other five virgins only have enough to last the ceremony and go home. Well, the groom’s late (viz. “While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.” v.5) and everybody runs out the oil in their lamps, but the ones who brought extra oil refill their lamps and are allowed into the wedding. But because the bouncer can’t see the others in the dark, he doesn’t let them in because he doesn’t know if they’re invited or not.
The moral of the story is obvious: Be prepared.
And, more specifically doctrinally related: Be prepared for the coming of the Lord.
In my work in progress, Magdalene (#3 in the Dunham series), the non-Mormon heroine, Cassie, wants to ambush the (widowed) Mormon bishop hero, Mitch, at church. They’ve been dating (excruciatingly chastely) for 5 months and she is thoroughly bewildered as to why he hasn’t invited her to attend (not to mention more than a little peeved that she hasn’t been able to seduce him). Not that she wants to go to church, mind, much less join; she just had the idea that we were all about acquiring converts—which is a completely reasonable and wholly correct assumption.
Since Mitch lives in the heart of the steel belt and she lives in Manhattan, she has quite a bit of trouble figuring out which ward he oversees, where to go, and what time to be there. Thus, she turns to Mitch’s best friend, who left the church halfway through his mission and is a professed and semi-practicing pagan. He gives her the procedural rundown and says,
“The more you understand about our culture, the better you’ll understand Mitch.”
“Our culture?”
“Well, yeah. Mine, too. You don’t stop being a Jew just because you convert to Christianity.”
“That’s genetic.”
“With us, it might as well be.”
I live in a place that’s rich with Mormon history, so, like any native, I take it for granted. I don’t feel any sense of heritage when I go to Utah (which state I avoid like the plague). It’s in Nauvoo, Illinois, where I feel this connection to my heritage; every time I go, I find my cynicism and willingness to snipe seeping out of my soul, leaving a refreshing softness and wistful smiles. And, well, I got married in Nauvoo. That might have something to do with it.
So I took some pictures when we were there in August for my cousin’s wedding. Enjoy.
* There’s a saying about a portion of folks who identify as ex-Mormon or recovering Mormon (yes, there is a 12-step group for it): You can leave the church, but you can’t leave it alone.
Shoal Creek Valley, in Clay County.
I’ve never been so happy to be wrong (about Olathe) in my life. Happy dance!
So today at General Conference the announcement was made that the greater Kansas City metro area would have a temple of its own soon.
For my non-LDS readers, what this means basically is that the second coming of Christ is right around the corner. (Kidding. Well. Kind of.) Thing is, I’d be a lot happier about this if I didn’t think that half the Mormon corridor will be packing their bags come Monday to move here to prepare for aforementioned second coming. (And by the way, we don’t believe in the rapture version of the second coming.)
See, Independence, Missouri, is in the greater KC metro area and it’s significant to our religious history. During my incarceration in Provo, Utah, I realized that very few LDS, however, know that Independence is in KC because, well, nothing LDS exists east of the Rockies. And now that a new temple has been announced, they’ll all Google and figure it out and then oh noes! Here come the Saints back east dragging their handcarts behind them.
And if you do hit eastbound I-70, I-80, and I-90 running, prepare for tarring and feathering at the state line because the evangelical/born-again Christians still aren’t over that whole cult thing–like, they’re RABIDLY not over that whole cult thing.
Really, I’m happy we don’t have to drive 4 hours to St. Louis or Nauvoo, or 3 to Omaha to go to the temple and we have a built-in babysitter (grandma). Maybe I’m wrong about the impending mass immigration, given how the economy is right now. But really, folks, stay in Utah and Arizona and Idaho and Nevada and California. If you do come here, learn how to pronounce Olathe.
Now the question on everybody’s mind is: Where will it be built? I say Olathe.
Because I like saying Olathe.
I play with boys. Always have. I was the Batgirl and Princess Leia to my cohorts’ Batman, Robin, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, etc. Apparently, I am not the only one, since the “urban fantasy” subgenre (with the blatantly hard-ass heroine) has become such a success.
Only within the last few years have I run into women with sensibilities similar to mine and with whom I feel comfortable. Also lately, I’ve found a couple of blogs with women I relate to on a more matter-of-fact level (e.g., Dear Author and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books).
But put me in the bloggernacle (a portmanteau of blog and tabernacle) and I have to start hanging out with the boys again because the women are … well, whiny. And inconsistent in their whining.
I didn’t realize this until I was reading over on Eugene’s blog about the Japanese movie, >Freeze Me, which is, in his opinion,
… the standard Death Wish revenge fantasy formula: pacifist gets shocked into action delivers violent justice to evil-doers (“a conservative is a liberal who got mugged”).
But then the film disappoints him:
Freeze Me could have hummed and purred as well. Instead it alternately shivers and sweats and clunks and gives up without a fight.
Then Eugene goes on to blame:
… Thelma & Louise which should more appropriately be titled: “The Original Dumb & Dumber.” This supposed paean to film feminism follows the exploits of two unbelievably stupid grown women who have spent their entire lives as victims of impulse and circumstance and aren’t about to let a little (almost justifiable) homicide stop them.
The good-guy cop (Harvey Keitel) finds them such a pathetic pair that he starts emoting like a father in pursuit of his two dimwitted daughters. Their exploits inspire pity at best, contempt at worst. Not once is logic ever allowed to compete with emotion, let alone overcome it. So why not just drive off a cliff?
It’s hard not to read a very obvious metaphor into the final scene: the caring man stands by helplessly while the newly “liberated” women cast themselves into oblivion. And a woman actually wrote it.
Which put me in the mind of Mormon feminist blogs. I can’t speak to feminist blogs of any other type because I don’t read those. (Except, well, I’ve stopped reading the Mormon feminist blogs, too. )
I can’t really get a handle on this feminist thing, being as I’m fairly new to the label. Some days I think I’m a feminist and some days I don’t. Most days I don’t know what a feminist is or how one defines oneself as a feminist. I mean, if it’s as simple as “equal pay for equal work” (and the definition of that is fodder for a different rant), I’m there.
This is what I have gleaned (albeit most likely incomplete) from my wanderings around Mormon feminist blogs:
Oh, amongst other things. So it looks like to me the hierarchy goes like this:
Liberal-ish politics
Mormonism
Feminism
There’s apparently room for the traditional Mormon woman role in this construct, but what I find disturbing is the willingness to completely bitch-slap a woman if her political philosophies don’t align with the label of “feminist,” especially if it hints at a more conservative bent.
So the LDS women of libertarian capitalist leanings have only one place to play in the bloggernacle: With the boys. As usual. Who are a helluva lot more enlightened than they’re given credit for—they just explain their philosophies in Belch (yes, it is an official language).
Mind you, these are just my gut impressions, but the “discussion” of feminist issues in the church has a whinier tone than I’m comfortable with. And at this point, I’m thinking I’m not so much a feminist (whatever that means) as a bitch.
Thelma and Louise or Beatrix Kiddo? I didn’t hear much whining in Kill Bill.
Haven’t talked about politics much, have I? Yeah. There’s a reason for that: I’m pretty burnt out.
Barack Obama: Untried newbie left-wing liberal with a yen to reach into my pocketbook. Yawn
John McCain: Moderate liberal who gave us McCain-Feingold attempting to pull the wool over the conservatives’ eyes. Yawn
(Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t thrilled with any other choice out there, either, so it’s not like I’m mourning the loss of, say, Romney, ’cause, oh, honey, I’m so not on the Romney wagon.)
Yeah, I’m not having a good time.
The Virgin Heroine has always been (and remains, IMO) a staple of genre romance. It’s getting not so much that way anymore, but as time goes on and society gets freer with its sexcapades, it’s harder for a writer to justify the Virgin Heroine, especially beyond, say, college age. On the other hand, we still have historical writers who are perfectly capable of pulling off the “wicked virgin widow trope,” which I have to admit is cracktastic and I never ever get tired of it. (Kind of like “I had to do it to fulfill the will” plots, but that’s another post.)
I don’t believe I’ve ever read a contemporary romance (other than an inspirational or sweet) that used religious beliefs as a solid, if not defiant, reason for the heroine’s virginity. And in any case, religious or not, if the heroine does lose her virginity before she marries the hero, she still marries (or commits to) the hero, so it’s all good.
For Mormons, the matter of celibacy until marriage is an expectation, a requirement. You don’t have sex with your one and only twu wuv before the vows are said no matter the commitment level. This also means you can’t have sex with yourself since, well, you aren’t married to yourself. Masturbation’s a no-no, folks.
Oh, yes, I just now heard all 4 of you non-Mormon readers gasp in shock and dismay. I know. Me, too. Think about being 29, 37, 46 and still a virgin. It’s a bitch. You think I’m kidding or talking about a very small minority of single women in the church who had no plans for default nunnery? I assure you, I am not. There’s a lot of ’em. I will never find a non-Mormon romance with a Virgin Heroine who’s 29, 37, 46 without some trauma or serious psychological issues that requires therapy. Nobody’d believe it.
So. For the more adventurous of LDS women who read genre romance of the steamier variety, I have written the unapologetic 37-year-old Virgin Heroine as a tribute to you (and when she finds her one and only twu wuv, she takes one for the team so you don’t have to); if you’re older than that and still can’t relate to Giselle’s celibate angst, I apologize from the bottom of my heart (although if you disagree with her choices, well, not apologizing for that).
For the non-LDS women who can’t relate to such a thing at all, I hope I’ve written for you a decent reason she is the way she is and a realistic picture of the way she deals with it. If you still can’t believe it, my only defense is that I know these women—a lot of them.
Angel Falling Softly
by Eugene Woodbury
published by Zarahemla Books
Perhaps I should admit upfront that I consider myself an undemanding reader. I’ll happily go wherever the author wants to take me as long as it’s logical, consistent, and interesting. Let me add that I don’t even particularly care whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven; give me something to chaw on intellectually and I’m good to go. Make me laugh and I’ll forgive almost anything.
This is one reason why, when I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, I was highly annoyed [private link]. I like vampires. I’ve studied vampire myths since I fell in love with Vlad the Impaler somewhere in the early ’90s, so her inconsistent worldbuilding, her habit of telling rather than showing, and her mostly flat characterizations grated.
By contrast, Eugene Woodbury’s take is haunting. Poignant, even.
I started a new book a couple of days ago. It’s easy when you start ripping off plots on purpose instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and then finding out someone else did it before you. First Hamlet, now the New Testament. Next thing you know, I’ll be rewriting Moby Dick.
Now, I can write for a Mormon audience. Or I can write for the romance audience. Or I can write for the general fiction audience (whatever that is). Well. I wrote for all three, because that’s what I like.