Tag Archives: Utah

Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas (and Cedar City)

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JQLV2019Last week, I went to a conference in a small city best reached by an international flight to Las Vegas. It wasn’t a big conference, wasn’t particularly relevant to my current research, and in the end, I made my presentation to six other people, mostly conference organizers attending out of the kindness of their hearts. But that’s what conferences are really about anyway, right—the friends we make along the way?  An important point of the trip was its function as a test-flight for my upcoming big conference trip across the Atlantic, to London. Air travel with a chronic illness—can I do it?

The test-flight was a quick one, booked on ultra discount airline Swoop. What’s it like to fly Swoop from anywhere to Las Vegas at the beginning of the May long weekend? Remember that 1990s dance song “The Venga Bus,” the one about the “inter-city disco”? Disappointed there isn’t more beer spilled on your flight? Fly Swoop.

It was my first time in Las Vegas but it had a familiar energy. Strangely, unexpectedly, it felt a bit like China—fat, English China, where what made me stand out in a crowd was nothing but the fact that I was there, in Vegas, alone.

In the dark, I drove north, into mountains which probably have a name, up to Cedar City. In a dormitory with no China-energy at all—mattress on the bed, potable water–I went to bed exhausted and keenly aware of something I hadn’t thought about for at least two weeks: the illness deep in my guts. It was there when I woke up, mounting through the day. Ignorable enough to leave me a clear head for making a comment on the presentation of the one woman who spoke during the morning. In the afternoon, I accidentally went to a talk on water management in Utah but got through it, even the question and answer section where someone asked what changed between the state’s early communal religious settler days when it was a model of responsible water use to now when it’s a complete mess. I did not jump up to yell, “Capitalism! Are you kidding me? It’s capitalism!”

Dinner was fabulous. USA, USA. The keynote address began at a little after six, in a room decorated like Hogwart’s dining hall. By 7:55, the Q&A was still in full swing. I had good will for the man speaking but realized I would be walking out at 8pm whether he was finished or not. And anyways, like most of the speakers I’d heard that day, it was more twentieth century Western theory for 2019 global issues and it was wearing away at me. The trip, the T.S. Eliot quotes, the May weather that would have been bad even in Canada—it was over for me, the conference’s queen of chronic malaise.

I needed drugs and a bathtub. Back at the dorm, damp and freezing, I looked at the raised lip of the shower stall and didn’t wonder for very long about whether I could stop up its drain and rig a tub out of it. No, drugs alone would have to do. And they did. In my own homage to the twentieth century, I laid in bed watching clips of Wayne’s World, lingering on the parts where white people speak Chinese. That’s the joke. That’s the whole joke.

In the morning, the symptoms that had me fantasizing about getting back to Canada and going straight to the emergency room had vanished. I went to just one more talk before rolling out. The conference had been fruitful. I met smart and good people, two of whom invited me to submit the paper I presented to their publications. I left right before another all-girl panel like mine began. Before heading down the mountain, I went up, to the tip top where my church has built a temple. It was a beauty, new but built after the style of the nineteenth century. The parking lot was full, the front plaza lined with people in Sunday clothes—wedding guests. Congratulations, y’all. Share your water now.

Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Vegas on a Saturday afternoon. My big backpack and the sweater I put on in Cedar City were making me look like a lone gunman, parking her rental car one block north of Mandalay Bay. Not the look I wanted, so I went into Ross Dress for Less and bought a summer dress—a red one with an elastic neckline. I wore it over my jeans.

Down at the Bellagio fountain, music came up with the water—bongos and an acoustic bass. How had I not known the soundtrack was “Viva Las Vegas”, the Elvis Presley version, the voice of the ghost of this city, heard half hourly, turning day into nighttime, turning night into daytime?

It was almost time to report back to Venga Airways. I needed to sit and gather strength somewhere out of the sun. I sat down in front of a slot machine, fed it a dollar bill, and pulled the lever, the rent for the seat. When I told a colleague of mine about it, back home, he was shocked. “Capitalism got our star student!” I heard his voice in my head as I read the text, his Shanghaiese accent.

Travel is part of this long, difficult, costly education of mine. That is actually what conferences are all about. The friends are nice but the learning also comes in being alone, unprepared, surprised, suffering a little as we take the schemes we dream up in our offices out into the world, into other people’s worlds, to see if there’s any truth to them. In Vegas and Cedar City, the work I’d done on an obscure problem of East-West ontological and epistemological theory hit the road and found some traction.

Still, when I go to London, it will be as we.

Lo, the First Foreigner on “The Good Word” Podcast

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After writing, my favourite medium is radio — no make-up, all talk. Podcasting is a lot like radio — radio without all the “ums” edited out, long-form radio where guests can really cut loose and do some damage. This is a podcast I recorded last month with Nick Galieti, a book industry guy in Utah.

We talk about my accent, my family, Mormonism, literary elitism, the Republican Party (a first for me in an interview, for sure), my marriage and the lighter side of death schtick, and the mysterious geography of the second largest country on the globe.

Nick: So how is Canada today?

JQ: Canada is — is enormous.

Nick was a fine interviewer and it turns out he served with my cousin-in-law when they were missionaries.

Check out the podcast if you’d like to hear some unfortunate, spontaneous voice acting, a little bit of Mormon jargon, and my six-year-old coughing through a door. Must have been a good time; my final word was “Woo hoo!”

Jennifer Quist Interview with Nick Galieti

Down the Rabbit-hole, or, Jenny’s Adventures in the American-Mormon Book Scene

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I’m churchy, okay.  I’m not even sorry.

I wrote a novel about people who quote the Bible at funerals, have a large family, and conspicuously don’t drink coffee.  I wrote a book with the words “Joseph Smith” printed in it.  In case anyone missed it, my characters are Mormons and so am I.

Like all writers, my goal is for everyone to read my book.  Everyone includes my fellow Mormons.  The Church is active throughout the world but its densest concentration of members is in the American state of Utah.  By the time my book was released, I had only been to Utah once.  It was when I was twelve years old and caught in one of my parents’ horrifically hot transcontinental summer road trips.

As a grownup author with a book to promote, I didn’t know how to begin to infiltrate the Utah market.  I picked through the Internet until I discovered the Whitney Awards.  They were invented to recognize fiction produced by Mormon writers.  It was a longshot but a few months later, a panel of judges selected my book as a Whitney finalist – one of the top five in the general fiction category.

And that’s when I tripped down the rabbit-hole.

I’m still a novice when it comes to understanding fiction considered “Mormon.”  I haven’t learned all its terminologies and talking points.  Please forgive any rookie misconceptions here.  As far as I can tell from outside the scene, “Mormon fiction” means several different things.  It has to since the Church is large and varied enough to include all kinds of people with all kinds of tastes and reading and writing levels.  Contrary to nasty, simple-minded fairy tales, there is no monolithic Mormon person.  Insisting there is would be calling on a stereotype and it’s as unfair to apply a stereotype to a religious group as it is to apply it to any other bunch of humans.whitneysepia

Far from being a unified movement, the Mormon book-scene is multi-faceted.  Within it there are writers who craft books intended solely for Mormon audiences.  They produce mainly historical fiction, kissing-only romance, inside jokes, and heartwarming lessons.

There are also Mormon authors – big commercial names like Brandon Sanderson and Stephanie Meyer – who write mass market speculative and young adult fiction.

When it comes to literary fiction, much of the book-length Mormon-y stuff is written from the negative perspectives of disaffected members – people who don’t like church anymore.  Some of these writers – no one famous or influential enough for me to spontaneously remember their names – loudly reject the idea that there can be a “Great Mormon Novel” that combines good literary fiction with Mormon orthodoxy.

I didn’t know this a year ago, but I’ve heard there comes a time in most Utah-Mormon writers’ careers when they must ask themselves if they’re going to work within the Mormon niche or in the mass market.  I have never asked myself this question.  Until recently, the Mormon book-scene hasn’t been part of my consciousness.  I’ve missed out on some good contacts and mentors because of that but I’ve also been spared some self-consciousness and second-guessing – the burden of a complicated, value-laden artistic and intellectual drama.

It was when my novel was named a Whitney finalist that it started to get traction in the Mormon book-scene.  At first, it was received with enthusiasm.  Kind reviews started to appear.  People were happy to read my book.  It unwittingly defied critics and filled a literary void in the 2013 Mormon publishing calendar.

What I didn’t understand was that all this goodwill was coming from just one corner of the book-scene.  I hadn’t counted on the larger, sometimes more petulant corner that prefers to have its heart warmed, flipped over, warmed again, flipped over, warmed again…  From that corner, literary work often seems risky and dangerous and pretentious.

I was about to learn this in an episode I’ll call “Off With Her Head.”

There’s a newspaper in Utah called Deseret News.  It’s not run by the Church but it is owned by the Church.  A freelance book reviewer assigned by Deseret News – a woman the same age as my mum — really, really hated my novel.  I can’t find a way to say this that doesn’t sound like bragging so I’ll just blurt it out.  I don’t have much experience with bad reviews.  The fact that this reviewer didn’t like the book was strange and disappointing.  But that wasn’t what made me sick about it.

The reviewer didn’t actually say much about the book – nothing that can be traced back to the text, anyways.  Instead of offering an analysis of the story, she chose to denounce it via the lowest road there is: the one that ploughs through my quality as member of the Church.  In this review, my book — and by extension myself — was pronounced “not the perspective of the Church.”

A complete stranger had called out my work in a Church-owned publication as bad Mormonism.  I don’t know how other churches work but in my Church, book reviewers aren’t supposed to have the authority to say what or who is or is not doctrinally orthodox.

Now, the last thing a novelist should do upon getting a bad review is challenge the reviewer and her editors about it.  Everyone knows that.  We are aloof artistes.  We ignore and move on.  But the reviewer had raised issues outside my book.  She’d attacked my integrity and fidelity.  It was so far offside I blew the whistle.

I complained first to her immediate editors.  They ignored me (though the reviewer showed some shocking hegemony when she wrote back telling me it is indeed her role to warn innocent readers when books “don’t match up” to good Mormon doctrine). Fuming, I wrote to the president of the newspaper.   Within half an hour of sending that email, Deseret News apologized, took the offensive comments out of the review, and asked me to forward the email where the reviewer voiced her absurd self-appointed mandate to judge my orthodoxy.

My novel had become controversial and polarizing.  When the controversy wasn’t terrible publicity, it was great publicity.  In the days after the review, people defended my work.  This included an old family friend who is actually an ecclesiastical leader in the Church. He likes the book, doesn’t find it doctrinally subversive, and when he read the review he wondered, “What book did she read?”

After all this, I decided to travel to Utah to attend the Whitney Award ceremony anyway.  I’d been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of the Mormon book-scene long enough to start to examine my surroundings and the other objects falling with me.  I was curious – perhaps morbidly so – and wanted to land in that world and move through it in the physical universe for a little while.

Once again, my parents were my traveling companions in Utah.  We had the good fortune to be in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square during a quick, free concert played on the massive pipe organ inside the big church that puts the “Tabernacle” in the “Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”  We all agreed this was the highlight of the trip.  Instead of indulging himself with a fussy highbrow organ piece, the organist played accessible songs – organ pop-songs with swelling choruses and big finishes like sonic tsunamis.  They were loud and fancy – songs meant to show us what the old pipe organ could do, sounds that vibrated through our chest cavities as if we were part of the instrument ourselves.  The organist was playing to the hearts and souls of musical Philistines like my parents and me – and we loved it.  It was exactly what we wanted.  There are times and places to play to more subtle and discriminating tastes but this was not one of them.

Back at the Whitney Awards, things weren’t going so well.  I’d brought books to sell and in an entire day, I’d sold one.  Sure, it was to the fiction editor of Sunstone magazine but – come on.  At the banquet I accidentally flung my tough cut of sirloin into the front of my dress and, of course, I did not win a Whitney Award.  I’d been nominated alongside three romances and a buddy-road-trip novel.  The best and most literary of the three romances won.  For the overall best book award, another romance – self-described as Bronte inspired — was the winner.  I was a little offended when, in her acceptance speech, the winner made comments that could have been construed as her claiming to have won because she had prayed harder over her book than the rest of us (again with the beside-the-point piety rankings) but other than that, the award made sense.

See, the final round of the Whitney competition is a popular vote.  It’s like a free, quick concert on an ostentatious pipe organ.  It’s got to be a crowd-pleaser, an easy, emotionally satisfying romp.  That’s just what it is.

What I do appreciate is that someone in the previous selection round, one or more of the Whitney judges, had stuck their necks out and brought my novel – a literary piece, a critic-pleaser by an obscure foreigner – to the Mormon book-scene’s attention.  The Whitneys aren’t really the time or the place to celebrate a novel like that – not yet, anyways.  But someday they might be.  This year, maybe they came a little closer.  Maybe someday that mythical “Great Mormon Novel” will appear on the scene and by then even the most guarded reviewers in the Deseret News will have learned not to be angry and afraid of it.

Until then, take my novel, Mormon book-scene.  Take it into your Wonderland and let it wear away some of the harshness of the hegemony still lurking there.  Grind it up, add its few small grains to the foundation being built for something better than what’s there now.