Life's Celebrations in Words

An Interview with Liz Busby, Guest Editor of the Mormon Lit Blitz specialty contest

Since 2012, I've been a co-editor of the annual Mormon Lit Blitz contest. The contest features flash fiction, essay, poetry, and experimental writing about themes that may resonate with Latter-day Saint audiences. 

Some years, we also hold themed specialty contests. The Four Centuries of Mormon Stories contest, for example, featured fiction set in the nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second centuries. Our Around the World contest focused on work in global settings and encouraged submissions in languages other than English.  

This year, Liz Busby and Katherine Cowley are serving as the guest editors of a specialty contest about Holidays. Writers will have 1,000 words to reflect—in fiction, essay, or poetry—on how holidays enrich and alarm us. With several weeks left before the November 4 contest deadline, I wanted to sit down with Liz to talk about what the editors are looking for. 

Why holidays? What attracted you to this theme? 

I first started thinking about Latter-day Saint holiday stories when I was doing research for a podcast episode about adaptations of A Christmas Carol. I came across a citation for a Deseret Book anthology of LDS Christmas short stories published in 1997, and I thought, "Why is nobody writing these today?" I began to wonder how the way we tell stories about the holidays might have changed since that anthology. Granted, we have things like Richard Paul Evans' perpetual Christmas novels, but they don't tend to really engage the holidays themselves so much as use them as an opportunity for cozy fiction. I also come from a family that has always gone all-out for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I grew up camping out for the Pioneer Day parade, eating pancakes cooked on a grill on the side of the parade route for breakfast. Our ward had an epic Independence Day parade complete with floats and old vehicles, crescendoing into a flag-raising ceremony and pancake breakfast. I guess holidays are just in my blood.

The contest call for submissions mentions a huge range of holidays: traditional Christian observances like Easter and Latter-day Saint dates like Pioneer Day, but also quite recent traditions, spread by internet humor, like Pi Day and Talk Like a Pirate Day. What do all these holidays have in common? Are there any holidays you're personally hoping to see submissions about?  

I am a massive sucker for made-up holidays. As a young adult, my personal golden week was the one between Pi Day and St Patrick's Day, with the Ides of March nestled in between. I'd bake pies for my roommates, pretend to stab people in the back, and dye random foods green. It was an opportunity to break up the long haul of the winter semester at BYU with some light-hearted fun. And I think that's what all holidays have in common: they are a break from ordinary time. The etymology of holiday is from the old English "holy day,"  and some holidays are certainly more holy than others. Nonetheless, I think all holidays give us an opportunity to reflect on the wonders of life and to introduce more joy into the everyday.

As for contest submissions, I can personally imagine some really hilarious entries revolving around celebrations at the ward level for various holy and secular holidays. Who took what side in the discussions of how to run the Christmas party (Santa or no?) and Halloween Trunk-or-Treat? What happened when someone decided to axe a beloved ward tradition in the name of simplifying? I always find these questions of lived religion to be fascinating. I'm also hoping to get some entries that talk about holidays celebrated outside the United States. I would love to see how Latter-day Saint culture has become more global and has figured out uniquely Mormon ways of celebrating local traditions.

The contest format allows readers to see twelve different finalists in conversation with each other. What's the value for you in that more collective literary experience? 

One of the difficult things about writing stories about a particular community is the worry that one piece will be taken to represent the experience of a whole group of people. There's a danger of flattening the experience of all Mormons into one thing. The great thing about the Lit Blitz is that the twelve finalists can showcase a range of perspectives on a theme. I really hope we'll have a range of positive and negative holiday experiences, some sappy, some suspenseful, some comedic, some sad, some introspective. And the short word count means that we can go through all of these different approaches so quickly and create a context that is greater than the individual pieces on their own. Plus there's the fun of experiencing each piece with a live audience commenting on each one on social media. Writing and reading are often solitary tasks, so it's absolutely delightful to get to experience some of that with other people in a way that doesn't take much time out of your day.

It meant a lot to me to hear from Paul Reeve via Wayfare this Father's Day. Have any past Latter-day Saint holiday meditations made a particular impression on you? 

I'd be remiss as a scholar of Mormon literature if I didn't mention Eugene England's Easter Weekend which is a fantastic essay, or my favorite First Presidency Christmas Devotional from President Hinckley, but honestly, one of my favorite holiday stories is Orson Scott Card's “Homeless in Hell.” It's a speculative fiction short story set in, well, the Bad Place. The recently deceased main character isn't bad enough to get into the demonic clubs with the real villains, so he ends up hanging out with a bunch of street vagrants. Among these he discovers none other than St. Nick himself, striving to do good even from the immaterial spirit world. How and why Santa Claus ended up in hell is the main twist of the story and one that moves me to tears every time I read it.

Liz Busby is a writer and scholar currently doing graduate work at BYU on intersection between Mormonism and science fiction/fantasy. Her writing has been published in BYU Studies, Irreantum, and SFRA Review.

James Goldberg is a poet, novelist, and champion of Mormon literature. His works include The Five Books of Jesus and A Book of Lamentations.

Art by Elizabeth Olds