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The New York Times article reporting the death of Vardis Fisher in 1968 said, predictably, that Fisher was “perhaps most widely known as the author of Children of God, a historical novel about the Mormons.”[1]…

So you want to write a Mormon novel? Great! Here’s a story for you:—

It’s about a Mormon bishop and his family, see, so you can get in all the little inside details about the L.D.S. people. The bishop’s wife is an extremely devoted mother of three children, two lovely daughters and a son who is a genius. The mother is so excessively devoted to her genius son that she drives him into a madhouse. But before he is locked up he has an incestuous affair with a sister which ruins her life, he causes his best friend’s suicide and drives his other sister into an unhappy marriage with a Gentile. His own disintegration causes his father, the bishop, to die of a broken heart.

While it is true that there has been no substantial literary tradition among the Mormons, there are indications that one is beginning. For the first time there is a sufficient number of Mormon scholars and critics who can help establish the climate for a legitimate literature and there are more and more creative writers who are turning their talents to Mormon subjects. Therefore, it is not my purpose to lament the fact that a Mormon literature does not now exist. Rather, I choose to discuss how the literary esthetic can serve religion and how a rebirth of the imagination can and should serve the Church today. For if anything would militate against acceptance of an emerging Mormon literature it would be our continued distrust of the imagination. 

A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. William Blake Observers of the Church must think it odd that for all…