"Borders on Pornography"

The Editors.
Dialogue Journal.
I am a long-time subscriber to Dialogue and thoroughly enjoy the scholarly articles that it features.
I must inform you, however, that I found the fiction section of the Spring 2010 issue disturbing. In my opinion it borders on pornography and is not worthy of LDS publication.
Sincerely,
Robert J. McCue
Levi Peterson responds:
I continue to endorse the defense of the erotic in literature that I made in the preface to Greening Wheat, the collection of Mormon short stories that I compiled in 1983. I say there that “the moral purposes [of literature] are served, not by censorship and exclusion of the problematic or violent or forbidden but rather by the achievement of breadth, balance, and proportion” (ix-x). I believe both my story and that of Lisa Downing achieve those qualities.
Levi Peterson
The editor responds:
Dear Mr. McCue,
I regret that you found the fiction section of the Spring issue “disturbing.” However, I find your charge that the stories in that section “border[…] on pornography” incomprehensible. There is nothing in either piece intended to titillate, nothing gratuitous or lewd–Levi Peterson’s story is convincingly narrated from the perspective of a teenaged boy baffled and delighted by his emergent sexual consciousness, and Lisa Torcasso Downing’s story tries to fathom the effects of childhood abuse of one partner in a marriage with respect and sympathy, even reverence. Both stories approach their subjects with the candor, wit, and grace that are appropriate to an artistic consideration of God’s most puzzling gift to humanity.
Kristine Haglund