I don't tweet more than a few times a week, and the main way I tweet is to take a facebook status or comment I like and slap it on twitter. Like this:

I get SO TIRED of watching out for people who don't know the difference between "weary" and "wary."

I was thinking yesterday about the three entries I posted here during the first week of July, and thought to myself that it might be a good long while before I post much again, 'cause I'm BUSY.

And I was also thinking about how what I posted today on Facebook was too long to post on Twitter.

And then I thought, why not just post it on my blog?

So here it is.

A thought impinged on my consciousness yesterday at 3 p.m. I told myself, "That's not my fault or my problem. I'm not going to worry about it." And I didn't.

A thought impinged on my consciousness this morning at 3 a.m. I told myself, "That's not my fault or my problem. I'm not going to worry about it." And then I did.

Song of an Ex

Do I tell you to fuck yourself?
Very well then: go fuck yourself.
(You are small, you define desuetude.)

I like editing, I'm really good at it, and you can hire me to do it for you.

Anyone who gets a degree in creative writing gets a lot of practice in giving and receiving feedback. Giving feedback is one of the main things you do when teaching creative writing. Giving feedback is about as close to editing as you can get, but it's still not quite editing.

Frankly, I like editing better. It's more collaborative and more goal-oriented. You're working with the writer to make a piece not just better, but ready to publish. You have to consider what is best for the piece as an organic unit, what the writer has the inclination and resources to do, what will work for readers, and, if you're dealing with something like a magazine issue, how the piece will work as one part of the whole. It's a fun puzzle to put together.

Whether or not the writers I worked with realized this, I quickly internalized the fact that as an editor, one of your ultimate goals is to make the writer look good. To that end, you offer suggestions and ideas that, if they get incorporated into the piece, the writer gets credit for, even though you came up with them and did the work of shaping them. If you don't like that, don't be an editor, because that's what you get paid for.

I worked with both very inexperienced and extremely accomplished writers on this project. I demanded a lot from them, and I'm sure there were points when a few of them thought, as I have thought with an editor or two I have worked with, "Heavens! Will this woman NEVER be satisfied?" But most of them have told me that they are extremely proud of the final product and gained a lot from working with me. In particular I was happy with this praise from one of the more accomplished writers I worked with: "Thanks for your editing style, so sensitive to my voice and what I am doing in this essay."

So if that account of my approach to editing appeals to you, and if you are actually willing to shell out for editing, email me or leave a comment here. My rates are in line with the going rates in Utah (in other words, cheap compared to either coast), and I am happy to work via email.

My long hiatus from blogging had many causes, including the fact that I was busy. In particular I was busy editing issue 166 of SUNSTONE magazine, aka "the motherhood issue." I am proud and happy to announce that it is SUNSTONE's most popular and best-selling issue. It has far outstripped all other issues in terms of people ordering individual copies, while other people (including my own father) who let their subscription lapse have renewed and asked that their resubscription start with issue 166.

I worked very hard on this project and am very proud of the contents, which include personal essays on topics like miscarriage and post-partum depression as well as scholarly articles on Mormon midrash and Mother in Heaven. A rather curmudgeonly SUNSTONE constituent commented to the office staff that "the essays in it were truly inspiring, instead of just whining as sometimes is the case at the symposia." And someone sent in an anonymous note on three-by-five cards saying, "Artist Galen [Dara], the cover front & back of the March 2012 edition (#166) of SUNSTONE is worth the price of a three-year subscription CONGRATULATIONS!"

I admit I am in love with the art, which I think is not just beautiful but important. Shortly after editor Stephen Carter asked me to do the issue, I started thinking about the cover. I could not execute it myself, but I knew what I wanted, and I knew who I wanted to do it. I have been a fan of Galen Dara's work since long before I learned that her mom was my mom's visiting teacher or that our grandparents were good friends in Tucson back in the day.

Anyway, I knew that I wanted a gender-bending version of Michelangelo's fresco on the Sistine Chapel depicting the creation of Adam. As I wrote in my introduction to the issue,

I want to make a couple of things clear: one, I didn't go rogue on this; I got permission to have a depiction of a pretty robust Heavenly Mother animating a naked and bosomy Eve before Galen and I got started. Two, even still, I had to fight for it--and I did fight for it. Michelangelo's original image is very horizontal, and SUNSTONE needed a vertical image. There was a point where we were playing with a close-up image of Heavenly Mother lifting up the chin of a forlorn Eve holding an apple, and I put my foot down. Many email discussions ensued with different people, and some different versions. In one, God the Mother and Eve occupied the same position as in Michelangelo's painting, but Mother God was handing Eve an apple. I wrote,

I still don't like it, and here's why: having God the Mother give Eve the apple puts both of them in the position of following patriarchy's script. It turns Heavenly Mother into the serpent. And maybe she is.... But before we change the story that way, and explore what it means for a feminine deity to be the source of human wisdom (in defiance of her husband's commands), we need to first establish and legitimate both these female characters as powerful, in their own right, through their own beings and essences.

In Michelangelo's painting, God and Adam offer nothing but power. They don't need props, because their power is self-evident, thorough, and innate. They express their power and identity merely by showing up.

If God the Mother and Eve have to express their power and identity through the possession and use of props, they are secondary and subordinate to male gods and human beings.

It might not be as fun as changing a lot of elements, but the most subversive and provocative thing we can do is to show God the Mother as the equal, in every way, of God the Father (except maybe fierceness--he does look pretty mean). She has just as much power to animate human beings with a mere touch of her finger as her male counterpart does. She has just as much interest in human life. She recognizes human women as an expression of her divinity and power, and she doesn't need to give them anything but life to make them extremely powerful and wonderful.

The final product, because it had to be something the postal service would deliver and that SUNSTONE could stand by, involved getting permission and agreement from several people. But permission and agreement were obtained on some pretty terrific points. You'll notice, for instance, that Eve's breasts are bare, because we agreed to expose them instead of covering them with her hair (though we agreed that she couldn't be very nipple-y). You'll notice that there's a black Angela Moroni in the upper-left corner. You'll notice that there are two lady angels initiating a fairly intense embrace in the upper-right. you'll see that there is an inter-racial same-sex angel couple holding hands at the right edge of the image just below Heavenly Mother.

We also had A LOT of fun coming up with illustrations for essays by noted feminist scholars Janice Allred and Margaret Toscano. I'm pretty sure it was originally Galen's idea to depict Heavenly Mother in four different manifestations, and she wanted some sort of way of unifying them. My suggestion: "one thing that struck me was the similarity of the four images you propose with the queens in the tarot deck." Galen didn't limit herself to a strict adherence to what the suits represent or how they're expressed, but that was useful. We played with different ways to Mormonize the images--one easy thing was to add a beehive to each. But the most fun was to make the Goddess of Cups, the "Mother Nurturer," a hot blonde pioneer woman in a prairie dress offering you a long cool drink of water while a wagon train passes in the distance behind her.

My favorite of those images is the Goddess of Swords, or, as she's called on the banner beneath her portrait, "Mother Protector." She's sort of a cross between Galadriel and Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior." I'm currently using her as my Facebook profile pic, so check her out, and don't neglect to look at the tags I added!

My second favorite is the Goddess of Coins, or our "Mother Teacher," a four-armed black goddess reading the gold plates. She has a traditional goddess symbol, the triple moon, above her head, and is in a building that we imagined as a Mormon meeting house, though the details that would have demonstrated that were too fussy and disappeared. (As did the dark green apron of fig leafs we thought ever so briefly of putting on her.)

This is what I was working on when the whole Randy Bott thing erupted. One of my friends wrote to ask me why I hadn't weighed in on it. I said I was too busy, but that what I was busy with would provide some commentary on it all. I think that depicting a Mormon goddess of wisdom as a black woman reading and teaching from gold plates is a pretty good response to all that nonsense.

If you haven't seen the issue, I hope you will check it out. And if you like the art, you can purchase it on everything from a maternity t-shirt to a shower curtain to a plain old poster at Sunstone's cafe press page for this collection.

And if you're coming to the Sunstone symposium this year, there are two sessions about Heavenly Mother I'm organizing. Session 131, Thursday 26 July, 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m., "Images of the Feminine Divine," is inspired in part by the art in this issue, though it will encompass other topics. The other, Session 171, Thursday, 26 July, 5 p.m. - 6:30 p.m., "Heavenly Mother and the Letter of the Law," is a session in which people will read letters to Heavenly Mother since we can't have a prayer or testimony meeting devoted to her. You can find abstracts for the sessions in the Sunstone preliminary program online.

on her Facebook page along with this statement from David Bowie:

It's not as truly hostile about Americans as say "Born in the U.S.A.": it's merely sardonic. I was traveling in Java when [its] first McDonald's went up: it was like, "for fuck's sake." The invasion by any homogenised culture is so depressing, the erection of another Disney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It strangles the indigenous culture and narrows expression of life.

In the first comment, she added, "Holly, I can't hear any DB without thinking of you."

This of course made me very happy. If someone is going to hear an artist and always think of you, well, it might as well be Bowie.

"'Cause you didn't think I'd be a fan of Trent Reznor or 'cause you didn't think I'd be a Bowie fan?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Both, actually."

"I admit I'm a much bigger Bowie fan," I said, "but I've owned the first Nine Inch Nails album for twenty years. I have a Ministry album or two as well."

"Huh," he said. "You just don't look like you'd be a fan."

It was my turn to shrug. "At some point, you stop bothering to dress in a way that reflects your taste in music."

Same thing came up in class last week. I sometimes play music when I'm asking my students to get into small groups and talk about stuff--the music makes them less self-conscious, and they talk more freely. I typically go to Pandora and set it to "Depeche Mode radio," because even Mormons like "Personal Jesus." On Tuesday, while "The Love Cats" played, some kid said something about "Kevin Smith of the Cure."

"Kevin Smith?" I asked. "You mean Robert Smith. Kevin Smith's that indie film maker dude."

"Yeah, Robert Smith," he said. "I meant Robert Smith." He paused, then asked, "What clique were you in in high school?"

"My high school was too small to have cliques," I said. (It really pretty much was.)

"The reason I ask is 'cause this is exactly the music my mom likes. So I wondered what you listened to in high school."

"This is the music I listened to in college," I said. "Depeche Mode didn't exist when I was in high school. In high school I listened to what is now classic rock: Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Stones." (I didn't tell him that I also owned albums by REO Speedwagon and Lynyrd Skynyrd, because I didn't want him to know, or albums by Alan Parsons Project, the Moody Blues, and Jethro Tull, because I suspected he might not know who they are.)

"You just don't look like the type," he said.

"What type do I look like?" I asked.

"Honestly, I thought you were a hippie," he said.

Again I shrugged. "You should have seen me in 1988," I said.

In fact, on Friday a friend came by for coffee and as it was the first time she'd been to my apartment, we looked at and discussed some of the stuff I display in my home to remind me who I am, or was. She picked up a picture of me in 1988, wearing a black trilby hat, black sunglasses, a black trench coat, black peg-leg pants, and black flats. She said, "Was that a Halloween costume?"

No," I said. "That was just how I dressed."

"You really wore a trench coat like that? And a hat?"

"It was Tucson," I said. "You could wear what you wanted after autumn. It's not like you were in danger of really being cold."

So for the record: I used to dress like a hipster, especially in grad school. Over-dressing almost every single day was one of the ways I motivated myself to get out of bed when I was dealing with the crushing despair I experienced as I transitioned out of the church. I tried not to wear the same thing twice in a single semester, and I was VERY aggressive about matching. I would never dream of wearing brown shoes with a black outfit--who does something so gauche? Actually I entirely disdained and avoided brown, the color of mud and dung. I didn't carry a backpack; instead, I carried a really big purse, and when I found one I really liked, I bought it in all four colors available: black, white, red, and blue.

In fact, my wardrobe was something people often commented on. Students would write thing in my end-of-semester evaluations like, "I loved seeing what outfit she would wear every day" or "She was my best-dressed instructor." My favorite professor once said to me, about that period, "You were always dressed very dramatically, and I kept waiting for you to show up to class wearing nothing but a clear shower curtain."

Also for the record, I did all this while wearing temple garments (aka magic Mormon underwear) under my clothes and multiple earrings in my ears. It's not really that much of a challenge to dress cool as a Mormon, no matter what the NY Times says.

Mormon Heretic/ Rick Bennett feels free to say all sorts of nasty personal things because he's managed to stay very anonymous, but here's the thing: I know how to find stuff out. Having discovered his name in real life, I am posting it here. Because douchebags who use anonymity to avoid consequences for their actions deserve to be outed.

Please feel free to pass on to any and everyone who might care (an admittedly tiny population) that Mormon Heretic is Rick Bennett.