By Lynne Larson

“That was it, she thought, that which would sustain her . . . the Light was still hers, growing brighter as one gained wisdom . . . The wave of joy broke, and the dazzling spray flooded her with love, faith, divine goodness.”

It is soul-piercing grief that haunts these hundred pages – Chapters Nine and Ten – and unfathomable loss of her beloved Freeborn and her three children that points Clory toward the maturity of spirit required to recognize the “Light” of the above quotation and survive her circumstances. The ultimate victory will be hard-won.

by Andrew Hall

I’ll start today’s post with brief review of the themes in Chapters Seven and Eight, and then spend the majority of the post on a discussion of Maurine Whipple’s lifetime relationship with the Church.

Themes of Chapters Seven and Eight

These chapters are long and full of interesting stories, incidents, and conversations. There is little of the descriptions of the natural environment or introspective passages found in the previous chapters.

The chapters feature Willie and Clory’s pregnancies and births. Willie’s baby is stillborn. Clory is shocked that not only does Abijah refuse to call a doctor (to show faith) but Bathsheba, a trained midwife, refuses to help because she thinks it is too early. She is wrong, and only Clory is there to help her with the birth. Clory, in her anger, foolishly gives Bathsheba the right to raise her unborn child. After she successfully gives birth to her daughter, Kissy, she scares the superstitious Bathsheba off by claiming she had placed a hex on the baby. Clory is enraptured with her baby, and feels the increased power it gives her in the family.

By Lynne Larson      

“You couldn’t whip the desert without togetherness. The Group Faith — the ability to live outside oneself, to sacrifice oneself for the Common Good. Some day they would be strong enough to afford dissenters — now salvation lay only in complete and disciplined togetherness. Except ye are one, ye are not mine . . . You had to be ruthless to colonize.”

As Chapter Five of The Giant Joshua begins, the relentless rain has eased, but the storm, and with it the swelling of the Virgin River, has struck at the hearts of the people and reminded them that they must stand together to survive, united in their faith and in their willingness to follow strict injunctions. Food supplies have been reduced to a “grim measure.” Sickness has run riot through the camp, and ‘Sheba fears that the burial clothes will mold before she can get a lifeless body ready for the grave.

By Andrew Hall

These chapters present a microcosm of several themes and conflicts found in the novel, including stirring depictions of the faith that led the pioneer Saints to make such enormous sacrifices in their mission of building a Zion society. Here too, we see some of the less appealing aspects of the colonizing generation—its fear and cruelty towards Native Americans, its child marriages, and the heartbreak that could result from plural marriage.

St. George pioneers and the tragic price of faith
Chapter Three opens with the Saints having just arrived in what would become St. George in 1861. Whipple provides a geographic description by having Apostle Erastus Snow, the real-life leader of the Cotton Mission, observe the valley from the Sugar Loaf, a high steep rock in the red cliffs to the north. At this point, he sees his people still living in their tents and wagons, but he will return often to that spot as the settlement grows, and the Sugar Loaf becomes a landmark for the town.

By Lynne Larson

White and crimson, or black and yellow and blue — behind her and ahead and around her — spewed in fantastic violence, in every shade and nuance, the colors of this unreal landscape glittered with such intensity that she closed her eyes and for a moment her breath clung to her throat. She felt hemmed in with untamed, imponderable forces . . . between the two black ridges lay the valley of sagebrush where she was going to spend the rest of her life — the valley that was already named, President Young had told them, the city of St. George. (The Giant Joshua, p. 3-4)

            As Maurine Whipple’s heroine, Clorinda MacIntyre is vividly presented with her new home in the first pages of The Giant Joshua, we as readers are introduced to “Clory” herself, and we meet a dozen other sharply-drawn characters as well. We will come to intimately know them all as we turn the pages of  the novel. There is bearded, rigid Abijah, with his Scottish brogue, the strict family patriarch, whom the teenaged Clory has recently married. At this point, he is still ‘Uncle Abijah’ to her, since the marriage has not yet been consummated, an event she is anticipating with both apprehension and girlish curiosity. There are Bathsheba and Wilhelmina, Abijah’s other wives, the former mean-spirited, imperious, and superstitious, with a prominent wart on her jutting chin, the latter soft, shy, easily subdued, and surely Bathsheba’s foil. With these are Abijah’s sons, including Freeborn, enraptured with pretty Clory, as any teenaged boy might be. The band of pioneers includes cheery Lon Tuckett, a tailor who loves to sing and quote original verse through all his hardships, and his very pregnant German immigrant wife Betsy. Also the Hichinopers, a happy couple so worried about their firstborn baby, they carry it up hill and down on a pillow, lest it ever feel neglected. They and the others make up a caravan of Saints sent by Brigham Young to establish the Cotton Mission in southern Utah’s Dixie.

By Andrew Hall and Lynne Larson

Welcome to the BCC Late Summer Book Club!

For the next eight weeks we will be reading Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, which is widely considered to be Mormonism’s greatest novel. Maurine Whipple is an enigmatic figure—in 1938 at age 35 she was broke, divorced and depressed, a failed grade school teacher who wrote obsessively but who had never published a substantial work. In that year, however, she was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for new writers, and the coveted prize allowed her to take pen in hand, let her genius flower, and create her masterpiece. Over the next two years she worked feverishly on The Giant Joshua, the epic story of the 1861 settlers of St. George. 

In case you missed the memo, BCC Press has developed a new web site and unveiled it at this year’s all-online Sunstone Sumposium. You have already seen Bob Rees’s book that we launched today as part of this grand unveiling. By Common Consent. And you know that we are selling all books by Sunstone Symposium speakers for 25% off.

Yesterday, we let the cat out of the bag about our evil plan to flood the world with excellent, reasonably priced audiobooks of our best titles. And, like we always say, when the cat is out of the bag, you might as well listen to the meows. (OK,we’ve never actually said this until today, but you know what we mean).

Anyway, we have more audiobooks on the way, but the approval process at ACX/Audible/Amazon is so darn long that we don’t have more than one to show for the effort. We would like to give you a wealth of listening pleasures during the Coronapocalypse (Coronageddon? Covid-Nineteen-Ninety-Nine?). And (we just realized), we have the files. If we can’t find a way to sell them to you, we can GIVE them to you.

by Nancy Ross

Editor’s note: This review of our most recent BCC Press book, The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, was published yesterday on the Exponent II Blog. Normally we wold just link to it, but we liked it so much we asked if we could cross post it to BCC.  

I devoted a good chunk of my life to reading and re-reading the Book of Mormon. My preferred method in my adult life was to read it very quickly, following a schedule I’d worked out when President Gordon B. Hinckley issued his challenge for LDS church members to read the book in 100 days. I enjoyed my Book of Mormon binge reads and the text grew with me as I worked my way through the church milestones of adult life.

Today, BCC Press is tickled pinkish to be launching The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, by Fatimah Salleh with Margaret Olsen Hemming. This is a downright remarkable book of learned theology, active reading, social justice, and, above all, deep fatih. The following post is by the authors.

The strength and beauty of a holy text is that it can be read again and again, with different and new understandings and insights revealed every time. A holy text is not exhausted by a single interpretation; it compels readers to return and review, reexamine, and reinterpret. The Bible has withstood millenia of innumberable methods of understanding: orthodox, liberal, academic, literary, feminist, etc. The Book of Mormon has certainly experienced readers examining it from various points of view, including through history, literature, and orthodoxy. But a close reading of the complete book as scripture that has messages about oppression, inequality, and other issues of social justice has not been available until now. This book, the first in a trilogy, is a social justice exegesis of the first third of the Book of Mormon, from 1 Nephi to the Words of Mormon.

Here at BCC Press, we want no part of the War on Christmas. We love Christmas. We love it so much that we have marked down nearly all of our 2019 line of books by 40%. From now until the end of the year (in case you have Christmas money that you need to spend), you can get any or all of the following books for a price that is closer to free than it is to any other book of the same great quality and value.

Marked down from $12.95 to $7.77

[Read more…]

At BCC Press, we believe that the line between poetry and prophecy is vanishingly thin and not really a line at all. Nearly all of the prophets in the Bible were also poets. Read correctly, the magnificent verses of Isaiah, the profound Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the stunning rebukes of Amos and Hosea are among the ancient world’s greatest poems.

The reverse is true as well: the poets of a culture are invariably its greatest prophets. Whether it is William Blake reconciling contraries through prophetic verse, or William Butler Yeats organizing history into self-annihilating gyres, or Walt Whitman telling Americans on the eve of the Civil War that “affection shall solve the problems of freedom”–poets warn us, challenge us, and reveal new and startling truths that complicate our lives. [Read more…]

Two years and two weeks ago, on April 6, 2017, BCC Press began with a single book: Steven Peck’s Science the Key to Theology. Today, we are proud to announce the publication of our 21st book, also by Steven Peck: The Tragedy of King Leere, the Goatherd of the La Sals.

In a certain (very metaphorical) sense, BCC Press is now a Steve Peck sandwich. We have a varied and tantalizing selection of fiction, poetry, drama, and memoir, and Steve is the artisan bread that holds it all together and gives it a shape. Science the Key to Theology is a serious work of philosophical nonfiction with the potential to change the way that Latter-day Saints see the universe. King Leere, on the other hand, is a post-modern, post-climate-change, post-American novel set in Southern Utah among people who used to be Mormons.

Rachel Hunt Steeblik is the author of I Gave Her a Name, her second collection of poems about Heavenly Mother. Her first collection, Mother’s Milk, won the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Poetry in 2018. Both books are published by BCC Press. Rachel will be reading selections from I Gave Her a Name tonight at Anthony’s Fine Art and Antiques in Salt Lake City and tomorrow night at Writ & Vision in Provo. Both readings start at 7:00 PM.

I very purposefully set Mother’s Milk inside two prayers, an invocation and a benediction, and as a prayer. I did it because I love Joanna Brooks’ poem called “Invocation/Benediction,” that addresses “Father, Mother”, and because before Jeffrey R. Holland’s 2015 conference talk, “Behold Thy Mother,” that explicitly thanked “a Mother in heaven” (along with Mother Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Mary of Nazareth) for Her “crucial role in fulfilling the purposes of eternity,” the last non “heavenly parents” reference to Heavenly Mother in General Conference was Gordon B. Hinckley’s 1991 talk, “Daughters of God,” that suggested that those who pray to Heavenly Mother are “well-meaning, but…misguided.” I wanted to offer my own language of how we might pray about Heavenly Mother or simply to feel closer to Her.

Keira Shae is the author of the phenomenal BCC Press megahit How the Light Gets In, a memoir of her early life in the dark underbelly of Provo, Utah. She was taken from a Meth-house to an LDS foster home as a teen. She will be joining fellow BCC authors Ashley May Hoiland, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Keira Shae this weekend for readings at Anthony’s Antiques & Fine Art in Salt Lake City (7:00 PM on Friday, April 5) and Writ & Vision in Provo (7:00 PM on Saturday, April 6). Her story, and her book, are featured in the April 3 Edition of the Deseret News.

I speak Mormon.

People ask me all the time for “proof” of my standing with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons and ex-Mormons alike will question my garment-wearing habits or Sunday routine, an “in-group” or “out-group” marker.

These are still tribes sticking to hard and fast rules. I did it, too. And do. It’s a way to gauge your interaction with others and adjust to their knowledge or preferences.

Mette Harrison, the author of this guest post, is a frequent contributor to BCC and the author of three books for BCC Press, most recently, The Book of Abish. She will be joining fellow BCC authors Ashley May Hoiland, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Keira Shae this weekend for readings at Anthony’s Antiques & Fine Art in Salt Lake City (7:00 PM on Friday, April 5) and Writ & Vision in Provo (7:00 PM on Saturday, April 6).

Since I heard from my own mother (who is ninety years old) about General Conference rumors that the Word of Wisdom would allow coffee and tea consumption, I was inspired to write this essay.

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BCC welcomes this guest review by Roger Terry, editorial director at BYU Studies and the author of Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary, published in 2019 by BCC Press.

BCC Press has recently released two missionary memoirs, and Michael and Steve thought it would be fun to have the two authors review each other’s book. In my own memoir, I made the following observation up front: “One thing you need to know is that in spite of the stultifying sameness of dress imposed upon male Mormon missionaries (females get cut a little slack in this department), no two missionaries are alike. Beyond this, there is another level of diversity: between missions. . . . My youngest son recently returned from serving in Ukraine. At the same time, his cousin was serving in Florida.

This guest post is by Mette Harrison, whose many books include The Book of Abish, which was published this week by BCC Press.

A male friend of mine asked me a few years ago, when I complained about how few women spoke at General Conference, why it mattered to me. “If you believe the message is from God, then surely it’s the same message no matter who gives it.” This is, in a nutshell, what I think many men believe about male leadership within the Mormon church, and to be honest, about male leadership at work, in government, and in the media.

The Legend of Hermana Plunge, by Angela Liscom Clayton. (Paperback: $12.95) (Kindle: $7.99)
Bruder, by Roger Terry (Paperback $12.95) (Kindle: $7.99)

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Keira Shae is the author of the phenomenal BCC Press megahit How the Light Gets In, a memoir of her early life in the dark underbelly of Provo, Utah. She will be Julie Rose’s guest on BYU Radio’s Top of Mind radio today at 2:00 PM Mountain Stadard Time. We present her essay “Mormon Batman” as a brief preview of the mature and reflective faith that you will find in her memoir. And because we love Mormons. And Batman.

Batman the vigilante is seen as both a hero and a criminal. To those who align with the law and revere the social structure in a unjust world, he is unpredictable and dangerous. To those who view the system as broken or favor less or no regulation, he is a corrective force–one that deals with crime and corruption in a way that the official entities cannot.

As my faith has matured and transformed, , I can see both sides. It is very difficult to place Batman on the scale. [Read more…]

The author of this post, Heidi Naylor, teaches English at Boise State University and is the closest thing that Mormon short fiction has to a rock star. Her stories and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, the Jewish Journal, the Idaho Review, Portland (magazine of the University of Portland), Dialogue: Journal of Mormon Thought, New Letters, and other venues. She grew up in Pennsylvania and raised her family of sons in Idaho with her husband. The best of her short fiction has been collected and published by BCC Press in Revolver: Stories by Heidi Naylor

Yesterday was our ward’s Primary program, based on the 2018 theme for the year: “I Am a Child of God.” The program opened in a tender way: A cognitively challenged sister, aged in her mid-50s and still attending Primary, came to the podium and asserted, “I Am a Child of God.” “Yes, you are!” said our Primary president, as the sister headed back to her seat on the stand. You could feel her quiet pride as she smoothed her skirt and looked out shyly at us. [Read more…]