A guest post from Jo Bird. Jo is an American expat living in Shanghai with her husband and five children. She has previously lived in NYC and London but grew up in Boise, Idaho. Her experiences living abroad have given her a richer understanding of relationships and community.

Each morning I wake when the hazy Shanghai sun comes through my linen curtains. There is nowhere to go, nothing to be late for. There is no bus coming, no yoga class, no after-school clubs or piano lessons. I roll on my back and think only about if I’m going to go for a run. I don’t have to worry about whether lunch accounts need to be topped up or permission slips need to be signed. I decide a run sounds good and as I change my clothes my husband Richard rolls out of bed to wake the kids.

Three weeks ago Richard and I flew with our five kids to the Philippines for a Lunar New Year vacation. Each day during our stay in paradise, news about the coronavirus escalated fear and panic, and we received word that schools were closing, church was cancelled and the official holiday was extended. By our last day I found myself sitting on the edge of a canopied four-poster bed in a heated discussion with Richard about what we should do. My instincts told me to return home to Shanghai, but there were concerns with that plan and Richard was worried I wasn’t giving them adequate consideration. Will our access to healthcare be compromised? What will our options be for leaving China if the situation gets worse? [Read more…]

We have a different version of the pride cycle here at BCC Press: we publish something great and feel proud of it, and then we publish something even better and feel proud about that too. And then we remember all of the other great stuff we published and become so justifiably proud that we have to stay in our rooms for a few days so we don’t go into stores and other random places and start sounding like Robert Goulet in Camelot.

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As BCC has already proved with math, the Book of Mormon does not pass the Bechdel Test. In fact, it doesn’t even qualify to sit for the Bechdel Test. It doesn’t have two named female characters who talk to each other about anything. It doesn’t even have two named female characters who are alive at the same time or part of the same story. Only three women in the book even have names at all, and these three never come near each other.

But do you know what does pass the Bechdel Test? Mette Harrison’s new Book-of-Mormon themed novel, The Book of Abish (Kindle edition here), that’s what. It passes it in the first chapter and then keeps on passing it, on almost every page, until the last chapter. That’s because the whole point of The Book of Abish is to give the women of the book of Mormon their own stories–and their own names. And it is available from BCC Press today. [Read more…]

There is a trend in Latter-day Saint rhetoric to argue that having questions or researching answers about the church are dangerous and misguided ventures. These arguments have good intentions—they are meant to help people avoid discomfort or cognitive dissonance by encouraging them to wear blinders or to place difficult questions on “shelves” to be ignored until all is revealed after death (this analogy is not quite as useful in the age of Marie Kondo, however!). I sympathize with the intentions behind these arguments, although I disagree with them. It’s true: questions can be painful. Questions can inspire disobedience to authority. Questions disrupt what is normal and familiar.

However, questions are also necessary tools for strengthening faith. God teaches us through questions, inspires us with questions, expects and even demands that we continue coming up with questions in order to have reasons to keep praying and researching and exploring and wondering. Questions keep us awake and curious. Questions are requisite for growth. [Read more…]

Since 1847, July 24 has meant one thing to Mormons across the globe: Pioneer Day, the anniversary of the arrival of Brigham Young and the Mormon pioneers to their future home in the Salt Lake Valley, where they would eventually set up an International Church, a great university, fry sauce, and a universal WiFi password.

All of this is important, of course. But, since 2017, July 24 has been a REALLY important holiday: the day that BCC Press releases its newest crop of amazing books. This year, we are proud to bring you two remarkable books by two modern-day pioneers in every sense of the word that does not involve pushing handcarts and eating roots. Or sleeping on the ground. Or malaria.

But in lots of senses of the word, the two women whose works we unveil today are pioneers. And when you read their stories, you will know why. [Read more…]

At BCC Press, we are all about breaking rules. And maybe the biggest rule in contemporary publishing  is “nobody reads serious poetry.” We say pshaw! As we found out with our blockbuster international bestseller Mother’s Milk, just about everybody reads serious poetry if it is also REALLY FREAKING GOOD. And just to prove it, we are doing it again.

Lawless Women, Heather Harris Bergevin’s new book, is probably not like any book of poetry you have ever read. It’s better—deeper, funnier, wiser, and, well, cooler. It does things. Lots of things. And you need to read it. [Read more…]