Why Bother Reading and Writing about Complicated Mormon Experiences?

THIS POST IS PART OF AN ONGOING BLOG SERIES FOCUSED ON THE CURRENT EXPONENT II BLOG FUNDRAISER . PARTLY BECAUSE OF REASONS I EXPLAIN IN THIS ESSAY, I’M DONATING TO THE FUNDRAISER AND I HOPE YOU WILL TOO!

Why do Mormon feminists like me keep writing? And why does our audience keep coming back for more?

I’ve been thinking about this partly because people tend to scrutinize my motives and whether the effort is worth it. Some urge me to give up trying to bring problems to the Church’s attention or to change it. People have argued over the dinner table over whether it is a good I write things that criticize the Church. In some cases individuals have told me to “fix” my thoughts and feelings through adopting their perspectives. Others have unfriended me on social media to avoid seeing ideas that threatens their worldviews, sometimes complaining to my relatives about what I share.

Sometimes I question myself: Am I helping people or hurting them? Why do I have such an urge to write? And why should I continue to write about religion when the institutional church doesn’t listen?

In trying to answer these questions, I’ve been gleaning wisdom about why writing matters from one of my favorite novelists, Jonathan Franzen. In his essay “Why Bother?” he asks: Why should people bother to write? (and read?) He really wrestled with this question as a younger person trying to make sense of his desires and purpose. In this essay, I’ll draw mostly on thoughts from “Why Bother?” but also a bit from other essays in his collection How to Be Alone.

One of the concerns that troubled Franzen as a young writer is that serious social novels don’t make the impact they once did. Only a fraction of people invest time and effort in reading, especially more difficult works. Film and television have replaced the novel as the art most discussed and celebrated in public spaces. 

“Why am I bothering to write these books?” he asks himself. “I can’t pretend the mainstream will listen to the news I have to bring. I can’t pretend I’m subverting anything, because any reader capable of decoding my subversive messages does not need to hear them…I can’t stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don’t believe that everything that’s wrong with the world has a cure, and even if I did, what business would I, who feel like the sick one, have in offering it? It’s hard to consider literature a medicine, in any case, when reading it serves mainly to deepen your depressing estrangement from the mainstream; sooner or later the therapeutically minded reader will end up [treating] reading itself as the sickness” (How to Be Alone pg. 73).

As a subversive Mormon writer, I relate to the doubts and concerns he raises here. The audience who arguably most needs to hear what I have to say (Church admins) usually aren’t interested in learning from writers like me. Most of the people who take my work seriously already agree with many of my thoughts. Do they actually need it? And the things I write might easily increase alienation and dissonance; it’s not fun to see yet more of what is problematic. There are plenty of Mormons who label writers like me as spiritually unwell or focusing on all the wrong things, and we can’t offer much in the way of solutions to the various sources of pain or malaise we address.

So why write? 

When linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath researched the question What motivates people to write? she learned that the individuals most likely to grow up to be writers were those who turned to avid reading during childhood to find relief from loneliness and feelings of being different from others. These individuals found dialogue and community with authors and imagined worlds that relieved feelings of alienation or disconnection, and this continued as a habit in adulthood. As Heath explains, since “writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness” (77). 

In the context of teaching him about this pattern among writers, Heath told Jonathan Franzen: “You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.” While she was referring to writers in general, these words helped Franzen better understand his love of reading and writing with unexpected, joyful clarity. He hadn’t been pressured to read as a kid. He turned to books largely because he was a deep-thinking misfit who felt ill at ease with the state of things around him. His urge to write as an adult started with avid reading habits in childhood that met his needs for connection, exploration, and creating meaning (78). He realized that as an adult, he didn’t need writing to be a path to fame or status, a way to persuade and change others, or an instrument to fix societal ills for his vocation to be justifiable or meaningful. He could value it simply because it had long been his preferred, intuitive, and effective way of creating the conversations he wanted to have with and in the world. 

How many of us subversive Mormon writers learned to value the written word when we were younger because it empowered us while facing alienation, loneliness, or how we experienced things differently? This might have been due to family or church culture difficulties, our personalities, our mental health, or other factors. How many of us write simply because it is our preferred and seemingly native way of connecting and feeling alive? Our writing is not necessarily about motivations to fix things or to demonstrate we have some kind of superior knowledge or solution. It’s our proven way to create channels of expression and belonging in the face of being different or alone.

I count myself in the group of people whose writing started with turning to books as a child. I was socially anxious, sensitive and prone to depression. I seemed to experience so many things abominably differently than people around me. Starting around age 12, I spent big chunks of time reading classic novels and the scriptures and journaling in the evening. I didn’t think of myself as a writer (I actually hated writing for school because of the grading process and negative feedback); I just had an instinct that doing these things made me feel better and more normal. My writing today is absolutely a continuation of my preferred way of being as a girl. I’m a lifelong questioner, reader, and journaller. I can’t help being this way, it’s what I need to do to cope with life, and writing and reading are inextricably woven into my spirituality.

Writing also allows us to develop and maintain a sense of self and to resist oppressive circumstances, including those we face in religion. In response to the question why bother writing?, fellow author Don DeLillo advised Franzen: “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals” (95-96). Even if literally no one were listening to us, and even if the Church were going to hell in a handbasket such that all hope of improvement were lost, independent Mormon writers would still be at work if only because this process empowers us to maintain and develop differentiated and thoughtful senses of self and personalized meanings. Writers at Exponent II work to neutralize the imbalance we suffer from due to conformity and submission being valued too highly in our religious culture.

We writers are also directly motivated by desires to respond to social and emotional needs caused by the world’s (and in our case, the Church’s) brokenness. Franzen discusses how the tech revolution, which involves ongoing planned obsolescence of both workers and machines and questionable values and objectives that directly hurt lives, is one major example of the kind of harm going on in the world that ensures he’ll always have interested readers and materials to work with. The tech movement leaves continual collateral damage behind it–including newly unemployed people, useless polluting waste, and mental health injuries (209). Our situation in the Mormon sphere is comparable. Someone needs to be there to help people process the detritus and suffering the institutional Church leaves in its wake as it evolves and changes direction over time, and members of our writing community take up this difficult work. As in the tech industry, people and programs end up being treated as unworthy or obsolete again and again over the course of time. The institution’s ongoing process of shedding, sifting and shifting without consulting members or granting them power to help decide its direction ensures that writers like me and communities like Exponent II will always be needed and wanted, and never out of material. We are like a clean up crew and emergency services working among those the Church hurts and abandons in its wake, even like spiritual care medics at times, however limited our reach and resources may be.

Why do we keep reading?

We read because sometimes there is no where else to turn to grapple with the problems we are affected by. Shirley Brice Heath found that those who read substantive literature did so because such works were “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically.” Such texts “refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys” (82). Exponent II readers are drawn to our space for some of the same reasons. We make space for questions and perspectives that defy oversimplified frameworks and rhetoric. Communities like ours are the only public venues where the most difficult dimensions of Mormonism and the LDS Church are acknowledged, held in tension, and examined without arriving at unsatisfying, or dualistic conclusions (such as X is all good/true/innocent or X is all bad/false/ill-intentioned). This works well at Exponent II partly because we accept, include, and value a wide a variety of voices and worldviews.

Sometimes reading helps us carry and make sense of our spiritual burdens in a way that religious institutions fail to do. Franzen writes that “Since religion lost its lock on the educated classes, writers and other artists have assumed extra pain to ease the burden for the rest of us, voluntarily shouldered some of the painful knowing in exchange for a shot at fame or immortality (or simply because they had no choice, it was their nature)…Men and women with especially sharp vision undertook to be the wardens of our discontent. They took the terror and ugliness and general lousiness of the world and returned it to the public as a gift: as works of anger or sadness, perhaps, but always of beauty too” (202). We value others’ writing because it takes ugly, painful, and chaotic experiences and reorder them into beautifully articulated thoughts, feelings, insights, narratives, etc. This writing is not just a complicator for people (though no doubt, it serves that purpose sometimes, which can be unpleasant, but is also a catalyst for learning and growth); it also helps them to process traumas, losses, and personal crises, to be empowered through exposure to new perspectives of their experiences, and to find emotional relief. Reading helps people learn to create meaning, identity, and beauty, in new contexts and stages of their lives.

Reading also offers validation that life and faith are unpredictable, something that is not adequately recognized in Church teachings and narratives. It’s a general pattern that people who’ve faced unpredictability are more likely to read the more complicated stories and material. As Franzen explains, “Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives haven’t followed the course they were expected to: merchant caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, openly gay men from conservative families, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers” (81). 

At Exponent II, we more often than not share stories and frameworks that deviate from the standard scripts that are usually upheld by the Church. We regularly affirm that life is not foreseeable or fair. Most of us who are involved have experienced religious and family outcomes we didn’t anticipate, and the community makes us feel accompanied and seen in this. It can also directly help us face ongoing challenges. In her research, Heath found that, “reading…impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life” (81-82). I believe that voices at Exponent II help others to handle the capriciousness of being human with keener insight, more acceptance, and more confidence.

Sometimes we also read in order to find stories and voices that are particularly relevant to personal circumstances and in which we can see ourselves and explore our inner experiences. Franzen describes how the novel Desperate Characters was unusually “coherent and deadly pertinent” to him when he read it after his divorce. In his words, the book “spoke directly to the ambiguities that I was experiencing…Was it a great thing or a horrible thing that my marriage was coming apart? And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side…felt akin to an instance of religious grace” (57, 74). Exponent II readers have comparable experiences, especially while reading pieces that grapple with personal pain, loss, transition, dilemmas and ambivalence like Franzen did. Sometimes writing here is received, in Franzen’s words, like a religious grace–a compassionate and uncanny token of shared suffering and perplexity, an affirmation that these experiences have meaning worth exploring and even sharing.

So, what are communities of readers and writers about?

Franzen’s perspective is that “readers [and writers] aren’t necessarily “better” or “healthier” or conversely “sicker” than nonreaders.” Rather, “[w]e just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community” (81). We are the people who need and want to hold deeper, more inclusive, more challenging and more open dialogues about the ongoing problems, questions and tensions that impact our world and lived experiences, in our case particularly with our faith tradition. Our writing and reading provides a sense of “having company in this great human experience” that we need as people who sometimes feel different and alone (83).

Sometimes we write because we can’t help it; reading and writing are intuitive to us and have been ingrained into our way of being in the world starting as early as young childhood. Readers and writers are critical thinkers and thrive on using imagination, drawing connections, and asserting our freedom to communicate and explore through the written word–in many cases it’s just who we are.

And in many cases, some of us probably we didn’t originally feel like writers and did not turn to books so much when we were younger, but we reach some point when we did come to feel different and alienated, and things we once repressed suddenly need to be said and seen in the open.

Collectively, we write because we know what it’s like to feel alone or to be hurt, we recognize life is unpredictable and not in our control, and we share our writing with others knowing we can form connections and community through this medium.

At Exponent II, we might not be fixing the world or the Church, and that might not even be the core point or motive much of the time (though I recognize activism may be an important part of what is going on). We’re forming communities that genuinely respond to peoples’ needs to connect, to discuss difficult and perspective-shifting experiences, and to use and develop their communicative capacities in satisfying and empowering ways.

We write and read to support and to be supported and to grow and be strengthened personally and collectively. Even one sentence can offer a refuge to us and to others. This is the power of honest, authentic writing. It’s a lot to hang on a few words in a blog post or magazine submission, but it seems to be working pretty well for us here.  

Personally, I’m very happy to be one of the many weirdoes whose preferred way of making sense of the world is the written word. And I’m grateful to have discovered Exponent II’s supportive and vibrant community of writers, thinkers, and enthusiastic readers and supporters.

Why donate to Exponent?

Are you part of our “strange community” of people who like to dig deeper into life’s questions through reading and writing? Have the words of Exponent II bloggers proven “deadly pertinent” in understanding your experience, helped you feel less alone, or helped you learn, heal, or grow? If yes, we are so thrilled we’ve been of service as writers. And we invite you to participate in our current blog fundraiser. Please consider making a donation that will go toward powering this blog. The blog is somewhat broken and does not meet our needs (this is very apparent from the backend). We need funds to hire professional tech assistance and to make upgrades. This grassroots community can only continue through the donations of community members who appreciate our work.

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Feature image: this photo is a selfie I took in the small office in Montreal that I usually write in. I share the space with my composer/music producer teenage son. There is a lot of music playing, and sometimes I leave so he can record his voice. It is decorated with calendar cat art from France. The “fearless feminist Mormon writer” button I’m holding is one I designed myself and have sometimes worn on my backpack.