Discussing the Lit Blitz: Annaliese Lemmon's "7 Reasons Nursery is the Best Calling"
Discussing the Lit Blitz, previous finalist Annaliese Lemmon talks with the finalists from our most recent contest about their work.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
James Goldberg: Well, welcome to this episode of the Mormon Lit Blitz. What do you call the podcast, Annaliese?
Annaliese Lemmon: It's the Mormon Lit Lab podcast
James Goldberg: The Mormon Lit Lab Podcast.
Annaliese Lemmon: Uh-huh
James Goldberg: Annaliese Lemmon, who I'm with today, has been interviewing different finalists in the 15th annual Mormon Lit Blitz and talking about their stories, poems, or essays. And because she's also a finalist this year, she invited me to come on and interview her about her piece, “7 Reasons Nursery Is the Best Calling,” and I'm excited to do that today.
Annaliese is a past Mormon Lit Blitz finalist. She's actually in our Hall of Fame. What year was your first finalist piece? Do you remember?
Annaliese Lemmon: I think it was in the second or third Mormon Lit Blitz.
James Goldberg: Oh, wow. Was that “Curelom Riders?”
Annaliese Lemmon: “Curelom Riders” was my first. That was back in 2014.
James Goldberg: Wow. Okay. So, yeah, for 12 years now, I've been reading Annaliese's pieces, often with a speculative twist, but consistently kind of engaging with what's a different angle on life experience with the church. So to introduce listeners to you a little bit, Annaliese, where are you coming from as someone… What's your life experience with this church and culture?
Annaliese Lemmon: Thank you. So I’ve been writing all my life, mostly in fantasy, and although finding a time to write as a stay-at-home mom and getting published has been a bit of a struggle, and the Mormon Lit Blitz is what got me into Mormon literature and exploring these different things. So as for the church, I have been a lifelong member, although my heritage only goes back to my grandparents who converted in the 1950s. Most of my callings have been in primary. I've taught every single age, and before Come, Follow Me, I taught all seven manuals that they had at that time. And another relevant piece of information for this piece is that my youngest child passed away two and a half years ago at the age of 10.
James Goldberg: Yeah. It was interesting being on the committee for this piece, right? We're reading everything anonymously and looking through, and we don't actually ask people to say what genre a piece is. And to me, it read like just fiction, that here's a short story that is introducing a character through this structural conceit of a list.
So you figure out pretty quickly this... Well, from the title, right? This is someone writing who is called to nursery and loves this calling. And then as you go down the list, you're finding things out about that narrator and speaker. And then at the end, you have this reference. Oh, how does it go exactly?
It's, yeah. Number seven, I'll just read it 'cause listeners have already read the piece presumably. "I don't have to pretend to be happy. We sing about turning frowns upside down, but when I'm sad, the kids don't offer platitudes of testimony. They'll let me just sit in the corner as they race the toy school bus across the room the exact way my son did when he was that age."
And it's interesting that the piece never says that this child has died, and yet it kind of brings you to that conclusion indirectly. There's a sense of at least this wistfulness, but really grief, that the narrator's sort of like slowly circling toward. And I found that really compelling just as a text, to start with the kind of lightness of nursery and the enjoyment of nursery, but then find myself being pulled into this sort of unnamed gravitational well, emotional gravitational well at the center.
And then of course once we, you know, find out who the authors are, I know your life experience and recognize, oh, this isn't fiction at all. This is a personal narrative. You've used the same kind of structural conceit you might use in fiction to help give us an entryway to things that are real to you.
So I really wanted to ask you about, as a writer, the power of the unsaid and why you chose in this piece to get at your life experience in this indirect way by talking about everything else but the way that even your relationship to your calling is so deeply informed by where you are emotionally in this other thing you've been through.
So, yeah, from, from a craft perspective, why'd you choose that? What does it feel like? How can somebody else make it work?
Annaliese Lemmon: Uh-huh. Yeah, so there's a few different techniques that I used putting basically my experience into this piece. First off, I am a huge fan of stories and poems where the final line re-contextualizes everything, and that's what I was aiming for here. So as I was picking details that would go into the different aspects of the list, I was thinking in terms of foreshadowing and details that could be interpreted multiple ways, but the true meaning would become clear at the end as you add them together and realize, oh, no, there's only one way that these can all fit together.
James Goldberg: Can I just pause there and say I love the way it becomes kind of a conversation with the reader, because on the way, I start thinking of alternate theories for what could explain this or that reference. Oh, this person, something is difficult here. Are they having questions about faith? Whatever, right?
And then the end sort of collapses those theories back in. But I kinda feel like as a reader, I'm talking to you as I'm trying to make up my own stories of what might be going on with this narrator before that closing revelation that brings it together. So I love the way you're talking about it as a foreshadowing, and the way the foreshadowing kinda draws the reader in and makes them a co-creator of the piece.
Anyway, continue.
Annaliese Lemmon: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and so last year when I interviewed you and you talked about my story “Disability, Death or Other Circumstance,” and your theater technique about fighting against the real emotion that you're feeling, that blew my mind because I'd never heard of that technique before. But because I was already working on this piece, I realized that is perfect for this.
So I deliberately went into it seeing if I could use that technique deliberately of working against what you're feeling. And I'm a very straightforward writer. When I read, I often miss implications, so this is definitely a new technique for me. And so one of the things that it did for me is that it gave me the shape of this story, that I would start, you know, very light-hearted, not much of a struggle, but then the conflict grows through the different numbers on the list, adding to a sense of progression, which a list story needs, until you get to the end when she kind of loses. But yeah, that's how I shaped the story.
And the third thing that went into using the unsaid to reveal character is that I've, in the last two and a half years, I've done a lot of study on how grief is portrayed in literature. Grief is a really hard emotion to write. If you go too far in one direction, your character can be pitiful and just immobilized by the grief. If you go too far in the other direction, your character's like, "That's sad. Anyway, on to the plot." And describing grief by showing the shape of it in the white space allows me to hit a middle road where the character's active because they're fighting against the grief, yet they're obviously affected by it, even though I don't really show what that is. Like her saying, I think it was in item number three, "I'm okay," in answer to how you're doing. That’s something I did in the first month of grief. I didn't wanna say “I'm fine,” because I wasn't, but I also didn't want to bring someone down who was just making small talk. So yeah, if you're paying attention, there's a whole lot that's revealed about the character by just those two little words not being the usual script.
James Goldberg: Yeah. Yeah, I did notice that, right? That as you're going through, and it's maybe on a semi-conscious level, but you start to feel like this is not... There is a script of how people are expected to interact with things, and the narrator is staking out a place that's just off that script and telling you, right, in a positive way, nursery is great. As you get through the story, even before you get to that closing reveal, there's a sense that nursery is great because it's got some distance from the script.
And that's the sort of solace that the narrator's finding there. Which kind of led to my other big question about the piece, which is because we're a voluntary culture, right? Latter-day Saint culture is something people can opt into or out of. A lot of what we do together is kind of build the scripts, right? What are the stock ways that we respond to things? And part of Latter-day Saint experience is being continuously confronted with a script of these are kind of the dominant ways to be a Latter-day Saint or express faith or feel happiness, whatever the case may be.
I guess I wanted you to comment a little bit on what do you think the role of fiction like this is in a culture where we're so often reaching toward an ideal?
Annaliese Lemmon: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think stories like this are very important because so often the ideal doesn't match what the reality is, and that's what I like to explore a lot in my writings is where is the truth, as opposed to the ideal. When my son died, the ideal story of grief is that the plan of salvation will help you to feel joy in that event. I didn't feel joy, at all. And in fact, when I tried to comfort myself with a thought of eternal families, I had a physical revulsion to that idea because I didn't care about the eternities. I wanted him back now.
And so I think it's important that we talk about how God works in many ways according to our abilities, our circumstances, and our personalities. If someone doesn't see themselves in the ideal, they can find these other ways that God can interact with us. And if you aren't someone who's in that circumstance, as we delve into the messiness and the variations of life, it can still help us to gain insights into what humanity is really like and what God is really like.
And the other motivation behind me writing this story is that I found nursery to be very healing, and when I was talking about that with a couple of my friends, one who lost her mom as a young adult, another one who had been divorced, and they said they had also found healing in nursery, and I was flabbergasted because I had never seen that depicted before, and yet it wasn't just me that had that experience. So I really wanted to show that possibility to other people
James Goldberg: Yeah. I really appreciate that. I work in church history, and I tell people I grew up in an era where we treated church history as here are the mascots of righteousness. We have our current ideals, and we just sort of pin them on to Joseph Smith and the pioneers and whoever else we're doing and yeah, project the script onto them.
We're using them to learn the script. When you get into documents, right, it's a little bit different as a story. There's a Heber C. Kimball moment I love where he says, "We need a new calling in pioneer companies, which is general murmurer,” because right now everybody is doing that work, and we should consolidate and have one person, right?
Which is not the image of pioneers that we were teaching in the '90s. And so I've said I think a healthier relationship to our history is to approach history as if we're looking at laboratories of discipleship. How do people act as disciples of Jesus Christ under different conditions and pressures?
And I love the way you're describing the way that, the tools of literature, right? In a personal essay or a poem or a short story, someone can kind of do the same thing to say you're holding onto this core relationship with God and the mortality He sent us to, right? That we've accepted. But then asking questions and running the experiment a little bit of what does discipleship actually look like under these conditions? And maybe it's different.
And yeah, not only can that be helpful in a sort of keeping it real way for people by letting you get some vicarious relief from living with the tension between your life and a script and going, "Oh, other people have this too." But yeah, I appreciate you pointing out that nursery has a specific healing power that we wouldn't see in the general script of nursery, which is about service and the children and that kind of thing.
But when you have this specific exploration of a nursery experience, the new angle brings out a different insight that we actually could act on, right? In our assignments. If people kind of brought-- If getting called to nursery was a moment you could say, "How is this an opportunity for me to, to reflect on different things or have a different experience?" You might get more out of that calling.
And maybe there's moments where we'd be able to receive different inspiration when we're extending callings if we had in our minds that sense of what might be possible for the person as well as the organization. So yeah, I really appreciate the way that your literary work here helps individual readers process things and potentially contributes to our community, expanding our shared sense of like, what do we have here, and what can we do with it?
As we close, I do wanna ask you what, what are you reading? And is there something that you would recommend, to podcast listeners?
Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, so I've got a couple of recommendations for you. The first one is the piece of religious literature that I found most comforting in the past year, and that is actually The Way of the Cross at the Colosseum. And for those unfamiliar with this tradition, on Good Friday, the Pope leads a procession through the Colosseum, stopping at 13 stations that depict various events of Christ's last day of life. At each station, there's a reading and a prayer. This reading doesn't just focus on biblical events. It's also a meditation on the suffering that exists in the world today, and the prayers ask God to relieve that suffering, to help us be instruments in relieving that suffering and not be the ones who cause it. For me, especially the station where Christ meets his mother, I felt the catharsis at my suffering being acknowledged and prayed for. So, that's one thing I recommend.
And I also have a short story. “There's Magic in Bread” by Effie Seiberg. This is available to read free online, and Effie is a Jewish author, and this story follows two people, a young adult who is attempting to bake bread during COVID lockdown, and flashbacks to her grandmother, whose father ran a bakery during the Holocaust. And you would expect the gravity of the Holocaust to dominate the narrative, but the two stories in parallel create a resonance that enhances the emotions of both stories. It’s really well-crafted, and when the magic comes, it's just delightful. So those are my two recommendations, and I'll put links to both in the liner notes.
James Goldberg: Oh, those sound awesome. I've got an album on my shelf over there. David Habben is a Latter-day Saint visual artist who did a Stations of the Cross version, a series of art pieces from a Latter-day Saint perspective. I think like you, kind of finding this new resonance with that tradition, and then Andrew Maxfield composed music to accompany it.
So you've got both the art and the music, but that's a good example of how we can go and look and find these traditions from other branches of Christianity, other world faiths, and sort of, yeah, if it's good, if it connects you to God, like find the way to love that, respect it for what it is, and make it your own in a different way. So, I love that you've given us a text to help connect to that tradition.
If people wanna read more Annaliese Lemmon, I know we've got several, as we've mentioned, Mormon Lit Blitz finalists they can look up. Where else can people find more of your work?
Annaliese Lemmon: So I have a website, annalieselemmon.com, and it lists all the stories, poems, essays I've had published. Besides the Mormon Lit Blitz, I've been in Wayfare and Irreantum, and I also have a few general fantasy stories I've had published as well. So you can find a list to all of those on my website. If you're interested in hearing about when I have new releases, you can sign up for my newsletter.
James Goldberg: Excellent. Well, thank you, Annaliese, for the interview and for letting me come and interview you. I loved, loved that piece and appreciate your work. Till next time.
Annaliese Lemmon: Yep. Thank you for coming in and doing this for me.
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