Discussing the Lit Blitz: James Goldberg on The Lit Blitz

In 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.

Annaliese Lemmon: Welcome everyone to the Mormon Lit Lab podcast. I'm Annaliese Lemmon, your host for this series where we discuss the 14th annual Mormon Lit Blitz. Today I'm joined by James Goldberg, the creator and editor of the Mormon Lit Blitz. Welcome, James.

James Goldberg: Good to be here.

Annaliese Lemmon: Thanks. Could you introduce yourself and explain what your experience is with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

James Goldberg: Yeah, so my name's James Goldberg, and I've been a Latter-day Saint all my life and I like it a lot. I’m also interested in literature. I did theater originally, and came up doing that and got interested in telling stories about my faith using the language of faith.

My extended family is Jewish on my dad's side, Sikh, on my mom's side. And then my grandmas were both from Mormon families. But I think because of that multicultural background, I grew up with a really strong sense that people should be able to tell their own stories in their own way.

So, my wife, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg and myself and Scott Hales started the Mormon Lit Blitz, I don't know, almost 15 years ago now. Is that right?

Annaliese Lemmon: Seems like it.

James Goldberg: And we've been just sort of steadily continuing and building a legacy of Latter-day Saint storytelling and exploration of what the faith and the culture can mean, and how we can use our imaginations to explore possibilities within that. But very proud to have been an editor and give a place for all these different voices to speak and for different writers and readers to connect with each other. It's been cool to see that sort of community develop.

So, yeah, that's a little bit about me and the contest.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I've been aware of the contest pretty much since the beginning, and I've really enjoyed watching what you've created, grow and develop. It's been really fun. So, I love numbers. I'd like to get into the stats for this latest contest. How many entries did we get? How many votes?

James Goldberg: So I don't remember the exact number, but what I would say is almost always lately we get between 100 - 200 entries for the contest. That seems to be kind of where we are. And it's a fairly stable community size for a literary contest that's actually pretty modest and small, right? It's enough that you get a variety of voices, but not so much that we need a whole committee of slush readers.

Nicole and I read the entries together. Some years, we'll read them out loud. We don't always finish everything out loud, but we like to start so we can get a sense of how people might experience that. So yeah, there's that nice intimate scale.

The voting has varied. I actually don't think I checked this year on the numbers 'cause somebody else runs those. But I would say for readers, it's kind of comparable. Most of the pieces will get a few hundred readers. Sometimes we've had something where people share it more and it'll get in the thousands of readers. I feel like that's been rarer since Facebook turned into Hotel California and really punish links, and so it's harder to kind of get the word out.

But yeah, I would say mostly this is a contest that serves this kind of intimate community. It's like doing a black box theater at a university or something where you've got the small stage where people try different things out and figure out what you can do artistically in that space.

Annaliese Lemmon: And for some reason I was under the impression that you created the Lit Blitz in order to help bring forth the prophecy by Orson F. Whitney that we’ll have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own. But I might be conflating that with the Whitney Awards.

James Goldberg: Yeah, I don't remember where that turned up in our early history. But I will say that's an Orson F. Whitney quote that everybody who does Mormon literature, Latter-day Saint literature, we all deal with that. Right?

So the context of that quote was late 19th century Latter-day Saints are doing home economics. They're trying to make their own physical products and be economically independent. And Orson F. Whitney, who was later an apostle says, you know, we need to have our own literature and our own culture too.

I've done some research later and found that that sort of dream goes back further. There's a Sidney Rigdon quote about how Zion will be known by the strength of her literary institutions, and by the Saints patronizing literature in their midst, right? They saw it as kind of this cooperative thing where we should have like a distinctly Latter-day Saint reader who cares about nurturing new voices.

I do think sometimes people have within that Orson F. Whitney thing, the line about, we'll have Shakespeares of our own. Sometimes we skip to think, oh, we'll have somebody who's like required reading on college syllabi all the time. The line from that speech I like better is when he says we need to make our own hive and honeycomb. This idea, not just that the goal is to be very popular, but also to create something really distinct.

And I think we're in an era where we've got both, right? In speculative fiction, there have been multiple Latter-day Saint writers, the Brandon Sandersons and Shannon Hales and Stephenie Meyers of our generation, Orson Scott Card being one example of somebody in the generation before that who brought a lot of Latter-day Saint thinking to their writing in a more, you know, popular genre that gave them room to explore.

So, yeah, I think we're at a good time for the field in general. I like though, having the space where we can unapologetically speak our own language. And you don't have to figure out how to work in Latter-day Saint ideas to a larger setting. You're allowed to like, tell a story that's a direct riff on something that's important to us. We believe in where people's, you know, ward experiences are part of this story.

And so that's really, in the contest we were interested in developing that kind of literature and it's a flash fiction / poetry / essay contest. But we've got that 1000-word word count. So for a reader, that's three to five minutes. And a big motivation to start the contest was that people had a lot of preconceived notions at the time about what it meant to do Mormon Literature. And it was kind of like, oh, that's gonna be sort of an inspirational, kind of shallow story, which is part of what we do, right?

We tell stories that are inspirational and reflect our values that way, but we wanted to give people a chance to find the range of stories people can tell and voices that exist in our community. And we thought if we do a flash fiction contest, again and poetry and essay, but a micro literature contest, that makes it easier for writers to experiment.

It's hard to just write a novel for a niche audience, but you can do this micro literature thing and it gives audiences a way to give this kind of literature a chance. It's really easy to dip your toes into the contest and let people experiment with something that's a lot less commitment than like reading a novel as well.

Annaliese Lemmon: And yeah, I've read a couple things that also frame that question of like, what would a Mormon Shakespeare look like? In an interesting light, one post is by an author, name of which has been lost to me, but he was responding to Bezos saying, you know, if we had a trillion humans, we'd have a thousand Mozarts. So he was thinking, well, if that's true, then we must have a Mozart today. So what would that look like? He's like, “okay, well, it must be a musician of significant talent, dedication, and skill, who can write music across a bunch of different contemporary genres, who explicitly draws from the work of other musicians to build their style, and who's willing to poke fun musically and wear fancy outfits while doing it. I can only conclude the modern day Mozart is Weird Al Yankovic.” And another post was by Tobias Wilson Bates, who is an associate professor of British literature. And he posted that first day of class, he says, “Hey everyone, if you liked K-Pop demon hunters, you will love our first text.” The first text was Milton's Paradise Lost.

James Goldberg: Yeah, I think a lot of times ideas of what literary greatness are, we're interested in the dust on the book, right? This is an old book that people have returned to, and that's part of how we think of what literature is, and honestly, that's not bad, right? Literature is a conversation between a writer and an audience, and part of what makes Milton or Shakespeare great is that people have kept coming back to it and they can still be part of the conversation and there's layers of the conversation. And in Mormon literature I would say we don't totally have something like that yet, shy of the scriptures, because we haven't had generations of people returning to the same text with that kind of intensity.

But to the Weird Al Yankovic sort of point, right? Like, Shakespeare originally is making lots of pop culture jokes and that kind of thing. So, the life in it isn't a straight-laced, he wasn't dusty to begin with. The great writers of the past were people who were willing to play and experiment, and just dig down on what does it mean to be human in a particular time and place and culture and assumptions, and we can still speak to that.

And part of what we're trying to do in this contest is say, writers, what if you had permission? What if you had the freedom to approach your culture with that same kind of intensity and write something that people can come back to, right? And where they get to see all of you, these layers of what you believe, your willingness to wrestle with different things, and I think we have successfully created a body of literature that's worth returning to. I still find myself thinking about Lit Blitz pieces from years ago. Right? And they still reward that encounter.

And so yeah, that's the thing we're doing. We're not trying to do the, let's just look like Shakespeare now, or let's imitate the forms of what was before. Literature in some ways is just really focused attention. And so the experiment is what if you focused your attention with the same depth? What if you brought the same kind of imaginative force to a question in your life, in the world as you experience it without worrying about those kind of market forces? The shape, what's likely to hit a best seller list right now? And I think in doing so, we've got the raw materials to stand the test of time and we'll see right? If another generation of Latter-day Saints goes and checks back in on this. But I'm glad to have something that would reward that effort.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, that's great. Another topic that's really hot among writers right now is AI written literature. A lot of magazines have forbidden AI submissions, but the Mormon Lit Blitz doesn't as far as I could tell. So what is your stance on this? Did you have any AI written entries?

James Goldberg: So for my stance on AI more broadly, people might be interested in looking up, I was on a panel on artificial intelligence and aesthetics and spirituality for Wayfare's Summer Festival. And they've posted a video now so people can look at. I have so many thoughts about AI.

One thing I will say is I think of AI, if it's an artistic tool, what kind of tool is it? It's like a blender, right? It's something that takes all the language that's out there and kind of averages. Here's how we input lots of language and an average output. So I don't think, I mean, you can use a blender in creating art and make a certain kind of collage or whatever.

But I think there's a narrow range of applicability for that tool. I don't know how good it would be at doing the kind of work we are trying to do, which is creating novel ways to approach religious tradition and doing a kind of literature that's really niche where there aren't tons of examples.

So that said, I think sometimes humans write with the same kind of logic that AI is doing, where we approach writing by trying to sort of imitate what's around us and reproduce something. I read a book recently that there was interesting stuff in the book. I liked the book, but I'm like, okay, I'm seeing there's a lot of like trope in here, right? That this is following patterns of other books. Because presumably the writer was like, okay, this is what's hot right now.

I think in a testimony meeting in a Latter-day Saint Church, if you took an AI produced testimony, there's some things that would fit very well and there are other things testimony meeting does that AI wouldn't do as well, because in testimony meeting, we use language as shorthand for a deeper spiritual reality, and we say like the same things, AI could 100% reproduce that. We also tell like, hyper-specific stories about personal experience and where we encountered God. AI is not great at that.

So have we had AI submissions? Technically, I don't know. Because we're not requiring people to disclose, it is possible that there are people who are using those kind of tools to say what's an expression of belief, or help me define my belief. I suspect that we have not published any of them yet because that's just not what we're looking for, right? In any given year, part of what we are sifting through to find our finalists is people who had sincere experiences but presented them in more generic ways. What we're looking for is somebody who found a different angle to approach things that creates some novelty for us.

And while it's theoretically possible somebody could use AI in doing it, I don't think the tool is good for that sort of thing. So I'm not super worried at this stage about AI. And for some places they're probably worried about getting inundated with just a sheer volume of submissions where it gets tough to manage. You're making a human read something that a human doesn't need to be reading. We want to connect with actual writers, not with the blended synthesis of many writers. At this stage, we don't have that problem. Where I think it's because there is not great glory in doing this, right?

The reason to enter this contest is to find a human connection with an intimate community of like-minded writers and readers, and it's that depth. And so, yeah, we just haven't attracted the kind of writer who is looking for shortcuts to fill out a writing resume. And so yeah, at this stage that hasn't been a concern, but I think it is telling that that's an issue.

And I think the kind of writing we're encouraging people to do is like the opposite of the kind of writing that AI is best suited to.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I can see all of that. Yeah. So what trends in Mormon Literature would you like to see gain popularity?

James Goldberg: I mean, one of them is I just want people to recognize the value of literature in the sort of larger conversations about what does it mean to be a Latter-day Saint. I work in Latter-day Saint History, and people have recognized that like, it's worth it to have a conversation about where have we been as a people and what have we tried.

And I don't think all of that conversation is necessarily like, the greatest. Sometimes we're a little like, gossipy about past leaders or whatever, and that's just not my jam. But I think more broadly like, history can give us a sense of range and possibility. What are like a lot of different ways to live the gospel via what are the ways people have done it?

I think at this stage in our community, we undervalue imaginative approaches. People are just less interested. And I think in American culture we've had a shift toward nonfiction in publishing generally. And again, I love nonfiction, but I'm interested, even within nonfiction, in more literary approaches. How can somebody kind of artfully weave together their life experience with different insights, from research or from other people's experience and tell a story that tries to be richly human rather than thoroughly documented,

You know, looking back at like my own journals, it's fascinating to me what I missed, what I did not include at a given time. And so I think that the tools of history are a little limited at helping us understand a complete human experience, certainly a complete spiritual experience.

And so, yeah, my biggest hope for Latter-day Saint Literature is that Latter-day Saint readers will recognize that you get something out of the kind of attention that literary writers bring and that they'll be willing to bring themselves, and their like, deep attention to that encounter.

And then within that, what do I wanna see? I see a lot of things. I like to see people experiment and try different things with form. I like to see people try different things in terms of subject matter. I've also been really interested in watching more Mormon literature be produced in languages other than English and then made accessible via translation. I'm really interested in seeing more of that.

And so, yeah. Maybe to be specific for a minute, a couple pieces from past Mormon Lit Blitz that come to mind. I mentioned formal experiment. I like, Kathy Cowley's, or she writes as Katherine Cowley, Katherine Cowley's piece “The Five Year Journal” that’s written in the form of a journal where you get the entries across five years from a given date and it's a marriage story. And so you’re seeing people date and get married and then go through the early years of marriage and the ups and downs in this sort of chronologically, non-linear way.  

I actually love your story. I think it was your first Mormon Lit Blitz story, “Disability, Death, or Other Circumstance.”

Annaliese Lemmon: It was my second, yeah.

James Goldberg: That was your second. But where it's written in the form of a list of blessings. It's someone trying to count their blessings. It does the thing that I learned since I was in theater first, right? So I learned performance and I learned playwriting. And in theater a lot of the writing is about what you can't say. People are working against the emotion that's pulling on them.

So in a really good stage performance of a sad story, an actor is working not to cry, right? Because as humans, we like to resist that emotion. We like to avoid it, and that story does really well at having this gravity of a tragedy, and it's funny and it's playful, but in the conceit that we're getting a tragedy through attempting to count blessings and then it kind of breaks down right as we get to this emotional core. It's not experimentation for experiment's sake, but to help us access a deep human experience. So, I like that formal experimentation.

We talked about this stuff in other languages. César Fortes, who's from Cabo Verde, wrote some really great stuff. He's got one essay called, “A Sunday at Laginha” That’s about this sort of, I don't know, it does a similar thing to your piece in that it circles what's the emotional core. It's about this, they're going out and having a nice Sunday and here's their adventures, and then the end is the mom is deciding whether to go abroad to work or not. Right? Is it more important for your family to get them a better economic future or to give them like, presence?

And that's a tough, I don't think there's one right answer for people. You know, in a lot of the world, that's a really live question for members of the Church. But in that story, the mom settles with, I'm gonna stay here. I wanna be with my family. But beautiful story dealing with that question in a literary way, right? That has this lightness of engaging with what the kids don't know is maybe the farewell celebrations 'cause their mom hasn't told them yet. And then this revelation at the end, just really beautiful.

One of my favorite pieces of Mormon Literature just period is Citlalli H. Xochitiotzin’s “TIEMPO una partícula”/“TIME a particle” that is set in Gethsemane. But showing us what it might have meant that Jesus is like experiencing all time and suffering from across time. It does a really beautiful job with that.

So yeah, you'd asked, what am I interested in? I'm interested in just seeing what people are doing, where they feel that spark of reaching out and trying to express something that's difficult to express or get at. And I respond well to that, whether it's something more playful, whether it's something more solemn. I just, I love people who are willing to reach for light in kind of unexpected places.

And I think that yeah, that's sort of the story of the Mormon Lit Blitz since we've done that over the years. And I like what happens. I like following writers who are willing to do that and not just trying to produce what they think we're gonna want.

One more thing I'll say on that. We decided from the first contest that we're gonna allow three submissions per writer. And the way we've messaged that over the years is we've said, send us the thing that you feel better about, but also send us the thing you think is a terrible idea, and you weren't sure if you should write, but you just wanted to try it. Because I think a lot of times for writers, we second guess ourselves all the time, right? Most of writing is second guessing yourself and trying to figure out, eh, is this a good idea or not? And so giving people the chance to write the thing they think is a good idea and the thing that they're not sure and send it in. Anyway, I think that's been good.

I ran a theater company before I did the Mormon Lit Blitz where we did short plays. And we'd do these short play festivals and do five to seven short plays in a night. And that was another way to experiment and learn to write. And one thing we said there is we want to have a couple plays that 80% of our audience is gonna like. But we also, when we're choosing plays, we want at least one or two that 20% of our audience will like, that went out on a limb, that tried something that maybe doesn't completely work. But we want a culture of rewarding artistic risk taking. And I think that applies to this contest fully as well.

Annaliese Lemmon: So I guess on that note, do you have a piece of media, any format, any genre that you would recommend for our audience?

James Goldberg: Yeah, what I would say is I do think Latter-day Saint writers should take a look at how people from different religious traditions have explored and expressed stuff so that you've got different tools. I really like Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire where he is retelling stories of Hasidic rebbes right? And saying this is just the heritage I grew up with via like foundational stories, but told in this literary way. I think that's a really effective model for how to play with stuff.

So Agha Shahid Ali was a poet who actually was at the University of Utah for years, but he's from Kashmir. And “Tonight” is the poem that I used to have my creative writing students read when I taught part-time at BYU. It's using religious and literary allusions in different ways that I think are interesting and, maybe different than the kinds of models people grew up with. So I think that's a good way to explore some range.

So anyway, those are two, you know, read a Hasidic humanist and a gay Muslim. You know, who’s engaging with his literary tradition and religious tradition in different ways and mixing stuff, and I'd recommend both of those.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I've read some short stories I've really enjoyed that were engaging science fiction and Judaism or Islam, and it's been really fascinating to read some of those.

James Goldberg: Yeah, and I think watching how somebody else does it can maybe get us over some of the self-consciousness we have about, am I really allowed to talk about my faith? Because yeah, there are other people who have given it a shot and that in and of itself can be encouraging.

Annaliese Lemmon: So, do you have any other projects or places to find you online that you would like to tell our audience about?

James Goldberg: Yeah, so, probably about the time that you publish this my book, Latter-day Sikh, which is actually co-written with Nicole. So she's the co-editor for the Mormon Lit Blitz and my co-writer for this book. So Latter-day Sikh is coming out with Deseret book.

It's a biography of my grandfather Gurcharan Singh Gill, who's the first recorded Sikh to have become a Latter-day Saint. He was later the first mission president when independent India got a Latter-day Saint Mission for the first time. And it's, I don't know, it's a cool book. To get to know Sikh tradition, but be a Latter-day Saint tradition. For some readers it may be an introduction to Latter-day Saint tradition. We made sure that it's somewhat accessible that way.

Also to kind of look at, the guy lived through a lot of history, right? He was born under British occupation. Lived through independence, lived through partition. The border between India and Pakistan is not far from where he grew up. And he saw, you know, a lot of the tragedy associated with that division. You know, my grandparents' marriage was technically illegal and they had to sort of trick their way into getting a marriage license, and so dealing with 1950s US racial history.

Anyway, and I could go on and on, but that's a book that maybe is one of my contributions to this kind of storytelling that I want to encourage, where through storytelling we show what's a different way to experience this faith. And here's somebody who brought a lot of Sikh spirituality and thought to his experience as a Latter-day Saint and maybe noticed things about what it means to be a Latter-day Saint that aren't as clear to other people.

And so I like the way that those interfaith and multicultural experiences tell us something about the core of what the gospel is. Help us see it with new eyes. And I like the way that in that book, we worked very hard to not tell the conversion story in the way that people tell conversion stories, right? Where it's that AI before AI gravity of this is the way we tell the story 'cause you're just expected to tell the story a certain way. I think there's also, you know, it's not the same kind of stylistic experiment that something in Mormon Lit Blitz is but we're still working with not only telling different stories than people are used to, but how to tell a story in a different way. So I'm excited about that.

Another thing I would recommend to people is just look at other things in the Latter-day Saint Literature space, so Irreantum from the Association for Mormon Letters, is just a great place to check out. Wayfare magazine, does a lot more nonfiction, but literary leaning and they also do poetry and fiction and sometimes short plays. That's a really vibrant, imaginative space.

You know, Sunstone, Dialogue, those both have longer histories. You have to be comfortable with kind of a different, you know, there's more space of critique of the culture there. And so that's not for everybody. But they are literary spaces. Exponent II, publishes some stuff in literary space. So anyway, I'd also explore people to just kind of look at what's the broader literary market and what's happening in that landscape.

Segullah has started to publish more recently again. They did a bunch and then were kind of quiet and came back, which is what happens with these sort of passion driven projects, as we're pioneering our people's literature. And so, yeah, I would say I've got a personal project I'm excited about.

And I'd also encourage people to just look around and see what's in things and frankly, find writers you like in the Mormon Lit Blitz and follow them. See where else they are both in Latter-day Saint stuff and outside in science fiction magazines or whatever else.

Oh, one more recommendation that I'm super excited about. Liz Busby, who's on the board of the Mormon Lit Lab, launched a magazine called Further Light where they're looking at speculative fiction with Latter-day Saint themes. And then I think they're also gonna do literary criticism about the speculative fiction that that comes from our community. And I think that's exciting, right? That's an important part, the speculative. One of the most important expressions of Mormon Literature has been in speculative literature. I mean, probably the most important. And, so it's exciting to see that new venue launching to really overtly look at the intersection and how people are existing there. So anyway, another thing to check out.

Annaliese Lemmon: And Liz does all the audio engineering for this podcast, so definitely support her with that. All right. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation.

James Goldberg: All right. Thank you so much and thanks for interviewing all the finalists. I love hearing the behind the scenes from them, so.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah. I really like getting to know these people beyond just those words that were on the page. So, yeah. All right. Thanks again and we'll talk to you later.

James Goldberg: Right. See you.

To receive updates on the Mormon Lit Blitz and other contests, please subscribe to our newsletter. If you would like to support the Mormon Lit Lab, you can do so on Patreon.