Scott Parkin writes:
As she points out, this is one of the strong draws of science fiction,
fantasy and horror--the fact that we can build distance between the very
real tension of the story and the tension of self-identification with
specific elements of that story..
I think this is part of why so many of our more literarily successful
writers are explicitly not writing Mormon-specific stories for Mormon
audiences (FUBU). The "lost generation" simply couldn't write the deeply
Mormon stories they wanted to tell for Mormon audiences--Mormons felt
too threatened and tended to leap to defend themselves rather than
accepting the *story* itself as an exploration.
It's a problem. Is the answer that our best writers *need* to focus on
outside audiences--not unlike
::Chiam Potok::
, who had to reach his own people from the outside in rather than the
other way around? Perhaps when enough of them succeed, the inside
audience will finally be able to read stories
about their own culture with less sense of direct threat.
It's a long process that takes decades to mature. Which means we need to
start very, very soon.
