Authors: Brian Evenson
Since the Mormon temple and its ceremonies are so integral to Mormon experience—and are also the most hidden part of Mormon culture, I felt that any book that spoke in any detail about the relationship of Mormon culture to violence needed to acknowledge the connection of the temple ceremony to violence. To do that, I would have to talk, at least a little bit, about the ceremony itself. I have tried to limit my discussion of the ceremony largely to one chapter in the second section of the book, and have tried to signal it in such a way that Mormon readers who hold the temple ceremony sacred will be able to see it coming and will be able to avoid it if they so choose. I’ve tried as well to be as respectful as possible and to focus on portions of the temple ceremony that are no longer practiced. I think this information is essential to non-Mormons who don’t know anything about the ceremony itself, but may also be important for Mormons who came to the temple ceremony after it changed in 1990. I give a great deal less information away, by the way, than one can find in a two-minute search on the internet.
The newspaper articles are actually from the
New York Times
and are quoted for the most part verbatim, with ellipses indicated where a portion of the article has been removed. I have in one or two instances made changes in spelling or corrected an error, but every attempt has been made to preserve the accuracy of these articles.
As the newspaper articles suggest, Young did write a piece called “Sunrise in Hell,” which he published in a newspaper called the
Crusader.
I tried to find this piece with the help of several different researchers, but though we located other issues of the newspaper we had no success finding the issue in question. I suspect no copy is extant, but would be delighted if I can be proven wrong. The poem that ends the second section is meant not to serve as Hooper Young’s actual work but as Rudd’s attempt to recreate the poem as a kind of Mormon hymn.
I intend for this to be my last Mormon-themed book, at least as far as fiction is concerned. It is my departure from Mormonism both as a person and as a writer. Mormonism is a culture that nourished me as a person and as a writer growing up; without it I would not be who I am. And yet at the same time I feel remarkably comfortable having left it and am not sorry to be free of it. Or at least as free of it as one can ever be of a culture whose rhythms of speech and ways of thinking one still finds oneself to lapse naturally into years later. I suspect those rhythms are sufficiently burned into my brain that they’ll stay with me until I die. But that relation to language, to me, is the best thing about the culture.