In the Lit Blitz Hall of Fame, we celebrate authors published in previous Mormon Lit Lab contests by asking their thoughts on Mormon Lit, writing, and life. Check back twice a month for new Hall of Fame interviews.
Previous Lit Blitz pieces by Mark Penny:
“Separation” (8th Annual Mormon Lit Blitz, Finalist)
“The Bride and the Ricestone Way” (5th Annual Mormon Lit Blitz, Semifinalist)
“Eyelight” (2014 Meeting of the Myths, Finalist)
“The Book of Laman” (3rd Annual Mormon Lit Blitz, Semifinalist)
“The Defection of Baby Mixo” (2012 Four Centuries of Mormon Stories, Finalist)
An Interview with Mark Penny
Explain the background of one of your Lit Blitz pieces–your inspiration, your writing process, or why the piece is meaningful to you.
The piece I put the most work into was “Eyelight” for the 2014 Meeting of the Myths. I remember grabbing moments between TOEIC classes at the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology to work out terminology, right down to a counting system–which I didn’t use. The exercise was really empowering. I was driven by the sense I got from a lot of Orson Scott Card’s stories that the author knew way more about the world and characters than the narrator was revealing in the account.
What’s one of your favorite Lit Blitz pieces written by someone else?
A lot of my favorites are from the 2012 Four Centuries of Mormon Stories contest: “Waiting” (Katherine Cowley), “Avek, Who Is Distributed” and “When the Bishop Started Killing Dogs” (Steven Peck), “Release” (William Morris), “Oaxaca” (Anneke Garcia), “Maureen Whipple, Age 16, Takes a Train North” (Theric Jepson), “Little Karl” (Melissa Leilani Larson). I like stories that twist and probe the framework of perception.
What advice would you share with future submitters?
Write what you want to know. Write what you question. Write your truth honestly. More germanely for the contests, bear in mind that you’re submitting to an anthology. It’s not just about quality: it’s also about the fit between pieces, assembling a whole. A really good piece might not make the roster simply because something else completes the anthology better.
What’s an idea for a Lit Blitz project you’d love to see another writer take on, or an idea you’ve had but haven’t had time to develop?
Between 2012, when I first submitted to what is now the Mormon Lit Lab, and 2019, when I submitted my last successful entry, I went through some big faith changes. I am now what you might call “faith-adjacent” and “ethnic Mormon”: atheist, but retaining many of the values and virtues instilled or encouraged in me by the religion, and interested in issues of religious belief and practice for the individual and society. I’m sure a number of pieces I submitted after 2019 had the wrong tone vis-à-vis the faith. Frankly, I’m surprised “Separation”, my one and only regular Lit Blitz finalist, made the cut. I’ve always seen that piece as rather scathing. For me, it’s more a matter of wishing I had new story ideas that suited the Lit Lab better. I really cherished my involvement with the community and the contests.
How did you get into writing?
The compulsion to write fiction seems to have emerged with being able to write sentences. I have the vague idio-mythical notion that this happened in kindergarten, but (again idio-mythically) the ambition to write bubbled up in fifth grade.
What are a few of your biggest artistic influences?
Shakespeare. Dickens. Conan Doyle. London. Tolkien. Asimov. Clarke. Le Guin. Card.
What is the best advice you have received as a writer?
James Goldberg said something once about one of my stories breathing. I suspect that was a case of double duty: praise and advice. The challenge for me has always been fitting my stories into the Lit Lab’s word limits. It took me seven years to hone the ability to write something that worked in a thousand words or less. One of my odysseys continues to be developing a sense of room within the narrative for characters and audience to experience the story.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
I’m an idea writer. The process may begin with a character or scene, but ultimately, my stories are about ideas rather than milieux, characters, or even events. It can be hard to craft narratives that serve the audience as well as they serve my thoughts.
What draws you to writing Mormon lit? How does Mormon lit fit into your larger artistic identity?
I have always taken the religion seriously, even as an effective ex-mo. In my believing days, I wanted to write the great Mormon novel and fill the world with my faith. As I progressed in my side-bubble of the Lit Lab environment, I got into interrogating the faith. “The Defection of Baby Mixo” started as a flipping of the gay-kid-in-a-straight-family trope: what if a straight kid was raised in a gay family, but grew (in the Lit Lab to a small extent, but in my mind and in notebooks to a vast extent) into a deep probing and correction of my own prejudice and ignorance in matters of sexuality and gender. “Eyelight” expressed and explored my discontent with the Church’s revelatory apparatus, and “Separation” challenged the core doctrine of divided heavens. Since 2021, I’ve been working on a story about the ways the faith requires moral sacrifices.
How do you hope your work will impact your readers?
In confronting my concerns with the institution and its mytho-theology, I’ve developed an approach I call Critical Discipleship, which informs the fiction I envision and realize on the subject of faith. A major contribution I would like to make in life is to give people the tools to analyze and understand their religious experience and make informed decisions about their doubts and beliefs.
Tell us about a formative writing-related experience.
My first Lit Lab finalist (“Baby Mixo”) had a huge impact on me. It’s not the best or best-written of my stories, but it led to a big change in my thinking about a great many things.
What’s a passion you have outside writing?
I write songs: music and lyrics. I’ve played guitar fairly well for years and have been gradually learning keyboards. And I am falling deep into street-and-trail photography: gear, techniques, theory. Both of these pursuits provide fruitful analogies for storytelling.
What else have you been doing, whether in writing, other creative fields, or life?
I recently “retired” as a full-time teacher at the cram school I’ve taught at since 1998. I still teach there part-time as well as at a private industrial and commercial high school and a children’s cram school, but a lot of my energy right now is going into preparing to build a private teaching business focused on exam preparation (TOEIC, TOEFL, IELTS, SAT, and such). And at the children’s cram school, I’ve been writing short-short stories with Cloze and ordering tasks as listening exercises. I imagine that if I ever have a lucrative writing career, it will be in TESOL, applying my insights into balancing language processing and narrative processing along with the whimsical skill of generating a story from a set of target vocabulary items.
Thank you, Mark Penny, for sharing your insights with us for the Lit Blitz Hall of Fame!
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