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Johnny Townsend earned an MFA in fiction writing
from Louisiana State University. He has published stories and essays in
Newsday, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Humanist, The
Progressive, Christopher Street, The Massachusetts Review, Harrington
Gay Men's Literary Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought, Sunstone, and in the anthology In Our Lovely Desert:
Mormon Fictions. He has also spoken at the Sunstone symposium in Salt
Lake on the subject of gay Mormon literature.
Read
an interview
with Johnny Townsend
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"He
agreed on one level that showing promiscuity as normal and harmless was
in fact very harmful, but at the same time, she wondered if Joseph
Smith's legal promiscuity made him any less of a prophet. If what he
had done was completely righteous, why were Mormons shielded from the
information that some of Joseph's wives also had other husbands? It
seemed so often that the saints were fed milk, the Church afraid that
meat would be too overpowering for them. But they couldn't stay
children forever could they?"
Reviewed by A.J. Kirby
"The problem with a lot of Mormon writing is that the writers are
trying to prove some doctrinal point. The stories are vehicles for
proselytizing in one form or another (…). Mormon literature can never
be a mature art form till we focus on the humanity of our position, not
on our 'chosen' status." Johnny Townsend.
Johnny Townsend writes about the Mormon experience both from inside and outside the community. Zombies for Jesus
is a wooden horse of a collection, enabling the uninitiated (as well as
those with well-rooted Mormon family trees) inside this often closed
community and to meet some of the individuals within it, whilst at the
same time raising important questions regarding the nature of the faith.
At
face value, there is something willfully subversive about Townsend's
short fiction; even a brief perusal of the table of contents provides
the reader with brilliantly memorable story titles such as Noseless Lesbian Mothers, Hairdresser to the Gods, and, of course, Zombies for Jesus. And amongst his previous short story collections we've been treated to the daring and risky Dinosaur Perversion, The Circumcision of God and Sex Among the Saints (which
sounds like a Madonna music video). But Townsend's fiction is not an
all-out assault on Mormonism, nor is it satire. Sure, he engages the
shock-tactics, but perhaps, he suggests, shock tactics are what are
needed in order to rouse some of the zombies out there.
These
are stories about trying to reconcile, on the one side, the Mormon
tenets of Church duty, familial responsibility and conformity, and on
the other, individual will, the thirst for knowledge and freedom. Such
conflicts are not unique to Mormonism. They will be familiar to many
communities and religions throughout the world today. And by tackling
such weighty subject matter, Townsend's writing becomes more than just
Mormon writing; it becomes simply good writing.
In Zombies for Jesus,
many of the stories are interlinked, reflecting the community in which
they take place. We meet recurring characters and, in some cases,
characters who appear as minor roles in one story become the
protagonists in the next. Often these characters are the square pegs
who won't fit into the rigidly-defined round holes of the Mormon faith
(women, gay men, lesbians, adolescents). Those who speak out against
the doctrine, or who do not conform, are excommunicated, shunned. Even
speaking one's mind is frowned upon.
The title story Zombies for Jesus,
is an obvious example of this, and the zombie theme is actually a very
good one. In this story, the Mormons we meet are zombies for Jesus
because they are "brainwashed" into becoming "mindless sheep" in the
name of their faith, and yet at the same time, they are Jesus' zombies
because the Mormon faith promises them eternal life as gods:
"The
Church squashed people's souls, pretending to save them. It wasn't
unlike a voodoo priest 'rescuing' someone from the grave, only to force
them into slavery for the rest of their lives." This slavery is
something which Cliff, the protagonist, is struggling with. Cliff is
well-traveled and well-educated. He's been taught to strive for
intelligence and knowledge. And yet, despite the Church's motto - "the
glory of God is intelligence" - he finds that using his brains to ask
questions (effectively speaking off-message) is not encouraged.
According to the leaders, asking questions can turn people into "evil
monsters". And even when he does find the courage to ask, he's told
that the only answers he can expect are standard ones, "the same
answer(s) the leaders gave. Anything else was apostasy and was
unacceptable."
But despite everything he sacrifices in the name
of the Church, he still gets sacked from his job, something which he
can only believe (because of his incarnation as a "zombie") is
incontrovertible evidence that Jesus has deserted him:
"God took
you out in the desert and then abandoned you. He made you prophet and
then let you be murdered in jail. He ordered you to have a family and
then left you in misery with them for the rest of your life." And,
still as a zombie, he determines to go back home and kill the rest of
his family, making them martyrs (turning them zombie like him) and thus
guaranteeing them a place in the highest kingdom. But at the last, he
realises his mistake. Instead, he decides on a new plan. He starts off
by telling his kids they don't have to do all the things they sacrifice
in the name of the Mormon faith; suddenly they can watch R-rated
movies, they can swear. If they want, they don't have to attend
Seminary. And in his throwing off of his shackles, Cliff feels as
though he is "regaining consciousness after a coma." He is "coming back
to life after many years in the grave, and he felt good. This time,
though, there'd be no voodoo, no sorcerer to control his actions."
The
stories here range from the gently chiding to the angry, coffee-fueled
wake-up calls which Townsend believes the Mormon community deserve. And
yet they never stray into full-on attacks. They can be funny – Rick in Murderers of Old Men
being a case in point – horrific, and moving. But they never stray into
bitterness or zombie-like anti-Mormon sentiment. Townsend is on his own
mission. His mission to prove: "...we can write great literature, too,
by using our Mormonism to give color to our stories, to give
specificity to our stories. We need to tell the universal through the
particular." Through the particular and the peculiar, he achieves his
aim.
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