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PHYLLIS BARBER’S WRITING

Biographical and Cultural Background

Sometimes, I just avoid reading book covers. Mainly, because those covers are usually the reason why I pick a book off the shelf in a bookshop, or why I do not. Such whimsical and impulsive reasoning determines my choices more than I would like them to. Basically, if I feel the temptation to glance at the back cover to see the blurb of the writer’s life, it means that I am still hesitant about reading that book.

Sometimes though, I look at the back cover when I have already finished reading the book. On these occasions, the stimulus to look for that information about the writer has a totally different origin. Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger’s main character in The Catcher in the Rye, explains it quite well when he proposes a particular criterion to determine what he considers worthwhile literature: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it” (Salinger 16).

When I finished reading Barber’s How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, I closed the book and read the back cover for the first time. I felt like smiling, but I also felt disappointed. This is what it says:

Phyllis Barber, a freelance writer and professional pianist, is on the faculty of Vermont College’s MFA in Writing Program. Her published works include And the Desert Shall Blossom, The School of Love, and two books for children. She was a first prize winner in the novel and short story categories in the 1988 Utah Fine Arts Literary Competition.¹

How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir is the biographical account of Barber’s girlhood and adolescence. In addition, it is a good example of what it meant to be a Mormon in Las Vegas in the 1950s and 1960s. When I was done reading the book, I felt like I had come closer to Barber. I felt like I had heard all her little secrets and that she had sincerely confessed all of them directly to me. So, when I read this brief summary of her life on the back cover, I felt disappointed: just three lines summarizing a few achievements? Is that all you can tell me about my nosy-parker Rhythmette? Maybe I was looking for a phone number and that is why I felt disappointed.

Anyway, I did not despair but decided to make an inquiry in an organized manner, starting from the very beginning. The first adult book that Barber wrote, even though, prior to that, some of her short stories had been published in different magazines, was The School of Love in 1990. The School of Love is a collection of short stories. Each one of those thirteen stories contains a singular lesson in what love means. A wide array of loving possibilities will be developed in this collection. I turned my copy around to read the blurb:

Phyllis Barber holds a B.A. in music from San Jose University and the Goddard M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College. Born in Nevada, she has since 1970 lived mostly in Utah.

This biographical note happened to be even shorter than the first I read, but there are two main differences when comparing the two of them. To start with, there seemed to be no outstanding literary achievement—no prize, no award—when she published this book; so, first, I see the woman, then, the writer. I know that she holds degrees. I know that she studied music. I know that she moved from Nevada to Utah. Secondly, there is something else that I found in this book, but that I cannot quote: there is a photograph; a photograph where Barber smiles—laughs with all her heart, I envisage—and she wears a big, round earring and a colorful blouse—even if the picture is in black and white, I again envisage. My first glimpse turned out to be positive, not to say just poetically kaleidoscopic.

Continuing with this singular research plan, I turned to the two children’s books that she published in 1980 and 1991. The first one is Smiley Snake’s Adventure, and the second one, Legs: The Story of a Giraffe. Smiley Snake’s story was illustrated by Bob Reese, whereas the one about the orphaned giraffe—her second attempt at writing for children—was illustrated by Ann Bauman. In any case, there is no personal information about the author in any of these two books. Kids do not care about the personal life of a writer. They do not care about the writer at all. They do not think for a minute about who is writing or drawing or why. They only care about Imburugutu and Smiley Snake, and what they are doing, or where they are.

However, I did find a new biographical blurb on the flap of the dust jacket of the only novel that she has published, And the Desert Shall Blossom (1991). In this story, A.P. Watkins, vice President of one of the companies in charge of the construction of the Hoover Dam during the earlier 1930s, helps the Jensen family to find a job. The Jensens have been traveling a lot, and they are excited about this new opportunity. The novel is an accurate chronicle of the construction through the compassionate perspective of Esther Jensen and her family’s disintegration:

Phyllis Barber teaches in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program and serves on the editorial board for Weber Studies. She is the author of The School of Love and Legs: The Story of a Giraffe and her stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and have received mention in Pushcart Prize XIII and The Best of the West 3. Barber most recently received the Associated Writing Program Competition in Non-Fiction award for 1991. Raised in southern Nevada—Boulder City and Las Vegas—until the age of 21, she lived in Utah for twenty years and currently resides in Colorado with her husband and three sons.

Here again, I found a few more facts about her literary achievements. If I had read this account while picking the book off the shelf of a bookshop, I probably would have abandoned any hesitations that might still threaten to make me decide not to read the book. However, if I see this resume after I had read all her published books and articles—once I am looking for the phone number—I must underline a few important details. Probably, these details are not as visible or significant as that list of prizes. Her being a mother and her having been raised in Las Vegas and Boulder City are the two facts that I wanted to retain. I would even add a third one: that although she was raised in Nevada, she moved.

There were a couple more books to finish my accurate research. The next one I turned around to keep with my curious investigation was the collection of most of the short stories that, over a long period, she had published in magazines such as Sunstone or Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and which had helped her to get the attention and honors that she enjoys nowadays. Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination was published in 1999 by Signature Books:

Phyllis Barber is the author of six books, including her prize-winning memoir, How I Got Cultured, and a contributor to Fiction: Crosscurrents’ Best, Literary Las Vegas, Great and Peculiar Beauty: A Utah Reader, and other anthologies, and has been honored in Best of the West (vols. 3, 6) and Pushcart Prize XIII. She has received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters, the Associated Writing Programs (affiliated university departments), Sunstone, and the Utah Arts Council. She is co-founder of the annual Park City Writers at Work Conference. Currently she teaches the MFA in Writing Program, Vermont College.

I did not find anything new. Following the line of her previously published books, in this account I found a list of her literary merits and a concise annotation on her work as a college professor.

When this book was taking shape and I had already forgotten my research on biographical accounts, Raw Edges: A Memoir was published. With reluctance and torpor, I went to see this new and last blurb. This time was short and succinct:

Phyllis Barber is the award-winning author of seven books, including an earlier memoir, How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing Program and lives in Denver. She was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2005.

Raw Edges chronicles the years after, before and during Barber’s first marriage, based upon the axis of a trip on bicycle across the United States. It opens with an introduction, in which Barber talks with delicacy and vulnerability about the beauty of risk in connection with her identity as a woman and wife, but also concerning her communion with God, music, words, family or landscape. Barber explains that she is embarking into the telling of her “seven lean years of being lost” (Raw 3). She recognizes her need for understanding “if not by no one else but myself” (Raw 2). When I was turning back the page after reading the blurb, I came across a sentence that attracted my attention: “she had to redefine herself as a woman, mother and artist.” I realized then that those “raw edges” would tell me more than any possible account summarizing her life.

I came to the end of my research, after reading all the biographical accounts on the back of Barber’s published works, and, even though it is obviously just a metaphor—and not really what I was looking for—I did not find her phone number. I could not answer any of those questions that sometimes come to your mind after—or while—you are reading a book; those questions that Jarold Ramsey calls “speculations” or “the irresistible imaginative consequence of all stories” (130). It would not be difficult to find a few more facts about her life simply by typing her name in an Internet search engine. Finding an author’s biography is that easy in these days of information technology and worldwide website networks. Having taken advantage of this, let me summarize Barber’s life and literary career.

Barber was born in the Rose de Lima Hospital in Basic Townsite, present day Henderson, Nevada, but she was raised in Boulder City and Las Vegas. She holds a degree in music from San Jose State College, and she is a professional classical pianist, having performed several concerts and recitals. Later, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Vermont College (1984), where she taught in the Writing Program from 1990 to present day.² She taught as a Visiting Writer at the University of Missouri in Columbia during the spring of 1994 as well. Co-founder of the Writers at Work Conference in Park City, Utah, she also served on many different writing competitions, and she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in October 2005.

Not only has she been successful in her careers as a musician and as a professor, but also as a writer, as can be seen from the numerous prizes that she has received. She has published seven books: the autobiography, How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (1994); the two collections of short stories, The School of Love (1990) and Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination (1999); her only published novel And the Desert Shall Blossom (1991); and the two books for children, Legs: the Story of a Giraffe (1991), and Smiley Snake’s Adventure (1980). Raw Edges: A Memoir (2009), her second autobiography, is the most recent one. It was released ten years after her last piece of fiction was published; Foreword Review listed it as one of the Outstanding University Press Books of 2010.

Among the prizes that she holds, some were received for her short stories; others were for excerpts from her memoir. These include a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XIII (1988) for “Wild Sage”; Distinguished Western Story Mention in Best of the West 6 for “At the Talent Show” and in Best of the West 3 for “Criminal Justice.” She also received first prize in the Utah Fine Arts Literary Competition for this same short story. “Mormon Levis,” another short story from her collection Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, was awarded by the Sunstone Brookie and D.K. Brown Memorial Fiction Competition in 1997, but, four years before, “The Fiddler and the Wolf” and “Ida’s Sabbath” were awarded with a second prize in this same competition. She has been anthologized in Crosscurrents’ Best Fiction Anthology (1994) thanks to her prize winning short story “Criminal Justice,” and in some other anthologies with different short stories: A Great and Peculiar Beauty: a Utah Reader (1995), Walking the Twilight II: Women Writers of the Southwest (1996), In Our Lovely Deseret (1998), or The River Underground: An Anthology of Nevada Fiction (2001). Barber is listed in Cheryl Glotfelty’s literary anthology of the state of Nevada, Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (2008). Other excerpts from her much awarded memoir can be found in various anthologies, including Fourth Genre (1999); Literary Las Vegas: The Best Writing about America’s Most Fabulous City (1995), and Frame Work: Culture, Storytelling and College Writing (1997). In fact, her first memoir has been widely praised as a whole. It was awarded with the Associated Writing Program Award Series Prize in Creative Non-fiction in 1991; the Association for Mormon Letters Award in autobiography two years later. In 2012, TheBrowser.com cited this autobiography as one of the top five books written about Las Vegas, and, in 2001, Las Vegas Mercury awarded the same recognition to this book. The novel And the Desert Shall Blossom was also honored in the Utah Fine Arts Literary Competition, and was chosen by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities for The Book Group Library Sciences. More recently, “Sweetgrass” was selected as “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2010 by upstreet five; and “At the Cannery,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2009, was the winner of the Eugene England Memorial Essay Award, Best of Dialogue Award for Essay in that same year.³

After considering all these personal details—dates and accomplishments—I still feel like asking a question that sounds like a sigh: are all these facts and dates the information I need to understand Barber’s literary production?

Everything I came to know by reading the covers of Barber’s books seems misleading to me—like a trap. That is why I wanted to enumerate all of them, before focusing on what I consider more relevant in regard to an author whose contribution to the history of literature relies on a daring commitment to the freedom of expression—“I want to speak what I speak, not what someone else tells me I should speak” (Barber, Mormon 109)—and faith in the healing power of creativity—“I want to be brave enough to stand naked in the snow, to live on if someone laughs, ridicules, or says I know nothing” (Barber, Mormon 110). It seems dangerous and counterproductive to reduce Barber’s significance to a few literary achievements when I am dealing with a body of work that is based on a personal trust in and a consistent commitment to the power of imagination and creativity—“creativity implies freshness, new life, new possibilities” (Barber, Rewriting 4).

In her article “The Mormon Woman as a Writer”—published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1990—Barber explains how she embraces the challenge of writing. She trusts writing, but she is also aware of the dangers, the risks and responsibilities that she has to consider when starting this journey. She wants to find answers to the many questions that she needs to ask. Writing becomes a way to raise questions rather than provide answers. Through literature she is able to break the sculpture, to unmask herself:

Subterraneously, like a blind reptile in a tunnel, I decided to dismantle the idealized sculpture, gather the disparate parts of myself together again, and find my voice—not an imitation or an echo. Against my better judgement, I began to write, a dangerous thing to do. Words were unreliable. People can pick words apart and throw them back with fingerprints on them. I felt nervous. Maybe I should dance, sing, play the piano, or write innocent children’s stories. Maybe I could speak most eloquently by not speaking at all. But the pen was in my hand. (Barber, Mormon 109)

In “On Rewriting and Practicing the Piano”—published in Weber Studies in 1989—Barber explains why she writes. She confesses the source of her compulsion to write. This appears as a fundamental clue to understand the nature of her style and the themes that she peruses:

Once while I was wandering through my life, I had a need to say something. I’m not sure where this something came from, but opinions and observations grew on the interior walls of my mind like lichen, growing into some kind of personal vision that wanted out.” (Barber, Rewriting 1)

In the next paragraph, she explains how, at first, she tried to relieve this need through music: “My first attempt at expressing this vision in something other than conversation was through music, namely the piano” (Barber, Rewriting 1). A few lines later, she explains that the piano was insufficient in order to achieve her goals, so she had to find something else: “After trying music as a vehicle for expressing my vision, I decided I wanted a medium that would last longer than the vibration of a string. I wanted to use words that would stay on paper and not fade away like sound” (Barber, Rewriting 1).

Accordingly, it becomes clear that Barber attempts to express herself through her writing. An analysis of her work must go beyond the fact that it won—or did not win—awards and prizes. The fact that she has been widely acclaimed is certainly noteworthy, but the meaning of her many successful achievements has to be analyzed from a subjective perspective. By a subjective perspective, I mean that the importance of the recognition awarded her work must be evaluated from within Mormon context, with special regard to her identity as woman and mother. The search for relevance and recognition has a meaning beyond any selfish or factual connotation. All those awards and prizes should be interpreted as a means of empowerment and a source of self-esteem. They mean visibility. Barber herself admits that desire for publicity when she writes:

In my experience, the LDS woman is not encouraged to excel in one area alone. Balance is the more important quality. Excelling in one area is somehow antibalance.

Knowing how to do many things adequately seems to be the sanctioned criteria because, after all, a mother (the most praised role of the LDS woman) needs to be able to perform in all situations—nurse, comforter, baker, canner, secretary, cook, scriptorian, manager. Writing is a selfish act.

And if, by some monumental good fortune, I succeed at writing, I mustn’t be too visible. If my husband is not successful at his business, I can’t be successful at mine. (Barber, Mormon 116)

As I will try to show when analyzing her fiction, those awards that I found listed in the back covers of her books become really valuable and meaningful when the role of women in a Mormon context is considered. Although she was referring specifically to How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, Laura L. Bush appears to share this idea when she states that “Barber’s writing achievement exemplifies just such an unmasking of desire and rightfully earns her the public recognition that she always sought” (Faithful 192).

Maybe that is why, when I read about all those awards in the first account published in the back cover of her first autobiography, I felt relieved. I came to feel closer to Phyllis Nelson⁴ and her longing for visibility and recognition, so it was a relief to read that she became such a successful writer. Her voice, in addition, was echoing the voices of previous women engaging in the act of writing: “that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them” (Woolf 58).

Nevertheless, I also felt disappointed. Not because I could not find her phone number, but because it could be dangerous to summarize her life and literary career in a cold list of achievements that lost its real meaning when presented in an emotionless inventory. By failing to take into account other important details that explain the value of her writing, the importance of those awards could be minimized or even misunderstood.

Therefore, I believe that the truly appropriate and useful facts about Barber’s life in order to implement a thorough analysis of her work were only briefly mentioned on the inside jacket of her novel: that she is a mother and that she was raised in Las Vegas and Boulder City but then moved. The fact that she was raised in those two places, together with the fact that she was a mother, are two of the relevant facts garnered from the biographical information provided on her books. Motherhood (or, in a wider sense, gender) is very important to understand the meaning of Barber’s fiction. Place (especially departing from a place) is also an important aspect of her writing.

Two other important components for my analysis of Barber’s work are also inferred from the information given in her biographical blurbs. Firstly, the only detail which two of these accounts include: that she is a musician; that, apart from being a writer, she is also a pianist. Secondly, something that goes unnoticed, but is tacitly present in all these accounts; a fourth feature that interacts with the other three in order to make Barber’s literature even richer and more complex: that she was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Art, on the one hand, and religion on the other; plus gender and place. These four topics constitute the pillars of this research: gender (motherhood), place (Nevada), religion (Mormonism) and art (music). My aim is to develop them in order to attain a complete analysis of Barber’s work. These four pillars are those that Terry Tempest Williams calls “biases” or “lenses”: “gender, geography, and culture” (Austin, Voice 68); Mormonism as “one of the lenses I see the world through” (Austin, Voice 155). They—whether it is called biases or lenses—imply coming from the inside to the outside. These terms do not symbolize a set of rules imposed from the outside, but a set of beliefs and cultural values adopted and accepted that shape her perception of the world.

All four of them interact in her work. They can be said to be the cause and the consequence of her involvement in the world of writing—“a dangerous thing to do” (Barber, Mormon 109). Gender, place, religion and art are extremely useful in the analysis of her autobiographical works, How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir and Raw Edges: A Memoir. But all four of them can also be found in the depiction of many of her fictional characters or the building of her creative landscapes. These four elements, therefore, facilitate a thorough analysis of Barber’s involvement in professional writing—her motivations and interests. They also are essential for establishing a proper method of analysis to approach her fiction.

In fact, real life and fiction are often blurred in writing, and that is definitely true of Barber’s work. This characteristic of her work is totally predictable, after reading how she understands the act of writing. Her conception of writing eradicates the distinction between real life and fiction, connecting them both in a close relationship: “Writing is only a way I’ve chosen, my pick and shovel as I dig out my life and make shapes of it” (Barber, Mormon 109). How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir transcends the conventional definition of memoir—if one should understand this genre as a chronological life history either presented from the beginning to the end or as a fragmented array of essays. Barber’s would fit in the second, but her serialized sections are neither essays nor even pieces that followed a clear line, they are short pieces of biographical material, dressed with the attributes of fiction, structured with the measure of a short story, and with a nature of themselves—an independence of coherent meaning and emotion that makes them have an internal connection. In fact, one of the sketches in which she divided her first autobiography, “Oh, Say, Can You See?,” was first published as a piece of fiction in The School of Love. Likewise, in “The Practice of Simple Faith,” Barber shows part of the body of feelings from which the character of Esther Jensen in And the Desert Shall Blossom was born, even if she is talking about herself: “One of my greatest stumbling blocks in the marriage was my inability to face, literally, the truth of my situation. I held onto the ideal as if it were a life boat and couldn’t see that we’d been stuck for years, locked in a grid and unable to shift from our positions. Something needs to change” (Barber, Mormonism 17).⁵

As it happens with How I Got Cultured, Raw Edges does also alter the conventional definition of memoir. Elizabeth Breau states that this autobiography symbolizes “Barber’s earnest efforts to accept the beliefs of the original tenets of Mormonism is testament to her belief in her marriage vows” (Breau 1). Marriages are a fundamental tenet of Mormonism. They are central to family and family, as Howard Hunter states, is “the most important unit in time and in eternity” (51). Boyd K. Packer adds that “the family is safe within the Church” (22). In Raw Edges, Barber offers an openhearted account of her failure. However, before publishing Raw Edges, Barber published “Body Blue: Excerpts from a Novoir” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2003—a little sample of what was to come in Raw Edges. In a footnote reference, Barber tells about her marriage to David Barber, which will be portrayed in Raw Edges: “This is not a ‘kiss and tell’ or ‘here comes the judge’ account, but rather a recognition that there are many whose idealism gets caught beneath the intersecting wheels of Mormonism and of contemporary life” (Barber, Body 68). The book can be approached as a study on marriage—a failing marriage

These examples illustrate the close connection between Barber’s life and her fiction. In her literary production, real life and fiction blend and mingle as if only a thin veil separates heaven and earth, reality and imagination, life and literature. Thus, the four elements that I selected from her biography are justified as proper features to exercise my analysis. Moreover, in her fiction, I also find evidence that these four ideas are pertinent to evaluate Barber’s contribution to the literary world.

It would be appropriate, before I start with my analysis, to situate Barber’s work within Mormon literary tradition. Scholars such as Eugene England and William Mulder have placed Barber together with other contemporary Mormon writers: Linda Sillitoe, Michael Fillerup, John Bennion or Douglas Thayer. All of them write fiction under the label “New Mormon Fiction” (England, Tending xxvi). Scholars indicate interest in the work of these writers because they use unorthodox themes, characters and styles; they explore new fictional realms; they write without any complexes or restrictions but, at the same time, their writing is not alien to the expectations of faithful Mormon readers. They approach Mormonism in new ways. Barber and the other members of this so-called “New Mormon Fiction” generation are trying to blur the borders. They write from inside Mormonism but attempting to make their writing understandable—and appealing—to outsiders; at the same time, they dodge the risk to be perceived as unfamiliar—and disloyal—to insiders.

Eric A. Eliason proposes a different label: Mormon Magical Realism. He is talking about a group of contemporary writers in which he includes the work by Margaret Blair Young, Orson Scott Card, Levi S. Peterson and Barber (Eliason 40-45). Eliason states that Barber fictionalizes Mormon vision of the “mundane world” and “the world of visions and spirits” (Eliason 40-45) as one. He says that “most of the stories that are not fantastic at face value at least leave the reader wondering at the reality of strange visions and touched by their haunting presence” (Eliason 40-45). My interpretation of Barber’s technique and intention when dealing with this world of vision and spirits is different from Eliason’s. When he says that “Mormon magical realism allows for the reality of sacred experience and the possibility of bumping into beings of light” (Eliason 40-45), I agree with him, but I perceive a complexity that, as I explain in my analysis of Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, opens up a broad range of possible interpretations.

There has always been a tendency to classify Mormon literature in two isolated categories, depending on its mission or appeal. In my introduction to Mormon literature, I explain the opposing definitions that some Mormon scholars employ to establish two different lines in Mormon literature. Lavina Fielding Anderson follows the same tendency to establish her own classification of Mormon literature. She outlines a definition that follows a long tradition and classifies Margaret Blair Young, Linda Sillitoe and Barber within that frame. Specifically talking about Barber, Anderson considers that the category in which she could be included is the one she labels insider/outsider—a category that, in Anderson’s words, requires “the trickiest balance, the most demanding standards and the highest stakes” (Masks 1). Anderson’s analysis of Barber’s fiction concludes that she fits into this category due to her ability to appeal to different audiences. Even though Anderson states that And the Desert Shall Blossom “shows Barber as a gifted interpreter of Mormonism as an insider, as someone for whom the signs, symbols, and shibboleths of Mormonism make a fabric of wholeness and coherence” (Masks 1), she also says that “most of Phyllis Barber’s short stories that she published in The School of Love are not explicitly Mormon. Most of them are experimental, highly impressionistic, symbols, dreams, and fragments of nightmares” (Masks 1).

Barber embraces this challenge to be spiritual and experiential, to address Mormons and non-Mormons. She departs from Las Vegas and the Mormon ward⁶ to walk far—and observe, experience and learn—but always with “a stitch on my side” (Precarious 120), always aware of the place she departed from. This movement helps me to detect the meaningful information that I need to understand Barber’s fiction. As Denis Cosgrove and Mona Domosh say, “when we write our geographies we are not just representing some reality, we are creating meaning” (35).

Barber deals with Mormon themes without avoiding the attributes of postmodernism and the wide range of possibilities that literature gives her. Barber admits the influence of having been a student of François Camoin at the University of Utah, and she confesses her taste for postmodern techniques: “I like to explore time warps, the edges of sanity, impressionism, experimental language, oblique approaches to the subject of humanity” (Barber, Mormon 118). She applies properties of modern literature to her work, while never becoming separated from her origins: she can deal with Mormon ideas—or develop Mormon stories—but always playing with irony, perspective, chronology, symbolism, structure, and many other techniques that help her literature attain a postmodernist flair. She multiplies meanings. She avoids resorting to stereotypes or providing conclusive endings. The use of those devices is basically secondary though. It would be too shallow to try to analyze irony, perspective, chronology, and fragmentation in Barber only to achieve the purpose of fitting her fiction within the frame of postmodern literature. Those devices are consequences rather than primary resources.

Postmodernism in Barber, rather than a set of literary devices, is a personal commitment that opens a wider approach to Mormonism: “a mixture of doubt and belief, transgression and faith” (Bush, Faithful 192). This position is rather ideological, and it needs to be separated from the technical fragmentation—the elusiveness—of her linear structure; the play with tenses; the irony, and the changes on perspective that she uses to make more complex her narrative. Barber, like many other writers, proposes a different picture of Mormonism, a contemporary picture in which urban, complex and modern conflicts play an important role in the plot, and in the construction of the fictional characters. This, as Elizabeth Breau explains in her recent review of Raw Edges, propels Barber into a wider audience: “her empathy and ability to articulate the emotions of divorce, loss, and struggle render her more than simply a regional or Mormon author, but an author of national scope” (1).

Besides, one of Barber’s most valuable attributes is her integrity and bravery when applying on the page her highly committed and frank conception of literature. She is a writer who disagrees with conclusive divisions, who has a taste for “no easy blacks and whites” (Barber, Mormon 109). Barber challenges dichotomies such as good versus evil—black versus white—so ordinary in religious belief. In her fiction, there usually is no resolution or closure—Barber’s books have no closing end; the reader is left with more questions than answers. In her review of Darrell Spencer’s CAUTION: Men in Trees, Barber recognizes her own philosophy: “Spencer is an excellent commentator on the pop-eyed condition of contemporary life, which, after all, is too diverse to reduce to any one explanation” (CAUTION 191). The same criterion applies to her work.

Barber is aware of the possible response that certain perspectives can motivate among some Mormons. Her resolution to dwell in a middle ground, embracing risk and hesitation—questioning and discovery—is a potential source for rejection. When talking about Levi Peterson and his famous novel The Backslider, Barber states: “These writers need to remember that making any choice includes the price of admission: there’s a price / prize for belonging and remaining safe; there’s a price / prize for living at the edge” (Mormon 113). In this quotation, she appears to be talking to herself, rather than advising Peterson. Barber is subtly referring to the imbalance between the praise she received and the price she paid. Behind those words, I sense how she is trying to negotiate the disturbing acceptance of her professional success—but also of her failure.

Karl Keller explains in “On Words and the Word of God” how literature is “essentially anarchic, rebellious, shocking, analytical, critical, deviant, absurd, subversive, destructive” (On 20). Keller is highly pessimistic and critical of any connection between religion and literature: “literature is seldom written, and can be seldom written, in the service of religion” (On 17). I believe that he could have changed his mind by reading Barber. Barber has dwelled—and wandered—in that place that Robert Raleigh describes in his introduction to In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions:

Like any religious culture, however, there are those who live near that warm, beating heart, those who reside in the vicinity of the brain, and those who live somewhere farther out on the periphery, closer to the hard, sharp edges of the world. This collection of stories is mostly about people who live somewhere nearer the periphery of the “body of Christ”—people who can’t or won’t quite fit into a culture where fitting is one of the highest values. (Raleigh vii)

Barber has dwelled—and wandered—in that “periphery”—in and out of it, crossing, bridging, suffering borders—boundaries, edges, raw edges. Then, she has translated her experience into words. Her characters dwell—and wander—in that spaced and unspaced periphery that she has turned into literary landscapes. Barber departs from her Mormon community to arrive at the infinite world. In that periphery, phones are out of range. I could not have phoned her, anyway. I did not find her number in any of those blurbs, but I found some other ways to connect. The following analysis of her literature tries to explain how to get in touch with her.

¹ This and the following five quotations are on the back covers of the books published by Phyllis Barber so far. Information about these quotations can be found in the bibliography.

² Barber recently retired, but she still takes part in different workshops and lectures.

³ More information about her professional achievements can be found at phyllisbarber.squarespace.com

⁴ In the different sections of this book, I use the expression “young Phyllis” or “young Phyllis Nelson” to refer to Barber’s self-representation in How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. In my analysis, I explain why I consider necessary to make this distinction.

⁵ I perceive here the boiling brew for her fictional Esther Jensen in the novel. In an interview for Iddie, Barber states that Esther Jensen is “based on my paternal grandmother whom I never knew, and I imagined her from family stories I’d overheard as a child” (Phyllis 1).

⁶ In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a ward is the larger of two types of local congregations (the smaller being a branch). A ward is presided over by a bishop, the equivalent of a pastor in other religions.