Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: It Needs to Look Like We Tried
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/17/1969
WEBSITE: https://www.toddrobertpetersen.com/
CITY: Cedar City
STATE: UT
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
http://www.toddpetersen.org/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | nr2002041378 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/nr2002041378 |
| HEADING: | Petersen, Todd Robert |
| 000 | 00791cz a2200145n 450 |
| 001 | 5804389 |
| 005 | 20171107144809.0 |
| 008 | 021108n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a nr2002041378 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca05913735 |
| 040 | __ |a UPB |b eng |c UPB |d UPB |e rda |d DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3616.E84263 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Petersen, Todd Robert |
| 670 | __ |a Sunstone, July 2002: |b p. 48 (Todd Robert Petersen) |
| 670 | __ |a It needs to look like we tried, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Todd Robert Petersen) data view (lives in Cedar City, Utah with his wife and three children. He is a Professor of English and the director of Southern Utah University’s project-based learning program. Petersen is the author of two books published locally: Long After Dark (2007) and Rift (2009). His recent academic work focuses on film and television) |
PERSONAL
Born August 17, 1969, in Moses Lake, WA; married; children: three.
EDUCATION:University of Oregon, bachelor’s degree; Northern Arizona University, M.A., 1996; Oklahoma State University, Ph.D., 2001.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. YMCA of Greater Seattle, WA, assistant program director, 1991-94; Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, instructor, assistant composition director, managing and project editor of Cimmeron Review; Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT, professor, 2001-13, director of project-based learning program, 2014—; editor of the Sugarbeet, 2002-05. Previously, worked at a camp in the San Juan Islands, WA, at a YMCA summer camp in OR, at a day care in Seattle, and as a bank cleaner in Seattle.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Todd Robert Petersen is a writer and educator based in Cedar City, Utah. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon, a master’s degree from Northern Arizona University, and a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University. From 1991 to 1994, he worked for the YMCA of Greater Seattle. While he was earning his Ph.D., Peterson taught at Oklahoma State University. He also served as an assistant composition director and managing and project editor of the university’s publications, Cimmeron Review. In 2001, he joined Southern Utah University, where he worked as professor until 2013. Petersen wen on to direct the school’s project-based learning program.
Long After Dark
Long After Dark, Petersen’s first book, is a collection of stories and a novella. Protagonists in the stories are Mormons dealing with faith and daily life.
The volume is in a genre called Mormon fiction. In an interview with Laura Craner, contributor to the Motely Vision website, Peterson stated: “For me the problem in Mormon writing is that Mormons as a group are so disinclined towards conflict. … What I tried to do was write a book with real stuff from the real world in it, then I tried to match it with some sense that somewhere down the line everything is going to be okay, maybe not now, but someday. That feels more like the world I live in. In a perfect world where nothing goes really wrong, we wouldn’t need Jesus, and I’m not sure I want to write about a world that doesn’t need saving.”
Rift
Rift, a novel, tells the story of a Mormon man named Jens Thorsen, who lives in Sanpete, Utah. Though he tirelessly serves the less fortunate in his community, he still harbors bad feelings toward a fellow-churchgoer named Darrell Bunker.
In the same interview with Craner, contributor to the Motely Vision website, Petersen explained: “It’s been a long project for me. I started it in the fall of 2001, when I first got to Utah. I took the main character, Jens Thorsen, from a few short stories I’d written about this crotchety old Mormon guy—he appears in the opening story in Long After Dark. I wrote two more and figured that I wasn’t done with this guy, or that he wasn’t done with me.” Petersen continued: “I took a few trips from Cedar to Sanpete County, where the book is set, and the place really captivated me. My wife has a lot of family there, in Manti and Spring City. It seems like a place frozen in time, which captured my imagination.”
It Needs to Look Like We Tried
It Needs to Look Like We Tried, released in 2018, is actually a collection of linked short stories. Among the characters who appears in multiple stories is a down-and-out yet fearsome veteran named Condit. He clashes with a real estate agent showing his home, which is being foreclosed on. Condit’s sister-in-law is cheating on his brother with a reality television star. A story called “Providence” finds a deaf teen named Eric attempting to rise above his humble roots by working for meth cooks in Oklahoma. “The Impeccable Drive” tells of a young man who hits a dog while driving to his father’s wedding.
In an interview with a contributor to the Counterpoint Press website, Petersen discussed the origins of the volume. He noted that Nat Sobel, a literary agent, received manuscripts of a short story collection of his. Petersen stated: “Nat passed on the collection but praised one story for its dark humor and quirky tone. He suggested that it could serve as the centerpiece of a new work, perhaps a novel in stories. So, that rejection letter was the real starting point for It Needs To Look Like We Tried.” Petersen added: “That initial story was about a man who hits a dog while driving through the desert to his father’s wedding. This one came to my while I was driving some state highways between Arizona and Los Angeles.” Petersen told a writer on the Arizona Daily Sun website: “When I was looking for a way to create connective tissue for the different storylines in this book, the idea of home evolved from a sideline to something much more central. I wanted to be able to use the book to help me see home from many different perspectives. Television has really done a number on our sense of what a home should be and look like, and I wanted to explore that as well. After writing this book, I can’t watch home shows anymore. It broke me.” Petersen added: “A lot of this book takes on the idea of the geographical cure: if you’ve got trouble here, try somewhere else. This is another way I tried to think about the mythology of home.”
A Publishers Weekly reviewer asserted: “Petersen’s stories sing with wise-cracking … irresistible characters who make the best of a world filled with corruption and deception.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “an engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of It Needs to Look Like We Tried.
Publishers Weekly, March 26, 2018, review of It Needs to Look Like We Tried, p. 92.
ONLINE
Arizona Daily Sun Online, https://azdailysun.com/ (June 24, 2018), author interview.
Counterpoint Press website, http://www.counterpointpress.com/ (June 24, 2018), author interview.
Motely Vision, https://motleyvision.org/ (August 6, 2009), Laura Craner, author interview.
Todd Petersen website, http://www.toddpetersen.org/ (July 6, 2018).
Todd Robert Petersen website, https://www.toddrobertpetersen.com/ (July 6, 2018).
I was born at the close of the 60s in Moses Lake, Washington, about a month after the moon landing. While my mother was pregnant with me, she watched Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon. When I was older, she told me on that day she patted her belly and said to the television, "I'd like to see you make one of these."
buzz-aldrin.jpg
We lived out there in Eastern Washington until I was a year and a half old, when my father's work as a tractor salesman took us to Portland, Oregon, which is where I grew up. After making it through the 70s and most of the 80s, I graduated from Jesuit High School and moved on to the University of Oregon.
I was planning to be an graphic designer or illustrator. A year earlier, I actually took a copy of my portfolio to the Marvel Offices in New York, and after a long silence, I decided to study film. While I was at the U of O, I began writing seriously for the first time, and by graduation, I'd decided against a career in film.
College wasn't a complete wash. Near the end of a Shakespeare seminar, my professor recommended I read some Raymond Chandler. On a trip home for Thanksgiving, I went to Powell's books to follow through on his recommendation, but I had forgotten the name of the recommendation. When I asked for help, I said, "I'm looking for a book by a writer named Raymond Something-That-Starts-With-C."
The guy squinted at me for a minute and said, "Must be Raymond Carver. He's awesome." He led me through the shelves, and I bought a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which had just come out. Once I read that book, an idea about becoming a writer began to form.
Photo by Chris Connelly. (cropped) Some rights reserved
My first real job in was working a YMCA Summer Camp in Oregon, and I continued to do that kind of thing all the way through high school and college. After college, I moved on to a camp in the San Juan Islands, and began working for them year round, teaching environmental education to middle school kids. In the islands, I began reading seriously, everything from Steven Millhauser to Cormac McCarthy to Annie Dillard. In the evenings when the campers were sleeping, I would go to the camp office and write. There was nine month period in there, when I lived in Seattle, worked for a day care, and cleaned banks. At night after I'd finished cleaning, I'd sit down at the typewriters in the drive through window and write until midnight.
When faced with the choice of full time, long-term employment with the San Diego YMCA or graduate school, I chose the latter, which took me to Flagstaff, Arizona for an MA in English and onto Stillwater, Oklahoma for PhD in English where I studied with Brian Evenson. For some reason that I can't fully fathom, I also focused a portion of my doctoral studies on critical theory. You know, Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and all that philosophy of literature stuff. Seems like a weird move for a guy who got a D in metaphysics.
After graduate school a fantastic opportunity arose for me and my wife to move to Cedar City, Utah, where I would teach at Southern Utah University. We fell in love the the place and stayed. I started by teaching composition, then added courses in creative writing, literary theory. I also developed new courses in the theory of visual narratives (graphic novels and experimental film), contemporary literature, screen aesthetics, along with a general education course science fiction.
In 2010, because of my YMCA experience, I was asked to participate in the development of an experiential learning initiative, which became a university requirement for all students. I'm now the director of that program, and I get to coach some pretty amazing students through the creation and documentation of their own projects.
Short Bio
Todd Robert Petersen lives in Cedar City, Utah with his wife and three children. He is a Professor of English and the director of Southern Utah University's project-based learning program. Petersen is the author of two books published locally: Long After Dark (2007) and Rift (2009). His recent academic work focuses on film and television.
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Long Bio
Todd Robert Petersen grew up in Portland, Oregon. His undergraduate degree is in Film from the University of Oregon. After college he moved to Orcas Island in the Puget Sound and worked for the YMCA of Seattle at Camp Orkila. In the summers he worked for camping services, in the fall and spring he was an assistant program director for the Outdoor Environmental Education program, in charge of the college intern program and the director of curriculum.
From there, Petersen moved to Flagstaff, Arizona and earned an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University. During that time, he was one of two assistant directors of the campus tutoring center. He was also one of the founders of Thin Air, the NAU English Department's literary magazine. From Flagstaff, Petersen moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma to pursue a PhD in English, where he studied with Brian Evenson. while there he taught composition, held a post as one of five Assistant Composition Directors, and was the Managing and Production Editor of the Cimmeron Review.
Petersen's PhD is in English with an emphasis in Fictional Rhetoric and Critical Theory. From 2001-2013 Petersen taught in the English Department at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. Currently, he is SUU's director of Project-Based Learning.
Todd Robert Petersen has published two books of fiction, and a number of short stories, essays, and poems. Information on those publications can be found elsewhere on this website.
Todd Petersen
Director of Project-Based Learning at Southern Utah University
Cedar City, Utah
Southern Utah University
Oklahoma State University Oklahoma State University
See contact info
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See connections (445)
445 connections
I am passionate about informal learning, the arts, and community building.
Highlights
Experience
Southern Utah University
Director of Project-Based Learning
Company Name Southern Utah University
Dates Employed Jan 2014 – Present Employment Duration 4 yrs 6 mos
Location Cedar City, Utah
I coordinate a campus-wide program in project-based learning. It is called the EDGE Program, and it requires all students to complete a project of their own design.
Southern Utah University
Associate Professor of English
Company Name Southern Utah University
Dates Employed 2000 – Jun 2014 Employment Duration 14 yrs
I teach creative writing and visual studies at a great undergraduate university in Southern Utah. I also work with Honors program teaching courses and developing a new program in partnership with the National Parks Service. It is called Partners in the Parks.
The Sugarbeet
Editor
Company Name The Sugarbeet
Dates Employed 2002 – 2005 Employment Duration 3 yrs
I was a founding editor, webmaster, writer, and designer for this humor and satire website about Utah and Mormon culture.
YMCA of Greater Seattle
Assistant Program Director
Company Name YMCA of Greater Seattle
Dates Employed 1991 – 1994 Employment Duration 3 yrs
I was in charge of curriculum development and university interns for an outdoor environmental education center located on Orcas Island in the Boundary Waters of the Puget Sound.
Education
Oklahoma State University
Oklahoma State University
Degree Name PhD
Field Of Study English
Dates attended or expected graduation 1996 – 2001
Activities and Societies: AWP
I focused in creative writing and critical theory.
Northern Arizona University
Northern Arizona University
Degree Name Master of Arts (M.A.)
Field Of Study Creative Writing
Dates attended or expected graduation 1994 – 1996
Activities and Societies: Started the literary magazine Thin Air
Volunteer Experience
Cedar City Library
Board of Directors
Company Name Cedar City Library
Dates volunteered 2005 – 2007 Volunteer duration 2 yrs
Cause Arts and Culture
I was both a board member one term and chaired the board for another term. We met regularly to assist in the library's policy review, program development, and general advocacy and support for the library and its literacy programs.
Skills & Endorsements
Teaching
See 49 endorsements for Teaching 49
Endorsed by Aaron Eden and 5 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 27 of Todd’s colleagues at Southern Utah University
Creative Writing
See 46 endorsements for Creative Writing 46
Endorsed by Robin Metz and 3 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 24 of Todd’s colleagues at Southern Utah University
Public Speaking
See 33 endorsements for Public Speaking 33
Endorsed by Stuart Bunker and 4 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 20 of Todd’s colleagues at Southern Utah University
Accomplishments
Todd has 2 publications 2
Publications
Long After Dark Rift
Todd has 1 certification 1
Certification
Storytelling for Influence
Todd has 1 honor 1
Honor & Award
Outstanding Experiential Education Program of the Year
Todd has 1 language 1
Language
Svorka.
Interests
National Society for Experiential Education
National Society for Experiential Education
1,129 members
Southern Utah University
Southern Utah University
25,580 followers
Northern Arizona University
Northern Arizona University
107,864 followers
Oklahoma State University
Oklahoma State University
161,989 followers
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QUOTED: "Petersen's stories sing with wise-cracking ... irresistible characters who make the best of a world filled with corruption and deception."
It Needs to Look Like We Tried
Publishers Weekly.
265.13 (Mar. 26, 2018): p92+. From Business Collection. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
It Needs to Look Like We Tried
Todd Robert Petersen. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $26 (224p) ISBN 978-1-64009-065-1
This propulsive collection from Petersen (Long After Dark) concerns the bad luck, hard decisions, and poor choices of a group of characters, each in a peculiar and dire situation. The opening story, "The Impeccable Drive," is about Doyle, a road-tripping son who, taking a detour on the way to his father's wedding, hits a dog and decides to track down its owners. In "Cape Cod Fear" the bride-to-be from the previous story is a realtor helping clients buy the foreclosed home of an ex-military man, Condit, who tries to intimidate them. As they investigate his past, they discover that he has a famous brother whose wife is cheating on him. In "Unscripted," the man with whom Condit's sister is having an affair is about to ruin the lives of a family of hoarders who live across from him. One of the hoarders' daughters, Jaymee, just wants to get away from the mess in "Providence," and her boyfriend takes a job trafficking ingredients for methamphetamine to make some quick money. In the last story, "Small World," things come full circle as Jaymee and her boyfriend meet up with the man from the opening story who never made it to his father's wedding. Petersen's stories sing with wise-cracking (a drug dealer on his business arrangements: "It's an LLC, man. Corporations are people"), irresistible characters who make the best of a world filled with corruption and deception. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"It Needs to Look Like We Tried." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2018, p. 92+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532997126/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e62e4f63. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532997126
QUOTED: "an engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling."
1 of 3 6/24/18, 4:02 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Petersen, Todd Robert: IT NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE WE TRIED
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Petersen, Todd Robert IT NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE WE TRIED Counterpoint (Adult Fiction) $26.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-64009-065-1
A variety of lives hit the skids in dramatic and usually self-inflicted ways in this linked story collection.
Though billed as a novel, Petersen's debut more closely resembles a disjointed Pulp Fiction-style narrative, hopscotching west of the Mississippi with a motley set of characters. In the opening chapter, a man is speeding through Arizona to get to his father's wedding when he strikes a dog on the highway, and in short order he's pursuing a fling with its owner. Cut to a story narrated by the son of a friend of the groom, recalling the perils of buying a home without a real estate agent. Cut then to a story about the angst-ridden former owner of the house and his brother, whose wife is having an affair with a reality TV star. And so on: The connections between the characters are often tenuous (though Petersen ties a bow at the end), but they're all grown-ups who make rash, immature attempts to reboot their lives and pay the price for it. "I wanted to find a different path," says the ill-fated home buyer, though he could be speaking for everybody populating this book. "I wanted to buck the system. That was all me." Petersen usually delivers the stories in the first person, with narrators recalling their personal-life own goals with sardonic humor or barely contained fury. But the penultimate story, "Providence," is a gem told in the third person, involving Eric, a deaf teenager attempting to rise above his trailer-park upbringing and sour memories of his mother's death by delivering chemicals for meth labs throughout rural Oklahoma. Like everybody else here, he's a victim of his own bad decisions, but Petersen so carefully and compassionately arrays the forces in his life (dead mom, remorseful dad, a conspicuous disability) that every easy assumption gets repelled.
An engaging set of stories of broken lives, jagged in structure but smooth in the telling.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Petersen, Todd Robert: IT NEEDS TO LOOK LIKE WE TRIED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528960007 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=37e83593. Accessed 24 June 2018.
2 of 3 6/24/18, 4:02 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528960007
3 of 3 6/24/18, 4:02 PM
QUOTED: "It’s been a long project for me. I started it in the fall of 2001, when I first got to Utah. I took the main character, Jens Thorsen, from a few short stories I’d written about this crotchety old Mormon guy–he appears in the opening story in Long After Dark. I wrote two more and figured that I wasn’t done with this guy, or that he wasn’t done with me."
"I took a few trips from Cedar to Sanpete County, where the book is set, and the place really captivated me. My wife has a lot of family there, in Manti and Spring City. It seems like a place frozen in time, which captured my imagination."
"For me the problem in Mormon writing is that Mormons as a group are so disinclined towards conflict. ... What I tried to do was write a book with real stuff from the real world in it, then I tried to match it with some sense that somewhere down the line everything is going to be okay, maybe not now, but someday. That feels more like the world I live in. In a perfect world where nothing goes really wrong, we wouldn’t need Jesus, and I’m not sure I want to write about a world that doesn’t need saving."
The Rift in Mormon Literature: an interview with Todd Robert Petersen
Some writers might be born great and others achieve greatness, but Todd Robert Petersen had greatness thrust upon him when, in 1998, he won first, second, and third place in the Sunstone fiction contest. The book that came out of those wins, Long After Dark, is Mormon Literature straddling an ontological rift–the rift between simple faith and reality, the rift between easy options and hard choices, the rift between plain ol’ writing and art. If you haven’t read it yet then go ILL or buy it right now–you might be offended or uncomfortable at times but you certainly won’t be sorry you picked it up. If you’re jonesing for a hit of intense, welll-crafted writing to round out the end of your summer reading this is the book for you.
While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive you can read my interview with Todd Robert Petersen. It’ll ease the ache. I promise. You might not agree with everything Petersen says, but you’ll be glad you took the time to think about it.
Oh, and he has a new book coming out!
Laura Craner: When the vision for Long After Dark was born?
Todd Robert Petersen: I was studying with Brian Evenson at Oklahoma State University, which is where he went after leaving BYU. I went up to see him in his office and said, “Hey, man. I just hit a trifecta in the Sunstone contest.” He was pleased. He kind of laughed. He said, “You should do a whole book of those Mormon stories and I’d write an introduction for it if you want.” Seriously, before that moment, I hadn’t thought about a project like this at all. I was only mildly aware that there was something that could be called Mormon literature. I wasn’t trying to write it, I was just trying to explore religious themes in my writing because I was a religious person and I was interested in the struggles and conflicts that religious people have. What I was doing was pretty much the weirdest thing going on in my workshops. Creative writing programs are a pretty secular environment. So, I was working on the premise that if I could make a religious story play in a graduate creative writing workshop it would probably avoid some of the pitfalls of “religious writing.”
LC: What made you write such a Mormon book?
TRP: I asked myself that question a lot, especially after pretty much all of the presses that do Mormon stuff said they couldn’t do the book, and I tried everybody, including Deseret. Everyone who responded to the book said they liked the writing but they either didn’t do short stories or the content wasn’t right for their readers. I had an early response from Cedar Fort, but that turned into more of a author subsidy deal, so I passed. After that I stuck the collection away and tried to forget about it. In the meantime, a lot of the stories had been published on their own in venues like Dialogue, Irreantum, and so forth. A couple appeared in national university-based literary journals, but I couldn’t get anyone interested in the stories as a book.
Chris Bigelow’s Zarahemla Books changed all that. He was looking to publish Mormon stuff with a bit of an edge. He’d read many of the short stories as they’d been published in the literary magazines. It was a perfect fit, really. Because of his publishing model (he does short printing runs digitally as opposed to offset print runs, which have to be bigger to make the set up costs worth it. I think this kind of printing model is a really big deal, especially for small publishers who want to get less corporate kinds of material out there.), the book can sell slow and steady and stay viable.
LC: One of the surprising things about Long After Dark is how atypical most of the Mormons in it are (i.e. Luis, the Argentinian in “Now and at the Hour of Our Death”, and John, the Rwandan, in “Quietly”).
TRP: I’m not sure what a typical Mormon is. I joined the Church in Oregon and lived outside of Utah for a really long time before moving to Cedar City and experiencing an abundance of Mormons. I think I used to know, or that I used to have some idea what that was, but the more I meet people, especially as I serve in Church callings, the less I seem to know. This new guy in our ward looks like a typical Mormon in his Sunday clothes, but the other day as he was reaching for some napkins at a ward barbecue, I noticed a red and black skull tattoo on his right bicep. I loved it as much as the tattoo of the young women’s medallion my friend Liz has on her shoulder. This guy cries about the 4th of July and started his answer to a question in priesthood with the phrase, “When I was getting out of jail and staying at my mom’s house…” So, looks can be deceiving. I am almost always surprised by people.
Typicality is all a matter of perspective. The idea of typical or stereotypical is interesting because it makes me automatically start thinking about people who don’t fit the category. Isn’t that how we define categories anyway? We are what we aren’t.
LC: Where did the inspiration for those “atypical” characters come from? Were they based on real people?
TRP: I don’t believe in acts of pure imagination as creation out of nothing, like the Big Bang. I’m always watching people and taking notes. I have this catalogue in my notebooks of bits and pieces stashed, waiting for the right situation. My wife sews, and she does the same thing with fabric. She has all these bins and piles of material she’s saved and reclaimed from old clothes. For her, part (maybe even most) of the joy of a sewing project is going through all that fabric, making selections. Many of my characters are amalgamations of people I run across or know. I try to make sure they I mix them up pretty well to avoid that problem you get in Woody Allen movies, where someone gets furious because they are in your story and they don’t like what you’ve done to them. . . Writers are larcenous. I feel bad about that sometimes. It might make us bad friends.
LC: What kind of response have you gotten from readers?
TRP: It seems like people are most disturbed by the sex in the novella, “Family History.” I tried pretty hard to play that the way Alfred Hitchcock might have done. The sex is all there, but it’s not in there. I hope that distinction makes sense. That first section is also supposed to represent the telestial world. That’s why I have the stars, moon, and sun marking each section. The telestial world is supposed to be full of chaos, enmity, and trouble. Still the sex bugs people a little, even non-Mormons. A colleague of mine took umbrage with the term “monkey sex,” which I use. She thought I was being a little hard on the simians. So, you can’t please everybody, and that’s okay. Art is (or can be) good practice for learning how to deal with the troubles of this world.
LC: Has that response changed at all over the last couple of years?
TRP: Response, generally, has been really good. Salt Lake City Weekly gave the book an ARTYS Award, which is great. I love getting props for a book of Mormon stories from a publication that also runs gay and bi-sexual personal ads. Reviews have been really strong, too. I was pleasantly surprised, as was Chris Bigelow. The coolest thing that happened was that my neighbor Sue came over after reading the book. She wanted to talk about it. She’s in her 70s and said that the stories made her think of the people in her family with troubles of their own. I think I like that kind of thing, you know a variation of the Holden Cauldfield line where he says a good book makes you wish you could call up the writer. I think it was cool that my neighbor just came over. I really liked that, and I wish it would happen more often.
LC: What can you tell me about your upcoming novel, Rift?
TRP: It’s been a long project for me. I started it in the fall of 2001, when I first got to Utah. I took the main character, Jens Thorsen, from a few short stories I’d written about this crotchety old Mormon guy–he appears in the opening story in Long After Dark. I wrote two more and figured that I wasn’t done with this guy, or that he wasn’t done with me. I took a few trips from Cedar to Sanpete County, where the book is set, and the place really captivated me. My wife has a lot of family there, in Manti and Spring City. It seems like a place frozen in time, which captured my imagination.
I took the basic idea for the novel from an 1869 Harriet Beecher Stowe local color piece by called “The Village Do-Nothing.” It’s about a guy who seems to just putter around, but he’s really looking after his neighbors in a small village in the Northeast. His wife and a lot of people in town think he is neglectful and a bit disrespectful, and it causes all kinds of tension. I felt like this fit the context of small towns anywhere, but especially in an isolated, tight-knit, church-based community like the ones in Sanpete County.
Rift is about a retired highway contractor who is trying to fill up the days by keeping this crazy home teaching route, one that he has assigned to himself. There’s an old lady who thinks her husband is coming back from the other side to see her, a family whose son is incarcerated for some antics with a gun, the Jewish doctor and his wife, an inactive man dying of emphysema. He’s also nursing an old feud with the bishop, who’s wayward daughter returns at the beginning of the novel. There’s also some shady land dealings, a barber shop, and dash of Lysistrada.
I’m pretty excited to have it finished and out. I’ve worked on it on and off (mostly on) for a really long time. I’m anxious to move on to some other projects that have been sitting on blocks in the garage. It comes out some time this fall. It’s getting ready for printing right now.
LC: Your writing, especially in Long After Dark, really walks the line between gritty and gratuitous in its visceral details and subject matter. (Skinny dipping! Murder! Wild sex!) Does that make it harder to find a publisher?
TRP: You can get skinny dipping, murder, and wild sex out of story of David, can’t you? I think it’s not a problem of content but context. The world is full of these kinds of things, and I think writers have to deal with the world. Since I teach at a state university in Utah with a high percentage of Mormon students, I find myself in a really strange position. Students seem to expect that literature is going to be free of subject matter drawn from the world we live in. I make sure we always have a discussion of the important distinction between representing something and advocating for it. I try to make sure that I don’t advocate for murder in my fiction but rather show its effects, or its causes. I might advocate for skinny dipping, though, it is a truly joyous experience.
For me the problem in Mormon writing is that Mormons as a group are so disinclined towards conflict. This perspective makes most fiction impossible. But look again at the scriptures–they are full of visceral details and conflict and bad choices. In fact, I often point out to my students and in Gospel Doctrine class that the standard works lack happy endings. I mean, have you read Revelation? It makes me think of what would happen if Sauron slit Frodo’s throat and took the ring for himself. In the Book of Mormon, Moroni wanders the countryside dodging blood thirsty marauders like some character out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Joseph Smith is murdered at the end of the Doctrine and Covenants. The one thing I have taken from the scriptures is that the good guys are going to blow it and the bad guy is going to win, for now, at least.
What I tried to do was write a book with real stuff from the real world in it, then I tried to match it with some sense that somewhere down the line everything is going to be okay, maybe not now, but someday. That feels more like the world I live in. In a perfect world where nothing goes really wrong, we wouldn’t need Jesus, and I’m not sure I want to write about a world that doesn’t need saving.
Todd Robert Petersen lives in Cedar City and teaches creative writing and visual studies in the English Department at Southern Utah University. He studied film in college and has a master’s degree (Northern Arizona University) and PhD in Creative Writing and Critical Theory (Oklahoma State University). His second book, Rift, won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award and will be published by Zarahemla books in the fall of 2009.
Author WmPosted on 08/06/2009Categories InterviewsTags Authored by Laura Craner, Literature, mormon arts, Todd Robert Petersen, Zarahemla Books
QUOTED: "When I was looking for a way to create connective tissue for the different storylines in this book, the idea of home evolved from a sideline to something much more central. I wanted to be able to use the book to help me see home from many different perspectives. Television has really done a number on our sense of what a home should be and look like, and I wanted to explore that as well. After writing this book, I can't watch home shows anymore. It broke me."
"A lot of this book takes on the idea of the geographical cure: if you've got trouble here, try somewhere else. This is another way I tried to think about the mythology of home."
Author Todd Robert Petersen talks home in 'It Needs to Look Like We Tried'
Arizona Daily Sun staff 1 hr ago 0
For better or worse, Todd Robert Petersen is a product of a culture highly influenced by media. Studying film at the University of Oregon showed Petersen the ways in which film and television shape and form our perceptions of the world, but he ultimately realized a career in film was not for him. After reading a copy of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver, he began to take seriously the idea of becoming a writer, but the influence of film never left. He then pursued an MA in English at Northern Arizona University and earned his PhD in English from Oklahoma State University.
His new novel “It Needs to Look Like We Tried” explores themes of home, broken dreams and unrealized goals in a series of cinematic and interconnected stories.
As Petersen makes his way back to his old stomping grounds in Flagstaff for an appearance at Bright Side Bookshop on June 26, the Arizona Daily Sun sat down with the author to talk about his new novel, the influence of cinema and what it means to find a home.
Arizona Daily Sun: In “It Needs to Look Like We Tried,” characters are either fighting to protect or fighting to flee their homes. Home acts like Dr. Science's magnets, pulling and attracting. What does home mean to these characters? Why is home such a powerful theme in their stories?
Petersen: I didn't set out to write a book with home as such a central theme. But during the time that I wrote this, I was in the process of settling into my new home in southern Utah after moving every few years from high school until I was in my early 30s. My sister is an architect, and we have had an ongoing series of conversations about what homes are, what it means to dig into a community and what value these buildings have for our sense of self. I was also trying to figure out what a home was for my kids and how to blend my ideas with those of my wife. We're lucky to agree on most things in this arena.
When I was looking for a way to create connective tissue for the different storylines in this book, the idea of home evolved from a sideline to something much more central. I wanted to be able to use the book to help me see home from many different perspectives. Television has really done a number on our sense of what a home should be and look like, and I wanted to explore that as well. After writing this book, I can't watch home shows anymore. It broke me.
A lot of this book takes on the idea of the geographical cure: if you've got trouble here, try somewhere else. This is another way I tried to think about the mythology of home.
The main catalyst in most of the novel's misfortunes (Barb Stein) only appears in one scene, though her shadow looms large over most of the stories. Why did you decide to leave her story out?
There's always somebody in our lives who can exert a lot of influence in a short amount of time and sometimes at a great distance. Catalyst is a great term: they can create reactions at lower energy states. Barb has influence because of her role as a television personality, but she doesn't have any day-to-day contact with the world she impacts. This happens so much in the world of celebrity, and it's going on right now in the White House. That said, I think Barb is a MacGuffin. She gets the plot moving in a certain direction and with a certain velocity, but I didn't really want to explain her. She's just another natural force. In the end, I wanted Barb to fall like Icarus and Daedalus do in that great old painting by Bruegel, just little tiny specks at the horizon.
Truth be told, I've had some daydreams recently about coming back to do a sequel of “INTLLWT,” or something like "season two," where I could pick things up and play with this world again. That would be a place to potentially dig into Barb Stein's life.
At what point did you know how you were going to link the stories together the way you did?
The idea to write a novel in stories came early in the process. That said, the first chapter of “INTLLWT” initially was part of a short story collection I was shopping around in 2003. I got some good advice to pull that story and build a linked collection around it. I knew that I was going to link them, but I didn't quite know how that was going to happen. That came over time and with a lot of iterations. After this book, I'm not even sure I could write a traditional collection. It's a great puzzle to work out all the connections.
You tweet a lot about comics and Hollywood, and your mentor is Brian Evenson, who writes literary and genre fiction (most famously, the "Dead Space" video game adaptions). Do you have genre aspirations as well?
I've always had genre aspirations, but it was hard to talk about that in graduate school, even with Evenson on hand to show the way. When I was working on my master's degree at NAU in the '90s, Allen Woodman was very encouraging about genre writing, and he let us have a pretty long leash. I wrote a screenplay for a “Hail Caesar”-style meta-Hollywood Western in one of his workshops.
From the beginning my reading has been all over the place. As a kid I read crazy post-Tolkien fantasy, like the Elric of Melniboné stuff from Michael Moorcock, as well as ‘70s and ‘80s X-Men comics, then I went on to Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut. Eventually, I found my way into Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor and all the contemporary authors that make up the landscape. In graduate school Evenson used to keep us on our toes with unexpected reading. That was the one thing he talked about over and over: he wanted us to read widely and against the grain.
I've told my publicist, Megan, that I would love to write a graphic novel or a comic series. She has encouraged me, which is a good sign.
Your academic work focuses on film and television, and much of the novel feels cinematic. Do you think film and cinema played a role in the new novel?
For better or worse, I think I am very influenced by cinema. My undergraduate degree is in film, and one of the courses I teach now is called Screen Aesthetics, which is all about the language of cinema and television. I'm always thinking about "the shot" when I write. I ask myself how long a passage of prose should last and when I should cut to a long shot and when to come in close. Sometimes I even storyboard scenes or sequences. This probably contributes to the cinematic or televisual feel of things, but I've been thinking a lot lately about television (reality television in particular) and how it shapes our perceptions and our sense of story. If I've got any political or cultural thing to say with this book, it's that television might have too much power over our lives, and I say this as someone who loves “Fargo” and “Bob’s Burgers” with all of my heart.
If you go
Todd Robert Petersen will be reading from his new novel “It Needs to Look Like We Tried” at Bright Side Bookshop, 18 N. San Francisco Street, on Tuesday, June 26, from 6:30-8 p.m. See the Facebook event page for more information. To read a full review of the novel by Mark Alvarez, visit www.flaglive.com
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Caught in the storm: 'It Needs to Look Like We Tried' explores home, fate and the wheel of fortune
Caught in the storm: 'It Needs to Look Like We Tried' explores home, fate and the wheel of fortune
The wheel of fortune is one of the most well-known images of fate. This wheel spins randomly, setting the course of destiny for the people and…
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QUOTED: "Nat passed on the collection but praised one story for its dark humor and quirky tone. He suggested that it could serve as the centerpiece of a new work, perhaps a novel in stories. So, that rejection letter was the real starting point for It Needs To Look Like We Tried."
"That initial story was about a man who hits a dog while driving through the desert to his father’s wedding. This one came to my while I was driving some state highways between Arizona and Los Angeles."
Five Questions for Todd Robert Petersen, author of It Needs to Look Like We Tried
How did you come to write this book? What’s the story of this story?
Over a decade ago, I sent to a literary agent named Nat Sobel. Nat passed on the collection but praised one story for its dark humor and quirky tone. He suggested that it could serve as the centerpiece of a new work, perhaps a novel in stories. So, that rejection letter was the real starting point for It Needs To Look Like We Tried.
I gathered up all the “novels in stories” I could get my hands on to get a feel for the shape of these things. I also started watching LOST and became obsessed with the show’s use of multiple intersecting plot-lines and major characters from one storyline appearing as minor characters somewhere else. This gave me a structure it wanted to try, but very little else.
That initial story was about a man who hits a dog while driving through the desert to his father’s wedding. This one came to my while I was driving some state highways between Arizona and Los Angeles. Because I have a kleptomaniac imagination, the book grew by the slow accretion of stolen goods. My wife and I bought our first home from an elderly woman. Whenever we would see her in town, she would ask us this creepy question: “How do you like living in my house?” This little bit of menace became the seeds of the “Cape Cod Fear” storyline. While my kids were little, we watched a lot of PBS, which helped me develop the character of Dr. Science and his friend Asa and their arc. One of my former students was on a reality show back when they were first starting. My conversations with him about how the production went (answer: crazy) led to the “Unscripted” storyline.
This kind of writing goes slowly, especially when you’ve got little kids, so it took me a dozen years or more to finish a draft. I was also working on other projects that came a little more quickly. When I finished It Needs To Look Like We Tried, I sent Nat another letter, not a query this time, just a thank you to let him know his rejection had been really productive. A few weeks later Nat sent me an email and asked to see the new book. He read it, brought me on as a client, put me to work re-writing with some excellent notes, then he helped find the book a perfect home. The whole process has been a grand adventure.
What’s the one book that you recommend to people, over and over?
I talk about Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft all the time. It’s a down-to-earth philosophical treatise on the history of education, the nature of intelligence, and the value of being able to fix things and work with your hands. I think it should be required reading for every teacher in America. On the fiction end of things, I can’t shut up about Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. I regularly pull it off the shelf, open it, and read random paragraphs aloud.
Who are some of your writer mentors? Do you find that’s changed over time as you evolve as a writer or do they remain the same?
Brian Evenson mentored me through my PhD work, encouraging me to read widely and helping me learn to hear the shape of sentences. Once, over a plate of cheese fries, he said, “Every writer needs to think about two things deeply: what it means to write and what it means to be human.” Twenty years later, I still try to think about those things every day. Most of my mentors have been writers and filmmakers. Flannery O’Connor is my north star. She helped me understand how a person of faith could write with such with, grace, wit, and ferocity. Once in a graduate workshop we were asked to reflect on some of our influences. I mentioned the Coen Brothers and talked about how their dark humor, narrative pacing, and use of the grotesque were important to me, but the professor sighed in a way that suggested by mentioning filmmakers I’d just driven another nail into the coffin of civil society.
What is your most prized book possession? A first edition? A gift? Please describe.
In my junior year of high school, I told my English teacher, Sister Mary Kay Lambert, that unlike the rest of my classmates I actually loved A Farewell to Arms. She was beside herself with joy and loaned me a copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, which I took home, read in a week, then re-read over and over again until it fell to pieces. I never returned it, and I feel so guilty about it.
During graduate school, I was dating a woman who worked as a book repair technician for a large university library. I asked her if she could fix this ruined book for me. She inspected it and told me it would be easier and cheaper just to replace it. I told her the book had sentimental value because I stole it from a nun. She rolled her eyes and agreed to re-bind the book in hardcover, using some beautiful deep blue book cloth and silver embossing on the spine. I eventually married that book repair technician and dedicated It Needs to Look Like We Tried to her.
Recently I took out the book and re-read “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” which is one of my favorite Hemingway stories. Holding that beautiful book and reading that beautiful story made me feel like a wretch who should buy the school a new copy of that book then get on my knees and say something like a million Acts of Contrition.
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