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January 2006 We invite submissions for an anthology of missionary memoirs we're planning to put together. Considering how central a mission is to Mormon experience and how often Mormons write about their missions, it is remarkable that more is not published on the topic. We intend to seek a national publisher for the book, the working title of which is Conversion Therapy: Real-Life Experiences of Mormon Missionaries. What We're Looking For We hope to gather a diverse collection of personal essays by former missionaries, with a focus on dramatic storytelling but also including some analysis and interpretation of what happened. We're looking for submissions in the style of the contemporary memoir, with fully realized scenes, dialogue, plenty of character development, sense of dramatic pacing and unfolding, etc. We seek essays covering every aspect of missionary experience, from receiving a call to reporting on the mission after returning home. However, individual pieces should focus on a particular incident that illustrates a specific point about missionary life, rather than trying to summarize a whole mission or touch on numerous themes. We hope to include writers from different ages and backgrounds, who served in locales all over the world. We want to represent a variety of positions with regard to the church and the enterprise of missionary work: faithful, skeptical, extremely troubled. We are particularly interested in work that considers how issues such as race, gender, and sexual orientation come into play on a mission. Submissions should be accessible to a non-LDS audience, not because we plan to use the book as a conversion tool but because we want to seek the widest audience possible. Therefore, writers need to avoid including unexplained terms and nuances that would be incomprehensible to nonmember readers, and they need to be sensitive to ways in which nonmembers might be put off by certain tones about the rightness and righteousness of missionary work. Submission Guidelines We invite submissions ranging anywhere from 500 to 5,000 words. If you are interested, please drop us a line right away, letting us know what you'd like to write about. We would like the finished essay by February 15, 2006. (We can, of course, be a little flexible.) We intend to provide our contributors with some remuneration; however, the amount will depend on the number of contributors and the amount of the contract. Please make your submissions easy for us to read: double space all prose, and use one-inch margins and a 12-point font. Please number your pages and include your contact information on the first page of the document. Please give your work a title. If you're not familiar with the field of contemporary literary nonfiction, you might start by reading David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked), one of the masters of the genre: there are few writers better than Sedaris at exploring the various nuances of some seemingly minor event, often to great comic effect, while a profound current of grief and loss throbs under the humor. As far as Mormon works go, Dialogue, Sunstone, and Irreantum regularly publish excellent personal essays on Mormon themes. For us, the first sample essays that come to mind are the ones Holly Welker has published, though they're hardly the only ones or necessarily the best: "Junior Companion." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36.3 (2003). "Converting Oneself." Irreantum 4.1 (2002). "Confronting the Powers." Sunstone 121 (2002). Please let us know if you have any questions we can answer. We hope to hear from you soon.
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