Virginia Sorensen was among the writers Edward A. Geary, in 1977, called "Mormondom's Lost Generation." Geary, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, saw these novelists of the 1940s as responding to a cultural breakdown in Mormon life; the pioneer era had ended, and the vision and ideals required by the struggle to establish the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon settlements in the West were being replaced by "the stagnation and decline of rural Mormondom."¹ Geary calls these works "expatriate novels" of writers who, in most cases, found it necessary to leave both Utah and Mormonism behind.² One wonders what Sorensen might have thought of being designated a member of "Mormondom's Lost Generation." But because there is a copy of Geary's article among her papers, a copy she herself had annotated, we can determine her response with some certainty.

Underlining, sometimes double underlining, indicates her agreement with many things Geary said--that she was writing about a "cultural breakdown ... in this ending of an era of Mormon isolation and self-sufficiency,"³ that her novels "have their roots in the author's effort to come to terms with . . . her Mormon heritage,"⁴ that "the central conflict is nearly always between individualism and authority,"⁵ and that the sympathetic characters "are the ones who experience a tension between the demands of the community and their desires to think and act for themselves."⁶ But in a couple of places she disagrees with Geary's assessment of her characters' motives. When Geary indicates that one of the characters of her novel On This Star has "lost his faith," she writes "No" and in the margin adds "A distortion." And when Geary, in describing the type of protagonist that appears in these novels, says, "Most often ... the character is divided, wanting in a way to become a wholehearted member of the community yet also longing to escape, to find some mode of life less filled with hardships, more rewarding culturally and aesthetically,"⁷ she corrects him in the margin: "Wishing the community's values were broader, more complex, more flexible—as in time they became." Sorensen approves of Geary's assessment of the issues and questions her novels raise, but disagrees that her characters want to escape the community or have lost their faith. They just want their community to grow, to become more compassionate and more tolerant. And because in these novels Sorensen is responding to her particular cultural situation, the characters seem to reflect the author's attitudes. Geary says, "Her sympathetic characters are all skeptics and rebels to some degree, but they also acknowledge the inseparable ties that bind them to the community and a nostalgic loyalty which amounts almost to a kind of faith."⁸ This description may be accurately applied not only to the characters but to Sorensen herself.

While it is true that Sorensen did not live in Utah after she became an adult and that she eventually stopped attending church, her reasons for disassociating herself from the Mormon community may initially have had more to do with the way her works were received than with her own faith. She seems to have felt that the issues her work raised were the major questions Mormons of her era needed to deal with and that the expression of these issues in her art did not indicate apostasy. In a 1986 letter to Edward L. Hart, another venerable BYU professor of English, she wrote: "During my years of trying to say what I felt about my childhood—and I still try, though age and infirmities limit the product sadly—I felt deeply the lack of sympathy `out home' and perhaps rather more deeply, the booing."⁹ Hart included this quotation in an article he wrote about the "double jeopardy" that Mormon creative writers face. First, a true artist does not and in fact cannot impose a pre-determined vision or meaning on the creative work. Most artists discover the meaning of a work of art as they create and refine it. As a consequence, "there is always the chance . . . that the meaning [they] discover may be disturbing–since when [they] took that walk into the unknown there was no guarantee of what [they]'d run into."¹⁰ In addition to the writer's uncertainty about the meanings that may emerge, Hart adds that "the writer's attempt to express a new perception may be mistaken for rejection or rebellion."¹¹ Mormon writers have to consider "that creative expression may be misunderstood and that that misunderstanding may lead to an alienation of the kind that was the last thing the writer wanted upon embarking on a career."¹²

The alienation Sorensen felt may have been partially created by the distance her life journey took her, both geographically and culturally, from Utah and her Mormon roots. She was born Virginia Eggertsen in Provo, Utah, on 17 February 1912, the third child in a family of three girls and three boys. She attended Brigham Young University for two years and then enrolled in a one-year writing program at the University of Missouri. When she returned to BYU, she met and married Fred Sorensen. In June 1934 her mother accepted her graduation diploma for her because she was in the hospital, having just given birth to her new baby daughter Elizabeth. Fred entered a Ph.D. program at Stanford University, and the couple's second child, Fred Jr., was born in Palo Alto in 1936. At Stanford Virginia took a poetry writing class from Yvor Winters, writing a verse drama called The Hungry Moon, about the legend of Timpanogos Mountain. The family left Stanford for Terre Haute, Indiana, and Fred's first academic position, and Virginia wrote the first novel she published, A Little Lower than the Angels, in a small "tower room in the Humanities Building" of Indiana State Teachers' College. As the family moved around the country—to Michigan, Colorado, and Alabama—Virginia published four more adult novels and then started writing for children as well. She won the 1956 Child Study Association Award for Plain Girl and the 1957 Newbery Medal for Miracles on Maple Hill. Her marriage to Fred Sorensen ended after twenty-five years. She met English novelist Alec Waugh, brother of the even more famous English novelist Evelyn Waugh, at MacDowell Writers' Colony. After a long friendship, they married in 1969 and lived for several years in Tangier, Morocco. Virginia eventually published a total of seven children's novels, eight adult novels, and the story collection Where Nothing Is Long Ago.

Despite the arc of her life away from her home and people, Sorensen always identified herself as a Mormon. In an autobiographical sketch she wrote early in the 1950s, she said, "Whether in Utah or not, I find myself at my desk constantly living in her climate and with her history and her people. The chief meaning of my other homes, I believe, has been complementary—they serve for comparison, to complete with what I believe to be the virtue of objectivity my particular view of the people to whom I belong."¹³ In 1980 she told Mary Bradford, "When I went away [from Utah], I found [Mormonism] was the thing about me that interested people most. And I have found that all through the years."¹⁴ Sorensen identified herself as a Mormon not just in her own mind but also to everyone she met—to Alfred Knopf, the New York publisher she first approached about bringing out her work, to famous writers she knew and worked with in MacDowell Writers' Colony, to her second husband Alec Waugh and his aristocratic English literary family, who probably considered Mormons barbaric.

Her ties to her Mormon heritage are also indicated by the fact that during the last summer of her life, 1991, she made a pilgrimage to Utah from her home in Henderson, North Carolina, to see the country of her childhood one last time. One of the places she wanted to visit was Manti, where she had lived from ages five to thirteen. She wrote this about seeing the Manti temple once again:

[T]he Mormon Temple rose gradually in front of us, and then we reached it and rode up to the very walls, which shone as never before, even in the transfiguration of my childhood memory. My morning walks in Paris across the Seine from San Luis to the Notre Dame cathedral were not more inspiring than that Temple and seeing it again. One wonders why thousands of statues have not been created from it—stones so naturally angelic. I remembered the long flight of steps that led up between the lawns and the wide iron gate; and when I went inside in my clean pajamas to be baptized as a child, I was allowed afterward to climb to the very top of the two towers on a twisting stairway built without supports by Danish carpenters who had been brought over oceans and prairies and mountains for the purpose.¹⁵

Virginia's comparison of the Manti temple with Notre Dame cathedral shows her reverence, affection, and nostalgia for the beautiful building that floated over her childhood, her community's most holy place. The passage also shows that her particular feelings about Mormonism were inseparably tied to her childhood memories. The life of the Mormon villages where she grew up became part of her core identity as a writer. She grew to understand family love and loyalty in her own childhood family. She learned about both strong Mormon community values and Mormon community insularity in the villages where she was raised. "My childhood is always helplessly with me, is it not, in my memories?" she asked. "Vivid and real and meaningful, more and more meaningful as the years pass and I can see the why of things I could not see when they were happening. I am actually nothing but the stuff of memories. Lately I see farther and farther back, more and more clearly, and am told that this is the natural way of things and one of the more blessed qualities of age."¹⁶ This turning to her past was the impetus for Virginia to write the collection of stories called Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, first published in 1963.

The stories of this collection include many characters who correspond to actual people in Virginia's childhood. Her parents and her older brother Claude often appear, as do her sisters Helen (nicknamed Lulu) and Jerry. Her best friend Carol Holt is also often present; the collection is dedicated to her. Even the animals are historical—Deecher the German shepherd, Virginia's cat Jiggs, Claude's horse King. The community where the stories take place is the Manti of Virginia's childhood, and the family house in the stories is the home where Virginia was raised. When, during that last visit to Manti, Virginia and I called there, she showed me parts of the house and yard that are found in the Where Nothing Is Long Ago stories. The door to the little closet under the stairs, where Virginia used to hide to read as a child, has been removed and the narrow window bricked up, but the staircase and the storage area are still there. The barn, sheds, and corrals are long gone, replaced by a spacious lawn and garden, but the granary remains. She pointed out where the garden had been and said, "We brought back lettuce and radishes, asparagus and carrots, beets and corn, tomatoes and new potatoes just ready when the green peas were swelling."¹⁷ As the settings of the stories were actual locations, many incidents in the plots, too, happened to members of Virginia's family. Her father did work for the railroad, "the old Denver and Rio Grande branch between Denver and the Great Salt Lake."¹⁸ There was an "other lady" in her paternal grandfather's life, whom he married just before he died; Virginia's maternal grandmother did consider herself to be an apostate from the Mormon church; and her great uncle did see a vision of his future wife while he was on an LDS mission in Denmark.

Why, then, do we consider these narratives stories rather than personal essays? Eugene England, during a 1988 BYU symposium honoring Virginia Sorensen, boldly asserted, in her presence, that these works of prose were personal essays rather than stories and that Virginia Sorensen was "the founding foremother" of Mormon personal essayists. He observed that "the myriad judgments of people, acts, choices, etc., which establish a recognizable shape of belief in Where Nothing Is Long Ago have to do directly with real people, including Sorensen herself." He claimed that the author who is created in the narratives (what we call the implied author) is Sorensen herself and that in the stories "she is revealing her present self through the fiction of revealing her past self, but she also is creating herself anew before our eyes and hearts through the power of the recreated truth of real experience in the past." The reason he gives that Where Nothing Is Long Ago should be called a collection of personal essays rather than short stories is that "it seems to make a difference in our ethical response if we believe that at least a major part of the experience was really real—that it indeed happened in real time and space to people like us."¹⁹

But do the factors England mentions actually differentiate between the short story and the personal essay? Surely many fiction writers have written about their own experiences and about people they knew, and surely they have revealed their own moral values and judgments as they shaped their fictions. Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, and Thomas Wolfe all wrote fictions that had their basis in the author's life. The implied author of a fiction, as well as of a personal essay, may seem to be the actual author, and may express moral values that are enlightening and instructive to readers. And while we may be particularly moved by personal essays because we know that "at least a major part of the experience was really real," we feel deceived by authors who present their material as authentic personal experience when it is not. When we learn of the distortions or exaggerations, we come to distrust those authors.

The difference between the short story and the personal essay seems to me to have to do, first of all, with the writer's sense of accuracy in presenting the incidents. Readers trust that writers who call their works "personal essays" are narrating accounts of real experiences, however artistically presented. Writers of fiction, however, may use actual incidents but feel free to rearrange or embellish them, to add or delete characters, to combine them with imagined incidents and characters. Virginia Sorensen considered herself to be a fiction writer and, after hearing England's paper, expressed annoyance at being called a personal essayist, feeling that his claim wrenched her work out of its authentic genre. Several years earlier she had told Mary Bradford, "All my life I was escaping into poetry and stories and liked to embroider everything even if I told something."²⁰ "I am busy with fiction all the time," she said. "Nobody must ever use my books historically."²¹

For example, Sorensen lived in three Utah towns during her childhood: in Provo until she was five, in Manti from the ages of five to thirteen, and then in American Fork until she graduated from high school. She said, "I belonged in all three of those places very strongly. But they resembled each other."²² She added:

It's very odd, the memories I have that I put in Where Nothing Is Long Ago about the family having picnics by the main ditch . . . and the band playing and so on. I didn't realize for a long time how they combined . . . three places, the Provo place when I was a very small child and remembered only the bare essentials, and then the little park in Manti and later on when I was in high school, . . . the band concerts . . . in American Fork. I put them all together.²³

In the dedication of Where Nothing Is Long Ago, she tells Carol Holt, "[A]s you'll say along with everybody else—so much is 'made up' it is scarcely memory at all, but a dream dreamed out of memory." Describing her method of composing a story, she said, "I just find the whole thing rushes in and what suits the story I put in and it doesn't matter whether it happened now or then. [Events] can be twenty years apart."²⁴ The author should certainly be allowed her own purpose, and Sorensen's purpose was to write fiction rather than personal essays.

But England is right to claim that with the book Where Nothing Is Long Ago, Virginia Sorensen should be called the foremother of Mormon personal essayists. Though Sorensen's prose narratives are stories, they might have been essays had her purpose been to re-create her childhood experiences with accuracy. Consequently, these stories provide an example of how an author might write personal essays about a Mormon village and his or her experiences growing up there. As England says, they create "a complex structure of memory and reflection, of discovered and recreated self, that reveals the complex shape of her belief and moves us toward correspondingly full and complex judgment and sympathy.²⁵ He describes another contribution of the collection; he says he learned from these stories how to write in a different voice, "a feminine voice," which he describes as "receptive, circular, vulnerable, daring, ethically complex and sympathetic but strong with integrity, rather than logical, straightforward, safe, ethically simple and judgmental or expedient and authoritative."²⁶ He concludes that Sorensen is "a skilled fictionist who can create the emotion proper to the experiences she is a witness for."²⁷ Edward A. Geary also said that Where Nothing Is Long Ago taught him how to write about his own childhood in a rural Mormon village, as he did in the fine collection of personal essays titled Goodbye to Poplarhaven. So, although the Sorensen's stories are not personal essays themselves, they have influenced some of the most important Mormon personal essayists.

The stories of Where Nothing Is Long Ago are a celebration of Sorensen's childhood. She wrote most of them in 1962 while she stayed eight months with her father in Springville, Utah, after her sister's death. (The title story and "The Face" had been published earlier in The New Yorker.) The narrator of each story is an adult remembering her experiences as a child and narrating events from the child's perspective, so the stories are often about the child's attempt to understand the values of her community. Several stories center on the community's response to an individual who is in some way an outsider—a polygamous wife who has been left alone after the 1890 Manifesto ostensibly banned such marriages; a black family from Tennessee, directed to Manti by one of the town's missionaries; a woman whose husband has fallen away from the faith—and the child's observations of the behavior of town members towards this outsider. Why, for example, are members of the community more sympathetic to the man who killed Lena's husband than they are to Lena? Why do they so distrust "the Negro"? Why is "the darling lady" all alone in her little store? Why doesn't she have a family? Other stories are stories of initiation—sometimes into the pleasures and pains of growing up, but other times into the adult knowledge of death and loss and destructive human behavior. In her Newbery Award acceptance speech, Sorensen says, "[A] story has its own being and . . . if one tells it true, and to the very end, there is always death in it."²⁸ Some of these stories will be enthralling to children as well as to adult readers—"First Love," "The White Horse," "The Vision of Uncle Lars," and "The Secret Summer." But many depend on the reader's ability to recognize the ironic distance between the child's perception and the meaning of the incidents to the narrator or to the adult characters.

Virginia Sorensen is a masterful storyteller. Her mother said that the first sentence she remembered Virginia saying was "Tell me a story," and the second was, "I will tell you a story," which Virginia proceeded to do.²⁹ She spent a lifetime telling stories, many of which she offered to her Mormon community as their own. She once said, "I suppose I get more pleasure out of being noticed by the Mormons than by anybody else."³⁰ She would be thrilled to see Where Nothing Is Long Ago again in print, and especially to see it published by a Mormon press. How fortunate we are to have this writer published again for a new audience, giving us the opportunity to read for ourselves these artful and affectionate stories of Mormon life.