“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer.” – Derek Walcott
Like many people, I first heard of the indie rock band Little Moon when they won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest this past May. Written by the Utah-based couple Emma and Nathan Hardyman while his mother was in hospice care, their winning song, “wonder eye,” confronts death and explores the liberating sense of not knowing what comes after. Around the time they wrote it, the couple was also leaving the Mormon church. Coincidentally, Little Moon’s redemptive paean to atheism debuted just months after NPR re-aired the story of the 2014 excommunication of Mormon feminist activist Kate Kelly. Her offense: organizing a protest in which she and other women requested entry to a male-only Priesthood meeting. She equated her expulsion, for simply exercising her free speech, as a kind of “spiritual death.” Although I’ve never talked openly about my Mormon past, it felt like Little Moon and Kelly were sending me a sign that it’s time to write about my own journey to the other side of Mormonism.
I grew up Mormon in the atheist city of San Francisco. Every Sunday, my father led his three daughters down the steps of our tall Victorian and drove us in his blue Volvo station wagon along the hills of the city to that white stuccoed church that stuck out among the festive painted ladies crowded around the Bay.
Often, I’d sleep over next door at my best friend’s house on Saturday nights, hoping to be forgotten about, but Sunday morning her telephone would ring and my father’s voice would come on the line, summoning me to church. My favorite fantasy in those days was being one of Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers. I imagined myself squeezing into a ball and flying up the chimney and out over the city.
After years of attending church classes in which young women were instructed in their future lives as homemakers while the young men went off to Priesthood meetings, my last stand was over a workbook I was supposed to be working on but that only gathered dust in the trunk of the Volvo. The book had lots of tasks that felt useless to me, such as baking cookies for the sick, crocheting needle point, and ironing my Church clothes on Saturdays. Amidst the pressure over the workbooks, our teacher completely ignored the true miracle before us. One of my fellow students, a lovely moon-faced blonde—I’ll call her M—was growing more pregnant by the week. Yet we never celebrated the new life in our midst. M’s pregnancy was treated as a mark of shame, her growing belly hidden under blousy black dresses, her demeanor sullen and downcast. Then our teacher’s husband, who was the Bishop, ran off to Utah with another woman from the congregation. She disappeared, and classes were suspended. The ships sailing outside looked suddenly hollow to me, as though they might be made of cardboard, and I wondered whose hand had put them out to sea. Soon after, I also left church one day and never returned.
Centered in Utah, Mormonism stays mostly out of the mainstream and is often viewed with disparagement. Within the faith, dissent is taboo, as demonstrated by Kelly’s excommunication. But, as I know from my own silence around my religious background, fear is the enemy of creativity. After I left the Mormon Church, I lost my sense of gravity. I ran to New York, then L.A., then Mexico City. I found my bearings by throwing myself into the study of Hispanic literature. I delighted in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, since they so gloriously, outrageously broke from Catholic conservatism. But, having turned away from my own roots, I had no idea how to locate my voice. I didn’t realize that someone could leave a religion while holding onto their culture until I read writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga in graduate school– writers who had rebelled as sincerely as I had against patriarchy, but still clung so fiercely to their culture that they reinvented it, reimagining the past until it fit them like a vestal garment.
If Little Moon’s creative breakthrough came with “wonder eye,” my own, smaller one occurred during a Mexicanist conference at UC Irvine this year. One of the panelists, Dr. Jacobo Sefamí, who grew up in Mexico City of Syrian Jewish descent, was reading a paper entitled “The Sacred and Exiled Kábala in the Essays of Angelina Muñiz.” As he recited all the Hebrew words for the name of God, a story my dad once told came back to me. It was about his great-great-grandfather, a man who had four wives who lived in four houses on four corners of the same street, in the southern Utah village of Pine Valley. I remembered hearing that one of the wives, who was a dressmaker, had fled to New York. Listening to Dr. Sefamí, I thought about that great great aunt, living in New York in exile, and about my own self-imposed exile. Wondering if my ancestress searched for the names of God in New York, I jotted in my notebook a poem entitled “The Fourth Wife” (forthcoming in Sunstone). A couple months later, with the encouragement of fellow WWS writers, I applied for a grant from the California Arts Council, in part to write more of my female ancestors’ histories from Utah. Recently I found out that I received the grant.
It’s as if by that same sense of grace that I switched on the radio this spring to hear a young band with Mormon roots making music that so joyfully and noisily rebels and transcends. Fronted by singer Emma Hardyman, Little Moon also features Nathan Hardyman on bass, Bly Wallentine on electric guitar, Bridget Jackson on harp, Chris Shemwell on drums, and Grace Johnson on keys. Watching them play with fresh earnestness in their music video, it’s easy to imagine them cutting their milk teeth on sacred music. According to the original NPR news release, “wonder eye” surprised the judges, moved them to tears, and filled them with hope. For me, the moment in “wonder eye” that gets me is when the music swells and Hardyman’s four-octave voice swoops into the chorus.
To where we are and where we go
Wonder Eye, wonder Eye
And when I go I’ll give my all to the sky, to the sky
Wonder Eye , wonder Eye
Commenting on the meaning behind the song, Hardyman told NPR, “Mormonism believes in life after death, resurrection and eternal families. There is beauty and comfort in our former beliefs of certainty, light and life; we honor and respect such teachings. But we also find deep beauty in uncertainty, darkness, chaos and death. Perhaps it’s all one and the same.”
“kind, kind home,” another song in Little Moon’s Tiny Desk concert set, registers the difficulties of leaving one’s community, the feeling of being an outsider and of having to learn to stand on one’s own.
I think I lost a kind, kind home.
It’s my fault I’ve run away,
even though I wished to stay.
You’re a ghost,
a dropout just drifting in this town.
Feeling lost and feeling all alone
I will try to be a kind, kind home.
For years after leaving the Mormon church, I felt adrift. I thought I had left the spiritual part of myself behind, but I rediscovered it in a Twelve Step meeting in my thirties. Throughout my twenties and thirties, I kept trying to find a place that felt like home, until I realized I carry it with me wherever I go. I plant seeds of self-knowledge on the page; if I tend them, they flourish; if I neglect them, they dry up. This summer, words grow around me like flowers, and my notebook fills with poems. To paraphrase Derek Walcott, poetry is my prayer. It is where I proclaim my belief in the importance of my ancestresses and their ongoing presence in my life; that, as in Mexico, the shedding of colonial religion gives way to something deeper and older, a spirituality that links all people with the earth; that the spirit is not gendered; that love is not a sin; that loving oneself is never wrong–no matter how far one has strayed. I believe that motherhood is sacred whenever and to whomever it arrives.
In the face of this nurturing, I feel my old anger give way to curiosity. Even some exercises from my old Young Women’s workbook no longer seem silly to me. Iron your Sunday clothes. Visit the sick. Bible passages come back too, from childhood readings with my dad. Do not hide your light under a bushel, but let it shine. I hope to return someday to my family’s village of Pine Valley, to stand on the corner of the four wives, and to gather more of their stories so I can tell them. I think they deserve that.
Audrey Harris Fernández is a Lecturer in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Together with Matthew Gleeson, she translated “The Houseguest and Other Stories” by Amparo Dávila (New Directions, 2018). Their translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Harpers, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her poem “The Fourth Wife” is forthcoming in Sunstone. She lives in Long Beach, CA with her daughter and husband.
Author’s Note
Audrey Harris Fernández would like to acknowledge the support of the California Arts Council and Los Angeles Performing Arts Initiative for this piece. She is currently working on a series of essays on Mormonism, and is gathering stories from other Mormons/ LDS who have left the Church. She is interested in what we hold onto and what we share (such as stories, customs, rituals, beliefs and connection to community), as well as reasons for leaving. If you would like to share your story, please email her at audrey.harris@gmail.com.
