I Bring the News and the News Is Good

In three weeks, I'll drive to Detroit and defend my dissertation. Assuming I don't set the room on fire or accidentally punch one of my committee members in the neck, I think they'll approve my work and I'll be done. Finally.

I'm in the process of finalizing my formatting and trying to make sure that every little detail is taken care of. It's a weird, exciting time, and it's a little hard to wrap my head around the idea that it's almost over.

Anyway, one component of finishing up the final document was writing an autobiographical statement. I wasn't sure what they wanted, so I went ahead and wrote what seemed right and was then told it was too long. Apparently, they only wanted something short and to the point, and I had written a three page essay. So I cut out the essay and wrote a paragraph because I'm all about getting this done, you know?

But I like what I wrote and I don't want it to just disappear into the junkyard file I've been building for the last eight years. So I thought I'd post it here. It's a little lofty and more formal-sounding than what I usually post, but what the heck - PhD-ing requires a certain amount snooty obnoxiousness, I think, so here's some of mine:

I was born and raised in the high deserts of southeastern Idaho. My parents were both fourth generation members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the area where we lived is a main artery in what is known as the Mormon Corridor, the stretch of land from southern Alberta, Canada to northern Mexico that LDS prophet Brigham Young systematically colonized in the 19^th century. My personal identity is deeply interwoven with my membership in the Mormon church. Every major decision I’ve made and each important life event I’ve experienced has been shaped and colored by my relationship with my religion. At times, that relationship is fraught with conflict and cynicism on my part while at other times it is a source of guidance and peace for me.

Because I recognize Mormonism’s centrality in my worldview and because I believe in the efficacy of writing and research for finding answers to important questions (both personal and academic), I have used my time in graduate school to unpack my particular set of religious, cultural, historical, academic, and aesthetic concerns. During my MFA program at Boise State, my thesis project was a book-length series of poems centering on the conflict between a Mormon’s desire to reach spiritually upward and the various temporal appetites that detract from that reaching.

Once I decided to continue on to a PhD program, I knew two things for sure: I wanted to pursue film studies (because I wanted a subject I knew I would still love even after years of close study) and that I wanted to study Richard Dutcher’s work. As I wrote in the dissertation itself, Dutcher’s work has profoundly affected me since I first encountered it, sometimes in positive ways, sometimes not. Positive or negative, it was important in ways that were a little mysterious to me. I believe that grad school can and should be an opportunity to work out questions and ideas that matter. Dutcher’s work matters to me. Mormonism matters to me. Sorting out my own sometimes conflicted feelings about my religion and reconciling them with my academic pursuits matters.

Over the course of the eight years it has taken me to get to this point, I had some of the most challenging and profound life experiences a person can have: my wife and I welcomed our third and final child after a seven year gap, my father died of a heart attack right in front of me while he was out visiting my family in rural Illinois, my mother died just four months later after finally succumbing to the effects of years of aggressive breast cancer treatment, and, as a result of their passing, I fell into a deep depression that lasted a couple of years. My religious faith was tried and almost worn thin in ways I’d never experienced. My relationship with my beliefs changed like they never had before. Serious academic pursuit is hard work. I think it is made harder still by the fact that it happens as real life is constantly impinging on it.

I was in my early 30s when I began this project. This January I will turn 41. Over the course of this project, I have gone from being a relatively young man to approaching middle age. I have more children, more wrinkles, and more pounds on the scale now than I did when I began, having spent the better part of a decade working on this project. As I write this statement as part of preparing the final draft of this dissertation, I look back and think that, while I wish it had taken about half as long, it has been time well-spent and I am glad I did it. Writing, studying, and talking about my church and my faith in combination with film, something that has been central to my life for every bit as long as Mormonism has been, created new understanding and also generated new questions and concerns. In other words, it has done exactly what both academic study and religious practice are supposed to do: shed light while raising new questions to pursue. One Book of Mormon prophet taught, “For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have” (2 Nephi 28.30). I feel as though I have spent the last eight years learning line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. I certainly haven’t come to any kind of “fullness of knowledge” about film studies, Mormonism, or even Richard Dutcher whose life and work continue to evolve and change in unexpected ways, but I made a tentative forward step into the darkness, testing the ground beneath me as I go, and found something useful, rewarding, and new as a result of my attempts. Stepping into the unknown, attempting to make a connection, being both rewarded and a little confounded by what’s found on the other side? This seems to me to describe the process and aims of both religious faith and scholarly pursuit. Despite how separate they sometimes seem, it gratifies me to realize how related the two worlds really are, and I am glad to have spent the last eight years working on a project that, I hope, created a few new nexus points between them.