regional academic journals like Weber Studies, Western American Literature, Western Humanities Review, and Quarterly West, none of which can very well ignore Mormon creative and critical expression. Through such nurturing, Mormon literature, like any other literature, can become, in Pound's phrase, "the news that stays news" (29).

Together these developments are producing, in every genrefiction, poetry, drama, and the personal essaya literature not of exhortation and doctrinal correctness but of Emily Dickinson's "freckled human nature." The sweet and sentimental, with its unearned increment of feeling, continues to co-exist, of course, even to flourish, clogging emotional arteries, and stereotypes persist in the less competent work. Helen Cannon, reviewing one such novel, finds that no Mormon character moves beyond a stereotype: "The women carry casseroles and attend to mothering; rigid andto Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Stories, which appeared in 1983, is both an assessment of the achievement of recent fiction and an analysis of its thematic and formal possibilities. He says Mormon writers are paying attention to style and structure as they explore themes of "compelling significance." "The Mormon ethos," he says, "invites opposition and creates conflict, which inevitably attracts the makers of fiction." He finds that major tensions in Mormon fiction arise "in the possibility of wrong behavior," in "the question of believing or not believing," and from "the failure of the promises," a failure because "Mormons typically cannot accept tragedy as part of the authentic life" and tend to deny and repress "disorderly impulses and emotions." They use the gospel, he says, "as a defense against