of contemporary Mormon letters. In their work, their enterprise as writers, in their craft and calling, Mormon writers are making essential gestures as accountable members of their society. "I make my way in the world telling tales," says Taleswapper in Orson Card's Seventh Son (234). May our storytellers help us continue to be a literate people, a people who began with a book and who, heaven help us, will resist becoming, as Helen Cannon fears we may, a people of the video ("of the Book" 117).

Notes

1 This essay, written expressly for Weber Studies, had an airing in abbreviated form at the Sunstone Symposium held on 8 August 1992 in Salt Lake City. A companion piece of sorts, "Telling It Slant: Aiming for Truth in Contemporary Mormon Literature," originallyread at one of AML's literary cottage meetings in September 1991, appears in Dialogue, Summer 1993.2 I quote from memory.3 The anthology (Signature books 1992) embraces the full sweep of modern Mormon fiction, from Virginia Sorensen and Maurine Whipple of the "lost generation" of Mormon writers, through Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall, second generation authors who were "first to probe contemporary Mormon culture," to such recent writers as Orson Scott Card, Judith Freeman, Neal Chandler, Phyllis Barber, Walter Kirn, Levi Peterson, and Margaret Young, twenty-two writers in all.4 In a letter of 29 July 1992 to Neila Seshachari, editor of Weber Studies.5 Here I reiterate points made in "Telling It Slant," Dialogue, Summer 1993.6For example, Central America in Margaret Blair Young's Salvador and Germany in her House without