Find Me Online
I have thoughts and opinions about a million different things, many of them Mormonish. My Patreon page is where I post the most drafts and reflections, but you can also find my thoughts on Social Media or my poor, neglected longer form places. A map:
Social Media
Twitter: Come for the niche opinions, stay for the recommendations and long, philosophical threads.
Instagram: At the time of this writing, I mostly post art from my kids.
Substack: Mostly poems, sometimes essays!
Mormon Lit Lab
I write a lot of stuff on my own, but I really like writing communities and collective venues. My latest longtime adventure is a thing called the Mormon Lit Lab. For the past eight years, we’ve run online Mormon Lit writing contests. We’re also done some extra work in writer development.
I would strongly recommend exploring our archives. We’ve specialized in very short work: you can read most pieces in less than three minutes. Writers have done some incredible things within that limit, though: we’ve published some of the most interesting work in Mormon Lit over the past decade.
If you like what you see, you can help support future contests and publishing efforts on our Patreon page. If you like our Facebook page, there is an outside chance that an algorithm will also occasionally show you what we’re up to.
Blogs
I started blogging in 2009: I was doing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the time and was really interested in how online forms might function as literature. My thesis project was three interconnected blogs: one religious, one ethnic, and one surreal.
I miss them. I still visit once in a while, but it’s not the same.
Mormon Midrashim: My religious blog.
Caucajewmexdian: My ethnic blog.
My Life and Hard Times: My surreal blog.
Most recently, I was honored to be interviewed on the Faith Matters podcast. From the episode description:
“For this episode, we were happy to bring on someone that’s been on our list for a long time — scholar and writer James Goldberg.
James is a fascinating person and Latter-day Saint, and brings a truly unique perspective to our faith. In his words, his family is Jewish on one side, Sikh on the other, and Mormon in the middle. He works as a historian at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is also a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator. He’s won the Association for Mormon letters awards in both the Drama and Novel categories, for different works, and has been a finalist in the Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Criticism categories. He’s also one of a rotating cast of scholars on BYUtv’s Come Follow Up series.
Our conversation was wide-ranging and it turns out James has interesting insights to share on just about anything — so we covered several topics, including how Latter-day Saints can approach the Old Testament, wrestling with other difficult scripture or history, and the virtue of the slow, distilled process of creating poetry. We also discussed James’s book of poetry, Let Me Drown with Moses and its provocative title, including the virtue of choosing faith in a chaotic world while maintaining our own moral compass.”
Finally, you can find a project I worked on called A Dance of Light here. A Dance of Light is a six-part collaborative project by Lisa DeLong, Nicole Pinnell, and myself. This project, created in a time of darkness, weaves together visual art, music, and poetry in a shared meditation on light. Starting on the 2020 Winter Solstice, we released one part weekly.
