Cash prizes help to reward writers
On Feb. 17, three Utah State students were awarded cash prizes for their entries in the 2010 Leonard J. Arrington Writing Awards competition. Arrington’s children, Carl Arrington and Susan Arrington Madsen, presented the September lecture, “A Paper Mountain: The Extraordinary Diary of Leonard James Arrington.”
After the lecture, attendees were encouraged to research and write a 2,500-word essay using at least two sources. The top three entrants were awarded scholarship money.
Sara Jordan – 1st place
Sara Jordan, graduate student in folklore, won 1,000 dollars for her first-place prize. She said she was very interested in the 2009 Arrington lecture topic: “Women and Polygamy.” She said at the time, she had too many other things going on, but committed herself to enter in the 2010 competition.
Though the new lecture focus was on what Arrington’s journals said about his life, she said she decided to focus on polygamy because “there was too much in the journal to not use that as the basis of the paper.”
“Scholarly analysis of the context of narrative as well as its components provide a much fuller understanding of a piece of written text, the people who produce it, the time and place in which it was produced and its impact,” Jordan said.
Jordan said she approached the competition seriously.
“The lecture was impressive and made me want to learn more about the plural wives of my great-grandfather and great-great grandfather who helped settle Cache Valley,” Jordan said. “I saw it as an opportunity to delve deep into my great-grandfather’s diary.”
She said initially she didn’t know how to accomplish this. After talking with a couple English professors, Jordan found Jennifer Sinor’s work on her ancestor’s diary and used the project as a starting point.
Through her research, Jordan said she was surprised there was little scholarship on the male diary.
“The diary was a feminist text,” she said. “My work applied a feminist interpretive model to a 19th-century Mormon male text.”
Jordan began writing after she travelled abroad in 2002-03 to the Middle East and Spain. She discovered a family folklore class offered through the Salt Lake Community College’s Community Writing Center and said she felt the need to attend.
“The class inspired me to get serious about writing, and I did,” Jordan said. She continued to travel and live abroad researching, writing and teaching.
Jordan loves storytelling and said writing is very important.
“It is a means through which the human experience can be conveyed,” she said.
Genevieve Draper – 2nd place
Genevieve Draper, a sophomore in history and a Statesman staff writer, was awarded 500 dollars for her entry in the competition. She said she heard about the lecture from ads and fliers on campus and announcements in the LDS Institute.
Draper researched Arrington’s historical diaries. The diaries had been sealed for 10 years and reached a length of 35 linear feet, filling 100 boxes. During her research, she said she went through about eight of the boxes. Draper said Arrington had a strong impact in Mormon history. As a journal keeper herself, she said she enjoyed reading the diaries.
She said she found the diaries to be interesting because they include more than day-to-day reporting. The diaries are a compilation of his daily stories, along with newspaper clippings and thank you notes. She said Arrington compiled other Mormon stories and his opinions on those events as well.
“His diaries are more than just diaries,” Draper said.
She learned about Arrington from his humor.
“What you laugh about tells a lot about you, it tells a lot about the time,” she said. “Humor is really telling.”
John Brumbaugh – 3rd place
John Brumbaugh, graduate student in American history, was awarded 250 dollars for his third place entry. He said writing is bittersweet for him, and the process takes a lot out of him, as he rewrote his paper multiple times.
“Good writing usually takes multiple drafts, which means a lot of time and energy devoted to a few pages of scribbling,” Brumbaugh said. “On the other hand, it is a great feeling to discover new information and clearly explain the significance.”
Brumbaugh was interested in how Leonard Arrington influenced the study of Mormon history. He said he started by examining a number of broad works on Mormon historiography to understand the changes in Mormon history over the last 60 years.
“Then I moved into the published autobiographical works by Arrington to understand how he felt about the changes,” he said.
“Leonard Arrington is the most important Mormon no one has ever heard about,” Brumbaugh said. “Mormon Church transparency about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Joseph Smith are due in part to a process started by this Idaho farm boy turned historian.”
– natasha.bodily@aggiemail.usu.edu