When members of the Utah Humanities Council got halfway through their project to publish an anthology of writing for the Utah Centennial, they must have felt like the kid who'd agreed to count the stars.
Many, many words have filled many sheets of paper over the past 100 years. And - to borrow a line from James Thurber - the resulting omnibus has become "the size of a small St. Bernard.""Great & Peculiar Beauty: A Utah Reader" (Gibbs Smith; 1,010 pages; $49.95) features nearly 150 writers - with work ranging from Eliza R. Snow's "Sketch of My Life" to Francois Camoin's "Mistakes Have Been Made."
Now the book is finally in print and up for sale. And the range of the writing parallels the range of the state's landscape itself. Befitting two naturalists, editors Thomas J. Lyon and Terry Tempest Williams have gone about their task "topographically." Writers are divided into geographical neighborhoods, with The Great Basin, Mountains, Colorado Plateau and Dixie serving as the suburbs of the great Urban Terrace. Mixing and matching poetry with essays and fiction, the twosome has stitched together a handsome patchwork quilt of literature.
"The editors say the painful thing was leaving people out," says Delmont R. Oswald, executive director of the Utah Humanities Council. "But it was a process of trying to narrow it down to a manageable length. We've had a lot of people express interest in the book, so the Utah Humanities Council will be doing five presentations throughout the state to bring it to the people. The book itself will not be in bookstores for a couple of weeks yet, however."
The irony, of course, is that people who have shown a healthy degree of interest in Utah literature have likely already read a big chunk of this material in other places. It's hard to be tapped into Utah poetry, for instance, without having come across "Hudson's Geese" by Leslie Norris, "Mean" by David Lee, Ken Brewer's "Concession" or Emma Lou Thayne's "Things Happen."
Ditto for a good many of the prose pieces, including Judith Freeman's "Chinchilla Farm," Dorothy Solomon's "In My Father's House" and Wallace Stegner's "At Home in the Fields of the Lord."
Yet having such fine work between two covers is a bonus in itself. And thanks to the tireless research of a cadre of scholars, the book also offers authors whose names hardly ring a bell: such names as Yoyo Suyemoto (of Topaz, Juab County), Elsie Brandley and Andrew Karl Larson.
As with any undertaking of this size, readers will find plenty of room to wrangle with the choices. Dead writers tend to trump living ones. And the editors' explanation that science fiction writers, children's writers and young adult authors were excluded because "to do justice to these genres many more pages than we could afford would have been involved" sounds a little disingenuous. One assumes the same argument would surface to explain why a good many writers in other pop genres - such as thrillers and light verse - were also passed over, including the work of Utah icon Orson Scott Card.
And in a state so known for its middle-American, mainstream values, the editors opt for work by several, young, University of Utah poets who quickly passed through the state at the expense of, say, writers like Gerald Lund, whose multivolume "Work and the Glory" saga has become an Utah industry in itself. And because of the limited subject matter, a couple of token essays by early LDS writers stand in for what are arguably Utah's most widely read and influential books - the devotional writings of Mormon leaders.
Nevertheless, quibbling too much would mean missing the "great and peculiar" beauty of this anthology and its unquestionable value as a resource book, a history text and - perhaps most important - a grand, high-minded volume of bedside reading.
No book like it has been published here before. Quite likely no book like it will be published again. Read it cover to cover and you will have something of a fix on a state that's impossible to pin down.
I, for one, was especially pleased to find half-a-dozen entries that I've wanted in my library over the years but have been unable to find.
This, for instance, a description of a young girl's first train ride from Virginia Sorensen's short story "The Ghost:"
It was wonderful from the first moment. Lulu insisted that my nose would be flat on top forever from the way I pressed it against the window every moment of my turn at the inside seat. Familiar places looked better seen from the moving train, for were we not superior to them all? Provo vanished at once, Springville was there like a wave of a wand, a flash of stones for the cemetery, a whiff of peavines from the factory, and I cried, "There's Maple Mountain! And Sierra Bonita - " Even the mountains were smaller from this moving window; we moved along their flanks at incredible speed. There, already, was the red glory of Spanish Fork Canyon.
Welcome to Utah.
And happy reading.