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Rejoice in beauty with One Hundred Birds

November 01, 2016 12:00 AM
Rosalynde Welch of the Maxwell Institute’s new advisory board introduces our latest book, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, which is officially released today. Five years ago this fall, Utah County commuters saw something exotic along the suburban streetscape: billboards advertising nothing at all. Instead, the giant signs serialized a poem, “Small Prayer,” a piece as intimate and suggestive as billboards are public and flagrant. Artist Ashley Mae Hoiland took the rhetorical form of the billboard and turned it inside out. The result was a quiet revolution for anybody who bothered to look out the window. Hoiland’s new project, a memoir titled One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, launches today, the latest in the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith series. At first blush, the book seems a departure from the large-scale. collaborative public art installations that have been Hoiland’s chosen vehicle in the past. This book, by contrast, is diminutive and personal, composed of dozens of fractured miniatures that recount, kaleidoscope-like, themes from Hoiland’s spiritual and artistic journey as a Latter-day Saint woman, mother, and artist. Her own line drawings of varied relational groups accompany the text. A closer read shows Hoiland working with the same unexpected inversions of scale that defined her earlier work. The book may be modestly proportioned, both in its physical presence and its reflective tone, but it tackles a flock of themes as numerous as the hundred birds of its title, and does so with candor and nerve. The pages touch on the author’s sometimes uneasy encounter with gender culture in the Church, and on her thirst for women’s voices on earth and in heaven. And on her relief missions to the margins of our community, whether as a young proselytizing missionary in Uruguay or as an open-hearted seeker in Provo, Utah. On her gentle wrestles with faith and faithfulness, her account of which deftly sidesteps the fraught language of crisis and trauma that too often crowds our discussions of doubt. On our human belonging in the natural world, and on the grace to be found in the earthly wild. On the soul-abrading experience of motherhood, which she explores with great tenderness and great vulnerability. And on the power of art to build community from the blocks of shared attention that are every artist’s truest medium.It is the latter that most captivated me. As I read, I thought of dozens of people I know who would resonate with aspects of Hoiland’s experience. I mentally populated her faceless figure drawings with my own family and friends. But for my part, it’s the art that has it. Her accounts of the inventive, inspiriting public art events she conceived—from an exhibit of portraits in an Uruguayan civic space, to an installation of seed packets spelling out the word GROW in a rundown streetcorner, to a simple fabric banner of encouragement placed with care near a college campus—delighted and moved me beyond my expectation. Hoiland does not work in the grand Western tradition of “capital A” Art that prizes the originality of the artist’s original vision above all. Neither her language, a lyrical, writerly idiom reminiscent of Terry Tempest Williams or Annie Dillard, nor her themes, which cover much of the territory of moderate Mormon feminism that has developed in reflective corners of the LDS internet, are strikingly original, though they are brought together with freshness and delight. Rather, Hoiland’s achievement is best understood as a finely worked performance, one that sensitively interacts with the reader’s expectations and acknowledges the “one hundred birds” that shaped her own generous sensibilities. The authority Hoiland claims is thus rooted in collaboration, community, and charity. It is a personal authority, deliberately local in scope—north American Mormon women’s experience—persuasive in character, and exploratory in method. It is authority that is slow to proclaim itself as such, but make no mistake: it is authoritative. Yet it seeks no confrontation with ecclesiastical authority. In contrast to some Mormon feminisms, a few of which have defined themselves (and been defined) explicitly in opposition to ecclesiastical authority, Hoiland brings only patience, peace, and an unblinking eye for beauty to her interactions with Church structure and discourse. Indeed, her name and the authority it claims shares a small page with the logo of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, named for one of the most revered agents of apostolic authority to Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century. Apostolic authority is centered, not marginal; commissioned, not improvised; explicitly public, not private; global in intention, not local. Apostolic authority is, in its rhetorical character though emphatically not its content, not unlike a billboard, in fact. In this sense, One Hundred Birds might be read as another kind of billboard project, in which Hoiland enlists a powerful rhetorical vehicle to accomplish a complementary kind of work, investing the public and private in one another’s care to serve the community that encompasses both. Elder Maxwell once wrote, “When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.” I think he’d sense those airborne instincts in this little book. The author has my gratitude for drawing another beautiful corner of human experience into the pale of Mormon experience. You’ll want to sit in it awhile.
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"...telling them to do the best things"—Another glimpse at One Hundred Birds

October 23, 2016 12:00 AM
In this excerpt from One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly Ashley Mae Hoiland writes about a touching conversation about Jesus.The latest book in the Living Faith series lands November 1. You can preorder on Amazon, or pick up a copy at Deseret Book and other LDS bookstores. In the meantime, we'll post a few more book excerpts here. Just click the active links in the Table of Contents.
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“I had not saved anyone”—A sneak peek at One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly

October 14, 2016 12:00 AM
Ashley Mae Hoiland is a creative writer, which is another way to say she’s a storyteller. Her forthcoming book in the Living Faith series shows what happens when a Latter-day Saint with a Master of Fine Arts degree brings her academic training to bear on her personal faith.I’ve worked on a lot of books here at the Maxwell Institute and I admire many things about each of them. But none have personally moved me as much as Ashmae’s One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly. Her stories about missionary work, friendship, doubt, family life, and other topics begun to change my perception of the world, noticing the godly in places I wouldn’t have noticed before.You can preorder the book on Amazon or pick up a copy at Deseret Book and other LDS bookstores when it comes out on November 1. In the meantime, I’ll be posting a few sneak peeks at the book here. Just click the link in the Table of Contents.In today’s sample, Ashmae writes about an unexpected lesson she learned from a missionary companion in Uruguay.
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The next Living Faith book takes flight this November

August 07, 2016 12:00 AM
During the October 2015 General Conference of the LDS Church, President Russell M. Nelson delivered “A Plea to My Sisters,” calling for women in the church to raise their voices: “My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out…Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God…Take your rightful and needful place in your home, in your community, and in the kingdom of God.” President Nelson’s plea seemed serendipitous. Literally days earlier I’d first spoken with Ashley Mae Hoiland, a Latter-day Saint artist and author who seemed like a good fit for the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith book series. Her book, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, is scheduled to come out this November, just a little over a year after we heard President Nelson’s plea. It will be the first Institute monograph ever written by a woman.Like the other books in the Living Faith series, Hoiland’s is the product of her academic background combined with her faith. Hoiland earned her master of fine arts degree at Brigham Young University, and her book is an experimental collection of stories, meditations, poetry, and original art. She’s speaking out, as President Nelson requested, and her voice will be welcome not only to women in the church, but also to men who stand to gain so much from their perspectives. His plea for women to speak up assumes there will be ears willing to listen.Practically all Latter-day Saints can recite by heart the first four principles and ordinances of the gospel. Faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost each seem neatly connected like sturdy rungs on a ladder in the fourth Article of Faith. But the article points beyond itself—these are only the first principles and ordinances. In our age of geographically precise GPS navigation we search in vain for a divine itinerary precisely outlining the safe route back to our heavenly home. In the gospel of John, Jesus employs a striking poetic device to describe a disciple’s life beyond the first principles and ordinances: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)One Hundred Birds is closer to Jesus’s description than to the Article of Faith. Hoiland’s personal vignettes, interspersed with her original poetry and art, are loosely grouped according to familiar gospel themes like faith, redemption, and hope, in addition to often-overlooked gospel themes like creativity, laughter, mourning, and beauty. This might challenge readers who are more comfortable following a linear narrative from beginning, middle, to end, but it’s more representative of life’s messiness. The disciple’s life can be unpredictable and surprising, often escaping the linear logic of lists. It’s more like an open canvas than a paint-by-numbers worksheet. As President Dieter F. Uchtdorf has suggested, we bring our unique perspectives to this task to the benefit of everyone: “Sometimes we confuse differences in personality with sin. We can even make the mistake of thinking that because someone is different from us, it must mean they are not pleasing to God. This line of thinking leads us to believe that the Church wants to create every member from a single mold–that each one should look, feel, think, and behave like every other. This would contradict the genius of God….As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are united in our testimony of the restored gospel and our commitment to keep God’s commandments. But we are diverse in our social, cultural, and political preferences. The Church thrives when we take advantage of this diversity and encourage each other to develop and use our talents to lift and strengthen our fellow disciples.” With the eyes of an artist, Ashley Mae Hoiland has come to see how holiness saturates everyday life. With the mind of a writer she translates that holiness onto the page so we can catch glimpses of that holiness more clearly. Not leaving the first principles and ordinances behind, she invites us to feel the wind blowing where it pleases. It is ours to spread our wings and learn to fly. * Keep watching the Institute’s blog (subscribe to it at the bottom of the page) as well as our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds for pre-order information and updates—including a sneak preview of One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God in the coming weeks.
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