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During the third and fourth weeks, things at the workshop started to get out of hand. People grew less cautious in the wording of their critiques. Feelings were hurt. Tempers flared. Cliques began to form. Cruel graffiti appeared on the walls. Pranks, which had always abounded, took on a darker, more mean-spirited edge, and a couple of people flirted with the notion of quitting the workshop and going home.

I was never one of the quitters. Even on the days when I was most convinced that my attempts to produce a golden literary egg were only fouling the nest, I never once wanted to pack my bags and leave. I was where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, and no matter how hard it was, I was going to do it.

Not that there weren't distractions. First and foremost was the idea, planted in my head by a jealous classmate, that my journey to Michigan had somehow transformed me into a chick magnet.

"God, I hate you," said Joseph to me one evening as we ate a late supper at a nearby Burger King.

I swallowed the bite of Whopper that had suddenly turned to a tasteless lump in my mouth. "Uh, why?" I asked him.

Joseph was a scientific and musical genius, nineteen years old, who looked enough like me that I thought we could have been mistaken for brothers. He let out a short, put-upon sigh. "That really cute blonde at the counter," he said. "You get a big warm smile, sparkly eyes, how are you, what can I do for you, thank you very much, have a wonderful evening, I want to have your babies--and then my turn comes, and she hardly looks at me."

"Joseph, I think you're imagining things," I said, though it secretly thrilled me to think he was right.

"Please. You walk by and panties hit the ground left and right."

"Not that I've noticed."

"Oh, trust me," said Joseph. "Every woman at Clarion wants to jump your bones."

I almost choked. "What?"

"Yeah. Makes me want to puke. And the pisser is, you're a goddamn Mormon and can't even do anything about it!"

Lying in bed that night, I thought long and hard about what Joseph had said. And by the time I was done, boy, was my forearm tired.

That conversation changed everything. Every day during our workshop session, I peered surreptitiously around the circle at each of those older women and tried to banish the carnal thoughts that assaulted me. Every evening, huddled under the covers with visions of cheesecake dancing in my head, I performed my nightly exercises, and I tried not to think about the maid whose job it was to change the sheets each morning. I stumbled through my days under a jumbled cloud of fantasy and guilt. I grew surly and snappish, and I started withdrawing from the group.

The dam finally burst one day toward the end of the fourth week. A mixed group of us were easing our way from the Lounge to the men's side of the dorm, moving in that amoebalike way characteristic of crowds of half a dozen or more. I was the last one through the heavy fire door we had labeled with a warning about Y-chromosome poisoning. I was careless. The door closed on my hand. I didn't think. I uttered a short and vicious "Fuck!"

Half a dozen silent faces turned to stare at me. "Pardon me, could you repeat that?" said Bob. "I'm not sure I heard you right."

"Fuck!" I said again, shaking my injured hand like it was a chicken whose neck I was trying to break.

Martha rushed over to me, horrified, eyes wide as moon craters. "Oh, my God!" she said, completely ignoring my hand. "We've corrupted you!"

You'd have thought she'd accidentally shot me. "Judas Proust," I said. "You didn't corrupt me. I swear all the time."

"You don't have to try to make us feel better," said Martha. She fussed over me like a mother hen, as if there were something she could fix--other than my hand, that is. "My God, we've corrupted you, and now you're going to go home talking like us, and your family's never going to let you write science fiction again."

I pulled away with a jerk. "I don't talk like that at home," I said. I knew better. Once my sister Seletha had tattled on me for swearing--she heard about it from my cousin Dougie and saved up for a long time, until a day when she was really mad at me--and my father confronted me in the car on the way to school and he pulled over and screamed at me until he was red in the face: "If I ever hear of you using gutter language again, I'll blister your behind, you hear me? I won't have you growing up to be a gutter slut! Do you hear me? Do you want to be a gutter slut?" Right there at the curb in a quiet neighborhood, big trees all around, and nice little houses, and my father screaming at me in the front seat of a little yellow Toyota.

I didn't even know what a gutter slut was. But I never swore again where anyone in my family could hear about it.

My cheeks blazed. "I bet I've said fuck a hundred times," I told Martha and everyone else. Why was it that my father believed it so readily when someone reported that I'd sworn, and the people here didn't even believe me when they heard it for themselves? Wasn't that more than a little . . . well, fucked up?

"Sorry, Bill," said Bob, "but you're not in the club 'til you get to a thousand."

"Fuck you," I said.

"Keep practicing. You'll get there."

It was that same week that Martha and I started hanging out together more and more. Frankly, I'd been half-intentionally avoiding her since the first week. Martha had a husband, and she and Bob were flirting pretty hard, but still I got this strange vibe from her, a vibe that made me inexplicably uncomfortable. So I made like she was a wild horse in a big corral, and I tried to stay on the prudent side of the fence.

But then Martha wandered through the Lounge one afternoon while I was there alone. "Won't-You-Marry-Me Bill!" she said, employing with great relish one of the nicknames our fellow Clarion wags had recently hung 'round my neck. (Another was "Young Henry Fonda." Apparently Joseph wasn't the only observer reaching interesting conclusions watching people watching me.)

"Hey, Martha," I said.

She took a seat across from me. "We haven't really had much chance to talk since that first week. I think that's a shame."

"It is." Warily I set aside the manuscript I'd been reading. The wild horse breaks loose.

"You're one of the more interesting people here, and in this crowd that's really saying something. The Mormon who writes science fiction."

"It's really not that strange."

"You say."

So we chatted, and Martha told me about her theater group in Chicago, about writing and performing her own material, about growing up with her younger twin sisters, about the world of hardcore science fiction fandom, about the eternal optimism of Cubs fans, about her attempts and repeated failures to establish contact with God. And you know what? I discovered I liked her. I did. Another unbeliever turns out to be a genuinely good person. Unbelievable.

Late in the conversation, Martha said, "You remember during the first week, when you and I were walking back from lunch with Geoff, and he kept bugging me about who the other guy was I thought was attractive?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"Did you figure out why I wasn't telling?"

My eyes shifted to the left, to the right. "I . . . think so."

"If that's what you thought, then I just wanted to let you know that you were right. It was you."

"Gosh," I said.

"Not fuck?"

I laughed.

"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable or anything," said Martha. "I'm sorry if I did. But you are a really great guy. I kind of feel like you could be my kid brother. I never had a brother. I always wanted one."

And that was how I acquired a big sister named Martha.

Early in the fifth week of Clarion, I finally turned in the big story I'd been working on for so long--a thorough rewrite of that timeless masterpiece, "Deus ex Machina." Wanda distributed copies in the workshop the next morning. Late that evening, I ran into Bryan in the dim hallway outside my room. "Did you get a chance to read my story yet?" I asked.

"I did," said Bryan.

I had just spent more than three weeks, over half my time at Clarion, working on the damn thing. I was desperate that it go over well. I was desperate not to have wasted that time. I was desperate to be taken seriously.

I was desperate to know what Bryan thought, so I asked him.

"I think you're a genius," said Bryan, nodding his shaggy head. "I think everyone's going to be jealous of you tomorrow."

I sagged with relief. "Thanks," I said.

Still, I slept fitfully that night.

Perhaps I couldn't sleep because I had some inkling of what was coming in the morning.

This was East Lansing, early on a summer Sunday morning: brown, brown, everywhere grainy brown, like the dust from an old sepia photograph risen into the air, floating like sandpapery motes in the smoky brown sunlight. Houses and trees all around, viewed through a hazy screen of brown. An asphalt street, rendered soft and brown as a dirt road by this peculiar filter of my memory. I could almost smell the brown.

This is me as part of that scene: a study in brown. And lost.

A few days earlier, I had looked up the local Mormon meetinghouse in the Yellow Pages, called it, and asked for directions and service times. I set out on foot first thing Sunday morning, wearing a tie and jacket, scriptures in a zippered case under my arm. Directions notwithstanding, I was thoroughly lost in a prewar residential neighborhood within twenty minutes. The day cannot possibly have been as brown as I recall, but for some reason that's how it looks and smells in my memory.

I topped a hill, certain the church had to be somewhere nearby. A neatly bearded stranger, dressed in white shirt, tie, and tweed jacket, was approaching. One of the few people out and about, he carried a leather-bound book and seemed to have an important but not urgent destination. As he drew near, I could see the clear outline of a scoop-necked undergarment beneath his white shirt.

Celestial smile, I thought to myself. Bingo.

"Pardon me," I said to him, pleased with my powers of observation and my clever deduction. "Are you by any chance Mormon?"

The man recoiled, wary. "Not a bit," he said with distaste.

At some point in their lives, usually before a mission or marriage, worthy Mormon men and women undergo a special ritual called the endowment ceremony. I didn't know much about the endowment at that time, only that it took place in special sacred buildings called temples and that you weren't supposed to talk about the ceremony outside the temple. Oh, yes--and that after your endowment you had to wear special underwear called garments for the rest of your life.

I had seen garments, of course. My parents wore them, so it wasn't unusual to see my father slouching around the house in nothing but. Garments looked like normal white underwear, at least for the men, except that the briefs reached to your knees and the top had a scoop neck so they wouldn't show if your collar was open. They came in both one- and two-piece varieties. They also had arcane marks stitched into the fabric right over the nipples. I knew the marks symbolized something or other, but I had no idea what.

Garments for women were similar, if a little more frilly, but the really strange thing was that you were required to wear your garments next to your skin, with nothing between. That meant that the garment had to go on first, with the bra, panty hose, and whatever else going on over it. I can't imagine a more uncomfortable Christian dress code, unless you want to join the Amish and throw a floor-length skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and a bonnet on over the top of that.

The scoop neck of the men's garment does leave a fairly visible signature, particularly if you have on a white dress shirt over it. Less reverent Mormons call that distinctive arc the "celestial smile," since you can't get into the Celestial Kingdom without it.

Thus my embarrassing mistake.

A further note on garment detection:

Because church leaders strongly urge young Mormon women to marry only returned missionaries in good standing, it becomes important for them to determine just how good that standing is. What I'm about to report is an unconfirmed urban legend, but I'm telling you anyway because it illustrates the sheer stature of the garment as an element of Mormon life, not to mention that it sheds some light on the preoccupations of Mormon youth. Besides, it's funny.

If a young man has returned from a mission and remains in good standing with the Church--in other words, has not confessed to any grievous sin of a carnal nature--then he will wear his garments beneath his clothing at all times, except when bathing or engaging in strenuous sporting activities. Thus, if a young man claiming to be a returned missionary should ask a young woman out on a date, she can determine the truth of his claim and the status of his membership by placing her hand on his leg just above the knee and feeling for the hem of his garment. If she finds the hem, then she can feel confident enough about the young man's intentions that she might just let him make out with her, or even go a little farther than that. Rumor would have it that some of the young ladies at Brigham Young University do just that.

Rumor would also have it that certain unscrupulous young men at Brigham Young University, hoping to get to first or second base but lacking the requisite underclothes, will wrap masking tape several times around their legs just above the knees, to simulate that magic hemline.

Honest to God, that's what I've heard.

It turned out that the stranger with the fake celestial smile did have a vague notion of where I needed to go. "I think the Mormons are down that street a few blocks," he said with an indeterminate little wave. I thanked him and continued on my way.

I found the meetinghouse a few minutes later. If it were standing in a police lineup with other neighborhood churches, I could have picked it out as a Mormon structure with no problem. In my experience, only the Catholics and the Scientologists retain as much centralized control over church affairs as the Mormons do, and that extends even to the architectural plans for their buildings. The basic look and feel of Mormon meetinghouses has evolved only slightly over my lifetime, and it would appear that only a handful of different blueprints are used in the construction of new chapels around the globe at any one time.

In fact, the Mormon church employs men with the title "church architect" to design all its buildings and monuments. This position seems to occupy a nebulous territory somewhere between job and holy calling. The goal, of the architecture as well as of the curricular materials of the church, seems to be that a Mormon can walk into any meetinghouse anywhere in the world and feel instantly at home, with similar lessons being taught in similar surroundings. It's the religious equivalent of McDonald's.

I sat quietly near the back of the chapel during sacrament meeting. There must have been three or four hundred people present--good attendance even so far from Utah--and, like at any Mormon service, the numerous babies and small children in the congregation made quite a racket. After an opening prayer and hymn, the bishop made a series of announcements. Another hymn followed, after which the young priests blessed bread and water for the sacrament ordinance, and the even younger deacons lined up to distribute the small morsels to the congregation on stainless steel trays.

After that came two or three sermons, delivered by regular ward members. Officially the Mormons have no paid clergy--although the higher you rise in the hierarchy the larger your expense allowance grows, and the greater your participation as a shareholder in the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But for all practical purposes, a bishop receives no compensation for the time he devotes to church business, and he continues to hold down a regular job during his term of service, which is normally three to five years. It is neither practical nor desirable for him to offer a long sermon every Sunday, so he or his counselors assign random folks from the ward every week to prepare and deliver talks on gospel topics over the pulpit. Not only does this relieve the bishop of an onerous duty, it also gives all the members of the ward the opportunity to hone their public-speaking skills--invaluable experience for those who will go on to become leaders themselves . . . and for those who will go on to serve missions.

When sacrament meeting ended and everyone was filing out of the chapel, the ward clerk--who had spotted me as a visitor while taking attendance notes--introduced himself and placed me in the care of two young blonde women a little older than I. He asked them to show me to the Sunday school class for young adults.

I have long forgotten these girls' real names. From the moment I met them, I thought of them as Laurel and Hardy, and those designations have replaced all other labels in the files of my memory. Both girls were students at Michigan State. The first was just a bit too tall, thin, and horse-faced for me to find attractive, and the second just a bit too short, round, and moon-faced. Besides that, they giggled all the time. They seemed far more interested in my Utah background and future mission plans than in my Clarion studies, but they were pleasant enough company. The tall one came from Utah herself, a city called Logan, up north near the Idaho border. I believe she was studying something along the lines of agriculture.

I sat next to them during Sunday school, and they put their heads together and giggled softly during the lesson. After class, the tall one said, "Why don't you come over to the Institute with us sometime this week?"

"Yes," said the short one. "They have Foosball and a pool table. Do you play?"

I did shoot pool. I gave the girls the phone number for the dorm, and told them they could find me at Phillips Hall.

How unexpected. Only two hours at church, and it seemed I had a date already. Two, actually. Joseph Smith would have been proud.

During our second week of Clarion, a popular novelist named Joe joined us as writer-in-residence. That was a week of colorful lectures and odd writing exercises, such as the day we each drew a slip of paper with a scientific concept on it from one hat and one with a verse scheme from another and had to compose a poem that blended the two--say, a Petrarchan sonnet on the subject of entropy.

I turned in a rather a silly short story that week, told from the point of view of the apple that fell on Isaac Newton's head. I was cheating--this was a gag story, science fiction at its most hackneyed and trivial, and it received only a lukewarm response from the workshop. But it also relieved me of the pressure to submit something for critiquing while I worked on my magnum opus, the story that would blow everyone away and demonstrate what a prodigy I was.

Every afternoon I sat down to write--and every afternoon something seemed to come up that not only distracted me but seemed designed to test my Mormon ideals.

That was the week Bob and I became friends. As brash and charismatic as he was funny, Bob was the only one in a wide field of challengers who could talk over Martha. They were destined either to love or hate each other, and maybe both. A 27-year-old Irish-Italian New Yorker, Bob came across as well-read, well-traveled, and supremely self-confident. The only way to consistently get a rise out of him was to make fun of his Brooklyn accent. On the subject of his accent, Bob had no "sensayuma."

On our afternoon food expeditions, our group tried to sample a different restaurant every day. I don't recall many of the meals we ate, but I do remember a startling fact: every restaurant contained a prominent and well-stocked bar. If I needed any reminder that I was a tourist in a hostile and alien land, that was it. That a tender young 17-year-old like myself could be admitted to an establishment that so blatantly purveyed alcoholic beverages came as a shock to my rather sheltered sensibilities. Nothing of the kind was permitted in Utah, where the liquor laws are as incomprehensible and arcane as Middle English--and largely dictated by the Mormon church, which exerts an discomfiting influence over most arms of state government. I'd had no reason to suspect until now that other states might view the sale of alcohol differently. It reminded me how fortunate I was to grow up where I did, and how inured people had become to the casual evils that ruled so thoroughly everywhere else.

Bob made a habit of ordering beer from a different country at every meal, and he would always pass the day's selection around the table for the benefit of those interested in joining him on his world brewery tour. I always declined, of course, which turned into a joke after the first few times, albeit a good-natured one. I was not just Mormon but underage too. No one seriously expected me to have a drink of beer, even if it did give Bob the perfect chance to tease me about my heartland values.

I took it in stride. I even enjoyed the attention. So far I was setting a pretty good example as an ambassador for my faith. But then again, I hadn't really been tested yet.

To attend Clarion, Bob had abandoned a job as an emergency-room security guard at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. He had also served in the Merchant Marine and the Coast Guard, and he did talk like the proverbial sailor. (I had never heard the word "douchebag" used in any context until I met Bob.) He once told me that no word I could utter could possibly offend him, and I never did succeed in proving him wrong. "There are definitely crude and offensive concepts out there," he told me, "but that's rarely a function of the words themselves."

Bob did succeed in offending me, however, one day in the men's corridor. A small group of us, comprising both men and women, had congregated there for casual talk, and the topic had somehow turned to masturbation. Bob was relating to us, in rather broad terms, his shipboard masturbatory habits, when he noticed the look of horror on my face. "Look," he said to me, "when you don't see a single solitary woman for six months at a time, you got two choices. You can either jerk off or go crazy."

It was the first time in my life I'd heard someone speak approvingly of masturbation. My friends back home brought it up all the time, of course, but it was always derisive and deprecatory talk, a big show meant to hide the fact that they were jerking off for all they were worth every night of the week. The guilt from my own forearm-strengthening exercises was heavy enough to crush a tank, which meant, strangely enough, that Bob's blasé take on the subject really rattled me.

So did his discursion on homosexuality. "You know, Bill," he said one day when he and I were talking alone, "you're a smart guy. How can you believe in a god that would make a person homosexual and then tell him it's a sin to follow his feelings? Send him to hell for doing what he was made to do?"

I wasn't sure where that had come from, but I wasn't exactly happy that Bob had launched another of his salvos against my faith. "What are you talking about?" I said. "God doesn't make people homosexual."

"If you believe that God makes people, then you have to believe He makes homosexuals too. And your church is going to kick them out just for being the way they are? Doesn't that strike you as rather un-Christlike?"

"I'm not the one kicking them out. They're kicking themselves out by the way they behave. A church isn't a democracy. It's got rules of behavior."

"If you support an organization like that with your money and your membership, then you're saying it's right and good to discriminate against homosexuals. Bill, have you ever thought about this, or are you just repeating things you've heard other people say?"

"I've thought about it."

"You've got to do more than that. You've got to study these kinds of issues, read up on the science, listen to both sides. Then you can decide what you believe in and what you stand for, and not let someone else do it for you."

I walked away from talks like this feeling uncertain and unsettled, like a tiny capsule of certitude buffeted by an ocean of immoral philosophy. I didn't really comprehend what Bob was up to until he told me a remarkable thing in the course of one of our gossip sessions. He and I were speculating on the various couplings, adulterous and otherwise, that might be going on amongst the other students, when he said, "I'll tell you, it's been my experience that the more promiscuous a person is, the more unhappy he tends to be."

As I was mulling over this strange statement later that night--strange coming from a fornicating gentile, anyway--it suddenly occurred to me that Bob lived by an ethical code every bit as strict as mine, and that, wittingly or not, when we weren't ambushing people with water pistols he was teaching it to me. It also occurred to me, for a heretical moment, that Bob's idea of moral responsibility was higher than any I'd heard in church, because it was founded in a profound respect for fellow humanity and not in any fear of punishment or hope for reward.

I shook off the thought almost immediately. No doubt Bob means well, I told myself, but I won't fall for it. If it sounds reasonable and pretty, that's because Satan dolls his lies up in fine clothes and sends them out to tickle the ears and excite the intellect. He's a master of deception.

But I know what's right. I can think for myself. I won't be fooled.

Late that week, Laurel and Hardy stopped by the dorm to pick me up for our pool date. I introduced the girls to two or three of the other students who were lounging about, but instead of enthusiasm my guests were greeted with standoffishness and even a little unfriendliness. It didn't occur to me until later that we had been creating a secure little unified world at Clarion, and that the girls were outsiders. By swooping down and spiriting me away, they threatened that world, reminded the others that I still had one foot on a plane completely separate from theirs.

The girls drove me to the LDS Institute of Religion, a huge old converted house off-campus that in an alternate universe might have made some sorority a fine home. The Mormon church maintains these religious schools near more than 1,200 college campuses in the United States and Canada. Each offers a slate of classes on a variety of doctrinal topics, easily meshed into a student's regular college schedule. Instructors, at least at the larger Institutes, are paid employees of the Church Educational System.

The East Lansing Institute was nowhere near as large or elaborate as the one at the University of Utah--which is, in fact, the largest Institute in existence, housed in a complex of immaculate beige brick buildings, and servicing as much as half the university's student body. (Of course, the only reason the U has the largest is because there is no Institute at Brigham Young University. Religion classes are part of the required curriculum there, so there's really no need.)

The church strongly encourages its college students to take at least one Institute class every term, not only for the sake of religious instruction but also for the fellowship and company of other Mormons--and, not to mention, as a nostrum for the godless philosophies being proclaimed on-campus. I had sampled a couple of Institute classes myself. My first quarter in college, I took the basic Religion 121, first in a full-year series covering the entire Book of Mormon. But the Institute was a long walk across campus, and I lost interest by the third or fourth week and stopped going.

The next quarter, determined to make a better showing, I signed up for something that sounded more intriguing, a 300-level course on the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. I even volunteered to play the piano accompaniment for the hymn at the beginning of class--every classroom had an upright--just so I'd be obligated to keep attending. But that didn't work either. My attendance tailed off again around the third week, and by midterm I had stopped going entirely.

My parents hoped I would take enough classes during college to earn an Institute diploma, but even that first year I knew it wasn't going to happen. I had reached saturation. Going to church every Sunday was about all I could do--after four years of seminary, I'd had more than enough religion classes for a lifetime.

Seminary is another program of the Church Educational System; it is the high school equivalent of Institute. The main difference is that it's much more difficult to avoid signing up for and attending seminary. Your parents pressure you to go. Your bishop pressures you to go. Your classmates pressure you to go. And if you don't go, everyone can tell that your priorities have slipped out of whack.

In parts of the U.S. and Canada where the Mormon population is relatively insignificant, students from ninth grade on attend seminary classes in the morning before school. Early in the morning, as in six-thirty or seven. Every day of the week. Kids in Utah have things a little easier thanks to the "released-time" law, which permits public school students to be released from normal educational obligations for one class period every day--a class period of your own choosing--expressly to receive religious instruction. For this reason, you will find a seminary building adjacent to nearly every high school in the state, just over the property line, and hordes of teenagers streaming into and out of it on every class break.

After a year of Old Testament, a year of New Testament, a year of Book of Mormon, and a year of Church History, I earned a diploma from the Kaysville Seminary. So did ninety percent of the kids I knew. And what did that mean?

As far as I was concerned, it meant I had put in my time. With that two-year full-time mission looming, I wanted to maximize the time left for my own pursuits. Institute classes could go hang.

One side effect of the released-time law is, of course, that non-Mormon students can use the same loophole. I had a few friends who attended classes at the Catholic seminary every day, but the trickle back and forth to that building was so thin that you couldn't guess its endpoint unless you already knew. (Actually, I never did learn where the Catholic seminary is located, sad to report.)

I've always wondered if an atheist student could exploit the law to get out of class for instruction in godlessness. I would find that splendidly entertaining. If anyone ever tries, they'll have my support.

After a few games of eight-ball in the Institute's student lounge, plus some cold root beer and pleasant enough conversation, the girls brought me back to my dorm. I didn't invite them in again. What would have been the point? Utah was overflowing with Mormon girls, and that vast selection would still be waiting when I got home from Clarion. Laurel and Hardy had done nothing to distinguish themselves from that teeming mass, besides being familiar and available in a distant land. For now, I was living among people who shared a different set of my beliefs, and I wouldn't have that again after I returned to Utah.

I don't think I made this decision consciously, but from then on I confined my social activities to my new circle of science fiction friends. I wanted to maximize the short time I would have to spend with them.

One thing this meant was seeing a lot of movies I might not otherwise have attended--most of them (with the notable exception of the Disneyfied version of Lloyd Alexander's young adult novel The Black Cauldron) rated R. Attending R-rated movies was still a bit of a novelty for me. I believe it was the Mormon prophet Spencer W. Kimball who instructed church members never to view R-rated material, and my parents had always strictly enforced that guideline with me. They didn't even take my sisters and me to see our first PG-rated movie, The Bad News Bears, until I was eight or nine. I didn't even believe my sister Seletha when she tried to tell me the movie was rated PG. "Mom and Dad don't take us to PG movies," I told her.

"Then why was there all that swearing?" she said.

She had me there.

My first R-rated movie was The Star Chamber, which I attended at the age of fifteen with my friend Chad Willis and his parents. Chad's mother also happened to teach elementary school, and with one of my sisters in her class she warned me not to tell my parents that she had gotten me into an R-rated movie.

But I broke. Racked with guilt, I confessed to my mother later that week.

Oddly enough, she didn't punish me. Mrs. Willis got off easy too, as far as I know.

That was 1983, and we'd had to go to Layton, the next town over, to see the show. Kaysville had only one theater, and it never even showed an R-rated movie until late in 1984, when profits were low and ownership changed hands. Beverly Hills Cop was the first, and you should have seen all the ladies with nothing better to do who turned out to picket!

I turned out, too--to see movie, along with half the kids I knew from school. This was a historic occasion for our little town. No way were we going to miss out.

Gradually I came to realize that a movie's rating has little or nothing to do with its quality or morality, and the power of the prophet's pronouncement evaporated for me. I still tended to avoid the edgier fare at the Blue Mouse, however, so I had never witnessed for myself the campy spectacle of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when the invitation to go see it came from Martha.

Rocky Horror played at the Blue Mouse in Salt Lake at midnight every Friday and Saturday, so I had of course heard about the costumes, the flying toast, the squirt bottles, the comic lines and the playacting--and that was just the audience part, all timed to mesh with the action on the big screen! But my friends and I had never quite dared to attend and see what all the fuss was about. Now here was Martha, offering a foray in the company of half a dozen or more of my Clarion compatriots. What could be safer?

"What's it like?" I asked nervously. "I've heard a lot about it, but . . . you know . . ."

"It's a sad, beautiful movie about loneliness and alienation," said Martha. "Try to ignore what's going on in the audience. None of them really understand it."

Sometime after eleven that night, eight or nine of us piled into two cars--a few of the students had driven to Clarion, hundreds if not thousands of miles--and headed over to a huge barn of a movie theater on the edge of Lansing proper, with a parking lot the size of Rhode Island. The theater could probably have seated eight hundred people; for the midnight movie, it was lucky to have gotten forty. Those of us from Clarion spread out in clumps. I ended up sitting with Bob, who was also a first-timer.

A group of teenagers in costumes milled at the front of the theater, beneath the giant blind eye of the screen. Two of them, a boy and a girl, had dressed themselves like a bridal couple, him in black tuxedo, her in lace and white veil. As midnight approached, the couple made their way up the aisle from the front, stopping to talk to various audience members. When I saw them say something to Geoff, whom surely they didn't know, I said to Bob, "What's going on?"

"Beats me."

We found out a few moments later, when the two kids reached our fellow student Kim, sitting a couple of rows ahead of us. Kim was twenty-two, a painfully shy South Dakotan girl with an almost inaudible voice who wrote gripping, blood-curdling horror stories. Kim was sitting alone. Bob and I leaned forward to hear what the couple said to her.

The boy spoke. "Hi there. We were just wondering if you'd ever been to see this movie before."

Face lowered, Kim looked up at them with her haunted eyes and shook her head a little--just the merest vibration, really.

The couple backed away a step, made a great show of pointing their fingers at her, and shouted at the tops of their lungs: "Virgin! Virgin!"

Kim's face blazed red, and she hunched down so far in her seat she seemed to be trying to become one with the gum and spilled soda on the theater floor.

Greatly pleased with themselves, the teenagers continued up the aisle. The next stop was our row.

They were a couple of years younger than me, and I was so appalled at their behavior I could barely look at them. But they trained their attention on Bob, who had the aisle seat. "Hey there," said the boy. "Just wondering if you've ever seen the movie before."

Bob sat completely relaxed in his chair, slouched like a lazy snake. He cocked an eyebrow at the boy without really looking at him, then said with dead seriousness in his best Brooklyn accent: "You call me a virgin, I'll rip your fucking lungs out."

The boy's face turned white beneath his rouged cheeks. His mouth chewed a moment on empty air. He looked at me, seemed to think better of his question, then tugged the girl on past us without another word.

The movie and all its attendant foofaraw got underway a few minutes later. The musical numbers were fun, I enjoyed the way the audience's lines turned the on-screen dialogue into self-deprecating parody, and I derived some cruel satisfaction from the scene where Tim Curry serves Meat Loaf for supper. But overall the movie's cheerful subversion of conventional sexuality disturbed me, despite Bob's lessons in open-mindedness. Frank, a fellow from Washington who could be flamboyantly provocative one moment and inscrutably prudish the next, declared the movie the most pornographic piece of filth he had ever seen.

"You need to see it without the audience," said Martha, plodding dejectedly through the warm night air to where our cars were parked. "You just can't get the point with all that distraction around."

That was a Friday night. Two days later was church. As I was making my way through the crowded hallway before sacrament meeting, I spotted the young groom from the movie theater walking toward me. Our eyes met, and for a brief moment his terrified expression returned. Then he looked down at the floor and hurried past me.

In the service that followed, he helped the other members of the Aaronic Priesthood prepare the sacrament for blessing and distribution.

Where I come from, we call that "ironic priesthood."

It didn't really have anything to do with that incident, but that also turned out to be the last Sunday during my Clarion tenure that I attended church.

It's not that I had anything against church, really--not then. It's just that there were so many other interesting things for me to do, I didn't want to waste the time.

Already, the summer days seemed slippery and fleeting.

This is Michigan State University in the summer: green, green, everywhere riotous green. No place in Utah was so green as this--vast swards of grassy green, mounded citadels of rolling green, crumpled hectares of leafy green packed around the branches of monstrous, bursting trees. Stolid brick buildings shrouded in emerald ivy leaves stand like isolated and mysterious jungle islands in that wide ocean of green; travelers ply the lanes from one structure to the next through the humid green air like early adventurers daring the deep just to see what lies on the other side.

My taxi, having navigated this torpid marvel of green, deposited me in front of Phillips Residence Hall, a monumental edifice near the edge of campus, crowded with a century's worth of the ghosts of joyless study. In the coming weeks, the presence here of my fellow Clarionites and me seemed almost an affront to the dignity of academia, and our mounting hilarity a desperate attempt to crack the impenetrable carapace of soberness and propriety which had accreted around the place. Inhabiting only two corridors on the ground floor of that massive dormitory, we could have been parasites in the bowels of a sleeping giant. Our unruliness was the only sign of life for miles about, or so it seemed, though an entire world buzzed with commerce somewhere just beyond sight of our remote fastness.

But those are thoughts that formed over the course of the summer. When first I stood in front of my new home in the sodden air of a Michigan afternoon--June 23, 1985, a Sunday--I was thinking how majestic this all was, and how much greater a thrill it was to be here than in church.

This was going to be one fabulous summer.

Professor Landrum, a self-effacing fellow with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy mustache, greeted me inside and helped me carry my suitcase and duffel to my room. Together with my briefcase, these items had caused me no end of trouble when I changed planes in Detroit. Having never flown alone before, I had failed to check my bags all the way through to Lansing from Salt Lake City. I retrieved my bags in Detroit, but they were far too heavy for me to carry all at once. Not knowing what other options were open to me, I leapfrogged all the way to my connecting terminal, across the entire breadth of the airport, dropping my briefcase and duffel to the sidewalk, backtracking to recover my suitcase where I had left it, ferrying that as far again ahead of my other bags, dropping it, going back for the rest, and so on. With three hours between flights, I still made my plane to Lansing with only minutes to spare.

Alone in my room, I both marveled at and shrank from its unexpected luxuries: a ten-foot ceiling, a small refrigerator, a comfortable oversized chair, a desk the size of a pool table, a closet suitable for hosting parties, a bunk bed from which I could choose either berth, a PCjr computer from IBM, and a sheaf of orientation materials to sift through. It was a room for two students to share and bump elbows in over the regular academic year. In the summer abandonment, though, it took on the dimensions of a temple, or a tomb.

I unpacked, and as I did my earlier sense of sangfroid began to dissipate. I had managed to avoid the other arriving students on the way in. Now, while they were out roaming the halls, striking up new acquaintances and taking one another's measure, I battened down in my room like a rabbit, decorating my walls with rock posters, and wondering what the hell I was doing there. I wasn't good enough for this. I wasn't smart enough, or brave enough. Around strangers, I consistently lost my voice; I could barely make myself speak out in class back home. No one here would ever take note of me or acknowledge my talent in any way, because I was incapable of giving them the opportunity. Why had I signed up for this?

Late in the afternoon, a leather-clad bear of man with a walrus mustache and a long ponytail interrupted my neurosis by knocking on the door. He introduced himself as Bryan and invited himself in to chat for a while. He was from the fabulous alien land of Baltimore; I confessed that, until this trip, I had never traveled farther east than Denver. He was over thirty, and we had absolutely nothing in common besides our love of science fiction, but he turned out to be much nicer than I ever expected any long-haired biker type could be.

When he left, I felt much better than I had before. The friend tally was up by one, and it seemed possible that it might keep climbing.

That evening we convened for our first workshop session--twenty people crushed into a basement room with flourescent lights overhead and walls painted a greasy yellow. As I surveyed the circle of unfamiliar and threatening faces, I became convinced that my optimistic projection of the night before would prove a complete pipedream. My clenched stomach told me that these people would remain utter strangers to me. At least there was Bryan, who sat to my left, a figure as shaggy and comforting as the Cowardly Lion.

Seventeen of us were students, selected from the year's eighty or so applicants, and we came in all shapes, sizes, and ages. Rounding out the slate were Professor Landrum, his graduate assistant Wanda, and our first week's writer-in-residence, Algis Budrys himself--a figure of legend from the late Golden Age of science fiction, and author of the article that had first introduced me to the idea of Clarion. My awe at his presence in our prosaic little circle of folding chairs bordered on reverence.

Budrys called the meeting to order, instructing us to call him A.J. and asking each of us to introduce himself. As we proceeded around the circle, our brief and generic bios dropped to the floor like dead birds in the stale air. There was nothing to mark any of us as special, at least in anyone else's eyes. We remained each sullen and alone, halting and inarticulate in our isolation.

Even so, when my turn came and I announced in a piping voice that I was from Utah, questions pelted me from all sides. "Are you Mormon?" someone asked.

I did not want to admit that I was, but my conscience screamed at me that I must. How many times had I heard lessons and sermons berating those ashamed to confess their belief in Christ? "Well . . . yes."

"What's a Mormon doing writing science fiction?" asked someone else.

"Yeah, I thought that was against the rules or something," said another anonymous face, throwing down the words like a gauntlet.

"Orson Scott Card is Mormon," I said. "And so's that guy who created Battlestar Galactica."

"God, I hated that show."

"I just sold a story to an anthology of Mormon science fiction," I said, stretching the truth just a tiny bit.

"It somehow doesn't seem like Mormons should be writing science fiction," someone said.

"That's actually sort of what my dad thinks." I was trying to field everyone's comments, like a novice tennis player darting from one side of the court to the other.

"You still live at home?"

"Uh-huh."

"You're how old again?"

"Seventeen."

"And your parents let you come here anyway?"

"Well, my dad didn't really want me to come."

"So are you, like, in trouble?"

"Not really, not exactly. He let me apply thinking there was no way I'd get in."

"He told you that?"

"After I got accepted, yeah. He said he wouldn't have let me apply if he thought I was actually going to get in. But then he had to let me come."

"You don't have a problem being Mormon and writing science fiction?"

"Not really," I said, exhausted, and the storm had pretty much blown itself out. Time to move on from the tall skinny kid with the big glasses to fresher pickings.

But as the circle moved on, I was left to realize, for really the first time, how alien my religion, my beliefs, must look to people on the outside. I had my handful of non-Mormon friends growing up, but, at least since the age of six, I had always been part of the majority, and everyone else's beliefs had always been the weird ones, the deviant ones, the mockable ones. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The gentiles here far outnumbered me, and I was the lone defender of my people, my culture, my faith, which everyone around me, even with the best of intentions, would like to tear down and destroy. They would set themselves no more sacred mission than to root out, set fire to, and trample into the dust my testimony of Christ, rendering me a cold-hearted, amoral, and hellbound atheist. Misery, after all, loves company, and no one is more miserable than an atheist.

I had been taught that this would happen someday, but now I would truly be put to the test. I hoped to prove equal to the task.

A word about Mormonism and science fiction:

I'm still not sure why people find it so difficult to associate Mormonism and science fiction, when those of us with an intimate knowledge of both worlds see such a natural connection between the two. Perhaps the traditional and widely perceived antipathy between science and religion lies at the root of this misconception. After all, a literature based (largely but not entirely) on the thesis of humankind's manifest supremacy in the universe can hardly coexist peacefully with the idea of God.

But Mormons occupy a unique territory in the landscape of theology. They believe that God lives on a planet orbiting a star called Kolob, where one day equals a thousand of our earthly years. They believe that God has created numberless worlds besides our own and populated them with beings just like us. They believe that, should they remain true and faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ, they will have the chance to become gods themselves in the next life, with the power to create and populate worlds of their own.

These are not things you'll hear right off the bat when the missionaries come knocking at your door, but they are nonetheless genuine Mormon beliefs, which means that Mormons are exposed from childhood to a mind-boggling cosmic vista of possibility and potential. Not every Mormon, of course, discovers an affinity for science fiction--many unthinkingly accuse it of the same crimes my father did, and the best of it certainly challenges the fundamental doctrines of any church--but the ones who make that leap tend to embrace the genre with almost religious zeal. They seem to welcome the challenge like they would a good argument, and even find their faith enriched by it. Perversely, many of these Mormon SF aficionados strike me as more down-to-earth and reasonable in their commerce with the worldly world than their "mundane" brethren.

In 1987, for instance, I made the acquaintance of a rural Mormon bishop by the name of Jaeger. He didn't merely find science fiction to be good recreational reading--he credited it with enabling him to comprehend Mormon doctrine at all. "The Gospel is full of these abstract concepts that I just didn't get when I was growing up," he told me. "But when I started reading science fiction, I started seeing dramatic illustrations of these scientific concepts like relativity and gravity, and I started developing the ability to deal with abstract ideas. And that's when the Gospel clicked for me."

On another occasion Bishop Jaeger confided to me, "You know, Elder Shunn, it's awfully difficult to be a bishop in a small little town like this. I'm supposed to tell all my young men around here that they can only date Mormon girls? How can I do that in good conscience? You've seen the girls here at church. Most all of them are dogs!"

But that's another story.

Beginning the next morning, we settled into our routine. Our workshop sessions ran from nine until one, Monday through Saturday. Each started with an hour-long lecture from A.J., after which we would unleash our tender mercies on the victims of the day--those poor unfortunates with new stories to offer up on the altar of sacrifice. While the author of the work under consideration sat mute, we would go around the circle, each participant in turn tendering his or her opinion of the story--or, sometimes, of the author. One student named Bob, a Brooklyn native who rates as one of the three funniest people I have ever known, once led off a critique by saying, "You know, the best thing you could do for the sake of art would be to cut off your hands and bury your typewriter."

The process could be brutal, but at least we flung our slings and arrows at one another in comfort. On the first Monday morning, we decided as a group to abandon our bilious yellow basement room in favor of the main lobby of Phillips Hall, with its overstuffed couches and armchairs. We called this impromptu classroom the Lounge, and it was so comfy that I frequently nodded off during workshop sessions. When once we found the Lounge occupied, we repaired to the lobby of Snyder Hall, a dormitory that sits behind Phillips Hall but faces the opposite direction, like its giant mirror image. We dubbed that lobby the Anti-Lounge, and before long it had become our preferred venue, perhaps because it felt less like we were holding class in our own home.

We could reach the Anti-Lounge without ever setting foot aboveground by sneaking into a wide passageway that led from the basement of Phillips Hall to the basement of Snyder Hall. From there, we could also get into the underground steam tunnels that honeycomb the Michigan State campus, though to my knowledge none of us went exploring there. These are the same tunnels where sixteen-year-old prodigy James Dallas Egbert III holed up during his famous disappearance in 1979. Popular rumor blamed his disappearance on the sinister side effects of his immersion in the role-playing world of Dungeons & Dragons, when in actuality he was suffering from depression born of the impossible expectations of his family and his confused sexual identity. He eventually turned up in Louisiana, but shot himself in the head a year later.

Maybe that's why we all avoided the steam tunnels, where exploration might otherwise have been damn enticing.

I enjoyed our workshop sessions immensely, at least when I was awake, largely because I hadn't yet managed to complete a new story and thus had not sampled the particular joy of having someone point out with ecclesiastical fervor that I had used it's where I should have used its. But to sit there in the Lounge every morning amidst that many highly intelligent, articulate, witty, and opinionated people was like being David Banner in a bath of gamma radiation. I felt as if I were soaking up ideas and techniques powerful enough to change me into the Incredible Hulk.

People even seemed to take most of my comments seriously--except for the day I made the mistake of illustrating a point about narrative technique with an example from a book by Piers Anthony. Such hoots of derision arose at my choice of reading material that I immediately reclassified his writing as juvenile hackwork not fit for use as toilet paper, and to this day I have not been able to pick up another of his novels. (In fact, the very week of my return home from Clarion, I boxed up all thirty or forty of my Piers Anthony novels and took them down to the used-book buyer at Cosmic Aeroplane.) I figured that meant I was growing up.

Our afternoons and evenings were reserved for writing, and for reading the stories on the docket for the next day's excruciation. Of course, we also used this time for other activities--staring at blank computer screens, gazing out windows, wandering the halls with glazed expressions while threads of drool trembled from the corners of our mouths. (This is what's called the "writing process," and if I'd bottled all the drool I've spilled over the years while I should have been writing, we could all drink a healthy toast to Dame Saliva, the muse of wordsmiths.) We also affixed blotters to the walls to scrawl graffiti on and played innocent pranks on each other, but by far the most characteristic behavior we exhibited was something we called "schooling."

I'm not talking about getting an education. I'm talking about what fish do--drifting about from place to place in large groups with the appearance of willfulness. As divisive and iconoclastic as we could be in our workshop sessions, as wildly divergent as our clothes, our hairstyles, our backgrounds were, we still had far more in common with each other than we did with anyone else on campus, so when any of us ventured away from the dorm we tended to do so in clumps and clusters. Need lunch? Let's travel by fours. Want to see a movie? Must take eight or more. Shop for books? Can't be done with fewer than eleven.

Oh, how East Lansing trembled to see our boisterous pack roaming the sidewalks of Grand River Avenue! Wary crowds parted to let us through. Cigarette-smoking frat boys stepped aside nervously, trying not to look like they were giving ground. Merchants quietly turned the signs in their shops and restaurants from Open to Closed, and mothers gathered their children to their breasts with reproachful looks.

We were isolated, castaways in our dormant volcano of a residence hall, pariahs among civilized humans, and thank God for it. Otherwise, we might have had no reason to come together the way we did, to cling to one another like lost astronauts floating in space.

Late that first week, an unusually small school of us--Geoff, Martha, and me--were returning from lunch at one of the few cafeterias in operation on campus during the summer. We were engaged in a favorite Clarion pastime--talking about those not present behind their backs. In particular, Martha was holding forth on the men of Clarion '85, one by one. A 25-year-old Chicago native, Martha ranked as the champion talker of our group, which might have been unbearable except that she at least had the grace to be interesting as she ran roughshod over all other conversation. "And then there's Bob," she said. "That Bob is one of the two really attractive men at Clarion."

I found this a strange turn of conversation, since Martha was one of the three married women among us. But Geoff found it more than merely strange. "Oh, come on--Bob?" he said. "You must be joking."

"Why would I joke?"

Geoff, with his scraggly copper beard and perpetually quizzical expression, was the epitome of the mild-mannered scientist. He was the only published writer among us, but he was such a nice guy we hung out with him despite that. "Who's the other one then?"

Martha was momentarily stricken dumb. She glanced at me, then looked away just as quickly. "I don't know," she said. "I . . . really don't think I ought to say."

Geoff practically bounced, like a kid pestering his mother for a treat. "Come on, Martha. You have to tell us now."

But Martha refused to say anything more on the subject, no matter how much Geoff hounded her. I kept my tongue as well, pleased but little flustered and confused, and wondered just how interesting this summer would shape up to be.

I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I'd moved out of the house when I started college. While many of my friends from high school were reveling in their new apartments and new freedoms, I was returning home every day to my familiar bedroom, eating dinner with the family, and asking if I could take the station wagon out for a group date when my homework was finished. By day I was confronting some rather strange and unsettling philosophies in my classes (the University of Utah being a notoriously liberal institution, at least when compared to the rest of the state), but at night my life differed very little from when I still went to high school.

Oh, I had my small adventures along the fringes of counterculture. I went to jazz concerts. I attended art films at a vaguely seedy theater in downtown Salt Lake called the Blue Mouse. I bought and sold books and records at a sprawling, brick-walled store called Cosmic Aeroplane, where incense scented the air and most of the magazines in stock were printed on grainy gray paper. Cosmic Aeroplane had two separate basements. Stacks and stacks of old used books filled the first basement, and I could spend hours exploring that fusty maze of words and ideas. I only ventured into the second basement once, in the company of several of my high school friends.

I had always sensed something a little disquieting about Cosmic Aeroplane, though I couldn't put my finger on it. I had the feeling that something unspeakable was happening just out of view, behind the scenes, something so vile and occult that I was placing my soul in peril just innocently shopping there for books. When my friends and I ventured into the second basement, I got an eyeful of what was bothering me, although I didn't really understand what I was seeing. This is because I had no familiarity with the term "head shop." We stood boggle-eyed a few moments amidst the incense smoke, black-light posters, and shelves and glass counters overflowing with drug paraphernalia, then beat a hasty retreat.

"That was really creepy," said Luke Thomas on the sidewalk outside, breath steaming in the cold night air.

"No doubt," said Kenny Arlington. "You could feel it all around you. That place was just full of evil spirits."

The three of us shuddered collectively. It was a few months before I dared to enter Cosmic Aeroplane again, even for something as innocuous as buying science fiction novels.

This was me, circa 1985: always ready to believe that everyone around me was far more in tune with spiritual matters than I.

I knew perfectly well how to think for myself. I did it all the time. It's just that, when I reached a conclusion that clashed with canonical Mormon doctrine, I would assume that the error was mine, and I would berate myself for having let my limited mortal reasoning lead me astray.

"O that cunning plan of the evil one!" exclaims the Book of Mormon. "O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish."

I didn't want to perish. So when I couldn't make my beliefs make sense, I would defer to the ones who seemed to have a better handle on things. And in my circle of acquaintances, that seemed to be almost everybody.

For that reason, I doubt my college experience would have turned out much differently if I had lived away from home. I was far too timid to do anything very outwardly wrong, and as long as there were other good Mormons around--and liberal school or no, half the students at the U were still Mormon--I would probably never outgrow that tendency.

Which is why the six weeks I spent at Michigan State University during the summer of 1985 were so significant.

That and the small role it played in sending me to jail a year and a half later.

Just as I was graduating from high school in 1984, I read a remarkable article in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Its author was the writer, editor and critic Algis Budrys, a lion on the science fiction scene of the fifties and sixties. He described a writing workshop called Clarion, which took place every summer at Michigan State University, and related his experiences as a teacher there. Early in 1985, a second article appeared in Asimov's. The author of this one was Lucius Shepard, one of the premier young writers in the genre, whose name was routinely mentioned in the same breath with William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Shepard's article described his experiences as a student at Clarion.

The thrust of both articles seemed to be that, while a talent for writing could not be instilled where none existed, a young writer with talent could progress far more rapidly in an intensive program taught by professional authors than he or she could working alone with only form rejection letters from far-off editors for feedback.

For some time, I had been seeing a peculiar phrase in the bios of many of the authors whose stories appeared in Asimov's: "graduate of the Clarion workshop." I had finally discovered what that mysterious phrase meant, and the profusion of these writers seemed to indicate that Budrys and Shepard weren't just blowing smoke. Clarion worked.

And if it worked that well, then I had to go.

I figured that the summer of '85 was going to be my best and only shot at attending Clarion. I would be getting ready to leave on a mission during the summer of '86, and I wouldn't get back for another two years, so if I missed '85, then my next opportunity wouldn't come until the summer of '89, and that was just too long for me to wait. Besides, I might not have the time or money to spare by then. So it had to be '85.

I sent off for an application right away, but I knew, even if I was accepted for the program, I could never attend unless I somehow wormed permission out of my father.

The straightforward approach seemed best.

I placed the two issues of Asimov's, with the Clarion articles clearly bookmarked, in my father's briefcase one morning before work.

A few days later, I accosted my father in the kitchen before breakfast. He was always the first one up, and he would put a huge pot of oatmeal on the stove to boil. The object among the rest of us, my mother included, was to get up late enough that the oatmeal would be gone and you could eat cold cereal by default and still get out of the house on time.

I rarely won in these reverse breakfast sweepstakes, especially during that first year of college when I had to car-pool with my father. But on that fateful morning, I didn't try to compete. With false cheer, I bounced upstairs from my room in the basement, scooped up a bowl of hot oatmeal, and joined my father at the kitchen table. He was, as usual, watching the morning devotional on KBYU, Brigham Young University's public television station. At the end of the prerecorded sermon, delivered with lethal monotony by one of the blander church leaders, I made my move.

"So," I said, with nowhere near the nonchalance I'd hoped to achieve. I was nearly frazzled with nerves. I hated asking my father for anything. "Did you happen to read either of those articles about the Clarion workshop?"

"I read them," said my father. "I presume you didn't plant them in my briefcase just for my entertainment."

"No."

"Let's leave off the discussion of whether or not you can go for now. How would you propose to pay for this thing? It says it costs two thousand dollars to attend."

"That's just an estimate, including travel," I said. "The tuition's only a thousand."

My father waited with raised eyebrows for me to continue.

"I thought I could use some of what I've saved up."

"Your cabinet-making money?"

I nodded.

"That's for your mission," he said. "Those are consecrated funds."

I cringed inside. When Mormons consecrate olive oil for use in anointing and blessing the sick, they recite a special prayer over it. My father had not actually prayed over my paychecks before depositing them in an account I had no access to, but in his mind that money was just as sacred as the consecrated oil at the back of the kitchen cabinet. It was my mission fund. That money was bottled up, labeled, and set aside expressly for the purpose of paying my way through two years in the service of the Lord, and any other use of it was unthinkable.

This was going to be every bit as difficult as I had feared.

Despite its billions of dollars in assets, the Mormon church does not pay its missionaries. Service is strictly on a volunteer basis, with the expense borne by the missionary or his family. You don't even get an honorarium at the end of your service, like you would in the Peace Corps. The object is to induce the greatest sacrifice possible and thus to bind the missionary to the church for life. The more you've given up in service to an institution, the harder it is to break away from it. You hate to face the possibility that all that time and effort went for nothing.

Obviously some parts of the world are more expensive to live in than others. Thus, it used to be that applying for a mission was a lottery in more ways than one. If the Lord called you to Guadalajara for your mission, you might be able to get by on seventy dollars a month, at least back in the mid-eighties. If He called you to Tokyo, it might be more like seven hundred. Either way, you were well-advised to have plenty of cash on hand before applying. If you couldn't afford to pay your own way, you could be supported by the general church mission fund, which consists of donations from members earmarked specifically for that purpose. But the church itself won't help you.

The situation is more equitable today. Each missionary who can, contributes an equal amount to the general mission fund every month. This money is then distributed to missions around the world as needed, with those in less expensive countries subsidizing the ones suffering from higher costs of living. Thus my brother Tim, who went on a mission to Florida in 1994, and my brother Lee, who went on a mission to Japan in 1996, both paid roughly the same amount of money for the privilege.

It's progress of a sort, I suppose.

My oatmeal steamed in the dim light of the kitchen, bleeding away its heat.

"It's only a thousand dollars," I said, aware that this tenacity might cost me far more than that in the long run. "Plus air travel and food. I'll earn that back and more next year."

"It's not right," said my father.

I played my trump card, which seemed less an ace and more a deuce under my father's stare: "It's my money."

As I recall, I had seven or eight thousand dollars in my mission fund. I seriously doubt whether my father had ever stopped to consider the fact that I had earned that money myself, and that morally it was mine to do with as I pleased. Or possibly it had occurred to him, which was why he took charge of every paycheck I brought home.

"Son, that money has been set aside for a sacred purpose. We've been contributing to that account since you were a baby."

"Well, I earned most of it. And I'm not asking for it all--just a little, and I'll earn that back next year."

My father frowned. "Son, why can't you go to this Clarion after your mission? There'll be plenty of time for that later."

The intensity of my need choked my lungs like bronchitis. "I'll probably never be able to take six weeks off during the summer again. At least, not until I'm already a professional writer, and who knows how many years that'll take otherwise."

The frown deepened, as did the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes.

"And look at it this way," I said. "It'll be the first time I've lived away from home for any length of time. It'll be good preparation for my mission."

He puffed out a short sigh. "This goes against every instinct I have."

"This is what I want to do." I said it with infinitely more conviction than the time I told him yes, I wanted to go on a mission, back on our L.A. road trip.

He seemed to sag, as if the breath had leaked out of him. "Then you can apply."

"Thank you," I said. I tried not to look too triumphant. I wasn't even unhappy to finish my lukewarm bowl of oatmeal.

My father was hedging, as I later discovered. He didn't think I'd be accepted to the program. In fact, he was betting two thousand consecrated dollars against it.

I sent back my application within the week. There wasn't much to it--just a little bit of information and a short story. Applications were judged on merit. If you submitted a good enough short story, you got in.

I spent the better part of that week trying to decide which of my stories to send. At last I settled on one called "Deus ex Machina," about a sentient computer named ARTHUR ("Artificial Thought with Unlimited Resources") who seeks out and kills God, then takes His place as the arbiter of reality. A band of daring scientists, including ARTHUR's creator, must confront the rogue computer in his lair and attempt to topple him from the Divine Throne. It turns out that God isn't really dead, but only wounded--which makes it a somewhat less daring story than it might have been, at least for a good young Mormon boy, but that was about as far as I dared push my theological speculations at the time.

The story was packed with everything I admired about my favorite science fiction--rigorous logic, bold problem solving, daring geek heroes, fanciful invention, and cosmic scope. It was also fairly short on such commodities as rhythm, pacing, character development, and plausible scientific extrapolation, and dosed with a healthy naïveté on the subject of human relationships.

But whatever. Despite its flaws, it was still the truest arrow in my quiver. I wasn't going to turn into Shakespeare, or even Isaac Asimov, overnight. I had to go with it.

The only problem was, the application specified a story of twenty-five pages or less. Mine was more like seventy-five--a novella, not a short story by any stretch.

But it was also double-spaced. I took a deep breath, retyped the whole thing single-spaced, and got it down to thirty-seven pages.

Not ideal, but it was going to have to do. Praying that the judges would let me get away with such egregious fudging, I sealed the story up along with my application, and sent them both winging on their way to East Lansing, Michigan.

One Saturday afternoon in April, the telephone rang. I answered.

A resonant voice at the far end of a long-distance line introduced itself as Professor Landrum from Michigan State University. "Mr. Shunn," he said, "I just wanted to tell you that your application for the Clarion workshop here this summer has been approved."

"That's fantastic!" I said. "Thank you!"

"I just want to confirm with you that you will actually be attending."

I didn't hesitate. "Absolutely."

He went on to discuss tuition and payment dates and residency plans, but I didn't hear much of what he said. None of it mattered. I was going to Clarion! All else was trivial detail.

When I got off the phone I went looking for my father, to break the good news.

The original draft of The Accidental Terrorist, the memoir of my days as a Mormon elder, contained four chapters devoted to my stay at the infamous Clarion science-fiction writing workshop in the summer of 1985. These had to be compressed to a few pages for space reasons, but it seemed there might be folks around who were interested in reading them for the sake of a small glimpse into one of the revered institutions of the SF community.

Therefore, here are those chapters, ripped whole and bleeding from the body of my memoir. It's just my odd perspective on Clarion, but I hope you enjoy it

My Clarion '85 classmates Geoffrey A. Landis and Mary Turzillo taught at Clarion 2001. For information on attending a future edition of the workshop, visit the Clarion Workshop Home Page. (There are also two sister workshops, Clarion West and Clarion South.)