Ships of Hagoth is a digital-first literary magazine featuring creative nonfiction and theoretical essays by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Where other LDS-centric publications often look inward at the LDS tradition, we seek literary works that look outward through the curious, charitable lens of faith.
Ships of Hagoth is pleased to announce its first book-length message in a bottle, AND ALL ETERNITY SHOOK, by
Jacob Bender, released April 2022.
Jacob L. Bender is also the author of Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), a work similarly rooted in his Puerto Rican mission service and his mother's passing. In LDS studies, he has previously written for Dialogue, Sunstone, Peculiar Pages, Ships of Hagoth, the Eugene England Foundation, and The Association of Mormon Letters.
Enraged, he wrestles with his God in passionate prayer as he pleads for her life; images and memories of his mission and his Mom jump, cut, and splice together in a cinematic crescendo, flashing furiously before his eyes as though he were the one dying and not her; all as he feels after some miracle, some impossibility, and the peace which surpasses understanding.
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A CALL FOR
We are hoping—for “one must needs hope”—for creative nonfiction, theoretical essays, and craft essays that seek radical new ways to explore and express theological ideas; that are, like Hagoth, “exceedingly curious.”
We favor creative nonfiction that can trace its lineage back to Michel de Montaigne. Whether narrative, analytical, or devotional, these essays lean ruminative, conversational, meandering, impressionistic, and are reluctant to wax didactic.
As for theoretical essays: we welcome work that playfully and charitably explores the wide world of arts & letters—especially works created from differing religious, non-religious, and even irreligious perspectives—through the peculiar lens of a Latter-day Saint.
We read and publish submissions as quickly as possible, and accept simultaneous submissions.
Sometime in the mid-1950s, Edward Abbey—a young social radical and aspiring author from Pennsylvania—took a seasonal job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in Moab, Utah.
Vacation as Sabbath, because you rarely know when your last time is your last time.
Seeking further light and knowledge from their 2007 album Sky Blue Sky.
Don’t do to me what you did to America…
This song is brilliant, because there really is this malaise associated with the month of July, isn’t there. Because you must now confront the fact that the year is not only half over but past half over.
Mournful ballad from her iconic 1996 album Boys for Pele.
Stand-out track from perhaps the most legendary unfinished album of the 20th century.
Turning to face the strange…
We have noticed that in many corners of ye oulde Bloggernacle, there has lately emerged a growing consensus–likely fueled by Bob Wright and Gregory Princes’ otherwise outstanding “David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism”–that President Alvin R. Dyer of the Seventy’s 1960 address “The Challenging and Testifying Missionary” was one of the infernal catalysts for the high-baptism/low-retention approaches towards missionary work that have bedeviled the Church since at least the post-war period.
Shortly after I moved to upstate New Jersey in 2018 for work, my Dad flew out from the west coast to visit. He hadn’t been
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