Both Micro and Macro

It seems like virtually everything worthwhile in the Mormon intellectual and literary communities has Eugene England’s fingerprints all over it. By far the most important and influential class of my English master’s degree at BYU was Gene’s Mormon literature class, which opened new horizons for me. Nearly a decade later I continue to be deeply involved in interests and associations first discovered under Gene’s tutelage, such as Wasatch Review International (now defunct, but which I’ve helped replace with Irreantum) and the Association for Mormon Letters, which he helped start. When I wrote a term paper on the author Walter Kirn, Gene allowed me to quote from a letter Kirn had written to him, and my paper was later published. He founded Dialogue and was heavily involved with Sunstone, which have both been lifelines for me.

Not too long ago I interviewed with Gene and some others for the Sunstone editor position, and I was impressed with his hopes for the magazine to move past some of the bad blood of recent years. When he left BYU, I passed along a rumor on an e-mail list that BYU had forced him into early retirement, and he firmly and publicly corrected me. I imagine there was some truth to the rumor, but I admire him for perhaps overcompensating so he didn’t take on the stink of disaffection. He really was an ­example of how to be a force for cultural change without losing the faith.

I saw him just a few days before his initial collapse. It was at the Jan Shipps lecture at UVSC, which he organized as part of the great work in Mormon studies he was getting underway there. When he smiled and waved in my direction, I looked over my shoulder because I wasn’t sure he meant me, and then I realized he did. As I relive that moment, I savor that my last encounter with such a public person included a personal connection, even though the large auditorium was almost full of people he’d invited.

Facing my own midlife vocational crisis, I’m astonished at how Eugene England pursued what I see as two simultaneous careers at such high levels of achievement. At the micro teaching level, he built one-on-one relationships with hundreds of individual students and others. At the macro publishing level, he influenced thousands with his personal essays, criticism, and editorial work. While his continuing micro efforts are now lost to us, I look forward to many more years of absorbing the macro side of Eugene England. Counting the periodicals he founded, edited, wrote for, and helped oversee, his publishing legacy measures several yards on my bookshelf.

—Christopher K. Bigelow
from Irreantum 3.3 (Autumn 2001): 94