What's the reason Emma denied polygamy just before her death? Was Emma Smith bound to secrecy? Was it a trauma response? Cheryl Bruno answers that in our next conversation...

https://youtu.be/2PtSqgzcaOo

Don't miss our other conversations with Cheryl!

Copyright © 2024

Gospel Tangents

All Rights Reserved

Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.

Introduction to Book Editing

GT  00:44  Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I'm excited to have a very busy author back on the show. For those of you who didn't see the previous segment, could you reintroduce yourself?

Cheryl  00:56  I’m Cheryl Bruno, and I'm editor of this new book, Secret Covenants.

GT  01:01  She's been a very busy author, as you know, if you watched the last segment. We just watched her co-author with John Dinger. Cheryl's written, well edited. Can you talk a little bit about the editing process? What is involved when you bring together all these different authors, because there's like 12 or so we talked about that before, but tell us about that.

Cheryl  01:27  Okay, so as I've said before, Gary Bergera, over at Signature Books, when he was still there, before he retired, asked me to put together a book made of essays about polygamy. I think the original conception was that I would bring together essays that had already been written and then just put them into a book. But I thought that I would like to have new insights on early Mormon polygamy, because it's been so long since we had Brian Hales book come out, or Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness. It has been many years since that came out, and so I thought we could come up with some new insights. I asked a group of authors to get together and write me a chapter for this book. I chose many authors that were well known for writing about polygamy. Then I have a few new ones that this is their first publication, and it makes for a very great book.

GT  02:24  It's a great book too.

Cheryl  02:27  The editing process is very intense. When I first was asking these authors to write for me, first I had to have a conception of what the book would be, so that they just didn't go off in all directions. Because I wanted it to be a cohesive book, so I had to be able to pitch what it was going to look like to these authors, so that they could fit their ideas into this cohesive whole. Then they sent me their first drafts. In many cases, because I gave them a idea of how long I wanted it to be, and I had 10 authors, and I didn't want to go over like 200 pages, but it actually did go quite over 200 pages; 400 pages, twice as long. But some of the authors were very enthusiastic and gave me 80 pages. So, I had to cut quite a bit. You know how sad it is for an author, for their editor, to just cut their baby in half.

GT  03:31  So you make them do it. Don't you?

Cheryl  03:33  Yes, but I would give them information on what I felt wasn't needed. In many cases, I did just line through [text] because it's hard sometimes for an author to see when they've spent so much time on their book what [to cut.] They think everything is important. So sometimes you have to give them a little bit of help on that.

GT  03:55  Okay.

Cheryl  03:56  We went back and forth, cutting a lot of them. Then when we thought we had it cut, they wanted to add more. They found something else. So, that was a really interesting process that we went through. I had to wrestle some. Some of the article or chapters had a tone that I didn't want to have in the book, because I wanted to strike a very scholarly tone. I did not want to be anti-Mormon in any way, and yet…

GT  04:27  Or apologetic, either. Right?

Cheryl  04:28  Or apologetic, either. That's right. So, there's a certain tone I wanted to strike. I had to argue a little bit with some of the authors about fixing their tone. It was quite a long process. I found that there weren't a lot of women that I could ask to give me a chapter on polygamy. Polygamy needs women's voices to discuss it in a balanced way. We have many, many women who do activism around polygamy, but we don't have that many women who, at the time, this was couple years ago, when I was first putting this together, were doing scholarly work on polygamy. So that was disappointing to me to try to find women's voices. I feel like I still have a dearth of women's voices in this book. Although in the past two years now, there have been women that have stepped forth in writing scholarly treatments of polygamy. So, I think that that's becoming better.

GT  05:32  Cool.

Cheryl  05:33  So, it was a difficult process. Oh! Then once we have done Don Bradley and Chris Smith both wrote articles for [the book.]

GT  05:42  Really good ones,

Cheryl  05:43  Right. They're great articles. But then, as they were doing these articles, they came up with a completely different insight that warranted another chapter. So, they both got together and came together to put another chapter in,

GT  05:57 Which is really good.

Cheryl  05:58  Yeah, it's a great chapter. It did end up a lot longer than I thought it would be. It's very dense, but I think it's great book.

GT  06:09  Very readable, I would say.

Cheryl  06:11  Thank you.

GT  06:12  One of the nice things about it, this is more of an anthology. So, you don't need to read it cover to cover. You can just pick a chapter and read it. And so that's what I've done. I've been all over the place. Of course, I read your chapter. I didn't read John's because I didn't get enough notice that he was coming. But Mark Tensmeyer, Clair Barrus, Mary Ann Clements, Don Bradley's chapter on Fanny Alger. Do you say Al-jerr Al-gurr?

Cheryl  06:42  Well, now the thing is to say All-gurr, because the family now says All-gurr, or the family that is descended from Fanny. That group in Utah calls it All-gurr, but David Goulding has done some research, and he says that Al-jerr was the way that they pronounced it back then. So really, you can say either one and be pretty Correct.

GT  07:10  Okay. That’s good to know. I like Al-jerr better.

Cheryl  07:11  Okay, you're good.

GT  07:15  But yeah, so it's great. You don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick and choose, and it's really fun. I've been reading Chris Smith and Don Bradley's chapter. I'm about halfway through, and it's just mind blowing.

Cheryl  07:31  It is mind blowing, and that's why this word “new insights” is really important, because some of these, and especially the Bradley and Smith article is very new insights that have never been brought forth before. You think that everything that has to be said and polygamy has already been said, but this is very new. I guarantee you have never heard it before,

GT  07:55  Yeah, for sure, for sure, it's great.

 

 

 

Did Emma Agree to Partridge Sisters Polygamy?

GT  07:58  Well, let's dive into your chapter you talk about Emma Smith's denials. There's also the Partridge sisters, which supposedly Emma participated in that sealing. It's funny because I read your chapter first, but then I read Don and Chris's chapter, and I was like, Oh, that has huge implications for your story as well.

Cheryl  08:28  Another thing, let me go back for just a minute. Another thing I had to do in order to make the book cohesive is people had different ideas on how certain things happened historically. I wanted to get them all together and try to figure out a way we were going to say it, where we weren't all contradicting each other. That was another [issue.] We did quite a bit of work on that so that and we still have differences, but we wanted to make it so it wasn't like you read the book and you were just very confused what happened.

GT  08:59  I think that's great. But from my point of view, I love it when people disagree. I want to get all the different perspectives. Disagreement is fine with me.

Cheryl  09:13  Well, I mean, there will be different perspectives, but I just don't want total disagreement especially on things that we can that maybe are facts that we can look at and come to a consensus.

GT  09:25  In reading Chris and Don's chapter, it gave me some other questions that I want to ask you. So especially since I read after I read your chapter, I was like, Oh, well, that's an interesting insight. I think one of the big insights specifically, there’s the story about Emma agreeing to allow Joseph Smith to be married to the Partridge sisters. Is it Elizabeth & Eliza? It’s something like that.

Cheryl  9:59   Emily & Eliza Partridge.

GT  10:00   Ok. The traditional story of Emily & Eliza Partridge is that Emma agreed that Joseph could be sealed to the sisters, and that she participated in the sealing. Then when she saw Joseph intimate with one of the sisters. I don’t know which one. She became upset and threw a fit, threw them out of the house and renounced all polygamy; anything that she had agreed to. Where is that story wrong?

Cheryl  10:41   The first thing; the story comes from Emily Partridge’s later reminiscences that they married to Joseph Smith. They were brought into polygamy first. Both of the girls married Joseph Smith, and then after that, Joseph was able to convince Emma for a short period of time to agree to marry some wives. The wives that she chose were Emily and Eliza. But they did not want to tell her that they were already married to Joseph Smith. And so, they had a repeat ceremony where, where apparently Emma gave them to Joseph.

GT  11:25  And put their her hand on there, or something.

Cheryl  11:27  One of the accounts says she put her hand in his and so gave her away. In doing a little bit of further research, we have affidavits in Utah from both Emily and Eliza. They give dates of the marriage, and they give the officiator of the marriage, who was James Adams, who was participating in the marriage that Emma participated in.