Dawn and I have just finished attending the annual conference of the Mormon History Association in Kansas City, Missouri. For the first time in several years I did not present a paper at this conference, so I relaxed and enjoyed listening to excellent presentations by other fine scholars.
Although I didn’t speak, a very nice thing happened to me nonetheless. At the Awards Dinner on Friday night I received one of three J. Talmage Jones “Article Awards of Excellence” for my BYU Studies article titled “The Boggs Shooting and Attempted Extradition: Joseph Smith’s Most Famous Case.” The other two who shared the award were Matthew J. Grow (history professor, Southern Indiana University) and Edward Leo Lyman (retired history professor, Cal State San Bernardino). Both Matt and Leo have been recent speakers at our Miller Eccles Study Group meetings and Dawn and I had a chance to get to know them better by taking them out to dinner. They are both fine historians and speakers.
I don’t know if it is ingrained in every personality to want (from time to time) a degree of validation, but I know it is in mine. I’m not sure why — I’ll leave that up to the psychologists. I know my little award doesn’t compare to winning the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer Prise, or even the MHA “Best Book Award,” but it made me feel good. It was a nice reward for the enormous amount of time I spent researching, writing, re-researching and re-writing the piece. Perhaps I would accomplish more if I pushed through each task more quickly. I ask myself, Why strive for perfection when you know you’ll never come close to achieving it? Perhaps it is my mother’s mantra that continues to ring in my head: “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
