Theric Jepson
THERIC JEPSON {[email protected]} recently wrapped up his fourth year of teaching early-morning seminary, his eighteenth year of parenting children, and his forty-fifth year of avoiding guns. He edits Irreantum and has a novel coming out later this year from BCC Press. He has silent-film recommendations if you need them.
Articles
THE WIDOWER
Note: This article one of the special web-only series and was printed later in this issue.
Read moreI Dreamed of Oil
I don’t know who was sick. Maybe it was you. Let’s say it was.
You were sick and I was probably more worried than you (as per usual) but we brought our faith to our prayers and we pled that you would be healed. I anointed your head with oil. And I sealed that anointing and blessed you.
Read moreHomesteaders
I’ll take your thigh road,
so rugged, overgrown,
that you and I can build upon each other
here, in our bed,
Joseph Smith and the Possibility of Comics Andrew Knaupp and Sal Velluto, Pillar of Light Mark Elwood, The Glass Looker Noah Van Sciver, Joseph Smith and the Mormons
Renaissance scholar Ada Palmer estimates we know 1 percent of what happened five hundred years ago and that two-thirds of what we know is wrong. I have no reason to doubt her expertise—and every reason…
Read moreLucky Wounds
Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…
Read moreReview: Dayna Patterson, If Mother Braids a Waterfall
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” Dayna Patterson. If Mother Braids a Waterfall. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. 118 pp. Paper: $10.95. ISBN:…
Read moreReview: Dayna Patterson, Titania in Yellow
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” Dayna Patterson. If Mother Braids a Waterfall. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. 118 pp. Paper: $10.95. ISBN:…
Read moreReview: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Marriage of the Moon and the Field
Lavers and Wilkinson know they deserve better and have left the exclusively Mormon world of letters in search of it. Each of these collections concludes with a long list of journals where poems were first published, and the collections, filled largely with these vetted works, are uniformly strong. The percentage of the work that is, on the surface, Mormon in content is low, but when these poets engage with Mormon ideas or themes, they do so in striking and original ways. As Wilkinson’s book had a standalone review in the Fall 2019 issue of Dialogue, I will focus more on Lavers here, but know that both books are strong entries overall and in their Mormon content specifically, and both stand as striking rebuttals to the institutional difficulties mentioned in part one of this review.
Read moreReview: Michael Lavers, After Earth
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” Michael Lavers. After Earth. Tampa, Fla.: University of Tampa Press, 2019. 89 pp. Paper: $14.00. ISBN: 978-1-59732-172-3. Sunni…
Read moreReview: Kate Piersanti, Life in Poetry
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” R. A. Christmas. Leaves of Sass. Self-published: 2019. 148 pp. Paper: $19.51. ISBN: 9780359896400.Colin B. Douglas. Into the Sun:…
Read moreReview: Jan G. Otterstrom F., Move On
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” R. A. Christmas. Leaves of Sass. Self-published: 2019. 148 pp. Paper: $19.51. ISBN: 9780359896400.Colin B. Douglas. Into the Sun:…
Read moreReview: Colin B. Douglas, Into the Sun: Poems Revised, Rearranged, and New
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” R. A. Christmas. Leaves of Sass. Self-published: 2019. 148 pp. Paper: $19.51. ISBN: 9780359896400.Colin B. Douglas. Into the Sun:…
Read moreReview: R. A. Christmas, Leaves of Sass
Find poetry reviews in the “Dialogue Book Report #10 Podcast: The best of 2020–Creative Nonfiction and Poetry” R. A. Christmas. Leaves of Sass. Self-published: 2019. 148 pp. Paper: $19.51. ISBN: 9780359896400.Colin B. Douglas. Into the Sun:…
Read moreDuties of a Deacon
I never got to do it when I was a twelve-year-old Mormon boy even if it is, technically, as much a duty of a deacon as passing the sacrament—and I doubted anyone in my presidency…
Read moreSonnet—For Solstice
Look:
My wife’s distended belly reaches
Into the room as if it wishes
To announce a separate humanity
In curves both out from and into her body.
Domestiku
the blade that scrapes one face
tomorrow scrapes another’s legs
smooth for each other
If Joseph Smith Had Been Born in California
The angel met him once every four years
in what is now the Ina Coolbrith Park.
The first time digging them up took longer
than the angel had anticipated.
A Cluttering of Symbol and Metaphor | David G. Pace, Dream House on Golan Drive
How to represent lived religious experience without either underplaying its reality or slipping into the magical-fantastical is an ongoing difficulty in Mormon literature. David G. Pace, in his novel Dream House on Golan Drive, has decided…
Read moreA Laurel’s First-Night Fantasies
Possibility one, extrapolated from what Betty, second clarinet, said about what Tabitha, first clarinet, did last Saturday: They enter the hotel room, both of them shaking as only virgins can shake. Somehow he manages to…
Read moreThe Widower
The Widower Eric W Jepson Four years had passed since Mary had died; Torrance still wasn’t comfortable dating and yet here he was, getting married. Five years with Mary may have been too short, but…
Read moreWhat if Mickey Mouse Isn’t Mormon? | Floyd Gottfredson, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: “Race to Death Valley”
The 2010 videogame Epic Mickey, before its release, was looking to be one of the more controversial games of the year. And that’s without any sex or decapitation. What made it so controversial? Because its Mickey was a bit more adventurous and scrappy and dangerous than the carefully controlled Mickey Mouse that developed in the animated cartoons. But that Mickey was never the only Mickey—or even the original Mickey.
Read more