Excavating Myself
April 25, 2018Somewhere a book is waiting to be written—somewhere, deepburied in the Mormon unconscious, and all we Mormon writers are hard at work digging up the back yards of our past trying to find it. It…
DiaBLOGue
Three Essays: A Commentary
April 25, 2018Mormons are perhaps not as interesting to other people as they think they are. True, we have our history of strange practices and our epic migration to recommend us to the wider community, but the…
The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography
April 25, 2018[1]David L. Wright did not begin to exist for me until more than a year after his death—in 1968 when I saw his play, Still the Mountain Wind. For other portions of the Mormon audience,…
Halldor Laxness, the Mormons and the Promised Land
April 25, 2018When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…
The Poetics of Provincialism: Mormon Regional Fiction
April 25, 2018The Latter-day Saints have been a source of sensationalistic subject matter for popular novelists almost since the beginning of the Church. But the Mormon novel as a treatment of Mormon materials from a Mormon point…
Proceedings of the Association for Mormon Letters: Introduction
April 25, 2018Bob Rees called it a “summit meeting of the Mormon literati,” the group which gathered April 20, 1976, in the conference room of the Church’s Historical Department. Actually it was just a group of people…
Home Again
April 25, 2018The bus trip from Utah had taken twenty-four hours and now, as the day darkened to evening, it was almost over. I had struggled the night before to sleep, but woke at each little village’s…
A Vision of Words
April 25, 2018Inside, to the left, in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University, rests the great painting, “The Adoration of the Magi,” by Peter Paul Rubens. To the right, the King’s College Choir prepares to sing. The hinged…
The Girl Who Danced with Butch Cassidy
April 25, 2018My earliest memory of Retty Mott is of hurrying past her house as I walked home from Primary. I hurried past because my cousins had told me that she chased people. Once she had leaped out from behind a tree in her front yard and hit Max Peterson with a fire shovel. She had chased him clear to the end of the block, hitting him all the way with the fire shovel . . .
Mormons and the Beast: In Defense of the Personal Essay
April 25, 2018Some circumstances in life lie outside the possibility of comfort. There may be philosophical arguments to support such a statement, but perhaps it will suffice to point out that the scriptures reveal a suffering God. As a matter of fact, sorrow appears to be the effect that we most frequently work on him. Indeed, our “Man of Constant Sorrows” has promised that his way of life is likely to bring a “sword” to our comfort, that his “peace” will be unlike any we might have imagined.