On Saturday mornings, mother baked good bread.
She always called my two sisters,
My two brothers, and me
To come and eat the crusts hot,
Spread with butter and strawberry jam
Made from strawberries she had picked and washed.
I’ve always wanted to be an artist. Somehow I thought that meant that I had to live like an artist—to find a lifestyle and an art form that is consistent with the ideals I want…
With apprehension I agreed to allow the new girl at Manetamers to cut my hair. Really I had no choice. My hairdresser had run off to Texas with one of the sales reps in the…
My tale begins in 1983—the year I turned thirty years old. It was definitely prime time. I had (and still do have) an incredibly fulfilling marriage with my husband, Lee. Our poverty-stricken years in graduate…
We live in a ward on the fringes of Salt Lake City’s central city neighborhood. Demo graphically, the ward contains a core of people who began young married life in their homes and are now…
My call to serve as Primary president eight years ago came at a time in my life when I was especially—maybe even uniquely—unsuited for the job. I was thirty-six, married only four years. I was…
The first church I remember attending as a child wasn’t a church at all—it was the Odd Fellows Building in the heart of rundown, downtown Wilmington, Delaware. It was a spooky (at least to me)…
“Another girl.”
Unheralded birth
Beginning nothing.
Dialogue 25.2 (Fall 1992): 75–96
The personal essay, unlike personal journals, letters, and oral histories, is not an artless form. It transforms the raw material of personal experience in the double crucible of carefully chosen language and the light of mature retrospection.
At first glance, people from a middle-class, educated, medically, technically, and industrially sophisticated country may be tempted to see the culture of a developing country as not merely different but as a polar opposite. We…