“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”
April 2, 2018Days after his death, I felt him
newly jovial alongside me. And weeks later,
when I again dreamed him young,
handing me a pail of watercress,
DiaBLOGue
C. Thomas Asplund: Quiet Pilgrim
April 2, 2018I am not a historian. But my limited exposure to the discipline tells me that writing history involves arriving at definitions of “eras,” “cultures,” and “movements.” In my work in literary theory, I have been…
Renegotiating Scylla and Charybdis: Reading and the Distance between New York and Utah
April 2, 2018Readers unpacked Brian Evenson’s nationally-published collection of controversial short stories, Altmann’s Tongue, in diverse (perverse) ways. Jerry Johnston, a columnist for the Mormon church-owned Deseret News, observed, “The word ‘macabre’ comes to mind. He is…
Lily Foot
April 2, 2018Did I hold the tiny Chinese shoe
or simply gaze at it
encased in museum glass
in the old mining town
A Saint for All Seasons
April 2, 2018As Sterling McMurrin put it, “Every religion needs a saint, and Lowell Bennion is Mormonism’s saint.” Why does a church need a saint? People need a flesh and blood example, a person who has attained…
Templum: A Place Thought of as Holy
April 2, 2018I. The coming
Inside this precise granite
the immensity of the walk comes home
Max Weber and Lowell Bennion: Towards an Understanding of Hierarchy and Authority
April 2, 2018Lowell L. Bennion was widely known among Latter-day Saints for his Christlike life and humanitarianism, as well as for his teaching and authorship of numerous church books and manuals.
Fiddler with a Cause | Marian Robertson Wilson, Leroy Robertson: Music Giant from the Rockies
April 2, 2018Leroy Robertson was one of my mentors. I played in the Brigham Young University orchestra under him in 1945-46, studied music theory from him as a graduate student at the University of Utah in 1955,…
A Collective Yearning | Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature
April 2, 2018There is a collective yearning here, a palpable sincerity, that you can’t help but like and respect. The desire that practically radiates from these pages is for Mormon literature to be taken seriously, both by…
A Classic Reprinted | J. Roderic Korns and Dale L. Morgan, eds., West from Fort Bridger: The Pioneering of Immigrant Trails across Utah, 1846-1850
April 2, 2018When published originally in 1951 as volume 19 of the Utah Historical Quarterly, this book made a major contribution to understanding the history of overland routes traveled west from Fort Bridger to California. No other…