I 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…
Readers 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…
Did I hold the tiny Chinese shoe
or simply gaze at it
encased in museum glass
in the old mining town
As 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…
I. The coming
Inside this precise granite
the immensity of the walk comes home
Lowell 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.
Leroy 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,…
There 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…
When 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…
When she went down into those Mormon waters, she must have been eighty years old. No one exactly knew, but it’d been a lot of years, at least sixty, her daughter thought, from that other…