Sparrow Hunter
March 31, 2018At fourteen, when I could legally hunt game birds, I became a serious hunter. I hunted ducks and pheasants, but also rabbits, crows, rock chucks, hawks, owls, eagles, coyotes, rodents, and rattlesnakes. I never killed…
DiaBLOGue
Metaphysics over lunch
March 31, 2018English professor and rebel:
Off campus, our sentences race
the tabletop, garbed in wit and color.
By the time food comes, our ideas dance
On Meditation
March 31, 2018I used to run. Fast and furiously, always anxious, always thinking I should be quicker, go farther. I had friends who had run marathons and competed in 10Ks. I envied them and wanted to be like them: longer legs, faster times, thinner limbs. I counted calories and measured miles. I ran, but never liked it, didn’t like the way I beat myself up while I was running—”faster! faster!”—nor the fact that I dreaded the next run before the current one was even done.
Caught Gull, Plowing
March 31, 2018At five, standing at the edge of the field,
Dad up there on the great green Deere,
I must have been scared he’d leave.
He made me an offer: Catch me a seagull
Companionship
March 31, 2018We’d had problems, especially lately:
Just last week I snapped at him
and found myself staring into the outraged eyes
of a former national rugby star, his one fist
The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine
March 31, 2018Dialogue 32.1 (Spring 1999): 119–135
Norman discusses instances where the racist teachings that justified the priesthood restrictions before 1978 continue to be taught.
Temple II
March 31, 2018
Essay for June 9, 1998
March 31, 2018Today is June 9, 1998. I have been forty-three for two days. My father, Robert Wallace Blair, is teaching spring term; he will retire when the term ends after thirty-four years as a linguistics professor…
Clay
March 31, 2018On the sill, torsos wrenched out of clay
still bore the sculptor’s mark, the print
of cocked thumb and nail. Tortured, vaguely
female, they shamed us. We crowded in,
Hard Day for Professor Midgely: An Essay for Fawn McKay Brodie
March 31, 2018The year 1998 found the nation in the grip of a sex scandal in the White House, a sex scandal in which a president (named for Thomas Jefferson) flatly denied “improper sexual relations,” believing, evidently,…