Brady Udall has given the same sort of message to readers of his fiction. In an interview with the journal Irreantum, Udall said, “I don’t want to teach readers a lesson of any kind. I simply want them to have a hair raising, heart-thumping, mind-numbing, soul-tearing experience.”
With a neighbor who couldn’t tolerate light,
I took stairs in the dark,
felt for knobs and shapes
of cabinets in windowless rooms. At home,
Philip Roth once noted that American writers were divided into two camps: “palefaces,” followers of the refined genteel tradition of Henry James and William Dean Howells with their elevated sensibilities and decorous language, and “redskins”…
“A crackerbox,” my mother called it,
Her marriage’s first scene.
My first home, my brother’s, tucked
Far back for remembering,
The place where she dyed feedsacks
To curtain the windowscreens.
A new litmus test of righteousness has swept the church: the shunning of all R rated and the de facto acceptance of all PG and PG-13 movies. I don’t like litmus tests. They are too…
It’s been ten weeks since Liz (my mother) came to collect me from the islands and pack me back to Michigan. She wanted me to tally my losses and get on with things. Liz has…
Bobbie wants to marry me again. Fourteen months now I’ve been pointing out the kids, our wedding pictures, our marriage certificate. Gosh, I even show him the mail—”Mr. and Mrs. Robert Franklin,” right there on…
When he was seventeen, David Thatcher Williams and his cousin Cleon, who was also seventeen, hopped a freight in the Provo yards to start a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit David’s Aunt Doris, his…
For and in behalf of those dead
before God’s love could smother
them. I enter the font and take a baptism.
Buried in the temple’s basement, twelve
garlanded oxen balance the precarious
Sunrise, Friday, November, 22,1963, not yet but about to be one ugly day in U.S. history, and standing over there about to climb into the family Nova was my dad, Jack, the man suffering—in words…