Growing up in the LDS faith, my parents always dutifully had large quantities of wheat, rice, beans, and all other manner of food stored—food we never ate in our daily lives. While they rarely discussed…
When I first sidled up to Make Yourselves Gods, I did so in the spirit of the Mormon Creed: “Mind your own business and let everybody else do likewise” (Trademark: 1842). Yes, I was suspicious.…
Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…
Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…
Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…
Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…
The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by…
Her eyelids were closing. It must have been the stillness in the room that made her realize. The two young elders advanced their slides across the laptop screen and it felt late. She nodded slowly.…
Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…
I don’t know why they’ve asked someone else to play the organ. I’ve been playing the organ in this ward for forty-eight years. When I first learned to play, I had to pump the air…