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Death in a Dry Climate | John Bennion, Ezekiel’s Third Wife.

Rachel O’Brien Rockwood Wainwright Harker—the narrator and eponymous heroine of John Bennion’s new mystery novel Ezekiel’s Third Wife, has four last names, none of which is superfluous. Together, they tell a remarkable story about our heroine in the years before the novel begins. Here is the digest version. 

Hymn #49

This morning I helped a friend bury her dog 
A dog that she once didn’t want 
Taken in under duress 
But in time grew affection for. 

Land and Line

Doug Himes is an artist whose work strikes me as both ethereal and earthy with the ability to speak in both lithe lines and grounding colors. In other words, his art exhibits a specific Mormon…

Singing in Harmony, Stitching in Time

Spring 1911. Seated in her parlor on the farm they lease, Bertha Hansen shivers as she slips her needle through beige linen. Heinrich has booked a trip to Germany, a visit home, but as departure draws near, uneasiness envelops her like the white mist of their native marsh. Does danger await them, a great storm perhaps, and is the chill she feels a premonition? Or is it simple bad humor, a wife’s irritation with a husband who squanders money on steamship tickets when they’re saving to buy a farm?

Proving Subcontraries: In Memoriam, G. Eugene England, 1933–2001

This essay originally responded to a call in the announced theme for the 2009 Annual Conference of the Association for Mormon Letters: “Proving Contraries.” It explicitly honors, as the AML Conference theme implicitly honored, the memory of Eugene England, who first brought that phrase (from a June 1844 letter of Joseph Smith) to the attention of many, if not most or even all members of the LDS literary community. And it attempts to continue and extend some of Gene England’s effort to explore the tensions and even to heal some of the divisions in contemporary LDS community and experience by “proving contraries.” It consists of two history lessons and an elementary logic lesson, followed by some applications to LDS culture and literature. 

An Open Letter to Prospective Fiction Contributors

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has been changing in 2019, including bringing on a foreigner as the new fiction editor. That’s me. None of the fiction I’ve been curating will appear before this winter,…

Third Watch

That time we drove from Idaho to LA 
            and you spelled me after midnight, 
            I didn’t want you to think me ungrateful 

Vernal

what i wanted to say, 
            but didn’t get to: 
in the end, there is one great sphere 
            that contains each lesser light,