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.
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.
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…
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?
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.
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,…
That time we drove from Idaho to LA
and you spelled me after midnight,
I didn’t want you to think me ungrateful
what i wanted to say,
but didn’t get to:
in the end, there is one great sphere
that contains each lesser light,
This year, for the first time in many years,
we’re thinking of hosting a dead and drying tree
in some public room of our house, one garlanded
in lights, the blossoms of dying winter—and hanging
Did the Deuteronomist say, I have set before you plutocracy and democracy, therefore choose democracy? Or, I have set before you capitalism and socialism, therefore choose socialism? Or, I have set before you economics and ecology, therefore choose ecology? Or, I have set before you Earth System science or Gaia, therefore choose Gaia? Or, I have set before you acidifying oceans and fresh air, therefore choose fresh air? No, the Deuteronomist said none of those things. Instead, they said something both more compelling and more enigmatic: I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life.