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Singing in Harmony, Stitching in Time

January 23, 2020

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

January 23, 2020

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

January 23, 2020

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

January 23, 2020

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

Vernal

January 23, 2020

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

Dry Tree

January 23, 2020

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

Being, A Household World

January 23, 2020

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.

Bodies Material and Bodies Textual: Conflation of Woman and Animal in the Wilderness

January 23, 2020

As a woman myself, I often wonder about the daughters of Ishmael. What did they think when their father suddenly decided to leave Jerusalem and follow Lehi and his sons into the wilderness? How did they decide who would marry Nephi, Laman, and Lamuel? What was it like giving birth in the wilderness without the life-saving expertise of the midwives in Jerusalem? Did Sariah know enough to guide them through this harrowing experience?

The Earth and the Inhabitants Thereof (Non-)Humans in the Divine Household

January 23, 2020

In 2009, Elder David A. Bednar warned about potential pitfalls of digital spaces. Reminding listeners that the acquisition of our bodies was our primary reason for entering mortality, he said, “some young men and young women in the Church today ignore ‘things as they really are’ and neglect eternal relationships for digital distractions, diversions, and detours that have no lasting value”: eternity or bust. In immersive virtual environments like Second Life, the allure of the merely simulated—“the monotony of virtual repetition”—can substitute “for the infinite variety of God’s creations and convince us we are merely mortal things to be acted upon instead of eternal souls blessed with moral agency to act for ourselves.”