Joey Franklin

JOEY FRANKLIN {[email protected]} is the author of My Wife Wants You to Know I’m Happily Married (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), which won the 2015 Association of Mormon Letters nonfiction award. His essays and articles have appeared in Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, The Norton Reader, and elsewhere. He teaches literature and creative writing at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and he is currently working on a memoir about the saints and scoundrels hiding in his family tree.

Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays

Articles/Essays – Volume 49, No. 3

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.

An Excuse I’ve Been Working on for a While

Articles/Essays – Volume 43, No. 3

I put bras in the dryer and forget to refill the toilet paper, and I left the milk on the counter this morning. Again. But I ask for directions and say “I love you,” and…