Lynne Larson

LYNNE LARSON {[email protected]} is a retired English teacher and a freelance writer. Her essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in Irreantum, Utah Holiday, Journal of Mormon History, Ensign, Dialogue, and other regional publications. Covenant Communications has published five of her novels. She is a graduate of Brigham Young University and holds an MA degree from Idaho State University. Together with Veda Hale and Andrew Hall, she recently edited A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (By Common Consent Press, 2020).

Dean Hughes, Muddy: Where Faith and Polygamy Collide Phyllis Barber, The Desert Between Us

Articles/Essays – Volume 53, No. 4

Give Me My Myths

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 1

I am a lover of legends, a spinner of tales. Pepper your preaching with anecdotes if you want my attention. Punctuate your sermons with parables, your homilies with flesh and blood, your lessons with people who breathe. Do this for veracity’s sake, for as Neal Chandler once so astutely reminded us in Dialogue, “Story truths are mostly truer than the truths of exhortation.”But great stories are also subjective, ambiguous, multi-faceted, and complex, not conducive to ten-minute talks or Gospel Essentials lessons, and they seem to be fading in importance, even as the need for thoughtful faith increases in this complicated world.