Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

Sysiphus In the West | Herbert Harker, Goldenrod

In a recent New Era article (August 1972) Arthur Henry King made an incisive comment about Mormon literature: Mormon artists, he said, “need not write especially for Mormons, and they need not write especially on…

Riding Herd: A Conversation with Juanita Brooks

Elsewhere in this issue Robert Flanders speaks of the New Mormon History as having begun in 1945 with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History. While Brodie’s book is certainly pivotal, an…

The Eliza Enigma

Proceedings of the Association for Mormon Letters: Introduction

Bob Rees called it a “summit meeting of the Mormon literati,” the group which gathered April 20, 1976, in the conference room of the Church’s Historical Department. Actually it was just a group of people…

Birthing

Dialogue 14.4 (Fall 1981): 117–124
So this was birthing, this crazy-quilt of contrasts, of senses and feelingsin chaos, coming occasionally to rest, as now, with a sleeping son in the crookof my arm. Had I won the grand prize?

The Uncommon Touch: Brief Moments with N. Eldon Tanner

I was a sophomore at BYU in 1953 when my parents called one Sunday from Calgary to tell me what we had already anticipated: that a new stake had been formed there. My father had…

Sister Sense and Hard Facts | Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

Samuel Johnson coined the phrase, and Virginia Woolf gave it its place in the language: the “common reader.” That per son, Doctor Johnson wrote, by whose common sense, “uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the…

How Do You Spell Relief? A Panel of Relief Society Presidents

The idea for this panel sprang from last year’s western Pilgrimage reunion, an annual meeting of women. We were sitting around observing who’d become a Relief Society president and being amazed. We tried to figure out what it could possibly mean and came to no conclusion but decided it would be interesting to talk about.

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Each in Her Own Time: Four Zinas

Leonard J. Arrington: Reflections on a Humble Walk

History itself—and historians in particular—will for years to come continue to assess the importance of Leonard J. Arrington to Mormon and western thought. From 1972, when he was appointed Church Historian, to his retirement as…