Patricia Gunter Karamesines

PATRICIA KARAMESINES roams and writes in southeastern Utah. She has won several literary awards for her poetry, essays, and fiction, including from Brigham Young University, the University of Arizona, the Utah Arts Council, and the Utah Wilderness Association. A poet, essayist, and novelist, she has published in literary journals and popular magazines locally and nationally. Her novel The Pictograph Murders (2004, Signature Books) won the 2004 AML Award for the Novel. She writes for the blog A Motley Vision and runs AMV’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone, a blog focused on nature writing.

Flying in a Confined Space

Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 1

In my dream, people mill at a fair, trying things they’ve never before done. There’s horseback riding on flashy steeds and archery with brightly fletched arrows. At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the…

The Peach

Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 3

Blake’s angel, for all his winks and nods,
Wouldn’t have it, though it hangs for having:
Drop of down and blush quavering on the rim
Of ripeness, playing at a fall.

The Orchid Grower

Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 4

He sought to grow rare orchids up bright air
On theory they were closer to the sun.
Such trailing gardens of the blue compare
To virga with refractions overrun.

Glaucus

Articles/Essays – Volume 41, No. 3

We can’t say what Glaucus knew
From watching storms crush and reshape
The surge, what voices he’d heard
When the tide swelled onto the beach,

Dixie Heart of Darkness | Shannon A. Novak, House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Articles/Essays – Volume 42, No. 1

The debate over the Mountain Meadows Massacre could be said to have two narrative as well as physical poles, one positioned in Arkansas and the other located in Utah. The Arkansan pole is a sixteen-foot-high…

Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers

Articles/Essays – Volume 44, No. 2

We could say that Joseph Smith Junior went to the woods for the same reason Henry David Thoreau went: He wished to live deliberately. Or maybe we should say that Thoreau went for the same reasons Joseph Smith did. In 1820, Joseph took to the Sacred Grove to discover “who of all these parties is right, or are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it and how shall I know?” (JS—H 1:10). Thirty years after Joseph went into the grove, Thoreau took to Walden Pond to “front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” Thoreau stayed at Walden for twenty-six months. Joseph Smith stayed in the Sacred Grove for—we might guess—only a few hours at most. But both men came away from their experiences with the “essential facts” they sought.

The ISPP Way and the Navajo Way | Robert S. McPherson, Jim Dandy, and Sarah E. Burak, Navajo Tradition, Mormon Life: The Autobiography and Teachings of Jim Dandy

Articles/Essays – Volume 46, No. 4

Months after we moved to Blanding, Utah, an LDS Navajo neighbor asked if my ten-year-old daughter would like to play a role in the Voices of San Juan Pageant, a local, outdoor LDS production then staged every year. I’d never seen the pageant but said I thought that she’d like taking part. Then my neighbor told me my girl would be playing a Navajo toiling among other Navajos in a scene portraying the Long Walk. The suggestion that my very white child assume the role of a Navajo in this reenactment of one of the most tragic events in Navajo history startled me so deeply that I laughed out loud. My neighbor laughed, too. But she still wanted my daughter in the role.