R. A. Christmas

R. A. (ROBERT ALAN) CHRISTMAS {[email protected]} has a BA from Stanford, MA from UC–Berkeley, and a PhD from USC, all in English. He joined the Church in 1957, and has been publishing poetry, fiction, and criticism in Dialogue since the first issue. He left college teach￾ing in 1973 for a forty-year career in business, twenty spent selling and investing in real estate in the Provo/Salt Lake City area with his late wife and partner, Carol Dennis, with whom he served three LDS senior mis￾sions. He has published seven books of poetry, a collection of stories, and a songbook from his years as a singer-songwriter in Hollywood and he is working on his first musical, “A Carol Christmas/Musical The.” He lives in southern Utah with a daughter and six of his twenty-some grandchildren. His publications can be found at www. lulu.com/spotlight/rachristmas.

His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)

Articles/Essays – Volume 53, No. 4

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Walking Back to the ‘70s

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 4

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Le Train à Grande Vitesse

Articles/Essays – Volume 50, No. 1

. . . we are passengers on the train of the Church . . . the luxury of getting on and off the train as we please is fading. The speed of the train is…

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Not the Truman Show

Articles/Essays – Volume 50, No. 2

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The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections

Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 1

I suppose by this time the reader has either forgotten the circumstances in which he took leave of myself, or else is somewhat weary with the winding of the narrative and impatient for it to…

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At Temple Square, Salt Lake City

Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 3

This was the dream, beginning with a questFor isolated work, that brought them westTo Salt Lake Valley, looking for new startsAnd land in Zion, pushing stock and cartsOut of the world into Millennium In the Rocky…

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The Dichotomy of Art and Religion

Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 4

It is easy to sympathize with Dr. Marden Clark’s essay, “Art, Religion, and the Market Place” — too easy. We are all, I suppose, concerned about the relationship of religion and art, and on the…

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A Translation of Paul Valery’s “Ebauche D’un Serpent”: Sketch of a Serpent

Articles/Essays – Volume 03, No. 1

In the tree, the soft breeze cradles 
The viper that I wear. 
A smile, where the fang strikes 
Appetites into flame, 
Drifts, like a prowler, through the Garden, 
And my emerald mask unwinds 
A split tongue into the blue. . . 
A beast, a cunning beast, 
And my venom is vile—but it leaves 
Wise hemlock far behind! 

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At Mountain Meadows: For Juanita Brooks

Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 3

The mass grave here is set with stones 
Piled low inside a low rock wall, 
And marked for travelers by a sign 
That tells us briefly of the murder 
Of six score emigrants, whose bones 
Lay here and there once—on the plain, 
In the gulley—left to the weather 
Of almost a century where they fell— 

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Eve

Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 3

Leaves and fruit were falling 
And I only wanted to know 
Why this, of all the trees, 
Kept alternating greens 
And browns and why it dropped 
Those ugly pods and stems— 
I only wanted to know 
Of the roots, the crazy clutch 
That broke the ground, the branches 

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Adam

Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 3

Let’s see. This morning—since you’ve been gone—
I’ve taken a walk on the beach, naming 
And naming and naming, until I can name no more. 
Comber, anemone, crab. Will these do? 

I talk to myself now—so I’ve found—
As never before, when he’d leave me, often 
Now, and now you. I guess I’ll get used 
To the feeling. But it’s funny—the way I get thinking

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Decapitating the Mormons: Richard Scowcroft’s New Novel | Richard Scowcroft, The Ordeal of Dudley Dean

Articles/Essays – Volume 05, No. 2

Dudley Dean is a forty-year-old befuddled jack-Mormon professor of English. Wife Hannah has left him and married one of his teaching colleagues—a maudlin, oversexed boor named Ashton—and his devout Mormon mother has just died. Dudley…

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John D. Lee

Articles/Essays – Volume 07, No. 2

at his execution, 
Mountain Meadows, Utah, March 23, 1877 

I want to say I used what strength I had 
to save those people. It went on. I could not

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Ghost Truck

Articles/Essays – Volume 07, No. 3

for RHC 

Now I lay me down by the freeway, 
In a duplex in Cedar City, Utah;

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Looking West from Cedar City, Utah

Articles/Essays – Volume 08, No. 3

When Jed Smith passed us by, in 1826, 
The junipers made a rush down from the hills. 
They were cut back 
Before they got to the freeway. 

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Close to the Bone | Joyce Eliason, Fresh Meat/Warm Weather

Articles/Essays – Volume 09, No. 4

It’s nice to know there was something to talk about in Manti last winter. I’m refer ring to Joyce Eliason’s Fresh Meat/Warm Weather, a confessional autobiography disguised as a first novel, which has a lot…

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Another Angel

Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 2

And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.  Revelation,…

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Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Articles/Essays – Volume 23, No. 1

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

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Illness in the Family

Articles/Essays – Volume 23, No. 4

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Heartbreak Hill

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 1

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Pancha Loca

Articles/Essays – Volume 25, No. 1

Pancha Robinson was doing dishes at her mother’s sink and watching her husband Rick, who was out in the backyard with the children. Gloria, Pancha’s sister, was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with a…

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Weight

Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 1

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How Things Look from the Other Side of the Lake

Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 2

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Cereal Polygamy

Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 2

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His Faith-Promoting Story

Articles/Essays – Volume 28, No. 3

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Stake Mission

Articles/Essays – Volume 30, No. 2

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At Fifty-Five

Articles/Essays – Volume 31, No. 1

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Hop Hornbeam

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 4

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Forever Family

Articles/Essays – Volume 34, No. 3

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Critical Condition

Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 1

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Nobody’s Grandpa

Articles/Essays – Volume 36, No. 1

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Liahona

Articles/Essays – Volume 36, No. 2

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Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow

Articles/Essays – Volume 41, No. 1

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Multi-level Marketing

Articles/Essays – Volume 41, No. 3

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A Short Poem about Nearly Everything

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 4

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The Hosanna Shout

Articles/Essays – Volume 46, No. 2

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Bibliography Bring ‘Em Young

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