Carol Lynn Pearson

CAROL LYNN PEARSON {[email protected]} began her writing career in 1967 with a little book of poetry called Beginnings. One of her major works is a one-woman play, Mother Wove the Morning, which she performed over three hundred times playing sixteen women throughout history in search of God the Mother. A recent book is The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men. In 2019 Carol Lynn received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Mormon Letters. She lives in Walnut Creek, California and can be found at carollynnpearson.com.

Articles

On Women and Priesthood Power

The Celestial Law

Guilt

I have no vulture sins, God,That overhang my sky, To climb, grey-feathering the air,And swoop carnivorously. It’s just the tiny sins, God, That from memory appear Like tedious buzzing flies to dartLike static through my prayer.

Death

Death is the great forget, they said,A mindless, restful leaving Of all consciousness and careIn a vast unweaving. And so I waited, cramped and still,For approaching Death to bringForgetfulness—but all he broughtWas a huge remembering.

Ritual

Why ritual? May I not receiveChrist without burialBy water? If I remember That He bled, If I believe, What need for Sacramental bread? Only this I know: All cries out For form — No impulse Can rest Until somehow It is manifest. Even my spirit, Housed in heaven,Was…

Scenes from the Book of Mormon | Doug Stewart, “A Day a Night and a Day”: A Three-act Play

As Mormon writers search their background for subject matter unique to their religion, one source that offers almost unlimited possibilities is the Book of Mormon. The most recent effort to dramatize a Book of Mormon…

A Motherless House

I live in a Motherless house,
A broken home.
How it happened I cannot learn.

“Dear Brethren” — Claiming a Voice in the Church

In the several decades in which I have heard LDS women discuss “women’s issues” as they pertain to the church, I have found it remark able how much fear there is among so many to…

Pioneers

My people were Mormon pioneers.
Is the blood still good?
They stood in awe as truth
Flew by like a dove
And dropped a feather in the West.
Where truth flies you follow
If you are a pioneer.