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 teaching 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 missions. 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.
Articles
His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)
Read moreWalking Back to the ‘70s
Read moreLe Train à Grande Vitesse
. . . 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…
Read moreNot the Truman Show
Read moreThe Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Some Literary, Historical, and Critical Reflections
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…
Read moreAt Temple Square, Salt Lake City
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…
Read moreThe Dichotomy of Art and Religion
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…
Read moreA Translation of Paul Valery’s “Ebauche D’un Serpent”: Sketch of a Serpent
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!
At Mountain Meadows: For Juanita Brooks
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—
Eve
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
Adam
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
Decapitating the Mormons: Richard Scowcroft’s New Novel | Richard Scowcroft, The Ordeal of Dudley Dean
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…
Read moreJohn D. Lee
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
Looking West from Cedar City, Utah
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.
Close to the Bone | Joyce Eliason, Fresh Meat/Warm Weather
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…
Read moreAnother Angel
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,…
Read moreThree Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices
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…
Read moreIllness in the Family
Read moreHeartbreak Hill
Read morePancha Loca
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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