Book Review: Mr. Mustard Plaster and other Mormon Essays, by Mary Bradford
January 28, 2017Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent
Mary Lythgoe Bradford. Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays. Draper, Utah: Greg Kofford Books, 2015. 185 pp.
Reviewed by Joey Franklin
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”1 This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.2 Tradition, to Eliot, was the deep well of Western literature. Studying the personal essay in school, tradition for me meant the work of the genre’s luminaries—Montaigne and Bacon, Hazlitt and Lamb, Woolf and Didion, Baldwin and White.
Book Review: States of Deseret, edited by Wm Morris
November 2, 2017States of Deseret. William Morris, editor. Peculiar Press, 2017. Alternative history short story anthology. 109 pages, $3.00.
Reviewed by Barrett Burgin
Last year I presented this scenario to my classmates: what if the Civil War had never ended and Deseret had become its own nation? This idea of an alternate Mormon history really took hold on a classroom of BYU Media Arts students. Later, I found myself similarly fascinated while reading the new alternative history story collection States of Deseret. There is, perhaps, something inherently interesting to Mormons about reimagining our own brief history. Whether it’s a Zionistic yearning for our unfinished theocracy or a regretful wish to rewrite past wrongs, States of Deseret taps into our cultural dance with history and uses it as a platform to entertain, educate, and inquire.
I just want them to own the history
October 11, 2019Web Only Fall 2019 Feature Justin Tyree is originally from Saint Albans, West Virginia. He received his BA in history from Brigham Young University and will graduate in May 2020 with his Juris Doctorate and…
Topic Pages: Old Testament Resources
February 19, 20212012: Grant Hardy, “The King James Bible and the Future of Missionary Work,” Dialogue 45.2 (Summer 2012): 1– 44. “Another difficulty, also related to new truths being revealed in familiar language, is that modernday scriptures occasionally…
D. Michael Quinn's Dialogue Legacy
May 22, 2021D. Michael Quinn (1944–2021) was a stalwart scholar of Mormonism who found an academic home in the pages of Dialogue. We honor his legacy by collecting his articles on this page. His work in Dialogue…
Topic pages: Book of Mormon Studies
July 18, 2021Podcasts: Dialogue Topics Pages Podcast: Book of Mormon, Part 1 Dialogue Topics Pages Podcast: Book of Mormon, Part 2 2020: Elizabeth Fenton; Brian M. Hauglid,; Michael Austin, “Dialogue Book Review Roundtable: Visions in a…
Dialogue Book Report #16: Beyond the Mapped Stars by Rosalyn Eves
April 8, 2022Rosalyn Eves teaches English at Southern Utah University and writes young adult novels in her spare time. She earned a PhD in English from Penn State in 2008, where she wrote about Women’s spatial rhetorics in the nineteenth-century American West,…
History Written in Celluloid Randy Astle. Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952
November 4, 2020In March of 1895, in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened ten short, single-shot films for an audience of two hundred, and the movies were born. Less than ten months later, after years of petitioning,…
Review: Poetry as Ceremony Tacey M. Atsitty, Rain Scald
August 13, 2021O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…
Diné Doctor: A Latter-day Saint Story of Healing
August 13, 2021Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…