Book Review: Mr. Mustard Plaster and other Mormon Essays, by Mary Bradford
January 28, 2017
Mormon 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: Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl
January 7, 2018
The Garden of Enid: By a Mormon and For Mormons
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part One. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 168 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part Two. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2017. 169 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Reviewed by Brittany Long Olsen, Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
At its core, Scott Hales’s two-volume graphic novel The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl is a coming-of-age-story through a Mormon lens. Self-proclaimed weird Mormon girl Enid is a misfit who feels equally misunderstood in her church community and at home with her single mother, a former alcoholic struggling with illness and depression. Some self-introspection and life-altering experiences lead Enid to care about other people and appreciate how much they care about her.
I just want them to own the history
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Dialogue Lectures #4 Mormonsandgays.org roundtable
December 12, 2012
On Thursday, December 6, the LDS Church released a new website www.mormonsandgays.org , which has been met with both praise and criticism from both Mormons and the media. Coincidentally, this site was unveiled soon after the third Dialogue podcast featuring Dr. Bob Rees and Dr. Caitlin Ryan, who talked a lot about ideas embraced within the site. Today, as a follow-up, join Morris Thurston, Dialogue Board president-elect, as he hosts a podcast roundtable with Bill Bradshaw, Bob Rees, and Mitch Mayne as they examine this new site.
Learn more about the panelists for this special roundtable:
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