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In this episode of Dialogue Out Loud, poetry editor Terresa Wellborn speaks with poet Doug Barrett about his three lyrical and spiritually searching poems in the Summer 2025 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Barrett reflects on memory, mortality, and the lingering power of moments that quietly transform us. His poems—Momiji, A Little Death, and Crossing Over—trace journeys through Japanese landscapes, illness and recovery, and the aching presence of wild American coastlines.
Doug and Terresa explore how mission life, solitude, beauty, and loss shape poetic sensibility. They discuss the ways poetry can preserve memory, explore unspoken longing, and push beyond doctrinal frameworks into personal meaning. The conversation highlights how Barrett’s writing gathers spiritual depth not from certainty, but from reverent attention to the ordinary and ephemeral.
As Barrett writes in Crossing Over:
“Why not sit down with me here and save it that way?”
Doug Barrett served in the Japan West Mission. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington and has taught at Sierra Nevada College, Deep Springs College, and Western Nevada College. He has also been a camp counselor, wrangler, bank courier, retail clerk, postal worker, census worker, and academic labor organizer. His poetry has appeared in Avocet, Canary, Weber: The Contemporary West, and elsewhere. He currently resides in Maine.
Credits
Hosted by Terresa Wellborn
Poems by Doug Barrett
Production and editing by Daniel Foster Smith
Music by Daniel Foster Smith
Presented by Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought