Literature

“What if . . .?” and “How so . . .?” and “I wonder . . .” Mix with LDS Doctrine and Culture to Generate Each Story in The Darkest Abyss | William Morris, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories

Paul Williams

“Mormon speculative fiction” must surely be one of the most niche genres available, and William Morris’s new story collection, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, published by BCC Press, is a standout and quirky addition…

The Last Day

Jacob Bender

“Scott Eccles?” “Yes!” “Please follow me.” Scott Eccles leapt from his seat, straightened his tie, and surreptitiously placed his fists on his hips in the Superman pose, for he had watched a video online that…

A Very Bad Dog Steven L. Peck, Heike’s Void

Jennifer Quist

Among the benefits to reading authors with large, proven oeuvres is trust. We can trust Steven L. Peck. Remember that through the provocations of the opening of his astonishing new release from BCC Press, a…

Sodom and Gomorrah

Wes Turner

Listen to the interview about this piece here. Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A man stands naked on the rubber of a checkout counter’s clnveyer belt, face smeared with something red.…

Second Place: Dispatches from Kolob

Ryan Habermeyer

Listen to the Out Loud audio version of this article here. Listen to the interview about this piece here. Dear President Russell M. Nelson, For centuries, the pope has been addressed as Your Holiness, and they…

Honorable Mention: Butterflies

Phyllis Barber

Trying to get to the nursery proper and all of the blooming plants—bright colors, heady smells, early summer at its best—Mona almost walked past his table. It was one of those fold-­up numbers with foldout…

Vardis Fisher Pioneered Literary Mormon Writing Michael Austin, Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist

John Bennion

Grappling with LDS Identity Formation: A Review of Recent Young Adult Novels Rosalyn Eves, Beyond the Mapped Stars James Goldberg and Janci Patterson, The Bollywood Lovers’ Club

Lisa Torcasso Downing

The Private Investigator

Ryan Shoemaker

Listen to the podcast version here. The doorbell rang as I hung up the phone, and then I heard my father’s deep, imposing voice fill our entryway. I stood and walked slowly into the unlit…

The New Calling

Robert F. Bennett

Podcast version of this piece. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt,…

The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists

Melissa Lelani Larson

The ten stories that comprise Losing a Bit of Eden sustain Levi Peterson’s position as one of the most adept scribes of the twentieth-century American West. Each story is well grounded in a particular time…

Q&A with James Goldberg, Co-founder of Mormon Lit Blitz

James Goldberg

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by…

Lucky Wounds

Theric Jepson

Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state…

Sisterhood and the Divine Feminine Twila Newey, Sylvia

Rebecca Bateman

Like a mother opening her arms to embrace her children, the span of mountains and trees that look over my childhood home in Salt Lake City extend to the south and cradle also the homes…

LePetit Richards and the Big Dipper Carpet—An Amusement Based on a Reworking of Whittle’s Research Notes

Simon Peter Eggertsen

Podcast version of this fiction piece. This was not the only time that Richards, originally born Neville Colyer, the son of a millwright in Oxfordshire, had worked through the imagery of the stars. He had…

Review: Delightful Futuristic Mormon Morality Tale Offers Teaching Tool for Progressive Parents Matt Page, Future Day Saints: Welcome to the New Zion

Christopher C. Smith

After his death and resurrection on Earth, Jesus Christ traveled to New Zion—a planet in the Kolob star system—and appeared to its six-eyed alien inhabitants, whom he named the Othersheep. He explained to the Othersheep…

Tatau

Lehua Parker

Uncle Akumu has tattoos. Big, thick pe’a lines shout his ancient Samoan genealogy as they crisscross his thighs. On his arms he carries his own story. There’s Aunty Lani’s name surrounded by vines and pua…

Excerpt from Eleusis: The Long and Winding Road, Translated and introduced by James Goldberg.

R. de la Lanza

Dean Hughes, Muddy: Where Faith and Polygamy Collide Phyllis Barber, The Desert Between Us

Lynne Larson

Mormon Saga

Maurine Whipple

Lessons in Scriptural Origami James Goldberg. Remember the Revolution.James Goldberg. The First Five Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories

Chad Daniel Curtis

I first discovered James Goldberg when a friend from my mission shared a blog post from the Mormon Midrashim entitled “Explanation, Justification, Sanctification.” In it, the author shares some profound theology with his ten-year-old daughter in a…

As Above, So Below: Mormonism Mattathias Singhin D. J. Butler’s Kaleidoscopic Cosmological Fantasy D. J. Butler. Witchy Eye D. J. Butler. Witchy Winter D. J. Butler. Witchy Kingdom

Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood

There are many different ways to construct a fantasy universe. Some are flowers, carefully grown from a single seed. Some are mirrors, with each element corresponding to a specific parallel in our own world for…

The Cunning Man and Fiction of the Mormon Corridor D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey. The Cunning Man

James Goldberg

On December 6, 2019, the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah hosted a release party for The Cunning Man. The novel, which has scenes in the city and in the old coal mines nearby…

A Rising Generation: Women in Power in Young Adult Novels Jo Cassidy. Good Girls Stay Quiet Emily King. Before the Broken Star Julie Berry. Lovely War

Katherine Cowley

When Was the Last Time You Read a Romance Novel? Ilima Todd. A Song for the Stars.

Madie Markle Moss

In the Garden of Babel

Luna Corbden

Eldria is a technician on a team that has unlocked the secret to prayer. The learning machine has labored for years. It has uttered prayers both ancient and fresh, rote and random, then monitored weather…

Review: “Is this the Promised End?” Steven L. Peck. The Tragedy of King Leere, Goatherd of the La Sals.

Kylie Nielson Turley

The Maidservant’s Witness Mette Harrison. The Book of Abish.

Luisa Perkins

An Astonishing String of Stories Steven L. Peck. Tales from Pleasant Grove.

Charles Shiro Inouye

Review: Welcome Additions Karen Kelsay. Of Omens that Flitter. Javen Tanner. The God Mask.

Edward Whitley

sonnet: on his blindness to autumn

Marden J. Clark

i too consider how my days are spent 
and fret but little when like autumn’s bright
orange maples they fade and fall, my sight
is good enough to burn those maples, scent 

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Continuing our bibliographical coverage of Mormon material, we turn our attention in this issue to dissertations and theses written to fulfill requirements for graduate degrees.

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use . . .  Henry James. The Aspern Papers  History is bunk.  Henry Ford The books, periodicals, and manuscripts listed in bibliographies are of little value…

Articles and Essays in Mormon Studies

Robert A. Rees

The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent.  Archibald MacLeish  A decade ago one might have been hard pressed to compile a sizable bibliography of…

Hugh Nibley: A Short Bibliographical Note

Louis C. Midgley

The name Hugh Nibley has become common coin of the Mormon realm. The household quality of the name in part depends upon the frequency with which his work appears in the Improvement Era. Since 1948…

A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.  Robert Louis Stevenson  As is all too evident from the newspapers, we are again approaching that quadrennial time when nominations for the…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.  Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act iii, sc. 2, 1. 78 [Antony]  As in the past years, the spring bibliographical survey is concerned…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

The difficulty in life is the choice.  George Moore, Bending of the Bough In this year’s survey of theses and dissertations on Mormon or Utah subjects the reader’s attention is called to the vastly expanded…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

I would the gift I offer hereMight graces fro thy favor take.  John Greenleaf Whittier, Songs of Labor  An article in the June 1, 1968, Church News entitled “BYU Gets Rare Books” described items of…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Are Mormons Christians? The official name of the Church includes the words “Jesus Christ” within it, and we consider Him our Savior. Our scriptures include the Bible, and, as Anthony Hoekema suggests, “Many people have the impression that the Mormon teachings are not basically different from those of historic Christianity.” Yet Dr. Hoekema has decided that “The Christ of Mormonism is not the Christ of Scripture.” The good doctor came to this conclusion by asking—and himself answering—the following ten questions: …

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Write on your doors the saying wise and old, ‘Be bold! Be bold!” and everywhere, “Be bold; be not too bold!” Yet better the excess than the defect; better more than less . . . .  Longfellow, Morituri…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

In an effort to keep Dialogue’s readers abreast of current research on the subject “Mormons and Mormonism,” the second issue of each volume (Summer issue) is devoted to a listing of theses and dissertations accepted by Ameri can colleges and universities on the aforementioned subject. Our sources of information are primarily Mormon Americana, a bi-monthly bibliography prepared at Brigham Young University, Dissertation Abstracts, a publication of University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and commencement programs of the Utah universities.

Literature, Mormon Writers, and the Powers That Be

Wayne Carver

For the better part of a month, I was with a group of young Mormons bent on giving the Church a vigorous expression in all the arts. We were not very clear as to just what we would do. We would do something. We felt the Church deserved this. It was such a fine Church, everything considered. And it deserved us. Not in its (then) present state, maybe; but we had faith that it could puff up to us. There was the son of an official sculptor, a yearn ing scientist from Alberta, two or three others who do not congeal into iden tities in the twenty-three-year-old mist I am looking into; and there was me, an ink-stained veteran of a year of writing C to C-plus freshman themes at Weber College. We all met near the end of our term at Biarritz American University in the south of France, the winter after one of the wars had ended. 

Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

Nearly fifteen years have passed since I, in looking around for a thesis topic, began to read “Mormon novels.” It seems odd to remember how electrifying were the “forbidden” Vardis Fisher and others I hadn’t heard of: Scowcroft, Whipple, Robertson, Blanche Cannon, even Samuel Taylor. It must be a clue to our culture that a girl could get through graduate school without such an awakening, especially when many of those writers seem so bland today that I wonder along with Sam Taylor “if most of them weren’t mainly victims of bad timing.” What my awakening really consisted of was a refreshing realization that some of those giants from our past were really human beings after all (“saints by adoption”). 

Vardis Fisher and the Mormons

Joseph M. Flora

The New York Times article reporting the death of Vardis Fisher in 1968 said, predictably, that Fisher was “perhaps most widely known as the author of Children of God, a historical novel about the Mormons.”[1]…

Beowulf and Nephi: A Literary View of the Book of Mormon

Robert E. Nichols Jr.

Dialogue 4.3 (Fall 1971): 42–45
It is tempting, of course, to redress the Book’s limited literary impress by recourse to history, sociology, psychology, and demonology. It is tempting to say that a hundred and forty years in the literary marketplace is too limited a test for such a grand design — but entire literary movements, like the pre￾Raphaelites, have come and gone in the same period

Little Did She Realize: Writing for the Mormon Market

Samuel W. Taylor

So you want to write a Mormon novel? Great! Here’s a story for you:—

It’s about a Mormon bishop and his family, see, so you can get in all the little inside details about the L.D.S. people. The bishop’s wife is an extremely devoted mother of three children, two lovely daughters and a son who is a genius. The mother is so excessively devoted to her genius son that she drives him into a madhouse. But before he is locked up he has an incestuous affair with a sister which ruins her life, he causes his best friend’s suicide and drives his other sister into an unhappy marriage with a Gentile. His own disintegration causes his father, the bishop, to die of a broken heart.

Literature in the History of the Church: The Importance of Involvement

Dale L. Morgan

Against my better judgment, I have been persuaded to discuss the place of literature in the history of the Mormon Church in the context of this special issue of Dialogue. That the topic is too…

The Imagination’s New Beginning: Thoughts on Esthetics and Religion

Robert A. Rees

While it is true that there has been no substantial literary tradition among the Mormons, there are indications that one is beginning. For the first time there is a sufficient number of Mormon scholars and critics who can help establish the climate for a legitimate literature and there are more and more creative writers who are turning their talents to Mormon subjects. Therefore, it is not my purpose to lament the fact that a Mormon literature does not now exist. Rather, I choose to discuss how the literary esthetic can serve religion and how a rebirth of the imagination can and should serve the Church today. For if anything would militate against acceptance of an emerging Mormon literature it would be our continued distrust of the imagination. 

On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature

Karl Keller

A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. William Blake Observers of the Church must think it odd that for all…

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: “Spring” and “Winter” in Prague: Some Thoughts on the Human Spirit

Ralph J. Thomson

Czechoslovakia is much colder and darker now than it was last year. Not that the meteorological phenomena have been all that different: Prague has consistently registered temperatures as warm as or warmer than those of…

Voices of Freedom in Eastern Europe: An Hour with Milovan Djilas—Heroic Yugoslav Intellectual

Melvin P. Mabey

By the time he was twenty-five, Milovan Djilas had already served three years in prison for communist activities. His keen mind, energetic spirit, and Partisan valor endeared him to Josip Broz Tito, and before he reached…

A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.  Samuel Butler the Younger, Life and Habit Reader who…

A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Over a year ago this column called attention to three new journals which in one way or another would be of interest to Mormons or bibliophiles of Mormonism. The journals noted were Mormon History, The Carpenter: Reflections on Mormon Life and The Western Historical Quarterly. Mormon History and The Carpenter are of unique Mormon interest and the latter journal has published a third issue, the contents of which are reported below. Mormon History (a journal of reprints) is now in its second volume.

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

The bibliographical listing which follows includes books, pamphlets and reprints on Mormon topics, most of which were published in 1970. Because of the time lag between the last book bibliography printed in Volume 5, No. 1 and this issue the following bibliographical listing is longer than usual. We could have eliminated some of the ephemera but decided that this would detract from the value of our service. Rather than resort to paring the bibliography, the superfluous introduction has been minimized and concludes here. 

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

The world of Mormon-directed periodicals continues to thrive as new journals appear and old (those that began within the last few years) journals struggle for continued existence

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

“Among the Mormons” is Dialogue’s ongoing effort to keep its readers abreast of Mormon bibliography. Three times a year we present bibliographical listings containing, in separate columns, theses and dissertations, books and related publications, and periodical articles. This issue’s listing contains books, pamphlets and records that have come to our attention during 1971 and 1972. 

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote. —Edward Young, Love of Fame  It has been this writer’s practice in the past to single out a sample of theses…

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: An Ornithologist’s Rod McKuen | Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Clifton Holt Jolley

Listen-up bird-lovers, Hindus, Eddy Rickenbacker, Father Schillebeechx, and Unitarians everywhere: Jonathan Livingston Seagull has arrived! Somewhat sooner and with greater flurry than many of us would have wished, perhaps, but, then, that’s his style, and…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

Life, Look and now Courage are gone but presumably not forgotten. Courage, for those of you not familiar with this periodical, was the RLDS counterpart to Dialogue which ceased publication in 1973 after three hopeful volumes. I bring this fact to the reader’s attention only to emphasize the tenuous existence faced by periodicals in this inflationary era. The problems are simple to describe but difficult to overcome.

Gambit in the Throbs of a Ten-Year-Old Swamp: Confessions of a Dialogue Intern

Karen Marguerite Moloney

How does an English graduate student who wants a visit to the East Coast, instruction in the American political system and an introduction into the Mormon publishing world satisfy these three ambitions in one two-month…

The Rise and Fall of Courage, an Independent RLDS Journal

William D. Russell

Dialogue 11.1 (Spring 1978): 115–119
Although Courage struck a responsive chord in quite a few hearts, its readers did not support it to the extent the editors had expected. Appealing only to a minority in a small church, and without either sufficient subscribers or a financial “angel/  Courage died after its eleventh number (Winter/Spring 1973).

Windmill Jousting and Other Madness: Century 2

Randy Johnson

Jousting with windmills is a bit out of fashion nowadays, insanity even more so. But every now and then some glittering-eyed individual comes by with an idea most people do best to ignore. 

The New Messenger & Advocate

Kevin Barnhurst

A magazine is supposed to be one of the easiest businesses to start. It requires no office, no equipment (printing and even mailing can be farmed out to local businesses), no staff as long as…

Sunstone

Scott Kenney

“Oh,” lamented Job, “that mine adversary had written a book.” Logic and syntax—even basic facts—which are unmistakably clear and irrefutable in manuscript form have a way of breaking down when committed to print. And when…

A Wider Sisterhood: Exponent II

Claudia L. Bushman

Many readers were surprised and delighted when Exponent II burst upon the scene. “You have lifted my thoughts from the mundane and sweetened my dreams of fulfillment,” wrote one. Another commented, “A newspaper for Mormon…

BYU Studies, How She Is

Laura Wadley

People are always asking me how I like working at BYU Studies. I say . . .

Gospel by the Month: Ensign

David Briscoe

In 1971, all official church magazines were literally swept away and replaced by three colorful, professional, slick publications, each aimed at a different age group—the Ensign for adults, the New Era for young people and…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

“Of making of books there is no end.” These words from Ecclesiastes could as well be applied to the more than thirty thousand doctoral dissertations and an even larger number of master’s theses completed in…

Insights from the Outside: From a Commentator’s Note Pad

Candadai Seshachari

At the second annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, as at the first, two literary concerns seemed to have emerged. Not so surprisingly, at the bottom of both these issues was the question…

I, Eye, Aye: A Personal Essay on Personal Essays

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

In A Believing People, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert lament that the essay “has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected.” Early Mormons, they note, kept forceful diaries, wrote…

Literary Dimensions of Mormon Autobiography

Steven P. Sondrup

Among Mormons, autobiography has been for decades one of the most widespread modes of literary expression and can be related to the larger tradition of the genre in terms of the nineteenth-century origin of the…

The Representation of Reality in Ninteenth Century Mormon Autobiography

Neal Lambert

Some have suggested that the most successful writing about the Mormon experience in the nineteenth-century comes from the frail and fading pages of the personal accounts recorded by first generation Mormons. From the first it…

Excavating Myself

Herbert Harker

Somewhere a book is waiting to be written—somewhere, deepburied in the Mormon unconscious, and all we Mormon writers are hard at work digging up the back yards of our past trying to find it.  It…

Three Essays: A Commentary

Franklin Fisher

Mormons are perhaps not as interesting to other people as they think they are. True, we have our history of strange practices and our epic migration to recommend us to the wider community, but the…

The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography

B. W. Jorgensen

[1]David L. Wright did not begin to exist for me until more than a year after his death—in 1968 when I saw his play, Still the Mountain Wind. For other portions of the Mormon audience,…

Halldor Laxness, the Mormons and the Promised Land

George S. Tate

When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

Woodrow Wilson, while still a professor at Princeton, told his students in 1900 that he “would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

As Hemingway put it, “A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

Only rarely does a piece of writing capture the imagination of both novice and professional alike. Even more infrequently does such a work begin as a Ph.D. dissertation or master’s thesis. Certainly the most renowned…

Among the Mormons: Periodical Articles on Mormons and Mormonism

Stephen W. Stathis

General Barlow, Phillip L. “On Moonists and Mormonites.” Sunstone 4 (January/February 1979): 37-41. Kenney, Scott. “Mormonism and the Fold.” Sunstone 3 (March/April 1978): 24-25.  Agriculture Bitton, Davis and Linda P. Wilcox. “Pestiferous Ironclads: The Grasshopper…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

“Of all the religious sects to emerge out of nineteenth-century America,” as Newsweek’s religion editor Kenneth L. Woodward recently observed, “only the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has developed into a worldwide faith.”…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

1981 is destined to be remembered as a year of indelible significance in Mormondom. Within a two-month period early in the year, stories about the Church twice achieved front-page status. During March the discovery of…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Ralph W. Hansen

If we are to believe what we see before us, we must conclude that authors interested in writing and selling books about Mormonism have boundless opportunities. Although most of the newly released volumes are modest…

Among the Mormons: A Survey of Current Literature

Stephen W. Stathis

As Mormonism embarked upon the 1980s, it appeared, at least outwardly, that the Church might be well advised to prepare for a new era of journalistic sensationalism and criticism. To combat this anticipated struggle, a…

A Survey of Current Literature: Selected Bibliography of Recent Articles

Stephen W. Stathis

From its early years on the social fringe,” U.S. News & World Report I recently told its readers, the Mormon Church “has become America’s largest and wealthiest home-grown religion by offering shelter in stormy times.”…

The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time

Michael Austin

Don’t Fence Me In: A Conversation About Mormon Fiction

Joanna Brooks

Custom/culture; sacred/profane; vision/imagination; literal/figurative—call them borderlands, call them crossroads—we catch glimpses of possibility and more fully understand the limits of our faith in these places. And the place where “Mormon” crosses “literature” looks like the…

When the Brightness Seems Most Distant

Todd Robert Petersen

“It might not be a problem,” she said to her husband before rolling onto her stomach with a pillow clutched in her arms. She was tired from crying and wished sleep would overcome her. Though…

bash | Neil LaBute, bash: latterday plays

David G. Pace

The last time we saw Mormons prominently featured on the New York stage was in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, where an orgasm-inducing female Angel Moroni crashed (literally) through an apartment ceiling and radicalized an…

Anne Perry’s Tathea: A Preliminary Consideration | Anne Perry, Tathea

Richard Cracroft

The publication of Anne Perry’s Tathea in September 1999 under Deseret Book’s Shadow Mountain imprint marks a significant literary mile stone in Mormon letters. Although Tathea’s appearance was heralded by The Salt Lake Tribune and the…

Surviving with Hope | Mary Clyde, Survival Rates

John Bennion

Mary Clyde’s short story collection, Survival Rates, won the Flannery O’Conner award for short fiction last year. Two other Mormon story writers in the past six years have achieved the same honor: Paul Rawlins, whose…

Heart, Mind, and Soul: The Ethical Foundation of Mormon Letters

Neal W. Kramer

When I was in my early teens—it seems like I was no older than fourteen—I received a special gift from my grandparents. They knew I liked to read. In fact, they knew that I read a lot. I was a regular patron of the local library, often rushing through two or three books on a long summer day.

The Path of the Wanderer: Autobiographical Theory and the Personal Essay

Valerie Holladay

In his novella, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean describes a conversation with his father, who knows of Norman’s desire to write. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” the father asks. “Yes,”…

The Lyric Body of Emma Lou Thayne’s Things Happen

Lisa Orme Bickmore

The epigraph to Emma Lou Thayne’s book Things Happen from Alice Walker reads: “One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people.” In the same spirit, I want to write to my people about a poet, one of our own, whose poems I believe stand among the finest. Some of these poems I read when they were published ten or more years ago; one, “Love Song at the End of Summer,” has stayed with me all those intervening years, shaping both my readerly and writerly consciousness with its heartbreaking grace. In order to address what I take to be a crucial ontological issue in lyric poetry, Emma Lou Thayne’s in particular, I want to set up a rubric, and to do that I need to talk about my own studies of, and concerns about, the lyric. 

“Easy to be Entreated”: Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent and Christian Communication

Grant Boswell

I first encountered Wayne Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent[1] when I started my Ph.D. program 1979. One of my best friends from graduate school told me that he owned the book when…

Modern Postmodernism: Worlds Without End in Young’s Salvador and Card’s Lost Boy

Robert Bird

Joseph Smith’s revision of the Pauline closing, “world without end” (Eph. 3:21) to become “worlds without end” (D&C 76:112), is a significant ontological move. Specifically, Smith’s closing provides an opening for contemporary Mormon literature to…

The Mormon Fiction Mission

Tessa Meyer Santiago

As Latter-day Saints, we are under obligation to fulfill three specific missions: perfecting the saints, spreading the gospel, and redeeming the dead. As LDS writers, we add a particular covenant and mission to “the word…

Toward a Mormon Criticism: Should We Ask “Is This Mormon Literature?”

Gideon Burton

Consider the Restoration of the gospel as a paradigm for Mormon criticism. Sensing some apostasy from truth, the critic rectifies this falling away through an act of restoration. As Joseph Smith sensed something incomplete about…

Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction

Eugene England

The first example of what could be called a Mormon short story was written by an apostle, Parley P. Pratt. It was published in the New York Herald on January 1, 1844, and collected in…

The State of Mormon Literature and Criticism

Gideon Burton

Two decades have passed since Dialogue last published an issue entirely devoted to Mormon literature. In the meantime literary writing about Latter-day Saints has been burgeoning both in LDS and national markets—so much so that it is difficult for literary critics to keep up with this growing body of novels, plays, poetry, and literary nonfiction. It is very important, however, that they try. To have a sense of the future of Mormon literature, it is vital that we see how present writings articulate with traditions from the past. 

from Falling Toward Heaven

John Bennion

The next morning Allison dropped Howard at the Mormon church in Rockwood, which, except for the thin spire, was shaped like a large, sub urban house. Though he had asked, she refused to go inside…

Sanctuaries

Margaret Blair Young

It’s been ten weeks since Liz (my mother) came to collect me from the islands and pack me back to Michigan. She wanted me to tally my losses and get on with things. Liz has…

A Good Sign

Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner

Bobbie wants to marry me again. Fourteen months now I’ve been pointing out the kids, our wedding pictures, our marriage certificate. Gosh, I even show him the mail—”Mr. and Mrs. Robert Franklin,” right there on…

Wolves

Douglas Thayer

When he was seventeen, David Thatcher Williams and his cousin Cleon, who was also seventeen, hopped a freight in the Provo yards to start a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit David’s Aunt Doris, his…

From Three Jacks

Darrell Spencer

Sunrise, Friday, November, 22,1963, not yet but about to be one ugly day in U.S. history, and standing over there about to climb into the family Nova was my dad, Jack, the man suffering—in words…

Havesu

Karen Rosenbaum

He watches Elain’s buttocks, the tan shorts browned at the seat, as she walks briskly ahead of him on the narrow trail. Her dirty orange day pack bounces on her back, the leaky canteen a…

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Marilyn Bushman-Carlton

Luis strained his ears, watching bare jacaranda branches twitch in silhouette against the bedroom wall. The bedroom window was sliding up. It was not a dream. A human shadow was nearly indivisible from the web…

Brothers

Levi S. Peterson

About a year and a half after Mitch fell, he decided on a comeback climb. Understandably, his wife was less than enthusiastic about it. Everyone agreed the fall should have killed Mitch or, worse, made…

Saturday Evening, Sunday Afternoon

Helen Walker Jones

At thirty-eight I’m still single. Actually, let me be perfectly frank: Possibly Steve Young and I are the only people in the Western Hemisphere who have remained celibate until such an advanced age, and he…

The Siege of Troy

Hugo N. Olaiz

Do not expect, Hera, to know all my thoughts, even though you are my wife. What I find fitting to reveal, no god or man will know before you. But beware of finding out what…

Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon

Larry T. Menlove

Listen to the piece here. Tim’s wife left him with three dozen blue spruce still trussed up on the truck and better than fifty juniper, Scotch, red cedar, and Douglas on the lot. She left…

The Gilded Door

Kristen Carson

It sat on a quiet end of Main Street, just a block down from the Shore line State Bank and the Sunshine Laundry. Within its dark cavern, you could lose yourself in fantasy. It was…

A Spiritual Awakening Amid a Hippie Faith : Coke Newell, On the Road to Heaven

Neylan McBaine

Marrow: A Review of Richard Dutcher’s Mormon Films

Dallas Robbins

Gazing Into the Face of the Other

Richard T. Livingston

Insight Inside

Rosalynde Welch

When Your Eternal Companion Has Fangs

Jonathan Green

Reading the Mormon Gothic

Tyler Chadwick

The Widower

Theric Jepson

The Widower  Eric W Jepson  Four years had passed since Mary had died; Torrance still wasn’t comfortable dating and yet here he was, getting married. Five years with Mary may have been too short, but…

Triptych: Plural

S. P. Bailey

I Nora bears the tray of hors d’oeuvres she spent three hours this afternoon preparing. Mushroom caps stuffed with chopped and sauteed artichoke hearts, onion, garlic, bread crumbs, and three cheeses. She approaches the door;…

At the Cannery

Phyllis Barber

The Education of a Bible Scholar

Sheldon Greaves

Richard Golightly: A Novel

Ryan Shoemaker

Conception  “They’re up there now,” Bishop Gray croons from the pulpit. His eyes move to the chapel ceiling. “Billions and billions of spirits waiting to inhabit mortal bodies, warriors saved for these last days, ready…

The Dream

Levi S. Peterson

Niles awoke from a strange dream to find that his snoring had once again driven his wife from their bed. On his way to the bathroom, he peered into the darkened living room and, as…

American Trinity

David G. Pace

The other two are more patient than I am. They bide their time. What’s worse, Jonas is always telling me that I am shirking my duty. I haven’t talked to him in over a century.…

The Birth of Tragedy

Hugo N. Olaiz

For Neal Chandler, il miglior fabbro  “Is Mormonism still part of your Weltanschauung?” Aunt Doris asks me every time she sees me. She knows that at 2:15 on Sunday afternoons I’m blessing the sacrament like…

Grandpa’s Hat

Ron Madsen

Recompense

Adam S. Miller

Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers

Patricia Gunter Karamesines

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

Jonathon Penny

Hank Toy’s Devil

Jack Harrell

A devil came to an old Mormon on an icy winter night when mounds of snow outside, as big as cars, lay black and cold, nearly invisible. Having searched since the beginning of the world,…

Sandrine

Levi S. Peterson

These things happened fifty years ago. It was 1962, the year of the World’s Fair in Seattle. I was twenty-one and had just finished my junior year at Utah State University in Logan. My forestry…

What It Means

Reed Richards

I was looking at the morning through the window in the front room like a bear in a cage remembering somewhere there are meadows, and I noticed how much water was running down the gutter…

Dark Watch

William Morris

“And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.” Isaiah 34:13 “I will make a wailing…

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

Simon Peter Eggertsen

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Michael Austin

Two-Dog Dose

Steven L. Peck

Jarring bang. Wheels leap up, rattling the heavy load of black piping destined for the oilrig. The truck rolls on. Oblivious to what it left behind.  On the macadam, a coyote. From its sacrum back…

Acute Distress, Intensive Care

Karen Rosenbaum

Barb’s dying, Carma thinks, and she steadies herself against the chest of drawers as Dan, kneeling beside his sister’s bed, strokes Barb’s face. Barb’s head seems to be rocking slightly on the pillow. Her eyes…

Moving On

Michael Andrew Ellis

So I’m down in Payson helping my father, Wymond, move his new wife’s things into storage. The landowner Peg has been renting from is selling out to developers who want the farmland. It’s early on…

Vardis Fisher’s Mormon Scars: Mapping the Diaspora in the Testament of Man

Michael Austin

Review: The Mormon Murder Mystery Grows Up Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife Tim Wirkus. City of Brick and Shadow

Michael Austin

Review: Mormons Are a Different Country Mette Ivie Harrison. The Bishop’s Wife

Scott Abbott

Spring Hill

Luisa Perkins

Section Title  Spring Hill  Luisa Perkins  Becca was taking too long. Emma huddled against the iron fencepost and hugged her knees. The chilly breeze had dried her tears, but her nose was still running. She…

“Slippery”

Stephen Carter

The sun streamed unimpeded through the kitchen window, warming Jake’s back as he ate a bowl of cereal. It was a pleasant feeling, but also strange. Usually the light couldn’t get in. His RV blocked…

Mormon Lit Blitz Introduction

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg

Every Mormon writer has heard Orson F. Whitney’s claim that “we will yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” Mormon writers have been so excited, overwhelmed, and preoccupied by this statement that we still…

The Rose Jar

Emma Lou Thayne

What the Call of the Deep Teaches

Douglas L. Talley

The Thirteenth Article of Faith as a Standard for Literature

Jack Harrell