Edward A. Geary

Recently Received

Recently Received

Recently Received

A Mission as a Bad Trip | Lynn Kenneth Packer, A Missionary Experience

“Probably the key issue in my entire mission was whether I should do everything my leaders told me to do. This issue, I believe, will be one of major importance in the years to come.”…

The Last Days of the Coalville Tabernacle

Surely if it be worthwhile troubling ourselves about the works of art of today, of which any amount almost can be done, since we are yet alive, it is worthwhile spending a little care, forethought,…

Theology and Aesthetics | Lorin F. Wheelwright and Lael J. Woodbury, eds., Mormon Arts, Volume One

Mormon Arts, Volume One, is a strange hybrid, a combination anthology, re view, picture book, aesthetic primer, and philosophical discourse, not to mention the phonograph record bound inside the back cover. An outgrowth of the…

Goodbye to Poplarhaven

Paradise lost, according to Marcel Proust, is the only real paradise. Proust’s lost Eden was Illiers-Combray, a village whose medieval church tower and encircling wall gave to his childhood, by their great age, a sense…

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sisters Under the Skin | S. George Ellsworth, Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters

Ellen Spencer and Ellen Pratt were born in 1832 and moved to Nauvoo in 1841, where they became close friends. They both crossed the plains in the emigration of 1848 without their fathers. Orson Spencer…

Disorder and Early Joy

A few months ago, the First Presidency issued a letter to be read in Sacrament Meetings encouraging Church members to tidy up their homes and yards. It is an old story. Brigham Young preached the…

Life Under the Principle | Samuel Woolley Taylor, Family Kingdom

Family Kingdom was written primarily for a non-Mormon audience, written, as the author says in his Preface, to satisfy the “insatiable curiosity” and correct the “amazing amount of misconception regarding the institution of plural marriage…

Grandpa’s Place

My grandfather, for whom I was named, was born in 1878 in a four-room stone house built by his father in Round Valley, near Morgan, Utah. My great grandfather had a small farm there and a job on the Union Pacific Railroad, but in the spring of 1883…

Provoans | Douglas H. Thayer, “Under the Cottonwoods” and Other Mormon Stories

Little of the Mormon fiction published thus far has dealt significantly with the central issues of Latter-day Saint religious life. On the one hand there is the propagandistic fiction, found chiefly in the church magazines,…

The Poetics of Provincialism: Mormon Regional Fiction

The Latter-day Saints have been a source of sensationalistic subject matter for popular novelists almost since the beginning of the Church. But the Mormon novel as a treatment of Mormon materials from a Mormon point…

The Girl Who Danced with Butch Cassidy

My earliest memory of Retty Mott is of hurrying past her house as I walked home from Primary. I hurried past because my cousins had told me that she chased people. Once she had leaped out from behind a tree in her front yard and hit Max Peterson with a fire shovel. She had chased him clear to the end of the block, hitting him all the way with the fire shovel . . .

Hying to Kolob

Old Bishop Leonard used to insist that the Spirit World was right here on earth and the dead were never far from home. He was not really the bishop anymore, but the title was for…

The Ward Teacher

On the first Sunday after my fourteenth birthday, I was given the responsibility to watch over the Church and see that all the members did their duty, and also to prevent iniquity, hardness with each…

Jack-Mormons

Aunt Ella used to say that a man who doesn’t live his principles is a poor specimen. This observation, like her other nuggets of conventional wisdom, was ostensibly directed at me, but she always cast…

Getting at the Marrow: The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore bu William A. Wilson

Innocent Hooligan : Douglas Thayer, Hooligan: A Morman Boyhood