Gay Taylor

GAY TAYLOR was born and grew up in Idaho, a state with sensible names for their towns like Bliss, Chili, Fish Haven, Potlatch, Lava Hot Springs. Traveling around she knew immediately what to expect. Then she worked one summer, in her student days at BYU, in the registrar's office mailing out catalogues to towns in Utah called Tooele — pronounced Two Will Uh — or Panguich, and only the Panguiches know how to say that. It was unsettling. Being married—is it only fifty-six years?— to S. W. Taylor hasn't helped.

If I Were God

Articles/Essays – Volume 22, No. 1

I often muse what I would do if I were God: Would I first stop wars, eliminate hunger and disease, make people loving and caring? I think not. Though the prospect is appealing, I know…

Why Am I Here?

Articles/Essays – Volume 24, No. 2

I found this philosophical bit by Chip Janis in In the New World (1988), a little book of poems put together by young Indian students at the Pretty Eagle School and St. Charles Mission in Ashland, Mon tana. Why am I here? It is a question most of us come face to face with. I have heard that Leo Tolstoy, after he had fathered thirteen children, helped Tsar Alexander II free the serfs, and written dozens of articles and books, still tortured himself with the question: “Why am I living?”