Mary Lythgoe Bradford

All on Fire: An Interview with Sonia Johnson

“If You Are a Writer, You Write!”: An Interview with Virignia Sorenson

A Conversation With Hugh Nibley

Mr. Mustard Plaster

I never intended to leave Utah. In fact, I didn’t leave until I was sixteen, and that was only a trip to my father’s hometown in Wyoming. I didn’t make it to California until I…

Review: Just Saying Stanton Harris Hall. Just Seeing

In My Father’s House | Rodello Hunter, House of Many Rooms

“Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent,” except that in this story all are innocent—innocent, and lovable, and representative of a tradition that is dying. Like Virginia Sorensen’s Where Nothing is Long…

Advice

Lift your withered hands and feelThe rush of words push from below.Lift up your dying hands and write.  Trace the lifted arc of wheel Pitting itself against the flow Of earth’s slow water in the night.  Force…

The Difference

This is not tragedy. A child Cannot suffer nobly, nor fling a wildCurse at the sky and die. A child can only flinch and cry,Soft hands outspread. No clenched fistFor you, my little one. You are pathos, I…

Joseph

Joseph, according to the record just, angel-riddenand consulted last, what glory may you claim?Was yours a father’s care, but, God-bidden,respect for foster child you could not name?Was your pride greater than any heart-hiddencommon love for…

Short Notice | General Board of the Relief Society, History of the Relief Society, 1842–1966

This is a public relations picture book presenting a collection of photographs from the Improvement Era and The Relief Society Magazine, with portraits of Relief Society Presidents, past and present, and one or two interesting…

Mormons in the Secular City: An Introduction

Mormons, whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, have entered the Secular City. This term, coined by Harvey Cox, expresses (in “secular”) a “this worldness”—meaning that the work of the world must be done by man himself, and (in “city”) all historical and Utopian dreams for the model community. Dialogue magazine stands at that intersection between the religious and the secular worlds.

Virginia Sorensen: A Saving Remnant

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”). 

Yesterday the Wardhouse

When I was a girl our Wardhouse appeared in booklets showing architectural oddities of Salt Lake City. We were proud that it looked so little like a Church. It was squat and white with a…

Triad

STEPHEN 
carries secrets he hasn’t had time 
to decode, 
takes his clues from me 
as I search for signals myself, 

From Someone Who Did Not Know Him Well

Throughout my life images of Joseph Fielding Smith come and go, connected somehow with that of my grandfather who, stern before I was born, gradually mellowed until he ended up raising a grandchild with a…

Sweet Home

“I love to go home” said a recent speaker. We in the audience agreed that home should be a place that when you go there you are glad to be there, a place for renewing…

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

Holy Thursday

Patient nuns 
cowel-toweled 
await annointing. 

the grammarian blows her mind

all i’d ever heard from you was I then I switched to We and included Me:now only you you you—from you—in me—over us—through us—lost in prepositions propositions—positions of love—engenderingparticles of praise—determiners of ecstasy—relational roots—you to me and…

You kept me from falling

by lowering me gently 
into a basket lined with silk. 
You spooned your knees into mine,
lifted me up the well’s damp sides,

Chant for Growing Older

Nothing in nature was meant to be sudden
(Hold me, hold me, let our love ripen) 
The sun takes all night to lift 
The child takes all year to live 

Man’s Search for Happiness | Keith Merrill, dir., Indian

Kieth Merrill, who created the Great American Cowboy, has done it again. This time the movie is Indian, a beautiful, kaleidoscopic montage dramatized through the odyssey of a young Navajo (Raymond Tracey), who has left…

Ten Years with Dialogue: A Personal Anniversary

We looked a lot like the picture in the Dialogue logo, although, of course, we didn’t know it then. Gene and Charlotte England, Karl Keller and I were taking lunch on the lawn at the…

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

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…

Editor’s Note

Earlier this year David Whittaker informed Dialogue that his long-awaited bibliography of Leonard Arrington’s works was ready—and that it would coincide with the 20th anniversary of Arrington’s trailblazing Great Basin Kingdom. We agreed that the winter…

Two Poets: Their Travels, Their Moods | Emma Lou Thayne, Once in Israel, and Marden J. Clark, Moods: Of Late

The scene was just past the gate at summer’s end. The pine trees brushed against the two-story mountain house. The poet’s study, all windows, looked out over a luxuriant mountain range, yellow and purple with…

An Hour in the Grove

I have visited this spot before—in my youth, in art, in my thoughts—so often that it has become cliche. The grove, a ripe symbol extending back through time and myth, has become too ripe in…

Virginia Sorensen: An Introduction

Mormon readers are rediscovering Virginia Sorensen. In her person and in her work, she combines many of the traits so often associated with Mormonism: a handcart pioneer heritage, a Danish, old world charm, a seeking…

Dear Diary . . . | Elouise M. Bell, ed., Will I Ever Forget This Day? Excerpts from the Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson

That last bastion of privacy—our personal diaries—has now been turned into a “program.” From the pulpit, we are admonished to keep diaries; we are treated to snatches of personal diaries in sacrament meeting, we are…

The Odyssey of Sonia Johnson

1936. Sonia Harris is born on the Waushakie Indian Reservation near Malad, Idaho. 

1948. She moves with her family to Logan, Utah, where she graduates from high school, works in a bank for one year and then graduates from Utah State University with a B.A. in English. 

The third child in a family she describes as “five only children” because they were so far apart in years, Sonia traveled from one small town to another in the wake of her father’s seminary teaching career. When she was twelve years old, the family finally settled down in Logan.

A Ten-Year Kaleidoscope

The young son of one of my friends was recently heard to say, “Mormon women all look alike. They have pretty faces and good teeth and most of them are overweight.” Just a sea of…

Famous Last Words, or Through the Correspondence Files

For the past six years, I have been engaged in various dialogues best under stood by a quick trip through the editorial correspondence files, a sort of diary (or dia-log) of my term as editor.…

Born Again

As you enter the water unsinning, 
I shall repent eight years 
Of watching in the dark and loving 
Without turning on the light. 

The Veil

Our family had just finished the pre-service reception, and Brother Holbrook, the funeral director, had just closed the doors to the Relief Society room. As Mother’s surviving sisters and their families filed past the coffin…

BIG D/little d: The View from the Basement

Recently I finished my first book, a brief journey on the road to self-definition. I called it Leaving Home[1] because my life has been a series of comings and goings to and from various homes…

A Life Well-Shared | Margaret Rampton Munk, So Far: Poems

In the Fall of 1985 DIALOGUE published Meg Munk’s suite of poems entitled, “One Year.” In a mature voice and through particular images, she dramatized her battle with cancer. In the spring of 1986, this…

A Saint for All Seasons

Soft Sculpture

Widow’s Weeds

Joseph Loved His Women

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

Gene, My Eternal Brother

Famous Last Words, or Through the Correspondence Files

Big Wonderful, Little Masterpiece: Big Wonderful: Notes from Wyoming by Kevin Holdsworth

The Word

One Tree

In Memory of Dr. Bill

Praise

One Tree Redux

Oceanography

Relinquishing

Gentle Dad

Follow the Light, Lulie