Volume 32, No. 3

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. 

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…

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…

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…

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 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. 

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,”…

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.

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…

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…

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…