[…] and hamburgers at the Oh-So-Good Inn” (50), son of goodly Mormon parents but grandson of a rule- breaking grandpa who believes in “a little fun when you get a chance” (21); and Jason’s half-Native-American […]
[…] less well-written contributions are so dramatic and on-the-nose that they read almost like articles from the satiric news site The Onion (which, I suppose, could still be argued as relevant alternate history). Perhaps this was […]
[…] Calvin and Hobbs (I am convinced that a thousand years from now, people will be learning twentieth-century English just so they can read this comic in its original language—that and watch the various Star […]
Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. 257 pp. Paperback: $24.95.
Reviewed by Scott Russell Morris, Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
In Immortal for Quite Some Time, Scott Abbott meditates on his brother’s death. That Abbott comes from a devoted Mormon family and that his brother was gay and died of AIDS is the tagline that seems to sell the book—and this review, too, apparently, as I am writing that first despite my best intentions—but really, this book is not about his brother John or about the homophobic culture of the LDS Church and many of its adherents, despite both of those being common motifs. It is about Scott Abbott. And, as all good personal non fiction is, it isn’t really about Scott Abbott either, but rather about what it means to grow up in a culture that is so overwhelmingly shaping that it “informs even your sentence structure” (89) and then to find that you no longer want to have a place in it. In the last few weeks as I’ve contemplated what I might say about Abbott’s book and as I’ve discussed it with others (one of whom saw it on my couch and asked, based on the title, if it was a vampire novel), I’ve described it in a few ways: It is about a BYU professor who was in the thick of the academic freedom concerns at BYU in the ’90s. Or, it is about a brother going through his dead brother’s things and thinking about what that might mean about the two of them, both nonconformists. For those more interested in writing and less about the story, I’ve told them about the most interesting feature of the book: It is written mostly as a series of journal entries, but there are a lot of other voices; for example, a female critic consistently questions the stories and rhetoric in Abbott’s entries, which he responds to in a separate editorial voice. There are also his brother’s words, at first taken from found texts like notebooks, letters, and book annotations, but then, toward the end, John actually speaks from the dead, directly to the narrator, though mostly to underscore the fact that he no longer has a voice, deflecting questions by responding, “You can probably answer that yourself,” and “I don’t really get to answer that, do I?” (207, 202).
Anything but OrthodoxMatthew James Babcock. Heterodoxologies: Essays. Butte, Mont.: Educe Press, 2017. 204 pp.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Tidwell. Published in Dialogue, Fall 2017 (50:3)
I was nineteen years old when I first learned about the essay form. I was enrolled in an introductory survey of creative writing, sitting in a middle row of pocked and drab desks in a windowless classroom when the instructor drew a daisy on the board to illustrate the fragility of the essay form—how distinct petals of thought all encircle and emerge from the central theme and become something more beautiful in juxtaposition and conversation. That moment was a lightning bolt moment for me: This is how my brain works! And so I became an essayist.
The instructor that day was Matthew James Babcock, or Brother Babcock as I knew him at BYU–Idaho. That day was just a few months shy of ten years ago and my first lesson in the essay, but not my last. Before graduating from BYU–Idaho, I took a second class with Brother Babcock, this one focused solely on writing the essay. His lessons have stayed with me, shaped me. So, when I heard about his recently published debut essay collection, I couldn’t wait to learn from him again. Within minutes of opening Heterodoxologies, I felt Babcock’s presence almost tangibly. The collection is reminiscent of my classroom experiences with him at the helm: moments of profound insight sprinkled with healthy doses of goof. But this time the only prerequisite for the course is being human, of any variety: a music lover; a seventh grader; a bowler; a thinker; a dad; a dreamer.
This article is in conjunction with the art featured in the new 2018 Winter Issue. Life is fleeting and fragile—you never know when it might flicker and go out. Like a quivering leaf in November,…
Race, Lineage, and the 1920s-1940s Genealogical Society of Utah As a complement to Dialogue’s fall 2018 issue commemorating the end of the Church’s race-based restrictions, we offer an audio-with-slides presentation by Stirling Adams of “Mormon…
[…] at those who appear naive. We are too busy and too distracted to notice details around us. News travels quickly. There is a bottomless depth of information available at our fingertips, and we can […]
[…] inherited from two parents—or, in the case of asexual reproduction, one parent.” 2003: David O. Tolman, “ Search for an Epistemology: Three Views of Science and Religion David O. Tolman,” Dialogue 36.1 (Spring 2003): […]
[…] 2020 elections, see Tad Walch, “ChurchBeat: What we know about Latter-day Saints votes in Utah, Arizona,” Deseret News, November 5, 2020. 26. David E. Campbell, John C. Green, J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised […]