Book Review: Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl.
December 29, 2017
Laughter, Depth, and Insight: Enid Rocks Them All
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl. Parts One and Two. Kofford Books. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 169 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Reviewed by Steven L. Peck. Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
When I was growing up, comic strips provided part of the ontology of my world. I devoured regular comic books, graphic novels, and other bubble-voiced media, but comic strips played a different and more important role than these other closely related forms. It was in the four-paneled strip that I was rst introduced to philosophical thought, political commentary, satire, and the exploration of questions rather than the explication of information toward an answer. Plus they made me laugh. There was a point being made. About life. And often about my place in it. Comic strips were my first introduction into a weird form of deep psychology that let me explore what it meant to be me. The sign on Lucy’s famous wooden stand in Peanuts, offering, instead of lemonade, “Psychiatric Help: 5¢: The Doctor is IN” does not seem an inappropriate way to express one of the functions these comic strips played in my life. I suppose given my age it is not surprising that it was Charles Schultz’s famous comic that proved the gateway drug to my infatuation with the medium.
Book Review: Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl
January 7, 2018
The Garden of Enid: By a Mormon and For Mormons
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part One. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016. 168 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Scott Hales. The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part Two. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2017. 169 pp. Paperback: $22.95.
Reviewed by Brittany Long Olsen, Dialogue, Summer 2017 (50:2).
At its core, Scott Hales’s two-volume graphic novel The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl is a coming-of-age-story through a Mormon lens. Self-proclaimed weird Mormon girl Enid is a misfit who feels equally misunderstood in her church community and at home with her single mother, a former alcoholic struggling with illness and depression. Some self-introspection and life-altering experiences lead Enid to care about other people and appreciate how much they care about her.
Book Review: Scott Abbott. Immortal for Quite Some Time.
January 7, 2018
Attempts to Be Whole
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).
Book Review: Matthew James Babcock. Heterodoxologies: Essays.
January 26, 2018
Anything but Orthodox
Matthew 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.
Book Review: Melissa Leilani Larson. Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love
January 26, 2018
Problem Plays that Cultivate Compassion
Melissa Leilani Larson. Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love. Salt Lake City: BCC Press, 2017. 142 pp.
Reviewed by Julie Bowman. Published in Dialogue, Fall 2017 (50:3)
Third Wheel: Peculiar Stories of Mormon Women in Love brings together two plays by award-winning playwright Melissa Leilani Larson: Happy Little Secrets and Pilot Program. The plays are presented chronologically by premier year. Happy Little Secrets premiered at the New Play Project in 2009, Pilot Program at Plan-B Theatre Company in 2015. Each won the Association for Mormon Letters award for Drama.
The book’s deceptively bright cover, illustrated with a young girl in a solo game of hoop rolling, belies the complexities and maturity of the plays in this compact edition. With hoop rolling as a metaphor for keeping things going, we may take Third Wheel’s cover as cautionary. The plays are thought problems that take us in a bit of a circle. The endings endorse a quiet kind of endurance. There’s nothing wrong with endurance, but it can be frustrating if one wants a conclusion that arrives at a point of view on either of the highly-charged issues that comprise the plays’ central conflicts: same-sex attraction and polygamy.
Dialogue Lectures #32 w/John Christopher Thomas
January 13, 2017
John Christopher Thomas is a Pentecostal who studies the Book of Mormon. He spoke at the Miller Eccles group on his new book A Pentecostal Reads the Book of Mormon: A Literary and Theological Introduction, published by CPT Press. Enjoy his fascinating insights in this newest Dialogue podcast.
From the Miller Eccles site: “Dr. Thomas (PhD, University of Sheffield) is Clarence J. Abbott Professor of Biblical Studies at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee, and Director of the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies at Bangor University, in Bangor, Wales, UK. He also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.
Dialogue Lectures #21 w/Neylan McBaine
March 4, 2015
The 21st Dialogue podcast features Neylan McBaine, founder and editor-in-chief of the Mormon Women Project, a continuously expanding digital library of interviews with LDS women from around the world speaking about her latest book Women at Church. From the Miller Eccles site: “The last several years have offered fertile ground for conversations about women, the Church and how the two intersect. Offering a call for understanding and unity and a path for more local inclusion of women, Neylan McBaine takes a middle ground between insisting all is well and advocating priesthood for women. McBaine will discuss what this middle ground looks like in the Church today and why it is important that we focus our practices to see, hear and include women more fully in our administration and services.
Dialogue Lectures #18 w/Adam Miller
October 16, 2014
The 18th Dialogue podcast features Professor Adam S. Miller who spoke on his recent book, Letters to a Young Mormon, published by BYU’s Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at the recent Miller Eccles lecture. From the site: “Adam wrote the book as a way of expressing his Mormon philosophy in a style that would make sense to young adults, but it would be a mistake to conclude the essays are simple minded—they are sophisticated, insightful pieces that will resonate with Mormons whether they are 17 or 71.”
Dialogue Lectures #16 w/Valerie Hudson
September 3, 2014
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Valerie Hudson headlines the 16th Dialogue podcast in her stop at the Miller Eccles group. There she discusses her new book Sex and World Peace (co-authored by Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett). From the Miller Eccles site: “(this book) unsettles a variety of assumptions in political and security discourse, demonstrating that the security of women is a vital factor in the security of the state and its incidence of conflict and war. Much of the data underlying Dr. Hudson’s research comes from the WomanStats Project, a research and database project housed at BYU that ‘seeks to collect detailed statistical data on the status of women around the world, and to connect that data with data on the security of states.’ This database has the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world.”
Transcending Mormonism: Transgender Experiences in the LDS Church with Keith Burns
May 8, 2023Keith Burns discusses the evolution of policies and approaches that LDS church leaders have engaged in the last decade. In this latest interview of #dialogueoutloud Burns sits down with Taylor Petrey to discuss the article…