Book Review: The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories, by Darin Cozzens
January 25, 2017[…] Cozzens. The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories. Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2016. 202 pp. Paper: $14.95. Reviewed by Braden Hepner
Book Review: For Time and All Eternities, by Mette Ivie Harrison
March 16, 2017[…] the wife of an LDS Bishop, and although she and her husband have raised five children to gether, recent months in their marriage have been rocky. Linda is sympathetic to those who have struggled […]
Book Review: Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories.
June 24, 2017
Invisible Men / Invincible Women
Eric Freeze. Invisible Men: Stories. San Francisco: Outpost 19, 2016. 150 pp. Paperback: $16.00.
Reviewed by Lisa Rumsey Harris
Dialogue. Winter 2016
The gaze of the girl on the cover of Eric Freezeās short story collection arrested meāstopped me. Her eyes, full of hostility, told me that if I opened the book, I would be intruding. Her bright knee-length plaid skirt, reminiscent of schoolgirl uniforms, belied the knowledge behind her glare. If it wasnāt for her posture, her arms embracing something, I wouldnāt have noticed the titular Invisible Man next to her on the cover.
Her warning wasnāt wrong. I felt like an intruder as I began to read. I could only take it in small dosesāread, then turn the ideas over and over in my mind, like rubbing a smooth stone between my fingers.
2017 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest
July 17, 2017[…] ENGLAND MEMORIAL PERSONAL ESSAY CONTEST Due date extended to November 1, 2017! In the spirit of Geneās writings, entries should relate to Latter-day Saint experience, theology, or worldview. Essays will be judged by noted […]
Book Review: States of Deseret, edited by Wm Morris
November 2, 2017
States of Deseret. William Morris, editor.Ā Peculiar Press, 2017. Alternative history short story anthology.Ā 109 pages, $3.00.
Reviewed by Barrett Burgin
Last year I presented this scenario to my classmates: what if the Civil War had never ended and Deseret had become its own nation? This idea of an alternate Mormon history really took hold on a classroom of BYU Media Arts students. Later, I found myself similarly fascinated while reading the new alternative history story collectionĀ States of Deseret. There is, perhaps, something inherently interesting to Mormons about reimagining our own brief history. Whether it’s a Zionistic yearning for our unfinished theocracy or a regretful wish to rewrite past wrongs,Ā States of DeseretĀ taps into our cultural dance with history and uses it as a platform to entertain, educate, and inquire.
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.Ā 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 SecretsĀ 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 bookās 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 Wheelās 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. Thereās 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 playsā central conflicts: same-sex attraction and polygamy.
After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective
December 10, 2021[…] me a whole new set of theories and approaches to identity, bodies, and desire. As I started writing my dissertation on how early Christians imagined sexuality and desire in the resurrection body, I turned […]
You Are Not Alone: A Plea for Understanding the Homosexual Condition
April 10, 2018[…] W. Taylor, a popular novelist and writer of Mormon history who is out of his field when writing about homosexuality. He borrows a dated argument from Desmond Morris, the anthropologist, who in The Human […]
A Queer Heavenly Family: Expanding Godhood Beyond a Heterosexual, Cisgender Couple
April 12, 2022[…] pairing enshrines cisnormativity as divine and excludes identities that do not fit neatly into these binaries. To gether, heteronormativity and cisnormativity exclude LGBTQ+ people from narratives of godhood. Both the exclusion of women and […]
She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication
August 29, 2023[…] to believe that her religion, her scholarship, and her activism belong integrally to Mormonism.ā Although Haglund was writing specifically about the literary scholar Eugene England, many people regarded the September Six with a similar […]