On the morning the Challenger space shuttle exploded, Maggie shot on over. I’ve been thinking about both events as though they were connected, even though I know they aren’t. They were separated not merely by…
You’re sure to hear a few such discordant notes as Brooks’s fingers glide up and down the scale, but to focus on such slips overlooks the book’s overall melody, the song of a Mormon girl whose nascent faith is challenged, lost, found, and refined by fire throughout. She’s the prodigal daughter telling only a little about years of riotous living, more about the faith of her youth and the re-visioned faith of her adulthood. Memoirs aren’t intended to tell a disconnected story of one’s life, but to invite readers into an intensely subjective world. The best memoirs aren’t written as how-to manuals (like the Marie Osmond brand beauty and fashion instructions Brooks read as an awkward, body-conscious young girl. You’re sure to laugh out loud as she spends a chapter pillorying such fluff). Instead, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, good memoirs awaken “a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, and they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”2 American publisher William Sloan says readers of such works are not so much saying to the author “Tell me about you,” but rather “Tell me about me; as I use your book and life as a mirror.”
Listen to the Dialogue Podcast #2 featuring John G. Turner discussing his new book Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet? Then check out this roundtable conclusion at Juvenile Instructor (with all the contributions listed at the end) wherein Turner responds:
Four-and-a-half years ago, during my initial research trip to Utah, I ventured down to Provo and had lunch with Spencer Fluhman and several of his students. Among them were David Grua and Chris Jones (and Stan Thayne, I think). The Juvenile Instructor was a newborn blog at the time. So it’s a bit surreal for me to have read the topical reviews of Pioneer Prophet over the past six weeks at this blog.
I love the field of Mormon history for many reasons. The rich sources. The voluminous scholarship. Most of all, I love the fact that so many people care about the Mormon past. This has some downsides. It makes the field contentious and testy.
By Boyd Petersen I was lucky because I had two families. My best friend, who lived two houses down the street from me, was Mike Backman (he went by Karl in those days). We spent so much time together that we both started calling each other’s parents mom and dad. Mike’s parents were very different from mine—his mother, Kathleen, was a kind, open, loving person who laughed hard and loved board games. Mike and his mother and I would sometimes play Yahtzee or Uno and eat buttered popcorn and laugh. The only grownup I knew who was even more fun than Kathleen was her mother, Grandma McLatchy. Milt was the father who would always take me along on the father-son campouts and ward socials. His thin, tall frame always looked a bit intimidating and dignified, even in his frumpy professor dress suits, but he was always kind and caring.
Listen on Apple Podcasts. Listen on Spotify. Dialogue is proud to launch a new monthly podcast series on the dialoguejournal.com/topicpages, exploring key issues in the history of LDS scholarship. Join host Taylor Petrey, editor of…
From my youth I was blessed with a God-shaped hole in my identity. I knew I came from somewhere, that my ancestors were whole and bore a cultural armor that it was my right to…
In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…
“Mormon speculative fiction” must surely be one of the most niche genres available, and William Morris’s new story collection, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, published by BCC Press, is a standout and quirky addition…
Dear Editor, After reading Melissa Leilani Larson’s review of Levi Peterson’s short story collection, Losing a Bit of Eden (“The Promise and Limitations of Working-Class Male Protagonists,” Dialogue, Summer 2022), I would like to offer…
Listen to the podcast version here. For nearly three hours, I’d been trying unsuccessfully to sleep. It was definitely not the most comfortable bed I’d ever had—only a thin yellow and silver accordion-style pad separated…