Some have suggested that the most successful writing about the Mormon experience in the nineteenth-century comes from the frail and fading pages of the personal accounts recorded by first generation Mormons. From the first it…
When the all-seeing eye on the facade of Zion’s Mercantile winked at him, beckoning him with its self-assured commingling of matter and spirit to write a novel about the Promised Land, Halldor Laxness had already…
My earliest memory of Retty Mott is of hurrying past her house as I walked home from Primary. I hurried past because my cousins had told me that she chased people. Once she had leaped out from behind a tree in her front yard and hit Max Peterson with a fire shovel. She had chased him clear to the end of the block, hitting him all the way with the fire shovel . . .
The Mountain Meadow Massacre was one of the most tragic criminal events in the history of the United States, and William Wise’s book concerning the massacre is similarly tragic in its lack of scholarship and…
We are the sisters of the sea.
Something there is in you and me
That calls us to our very coasts, bids us stand
Where green-veined breakers moan upon the sand,
Seeking something the old oceans hide.
I will tell you now that words come hard for me. Perhaps that is why I value them so highly. And I make no apology for being simple where most men are complex and complex where many men are simple.
At evening Paul contemplated two trees on a distant ridge. They were both firs, one tall, straight, conical; the other curiously warped midtrunk into a great bent bush of a tree. The crippled tree troubled…
Dialogue 11.4 (1977): 63-70
In the 1950s there was a book published call Fate of the Persecutors of Joseph Smith, which contains stories that have been part of folklore that have been passed down discussing what happened to the people who helped kill Joseph Smith.
Most readers of Mormon fiction would quickly agree that the genre still awaits a writer of the stature of Chaim Potok or James Michener, to say nothing of a Joyce or a Faulkner. Perhaps one…
Latter-day Saints are fond of quoting a scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants that reads, “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom”—an injunction repeated with minor variation at least four times. All…