This paper was first read at the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City. It was later published as an essay in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 36 No. 3 (Fall 2003) “THE POPULAR FILM MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING suggests that enthic families will flood pell mell into any …
In this 1995 essay, which was later published in the Case Reports (Vol 2) published by The Mormon Alliance, I talk about a tempest in a tea pot which nevertheless had wide ramifications in Mormonland during the early to mid-80s. My father was at the center of it. I don’t …
This essay was originally a talk given at The Sunday Gathering, August 21, 1994 at the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City. It was later printed in Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Spring, 1998. WHEN MY FIRST MARRIAGE ENDED IN DIVORCE in 1991, what I describe as my …
Announcing my first book: Dream House on Golan Drive, forthcoming from Signature Books (Salt Lake City) August 2015. It is the year 1972, and Riley Hartley finds that he, his family, community, and his faith are entirely indistinguishable from each other. He is eleven. A young woman named Lucy claims …
This review originally appeared in 15 Bytes Magazine. “House Under the Moon” was a finalist for the 2013 15 Bytes Book Awards in poetry. I liked this book partly because I’ve met Michael personally in Logan where he and his family live, and partly because he’s a practitioner of Buddhist …
In the fall of 2013 the winners of the first annual 15 Bytes Book Awards were announced. As the literary editor of this online arts magazine, I had the privilege of working with other magazine staff and the editor, Shawn Rossiter, to determine all the particulars of launching a new …
“It’s rare to read poetry that is this experiential, visceral and somehow transcendent at the same time. In three sections Bertram runs her electric fingers as if over the braille of American life as varied as wildlife (coyotes, elk), the natural sciences (inter-galactic formulas, weather patterns—in both a …
In Nov. 2013 at the Orem [Utah] Public Library, author Brian Doyle gave a reading as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival. Below is a short essay he handed out to everyone in the audience and asked that we post on this day commemorating the massacre at Sandy Hook …
“MOTHERLUNGE IS A FULL-FRONTAL assault on every dappled, dimpled and doily-enhanced image we’ve had of both women and mothers. Think Sandy or Orem, Utah—scrubbed clean with culturally-defined markers of motherhood, riven with Victorian charms that are neither really Victorian or charming. Then think the opposite.That is Scott’s literary world. That the story is also hysterically funny …
As with this country of ours at large, there is at play, in Jana Richman’s new novel The Ordinary Truth (Torrey House Press, 2012), the national see-saw of delusions vs. reality, collective doctrines vs. the sweet, inevitable flux of life’s authentic rhythms. In central Nevada—the driest state in the union, …
