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Category Archives: Personal Narratives
I Can’t Do That…
It becomes very easy to see your own gaps of talent, to identify the admirable in others and despair at its relative lack in your own work. We seek to be Miltons and Shakespeares, and in so doing sometimes fail to recognize how successfully we cover much of the same ground by somewhat different means. Continue reading
Four Thoughts on Love and Desire
The headline I saw on Google News read, “Kate Upton says body shut down after Antarctic bikini shoot.” Beside it were various thumbnail photos of an almost-naked young woman in various poses against the tundra. I’d imagine her body was … Continue reading
One Writer’s View: Confessions of a Reluctant Novelist
I was once considered a promising writer. I had written more than 150 short stories. Then it happened. The horrible realization that sapped my strength and crushed my heart and left me dazed and disoriented and despondent. I was a fake. A fraud. A pretender. I was not the spinner of brief tales I had always seen myself as.
I was not a short story writer at all. It seemed I was a natural novelist—an entirely different animal. Continue reading
Observations: The Challenge of Recasting
As we age and learn, we often recast the things we experienced in earlier life in light of that new knowledge. We intentionally re-contextualize and re-index. We discover and formulate a larger—and hopefully more complete—story of that experience. Sadly, in the process we also tend to rob much of the vital essence from those experiences. Continue reading
Posted in Community Voices, Personal Narratives
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in verse # 22 : back to blank verse
It is one of the guiding principles of in verse that verse should always be read aloud. This includes Shakespeare and Isaiah, Dante and Jeremiah, Milton and John of Patmos. It includes Pope and Chaucer, Beowulf and Homer, Dryden and … Continue reading
Posted in In Verse, On-stage, Personal Narratives
Tagged "The Highwayman", "The mirror for magistrates", "Tragedy of Gorboduc", Alfred Noyes, Bessie Soderborg Clark, Christopher Marlowe, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), Marden J Clark, Stephen Greenblatt, The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville (Earl of Dorset), William Shakespeare
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Children’s Lit Corner
Three years ago this coming Friday, my best friend died suddenly after suffering a deep thromboembolism. That death, especially the unexpected nature of it, shook me to the core. Of course I had lost friends and loved ones before, but … Continue reading
One Man’s Meditation: Merlin, Motivation and Letting Go
It seems to me that we are in the midst of a rather startling expansion of our traditional concepts of Mormon literature. There’s an active effort going on to expand the possibilities, to rethink what we can and should be doing with our unique voices and viewpoints. A lot of it makes me uncomfortable, but the more I consider it the more I think it’s a useful discomfort… Continue reading
In Tents # 18 Pilate’s Trial before Jesus Part 4
In 1979, shortly before the end of my mission my father sent me a letter saying that the bishop of the BYU 29th ward, which he had been serving as high councilor, was being released and the high councilor called. … Continue reading
Meeting the Gods
We’d been hiking for hours, the wind sandblasting our faces and whipping up dust devils as tall as the rock canyon walls. I wasn’t sure why we had come, or what we were there to see. And when we arrived, … Continue reading
Wanted: One Internet-free Dark Night of the Soul
At a Sunstone Symposium a few years ago, I was talking with a person who ran a popular podcast. She mentioned that one of her hopes was that the podcast would help people to feel not so alone when they … Continue reading
