This is my favorite Christmas poem. What's yours?  More...

(Cross posted on Bycommonconsent.com)

We should have known that anyone who could write a melodic, lyrical ballad about a serial killer (John Wayne Gacy) still had some secrets and mysteries to explore.  In fact, he announced just that in the final lines of the John Wayne Gacy song:

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him

Look beneath the floorboards

For the secrets I have hid.

In his Salt Lake City concert, Sufjan Stevens talked about a dream he had had the night before.  He had attended a “by invitation only” Prince concert—featuring all of the original band members.  Except it wasn’t quite a concert.  It was in a trailer, not a theater.  And it was somebody dressed up to look like Prince, but not actually Prince.  And he was doing karaoke.  Badly.  Nonetheless, in the dream, Sufjan and his friends were enthralled, raving about how good the performance was, deceived by their own expectations and convincing themselves that they really had seen Prince.

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I wrote the play I Am Jane a decade ago, and we had our premiere performance in an LDS chapel for the Genesis Group meeting.  We turned the sacrament table into a deathbed and the choir seats into a pioneer camp.  It was a sweet evening.  Nothing professional about it, but very sweet—probably because we did have some good actors, and certainly because we were depicting the compelling, inspiring story of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a Black Mormon pioneer.  For Black Mormons, her story often provides a link to Utah’s Pioneer Day celebrations.  As one of the actresses said, “I used to hate pioneer day.  I’d think, ‘Yeah, you had pioneer ancestors—but they CHOSE to come.  My ancestors had no choice.”  Jane’s story was a bridge builder.

We subsequently had more professional performances, and BYU expressed an interest in staging it for Black History Month. 

That was when we got into trouble.  More...

I am in London, and will be until July.   The week before I left, the editor of a documentary I helped make was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor.  Two days after I arrived in London, I learned that a colleague of mine in BYU’s English department—Gary Hatch—had suddenly passed away of a pulmonary embolism.  He was a decade younger than I am.  Death is no respecter of persons. More...

I first read Linda's work in the 1970s, and found her style evocative and deceptively simple. She was a remarkable woman, and fearlessly tackled such difficult issues as sexual abuse (Secrets Keep) and the Mark Hoffman case (Salamandar). She was also a fine poet and a kind, generous person. To say she will be missed is so much an understatement as to be ridiculous. I thank God for Linda, for her good life, and the ways her talent has furthered the path of Mormon literature. Please feel free to add your reflections on Linda's life and literature.

A little over a decade ago, I had met several of my goals as a writer. I had won awards and published books. Strangely, I found that publishing wasn't that big of a deal. Neither was winning an award. I even faced a rather embarrassing situation after I was given a medal for my fiction. I was joking around with my family and put the medal on, saying, "What if I really wore this thing?" Then, of course, I forgot that I was wearing it. Sure enough, company arrived, and there I was wearing my medal, as though it were part of my daily wardrobe. It was like answering the door wearing a tiara, swimsuit, and a queen's robe.

I could write stories which made it into some good journals, but I wasn't at all sure that a well-crafted sentence mattered much--certainly not nearly as much as it once had, when I was embarking on my dream to become a published writer. Now I really wanted to write something of importance, not just something that might win an award. I wanted to consecrate my talent, and I prayed for guidance to do just that. More...

For the past few years, I have been making a documentary.  For the past few months, I have been doing all of the business associated with distributing that documentary, since we haven't yet found a distributor we're satisfied with.  I have actually been using a calculator, which thing I never would have supposed.  People think of me as a writer, but the only writing I've done for a few years has been in little blog posts, emails, and letters to missionaries.

The missionary I communicate with most often, a young man who was in our MTC branch when my husband and I served there, thanked me for the letters I had sent him and said, "It's like you have written me a book."   I told him that I HAD written him a book.  It was all in the mail. More...

I have been teaching English at BYU for twenty-five years, focusing on creative writing for more than half of that time. As I contemplate winter semester 2010 and the new AML blog, I have been thinking about conversations. A blog is a long conversation, and likewise, we teachers have somewhat structured conversations with our students during every class. Some might label the teacher/student conversations lectures or lesson plans, but I always aim for an exchange. Since I married one of my professors, I have some unusual insights about relationships, academia, and conversation.

My husband, Bruce, is brilliant. He is far better-read than I am, though I am funner. Our department told him when he was a single, 34-year-old professor that he would need to get married in order to keep his job. The university told me I'd get free tuition if I'd just marry a professor. So Bruce and I really invented the win/win scenario before Covey even coined the phrase. But then we were two very insecure, smart people and we were MARRIED. On our honeymoon, we had our first fight--about my odd interpretation of King Lear. The conversation did not go well. More...

When I was in my teens, Mormon literature was going through an adolescent phase, with clichéd romances asking such earth-shattering questions as “Will they get married in the temple or not?”

Amidst the feel-good-because-I’m Mormon literature were some genuine breakthroughs, however: Don Marshall’s The Rummage Sale and Douglas Thayer’s Under the Cottonwoods. But we still had miles to go. And we have come a remarkable distance in the forty years since then. Thayer’s recent novel The Apple Tree completes a story (“The Clinic”) found in Under the Cottonwoods; Levi Petersen has left an indelible mark, and young LDS authors are proving themselves in the national market. (Many have stories in the forthcoming fiction anthology Dispensation.) I am pleased with our direction, and I foresee even greater things on the horizon. More...