The winners of the 2018 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest will come together to read their essays: 1st Place: “The Process of Staying,” by Susan M. Hinckley. For many people, it looks like Hinckley, with her independent ways, is in the process of leaving the LDS Church. But she argues that she’s actually in …
Speaker: Tyler Chadwick
Mormon Poetry and the Prophetic Imagination: Opening (the) Faith Toward Possibility
The prophetic imagination as a mode of consciousness disrupts mainstream cultural trends and seeks to expand individual and communal faith using language ripe with poetic rhythms and imagery. Whereas dogma intends to pin down and flatten out ideas and to narrow the conceptual frames through which people view the world, poetry relies on metaphor, nuance, …
Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry
In April 2018, Peculiar Pages released Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, Martin Pulido
Doing Mormonism
Community identification is performative. It’s a matter of putting on the discursive practices—the ideas, beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, roles, etc.—that constitute the community’s being-in-the-world. Social scientists have called this “doing” identity. This presentation explores what it means to “do” Mormonism, to put on a Mormon identity, especially through speech acts and literary texts. Tyler Chadwick
Woman Of Another World I Am With You Heavenly Mother In Mormon Poetry
The A Mother Here Art and Poetry Contest (2014) aimed to counter Mormonism’s cultural silence about Heavenly Mother, to inspire thinking about the Divine Feminine, and to show that Heavenly Mother is a valued part of the Mormon religious tradition by encouraging artistic and literary portrayals of Her. In my presentation, I will read and …
Sunday School Psychotherapy Mormon Poets On Vulnerability And Madness Healing And Hope
Brigham Young once called Joseph Smith a poetÑand poets, Brigham continued, “are not like other [people]; their gaze is deeper, and reaches the roots of the soul” Such vision, he said, is akin to having “the searching eyes of angels” with which poets can “catch the swift thought of God and reveal it to us, …
I Took This To Mean Poetry S Communal Moment And The Virtues Of Textual Intimacy
This presentation is a reflection on my encounters with Latter-day Saint sexual mores through Mormon theology’s expansive view of embodiment, procreation, and desire. I weigh these encounters against my readerly desires, my family relationships, and my experience with specific poems by American poets Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Javen Tanner. The …
Sunday School Psychotherapy Mormon Poets On Vulnerability And Madness Healing And Hope
Brigham Young once called Joseph Smith a poetÑand poets, Brigham continued, “are not like other [people]; their gaze is deeper, and reaches the roots of the soul” Such vision, he said, is akin to having “the searching eyes of angels” with which poets can “catch the swift thought of God and reveal it to us, …
I TOOK IT TO MEAN
My presentation begins with me reading Javen Tanner’s poem, Tyler Chadwick
POETRY READING/PANEL
Contributing poets read and discuss their work published in Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Centruy Mormon Poets. Tyler Chadwick, Neil Aitken, Karen Kelsay, Elisa Pulido’s Laura Stotts, Holly Welker