Louise Plummer talks about how lists can provide inspiration for writers, and has exercises and mini-workshops in which list-making is the focus.

My mother told me every so often that the great thing about lists is when you can check things off of them.  It gives such a feeling of accomplishment.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812, is an eye-opening read about a diary that is essentially a list.  The diary has been known to historians for years, but until Ulrich looked at it in a different way, it was considered uninteresting to say the least.

So can lists really be considered literature?  I submit that they can certainly be considered a means of insight into culture, even if it is only the one-person culture of the list-maker. More...

Yesterday my family painted two newly finished rooms in our basement (one a bedroom, the other my new office). More...

Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (TLP) left me in a love conundrum. More...

My wife and I drove to Ogden on Saturday to be part of the audience for the “Youth Spectacular” at Weber State University’s Wildcat Stadium. I had written a song for the event, and had shepherded the song through a couple of big firesides and a recording session. The event itself was monstrous (and the song a very small part of it): 3,500 costumed youth on the field, performing for a packed stadium. And I’m of two minds about the experience. More...

Recently my good friend Heather (H. B.) Moore received a rather scathing review of one of her books. Apparently the reviewer had bought the audio version  and had it playing in the car during a family trip. She was horrified at the content, which she found offensive, and turned it off because her small children were in the car and shouldn't have been exposed to something that deserved a PG-13 rating. (And what, pray tell, she demanded, was such a thing doing on the shelves of an LDS bookstore?)

This from a book published by pretty darn conservative Covenant Communications. More...

Two weeks before beginning work on an MFA in Creative Writing at BYU, Anna Lewis turned in her two weeks' notice to the eating disorder clinic where she worked. One of the girls there asked her, "Do you really believe that you will be doing anything as a writer that is more important than what you are doing here?” I know about this incident because Lewis tells it in her thesis's Afterword, in which she searches for the intersections and differences between creative writing and social work.

That struck me as a very Mormon-writer sort of thing to do. More...

I am not a professional photographer.

I am not a designer of any stripe.

I don't know nothin' 'bout magazine layouts or art direction or any of that fancy stuff.  I just know what I like.  And what I don't like.

And I don't like the new Conference Report issue of the Ensign.

More...

*Don't forget to renew your subscription to Irreantum!  Our new issue just went to the printer.  Check it out here.*

A few weeks ago, a family member asked me a question. “Okay,” she said, “tell me one more time … what you mean when you say literary?” She admitted that she’d once thought the word was only used by certain people to assert their superiority over others. “Are there actual standards?” she asked.

How would you have answered? More...

The recent Utah execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner via firing squad became national news, and led to inevitable editorializing pro and con the death penalty.  Because Utah is the only state that allows for firing squad executions, Utah is presented, by those who oppose the death penalty, as a particularly benighted state, and the discredited doctrine of blood atonement usually gets attention.  Blood atonement is, as Scott Card once put it, "a doctrine never taught in the Church, especially by Jedediah M. Grant."  But Gardner's execution had, for me, a personal historical context unrelated to blood atonement.  Only three Utahns have been executed via firing squad in the last 70 years.  Gardner's one; Gary Gilmore (of Executioner's Song fame) was another.  The third was a man named Donald Condit, who was executed in 1940 for murdering my grandfather. More...

I’m thinking of three things. Here’s the first one: I remember a conversation some years ago with Scott Bronson. Having danced around as sort of an art-hobbyist for years, I was contemplating what I described in conversation with Scott as a kind of mystical leap into greater loyalty to artful pursuits – a new covenant to follow the muse.  My tone was getting pretty lofty, and I was getting kind of worked up. Scott listened patiently, and then brought me back down to earth by saying something like, “Relax, Sam. It’s not like we’re talking about curing cancer.” The comment was made more potent, perhaps, by the fact that Scott was, at that time, battling cancer. Anyway, that’s the first thing. More...