Satan and the snake had watched each other for a long time before either spoke. It was mid-morning—it was always mid-morning—and the breeze was pleasant and warm in the thick tangles of shining dark leaves. The snake, a long purple shadow, was hanging in negligent coils from a branch of the tree hanging with blue-spotted [...]
A few years back, after attending a local storytelling festival, I wondered in this post what would happen if I released a story into public domain. I resolved to work up the nerve to let go what some might imagine to be my intellectual property, to “breathe it out” into the common atmosphere, where anybody [...]
My happy thanks to everyone who participated in WIZ’s People Month. My list of folks for whom I’ve felt deeply grateful includes:
Th.
Nephi Anderson (via Th.’s gravelly voice)
Mark Bennion
Tyler Chadwick
greenfrog
green mormon architect
Elizabeth R.
And, of course, many thanks to WIZ’s loyal readers and commenters.
I appreciate each writer’s help keeping People Month on WIZ interesting and fun. We’ll do it again next [...]
Th. writes of this recording, “This is a selection from chapter three of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian (1921), perhaps my favorite Mormon novel. This chapter will be featured in an upcoming series of posts I’m doing on Anderson for Motley Vision. Dorian may be read online. The birds are from Soundsnap.”
For Th.’s–Eric Jepson’s–bio, go here.
Listen to Mark read “Letulogy.”
Uncle Howard,
At sixty, your traces stalk the hollows
of grocery stores from here to Snowflake,
Arizona. A thatch of curly gray hair
shuttles past the cash register, your cow-
milking hands pull a list out of an empty wallet.
You are forever in the next aisle over,
shaking a watermelon, picking at your
mustache, laughing with the manager
over [...]
Listen to Patricia reading “The Pear Tree.”
When early autumn’s storm wrung from the clouds
Summer, wearing the last thundering rain thin
And sharp on the wind’s rasp; when thorns
Of the first frost bloomed over the grass,
And the morning glory hung brown and bitten
On the garden fence; on those first nights
Of cold window glass and the drip of [...]
As deeply as I feel the charge from hearing a coyote call close by or catching the wood-and-water chuckle of wild turkeys, as fully as wind flittering through cottonwood leaves inspires me to listen and to breathe, I appreciate the sing-sound of the well-turned human tongue.
Sometimes, in lonely canyons, when there’s no one else there, I’ve heard [...]
It seems strange to think that sitting with what’s left of a woman who second-mothered me most summers and for two school years of my life is yoga, but it was the most heart-opening practice I’ve done.
What’s left? A bag of bones, draped with a thin and mottled fabric of skin. Bits and pieces of [...]
As the bus exits the Lincoln tunnel and enters Manhattan, I strain my neck to look out the window at the buildings towering over me in the narrow corridor called a street. I am overwhelmed with awe at the beauty and majesty of this new environment. I can hear, feel and smell the city breathing [...]
I’ve decided to officially declare August Homo narrans month on WIZ. Throughout the month, I’ll post narrative prose and poetry that’s people-centric in nature. Homo narrans (”storytelling man”) is John D. Niles’ provocative turn on our self-assigned scientific designation Homo sapien:
Only human beings possess this almost incredible cosmoplastic power, or world-making ability… Through storytelling, an otherwise unexceptional biological species [...]