The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.
A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.
When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.
It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.
When one woman doesn’t speak, other women get hurt.
I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.
I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear – of women’s voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.
Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.
I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I’m outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer – in hibernation. I write with the bears.
I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.
Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one’s own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.
I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.
Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.
Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.
I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.
What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.
The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn – where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.