Articles on Utah literary arts, Utah authors, Utah literature and poetry published in 15 Bytes.
Sometime in the 1980s, an edition of Douglas H. Thayer’s Summer Fire was published bearing a jacket blurb, written by Orson Scott Card, reading, “I have never read a better Mormon novel.” His calling it a “Mormon novel” makes Summer Fire a problem for a critic like me, […]
Face it, Katherine Indermauer’s chapbook Facing the Mirror says: since mirrors arrived, people, and our world, have never been the same. So powerful are mirrors, says this small spell of a book — an essay which also has, mildly, sometimes, the feel of a scientific/alchemic journal – that […]
Welcome to our Independence Day issue of READ LOCAL First, our monthly celebration of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we proudly introduce Jeremy Spencer Rees. Rees, a Texas native, recently finished his undergraduate degree in Utah. In the final year of his undergrad he was awarded second place […]
Heresies of Nature, Margaret Blair Young’s 2002 novel about a Mormon family gripped by a chronic, unpredictable illness, begins with a bit of authorial slight-of-hand. A narrator’s voice and an author’s voice are easy to confuse, and Young takes advantage of it by starting out as herself, speaking […]
From everyone here at 15 Bytes: Happy LGBTQ+ Pride Month and welcome to our June installment of READ LOCAL First — the world’s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce award-winning poet Britt Allen. In May of 2020, Allen completed her Master […]
“He could have been almost anything he wanted, but he chose to be a bad artist. Nobody will ever know why.” The “bad artist” that Buckdancer Skinner refers to here was his father, Adam Skinner, whose disappearance and possible demise reunites his three sons, 33 year-old Jacob, 27 […]
Marilynn Bybee Rockelman describes her work as containing “sexual language” that doesn’t rely on constructions like “f—k” to masquerade for the word itself. Chapter one of her manuscript earned an honorable mention in the Creative Nonfiction category of 2020’s Utah Original Writing Competition.
There’s a scene from playwright David Kranes’ 1971 novel, Margins, set in densely populated New York City, that might appeal to a 15 Bytes reader today. Here we witness a man falling in love with a woman through the medium of art: They walked unhurriedly down Madison Avenue. […]
“I love how Joy Harjo’s poems tap into the spiritual, the animal, and the human all at the same time,” says Laura Stott, a poet, professor and the 2020 recipient of the Ogden City Mayor’s Award in the Arts. “They show how connected we all are on […]
Elizabeth Bishop’s “The End of March” has resonated with Lisa Bickmore since the first time she read it. It has spoken to the Utah poet of her own “deep desire for retreat — for solitude and silence — and also how impossible it is, or can feel, […]
“I love Pablo Neruda’s big-hearted exuberance, especially his odes,” says former Utah poet laureate (2012 – 2017) Lance Larsen. “Linguistically and metaphorically, ‘Ode to My Socks,’ goes everywhere. Neruda the man was a collector of antiques, maritime flotsam and jetsam, glassware, seashells, figureheads of ships. In 2019 I […]
Sunni Brown Wilkinson says Joseph Stroud’s Of This World is one of the best poetry collections she has ever read. “Joseph Stroud is a remarkable but less well-known poet, mainly because he purposely shuns the spotlight,” Wilkinson says. “He lives part of the year in a cabin in […]
