Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays

Where do Mormon letters come from? How from within what has been perceived as a rigid, highly practical culture do we continually produce those faithful enough to wrestle the angels for Truth in its fully sticky and tumultuous relationship to mortality? To claim from our tradition both those practical truths which guide our daily choices, as well as those metaphorical truths—perhaps more shallow, perhaps more deep—which breath into our Mormon practices the very spirit of Life?

Poet, editor, biographer, and author Mary Lythgoe Bradford has had one of the longest and most consistent careers of anyone working in contemporary Mormon letters. This new collection, Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays, conveniently provides under one cover a picaresque memoir of her impressive cultural contributions—from her graduate days, during the late century, at Brigham Young University where she received her Master’s degree in English literature; through her becoming the first “Sister” to have edited Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; well, now, to her later-life career as poet and author of the collection Purple: Poems by Mary Lythgoe Bradford, published during the present century. Many more writers and readers with a love of Mormon subjects will know her from her lively personal interactions, or her regular participation in symposia, conferences and workshops—all drawing upon and her inexhaustible energy, interest, and tolerance for mentoring younger writers.