Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination
Phyllis Barber
Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1999
- Phyllis Barber: Author
Short Story
Mormons--West (U.S.)--Social life and customs--Fiction; Mormons--Fiction
Phyllis Barber writes about miracles, premonitions, visits from our dearly departed, and the sometines angst of good church-going people. Take Ida, who puts her undergarments into the wash and prances naked through the spin cycle, thinking no harm done and that no one will know. The ensuing comedy confirms that God sees everything.
These twelve short stories are based on tales overheard at church, newspaper accounts, and stories from the Fife Folklore Collection at Utah State University, Latter-day Saint publications, and family records. Some have passed form generation to generation. All, of course, are true. [from back cover]
Something about Mormonism keeps bringing Phyllis Barber back to its roots, something about the power of the miraculous she knew so intimately as a child. She was always fascinated by Sunday school stories of Joseph Smith's visions, about the Three Nephites rescuing people in harm's way, and about how unborn spirits talk to women in the night and ask to receive a mortal body. The idea that the veil between heaven and earth can be parted has never been far from her.
The Mormonism with which Barber identifies begins with Joseph Smith's ideas which give her own imagination access to infinite possibilities: conversations with heavenly beings and free-flowing consideration of any meritorious idea.
These stories are drawn from western folklor and Mormon history and from portraits of contemporary people caught by religious ideals. As much as Barber vacillates between the need to know and the need to doubt, she can't help telling stories that wrestle with the possibility of a thin veil fluttering nearby. [publisher blurb]
BX 8688.3 .B233p
129p.