I experience flashes of poetry, but I was assigned an unreliable muse in the heretofore, alas. My moment of greatest poetic inspiration arrived when I was twelve or thirteen, on a trip across country in our fifteen-passenger Ford van. My mother devised a contest among us siblings to compose the best family cheer, and, motivated as I always have been by competition, I came up with these four immortal lines: Get the baby, shut the door! What’s for dinner? We want more! Though we’re busy and sometimes mad, The Frandsen family is really rad! Needless to say, I won the competition.
Author: Rosalynde Welch
I grew up in Southern California, the daughter of Russ and Christie Frandsen and eldest of their eleven children (including Gabrielle, Naomi, Brigham, Rachel, Jacob, Benjamin, Abraham, Christian, Eva, and Isaac, in case you're wondering if I'm related to that Frandsen you used to know). In 1992 I graduated from La Canada High School and started at BYU, where it didn't take me long to switch from a pre-med to an English major. In 1993 and again in 1994, I spent several months in England studying literature and theater with, among other able teachers, Eugene England. I developed interests in Renaissance English literature, contemporary critical theory, and creative writing, and wrote my Honors thesis on composition pedagogy. I served in the Porto, Portugal Mission from 1996-1997. I graduated from BYU in 1998 with a degree in English, and married John Welch later that week. John and I attended graduate school at the University of California at San Diego, and I was awarded a PhD in Early Modern Literature from that institution in 2004. I studied under Louis Montrose and dissertated under the title "Placing Private Conscience in Early Modern England," combining my interests in Renaissance literature, religion, and poststructuralist theory. During our years in San Diego, our daughter Elena Rachel was born in 2001, and our son John Levin Frandsen in 2003. We moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 2004, where John is an oncology fellow and I stay at home with our children, including since 2006 our daughter Mara Gwen. I currently serve as Relief Society instructor and choir pianist in our ward. I also maintain eclectic interests in backpacking, piano, food writing, travel and jogging.
Love Requited: Fidelity in Marriage
In honor of Valentine’s Day, a love simile: If married love were chocolate, it would be have to be a bittersweet dark, because no chalky milk or bland white could adequately convey the depth, complexity, and challenge of fidelity in marriage.
Placing the Indian Placement Program
Two weeks ago I caught a few minutes of a story on NPR about the Church’s Indian Placement Program.
Unrequited Love
I just finished a ravishing little novel called “The Confessions of Max Tivoli.” It begins, “We are each the love of somebody’s life.”
From the Pulpit: “A Mantic Celebration of the Holy Spirit”
“I wish to celebrate this morning the reality of the often ignored and too little heralded but very real outpouring of the Spirit of God upon the believing inhabitants of earth–right now, this morning, in the early evening of the last dispensation.”
Marrow and Fatness: LDS and BMI
My husband’s grandfather once uttered a one-liner that has made its way into family lore. Surveying a particularly, uh, well-endowed session of temple patrons, he said, “We may be a chosen people, but we are a corpulent people.”
From the Pulpit: Notes on Repentance
In the noble tradition of literary hacks who never miss an opportunity to recycle old material, here are the interesting bits of a sacrament meeting talk I delivered in church today. Repentance is, at its simplest, a turning away from sin and a returning to God.
An Interview with Neil LaBute
Writer, director and playwright Neil LaBute has been producing provocative and critically-acclaimed theater, film and fiction for more than a decade in the US and abroad.
For JV on January 17
JV is the kind of person one notices right away in an LDS chapel, the kind of person one remembers. I’d seen her at various stake activities after I moved with my new husband into our micro-studio apartment in a transient-urban ward; when we moved into student housing in the neighboring transient-student ward the next year, hers was one of the few familiar faces that greeted us that first Sunday. It was impossible not to like her instantly: JV is outgoing, exuberant, affectionate, interested, and an intent listener. She also happens to be African-American.
In the Cultural Hall
The danger in telling people you write a little bit is that they then assume you can. Last week a friend from my ward called and asked me to write the libretto for a musical show she has been called to coordinate for the stake; a few of the creative decisions had already been made, she told me, but she needed me to write lyrics and a narrative frame for the story. The show is meant to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of our stake, headquartered at the Butler Hill meetinghouse; the stake presidency had designated a “Sound of Music” theme, and the show had been titled, naturally, “Butler Hill Is Alive with the Sound of Music.”
The Way to Apply the Truth to (My) Life
As I read yesterday’s text from the David O. McKay reader, “Jesus Christ: ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life,’� I was struck by its repeated injunction to apply Christ’s words to our lives—and, more boldly, to extend that application into the world. I frequently hear admonitions of this sort urging me to liken the scriptures to myself, and inasmuch as this means merely that I must be a doer of the word and not a hearer only, I think I get it. But once I get down to the actual business at hand—that is, reading the scriptures and figuring out how they bear on my life—I confess I’m often at a loss: what does it mean to apply the scriptures to one’s life?
David O. McKay: Father, Teacher, Prophet
On Sunday I received this year’s course curriculum for RS and Priesthood: a diminutive paperback with a striking portrait on the cover, entitled Teachings of Presidents of the Church: David O. McKay.
So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen and All the Rest
Please join me in sending off our crack team of guest bloggers, Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson, with our collective thanks. Invariably funny and occasionally controversial, their posts were a delightful addition–and one of them even made it onto the T&S favorites sidebar! We especially thank them for blogging over a difficult holiday period and soldiering on through more than their fair share of Christmas travel woes. Back to work taking over the universes of reality television and educational literature, you two!
Springtime in Winter
After you try your hand at composing a haiku, take a chance on writing a Christmas story. All you have to do is supply the ending: a crotchety old cop is assigned to supervise a Christmas shopping trip for two needy kids, and after grudgingly performing the act of service he finds himself
Labute and the Beasts
Speaking of Mormon masculinity, once-Mormon playwright Neil Labute premiered his new play this week, Fat Pig.
Welcome Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson
We’re pleased to introduce Shannon Keeley and Brian Gibson, our newest guest bloggers and our first co-blogging team.
Mormon Masculinity
An exercise in historical imagination, if you please: you’re sitting in the tabernacle on a hot Sunday afternoon, Brother Brigham at the pulpit.
Fa La La La La
It’s shockingly easy to make confessions on the internet, and I can’t resist making one of my own:
A Sense of Place
It’s been five months since my family moved from the edge of the country to the middle, and I’ve never felt so out of place. The change of season is to blame, of course: it happened quite quickly, here, on the day before Thanksgiving, when the low sky let fall flurries of snow and something else, too–a dampening of the light that makes everything look different, somehow. I’m not pleased.
Reading, Recreation, and Redemption
Well, it must be autumn again. Not only is my house threatening to sail away in a sea of leaves (mostly ugly brown oak, sadly), but I’ve been asked to teach a mini-class on literacy at Enrichment. The rhythm of the schoolyear is hard to resist, and almost every fall I’m asked to give a presentation on reading. I’m always happy to comply. This year, though, the notes to my standard presentation were lost in a cross-country move, so I’m asking myself–Why do I like reading fiction, again?
Notes on the Proclamation
In the fall of 1995 I enrolled in a critical theories seminar; first out of the block was feminism. One afternoon in September, I sat at a carrel in the old reading room on the south side of the HBLL and wrote on the inside cover of my reader a personal manifesto of sorts: “Why I don’t believe in gender essentialism.� Less than a week later, I sat in the Marriott Center watching the Women’s Broadcast on the big screen, and heard President Hinckley say, “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal and eternal identity and purpose.�
Against an LDS Theology of Conscience
I’ve never seen the Disney version of “Pinocchio,â€? but I’ve absorbed by cultural osmosis the image of Jiminy Cricket cheerfully chirping, “Always let your conscience be your guide.â€? Our banal present-day version of conscience—and our uncritical acceptance of the concept as a stable psycho-spiritual category–belies the treacherous history of the idea.
Bowdlerizing the Book of Mormon
This afternoon at lunch, my angelic three-year-old daughter said causally to her quesadilla, “I’m going to kill you by plunging my spoon into your heart.”
Dinner Theater, or Do We Consume Media?
It was late spring in London, and just as the weather outside started warming up, things inside started heating up, too.