Desert Seas

by: Anca Segall

Lars’ baby blue VW bug, rusty and dented, came to a stop in the rutted parking lot at the trailhead into Dark Canyon. Covered in nearly as much dust as the car, we both tumbled out into the scrub desert, already parched in May. Fable Valley had enough flash floods to make leaving our names at the BLM box prudent, though it was still early in the season. Eager to stretch our legs, we shouldered our backpacks and started down the steep trail into the valley.

We had driven down from Logan and stopped in Provo for a Saturday fair in the city park, where Lars did a brisk business drawing portraits of fair-going kids. He’d kept them captivated with stories on a rickety stool as he rendered their character in strokes of charcoal and Conte crayon. At midday, while families lunched and the kids trickled in more slowly, Lars had me pose for him, to pass the time and entice paying customers.

Lambertian Portraits

Photographs by Greg Halvorsen Schreck
Concept and Software by Mark Woodworth

Lambertian Portraits are digital photographs, made out of wood.

Fauré’s Requiem

By MAxima Kahn

The deer are here, four of them, all does, strolling through the underbrush, munching the tender leaves, picking clean the lowest branches of my flowering pear tree. It has been so long since they have spent time here in the daylight, I am glad to see them and watch their elegant dance among the trees.

I don’t go out on the porch this morning so as not to disturb the deer—and also because it is chillier. I sit inside and listen to Fauré, who takes my breath away with the beauty and perfection of his music. If I could write music like this but relevant to now, if only I could do that, be in that state of grace, what a gift and blessing and offering that would be. I would have to know that was worthwhile, that was enlarging the world, that was magnifying, in a sense, the glory of God, of creation.

Book Review: Maria Hummel’s “Still Lives”

BY D.M. Olsen

It’s the opening night of Still Lives at the Roque Museum and it’s the buzz of the art scene in Los Angeles. It’s also the wildly anticipated return of Kim Lord, who has conjured up a twelve-piece exhibit portraying the murdered bodies of famous victims including Elizabeth Short, Gwen Araujo, Chandra Levy, and Nicole Brown Simpson. The only issue is, Kim Lord never shows up.