"She witnessed the veil between heaven and earth, the thin membrane protecting the power and the glory, the face of the Almighty."

But if Barber's stories were merely statements of her religious beliefs, they would be weak. When an author is convinced he knows the truth and that his job is merely to translate that truth into words, the writing is bound to be propagandistic. But Barber, like all good writers, has a sense of discovery embedded in each of these stories. They draw from Mormon mythology, not in the sense that they are untrue, but rather in the literary sense that they are based on other stories, true or untrue, that are known throughout Mormon culture, like the seagulls eating the crickets or unborn babies selecting their parents. Barber filters that mythology through her own imagination, which happens to be Mormon.

The two best of these stories, "Mormon Levis" and "Bread for Gunnar," draw from different portions of that mythology. "Mormon Levis," set in 1960s Las Vegas, is about two teen-age Mormon girls who have non-Mormon, "Forbidden boyfriends." Mattie, the narrator, and Shelly aren't repulsed by the foul mouths of the boyfriends, Rod and The King: "I love it when they talk like that," says Mattie, "words from the Forbidden City." The girls want the thrill of the forbidden, but recognize and accept the limits their culture imposes on them: "We are, after all, Mormon girls in Mormon Levis, saving our sacred bodies for The Big Event called temple marriage."

The undercurrent of sarcasm in the story, which at times seems as much the author's as the narrator's, elevates it above mere careful observation. It gives it verve. Mattie's father "won't allow me to say anything unkind about someone unless I say three nice things. Life is one big bud of goodness. . . .Sometimes it's a maximum security prison to have to smile and be loving all the time." Later she says, "we're saving ourselves like stamps or coins or something valuable."

Barber takes the myth of the perfect Mormon childhood and renders it funny and appealing (in a note on sources, she tells us she lived in Las Vegas in the 1950s and 60s).

"Bread for Gunnar" examines the myth of the happy plural life in 19th-century Utah. Anna, the narrator, is contentedly married to Heber, but church leaders want him to adopt "The Principle." He tells her, "We've been chosen, Anna. Brigham Young has given his blessing." Anna insists to herself, "I won't do it. No one can make me do it." When Anna, who has four children, meets her husband's choice for his second wife, she tells him, "Me being replaced by another woman, especially someone so young and attentive to your every need—she makes me feel like her mother. And you could be her father. That's not right, Heber. The way you look at her. That's the way you used to look at me."

But Anna finally gives in. "Because I honored God's wisdom more than my own, I'd give my husband away to another woman." It seems a religious inevitability.

Whether it's a "Devil Horse," in which a man travels to Nauvoo to meet Joseph Smith, or "The Whip," in which a Mormon pioneer on his way to Utah becomes overly proud of his abilities with a whip, Barber draws on familiar Mormon stories and reworks them, often instilling them with a humanity they lack on their own (just as the George Washington who chopped down the cherry tree is more a parable-device than a real person). She has fashioned plots into stories, skeletons into bodies by covering them with flesh and blood and life.

The Salt Lake Observer, Paul Swenson
Phyllis Barber's coming home in May. Not to that long, low house on Lincoln Circle in Holladay, where she used to live. But home to places in her supple psyche, where many of these stories first germinated, and to friends and mentors who watched during the 1970s and '80s as she transformed herself from a musician into a writer who could conjure sensuous literary miracles from the fingertips that once produced sonatas.

Ms. Barber has always been interested in the relationship of the spiritual to the sensual. Lurking in the folds of a shy sensibility, the ferociously powerful voice she eventually discovered was heard in such works as How I Got Cultured, School of Love and her novel, The Desert Shall Blossom. In Parting the Veil, she returns to her roots, playing afresh with folk elements of the Mormon story. Her wide-ranging imagination takes us from a dusty journey down a dirt road to a prophet's house in the 19th century in "Devil Horse" to the back seat of a silver Pontiac flying down a two-lane Nevada blacktop toward Lake Mead in "Mormon Levis."

When a friend responded with lack of interest to my description of these stories as "newly-minted Mormon folktales," I realized that even for the literati a shroud of stodginess and questionable appeal may hang over folklore as a modern idiom. However, the bracing breeze that blows through these stories—an alternating current of pathos and frolic—will obliterate any tendency to quibble over categories or definitions.

Many of Ms. Barber's tales are spare; others are lushly exotic. Having originally appeared in such publications as Quarterly West, the New Hampshire College Journal, the Beloit Fiction Journal and Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, they will pique the curiosity and imagination of students of the human condition, whether possessed of a nodding acquaintance with Mormon traditions or not. If there is a complaint to be lodged, it may be that we yearn for additional contemporary pieces to balance those from the past, since among the most memorable in the collection are three set in the late 20th century.

Two of these stories have female protagonists who must grapple with the tension between the strictures of their religion and the natural passions of their inner lives. In the uproarious "Ida's Sabbath," Ida Rossiter, a devoted, middle-aged organist who has served her Mormon congregation for more than 20 years, is surprised by an unsettling Sunday in which the architectural symbol of her faith (the steeple of her ward chapel) is struck by lightning. She is also shocked by her own willingness (once the storm renders her clothes dryer without power) to play sacred hymns during a church service sans underwear. What Ms. Barber eventually gets down to during the sacrament service is Mormon bedrock—the power of personal revelation, embarrassingly embodied in Ida's spontaneous trance at the foot of her organ, a faux pas in full view of the congregation.

The heroine of "Mormon Levis" is Mattie, a Las Vegas Mormon teenager who can't wait to get out of the house to cruise for boys with her friend Shelley. "My eyes brush past my mother's eyes and the picture of Jesus on the wall behind her. Sunrays coming out of his head. Light like the sun on his forehead. Jesus is always looking over someone's shoulder it seems. Sure, Mom, bye."

Mattie and Shelley are "good girls" who want to live with Jesus some day. "We're saving ourselves like stamps or coins, or something valuable." But the King's silver Pontiac is crashing through the night, "headlights cutting the dark into ribbons. I have a hunch we're both thinking that some day soon we'll be more careful. Do what our parents ask us. But this Nevada night. It sucks us in like a Hoover, and we're on the edge of something big."

In "The Whip," Karl and Hilma Gustavson, headed west to the Salt Lake Valley on the Mormon trail, inherit a Conestoga and two oxen from a dying family and are promoted from handcart pioneers to wagoneers. But it is the braided whip left coiled on the high shelf of the wagon seat that takes Karl's eye. He soon becomes so proficient in its use that he can clear the wagon train of flies with a few flicks of its tail. On a journey heavy with hardship and devoid of entertainment, the whip becomes a symbol of dominance and bravado and begins to take a toll on the Gustavson's difficult marriage. A severe but satisfying solution comes to Hilma as an answer to prayer.

"The Boy and the Hand," almost Zen-like in its simplicity, is about the limits of spiritual intervention. It begins: "Once upon a time lightning sawed the sky and cracks appeared in the roof of the day. About the same time, a family of four sat at the dinner table, huddled over their bread, corn, salad and fish. The mother and father were arguing over minor points, as people who argue usually do."

A writer with a strong visual gift, Ms. Barber's long view pierces a sandstorm in "Dust to Dust," penetrates a pre-life in "Spirit Babies" and sets up a curious close-up of a white-maned healer and a Hispanic skeptic building a sand castle together on a Pacific beach in "Prophet by the Sea." We emerge from these stories with a clearer vision of our own lives.

Journal of Mormon History, Eric A. Eliason
Phyllis Barber's literary sensitivity to Mormon and Western history has already been demonstrated in How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), for which she won the Associated Writing Program's creative nonfiction prize awarded by American university creative writing faculty. Barber followed this success with And the Desert Shall Blossom: A Novel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993) about a Mormon family involved in constructing Hoover Dam. In Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, Barber develops a literary interest in Mormon folklore to produce what may be her most important fiction yet.

Although all dozen stories have a strong Mormon folk component, this review focuses on those with a historical setting. Barber's epilogue intriguingly describes the origin of each short story, sometimes a personal experience, a family story reported to her by another, or a published item. In four cases, her stories are based on tales recorded in the Fife Folklore Archive at Utah State University. The process seems very Mormon; if writing is a creative process, it is not accomplished ex nihilo but by molding matter unorganized or reshaping material once organized for a different purpose.

Barber's most ambitious story "A Brief History of Seagulls: A Trilogy with Notes," is really three stories about the famous miracle of the gulls in the lives of an 1848 pioneer woman, a modern separated couple, and the hazard gulls pose to planes from Hill Air Force Base. In a wrenching scene in the first vignette, a young Mormon wife sacrifices her one treasured luxury—a set of delicate curtains—to be used in beating back the crickets. For her the miracle is bittersweet.

"Those curtains were everything to me." She looked white and pale and small in the emptiness of the backlit desert, unaware that the sky behind her was filling with brilliant light. "I thought God loved me." (93)

The best story in this collection also touches on the historical theme of the trek to Utah. In "The Whip," Hilma becomes distressed when her husband evinces an embarrassingly boyish enthusiasm and passion for precision violence when he finds an abandoned whip. After long enduring Karl's targeting small animals and showing off to other travelers, she prays: "Dear God. The whip. It is not good. All of thy little creatures are unsafe. I promise I'll never complain about flies again if thou will aid me in a solution. Karl is forgetting about thee. His mind must be single to thy glory. Amen." (3). Her inspired solution is to dice the whip and boil it into a tasty soup that Karl eats with relish, assuring him when he looks for the whip later, "I'm sure you have it with you, Karl" (4). Solving the problem without challenging Karl's ego and position as head of the house, this story raises evocative questions about gender relationships within LDS marriages.

Perhaps the biggest contribution to the collection overall is hinted at by the title Parting the Veil. In her preface, Barber claims, "When I was a child, it was common to think of an angel appearing by my bed as it was to drink orange juice for breakfast" (ix). While this statement may be hyperbole, Barber captures an essential facet of Mormon epistemology: The foundations of the Restoration were laid by people who concretely witnessed heavenly beings acting among men. There is no workable way to "spiritualize" or "metaphorize" these events that makes any sense in literary or historical writing. Barber thus breaks new ground away from such distinguished literary Mormon forebears as Maurine Whipple, Vardis Fisher, and Virginia Sorensen. These "Lost Generation" authors won critical acclaim nationally but also sold out their essential Mormon folklore as if they were only nostalgic survivals or psychological anomalies from a more fired-up but gullible age. (Edward A. Geary, "Mormondom's Lost Generation: The Novelists of the 1940s," BYU Studies [Fall 1977]: 89-98.)

In contrast, most of Barber's stories that are not fantastic on their case at least leave the reader wondering at the reality of strange visions and touched by their haunting presence. Barber often takes her reader from the mundane world to the world of visions and spirits so quickly and seamlessly that a reader can be caught off guard. That these two worlds are one in the classic Mormon mind is, of course, her very point.

Barber occasionally confuses parting the veil with embracing the wacky. She may lose the pulse of her people in "Devil Horse," where Joseph Smith baptizes a horse possessed by the devil when a prospective convert turns away from Nauvoo and in "The Boy and the Hand" about a floating hand showing up at a family dinner. Of course one person's wacky is another's spiritual manifestation, but in these two instances Barber seems to leave the familiar forms of the faith-promoting too far behind.

In perhaps the most challenging story in the collection, "Dust to Dust," Barber forcefully poses a religious dilemma. Most Christians would agree that one's duty is difficult but clear when one is poverty-stricken and a poor stranger asks for food and money. However, in this story, narrated in an ethereal stream of conciousness style, a lonely pioneer woman who yearns for refinement is visited by a handsome stranger in an ornate carriage who asks for money. "Dust to Dust" is set in pioneer times with a curiously contemporary sensibilty that makes for a haunting and effective mix.

Barber's stories tack back and forth between the concerns of the past and the concerns of the present. The chapters span from the first decade of the Restoration to yesterday. In this setting of the past in the context of the present, her work is not unlike that of a historian. It is a common misconception that folklore is the opposite of history. Most scholars understand that historians' agendas, theories, and assumptions make history writing anything but a straightforward unmediated representation of prior events; but they may not realize that folklore is more than stories about the past that conflict with document. As ethno-historians have shown, oral traditions often preserve accurate information about past events for which documents have been lost or never existed. Also, since folklore is a mirror for the values, concerns, fears, hopes, prejudices, and aspirations of any group of people at any given time, studying folklore should be an essential part of the work of any social historian. (See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985]; Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History [New York: Random House, 1985].)

Historians of literature have long recognized that literature of group identity often springs from turning to folklore. We need look no further than Washington Irving and Mark Twain for proof of this thesis. Barber follows these examples in working the Mormon folklore tradition into the development of an increasingly noteworthy Mormon literary tradition.

While the Mormon studies community has become more sophisticated in our understanding of historiography, we have not yet fully incorporated an understanding of folkloristics into our enterprise. Phyllis Barber's book, in a small way, may help us see wider vistas.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Mary Ellen Robertson
When I was twelve, the youth in our ward did baptisms for the dead in the Los Angeles temple. To pique our interest, our leaders told tales of spirits appearing to the living and thanking them for performing ordinances on their behalf. I stayed awake half the night afterward waiting for my visitation; however, the veil did not part as I expected it would..

Phyllis Barber's collection of short stories, Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, illustrates the form our longing for the divine can take. Barber describes a childhood wherein "it was as common to think of an angel appearing by my bed as it was to drink orange juice for breakfast" (p. ix). As a result of being steeped in Mormon culture, Barber says, "I can't help telling stories that wrestle with the suspicion of a thin veil fluttering nearby" (p. xi). Her twelve stories are inspired by the Mormon experience—testimony meetings, family history anecdotes, and collections of folklore.

In the stories, unborn spirit children appear in dreams and ask to be made flesh. A fiddler's lullaby tames a hungry wolf pack. Three divine beings inspire a mother to send wild sage to cure her ailing missionary son. An aristocratic stranger appears during a dust storm to ask a grieving widow for her last gold piece. A disembodied hand appears over the dinner table in time to remove a fish bone from a choking boy's throat. A prophet implores a harried follower to forget the demands of God long enough to help him build a sand castle.

Barber's stories rework the human quest for the divine and prompt questions about the parting of the veil. How do we identify the hand of God working in our lives? How can we distinguish the miraculous from the circumstantial? Is our appreciation for miracles indivisible from our Mormonness? Barber's stories invite us to part the veil and explore the possibilities.

In "Bread for Gunnar," Anna Crandall watches Gunnar Swenson adorn his house and yard—painting his fence a vivid red, building a staircase to nowhere, covering his chimney with paper flowers. Watching Gunnar soothes Anna as the demands in her own life grow. After months of observation, Anna decides to take Gunnar a loaf of bread and introduce herself.

Mistaking her for his long-lost sweetheart—also named Anna—Gunnar invites her in. He asks why she left, then rejoices at her return. He lights a fire and accidentally sets the house ablaze. "Anna's bower—bouquets, valentines, bluebirds, poems hidden in drawers, lace hanging to protect the bridal chamber"—is devoured by flames (p. 87). Anna embraces Gunnar, tells him she loves him, and flees the burning house. She continues to feel Gunnar's presence and "the enormity of his devotion" (p. 88), and this gives her the strength to watch her husband take a second wife. Experiencing Gunnar's love allows Anna to submit her will to God's mysterious ways.

"Ida's Sabbath" tells the story of a woman "dependable as the seasons (p. 40) who discovers her own unpredictable skin. One night, Ida Rossiter "decided it didn't matter if she kept [her garments] off for a few minutes beyond her nightly bath. Just once. Just for the one hour it would take to wash and dry the pile of soiled clothes accumulated in her hamper" (p. 41). Ida spends that hour awakening to her own sentience. "She loved the feel of her body, free of belts and zippers and buttons and nylons, the feel of nothing between her and the air" (p. 48). But her conscience kicks in; she kneels, prays, repents for enjoying her own skin.

That night, a storm knocks out the power and Ida wakes to discover the washing machine full of cold, wet garments. She puts on her clothes (sans garments) and goes to church, but she can't escape the events of the previous night—or their curious effect on her Sabbath. I find Ida's awakening miraculous, giving a religious culture that cloaks sentience with a second skin, depriving sensation for righteousness' sake. To shed that skin—even for a moment—is a powerful act.

Another story explores the possibility of misinterpreting mundane events as a parting of the veil. In "The Whip," Karl and Hilma Gustavson's miracle happens at someone else's expense: they inherit a dead woman's wagon, team, and whip. Karl's involvement with the whip becomes obsessive. Hilma's embarrassment and her failure to redirect his energies cause her to turn to God for help.

One day Hilma notices that Karl has left the whip at home and seizes the opportunity to dispose of it. She cuts the whip into pieces and adds it to the soup, convinced "she was doing God's will as she scraped the diced whip into the boiling water" (p. 3). Karl misses the whip while they are eating dinner. Hilma reassures him that he knows the whip too intimately to really lose it. Karl tells her, "God knew what I needed when he sent you, Hilma. The wagon, too" (p. 4). Had Karl been aware of Hilma's part in the whip's disappearance, would he be so understanding? Would he think she was carrying out God's will—or her own? And does a loving God cause one person's demise so another can inherit a wagon?

Perhaps the miracle is in the eye of the beholder. Barber's stories invite the reader to muse about the miraculous, pose provocative questions, and explore the ways God's hand touches our lives. In a religious community that tends to distance itself from its ecstatic past, Barber's stories serve as a valuable reminder of our collective belief in miracles, the potency of our oral traditions, and our persistent efforts to part the veil that separates us from the divine.