By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Memorial Day is almost halfway between Mother’s Day (in mid-May) and Father’s Day (in mid-June). It’s the perfect time to remember that I am a living…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Some people who live in Utah, but do not belong to the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, feel ostracized. I’ve been lucky to…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– There are fifteen women from the past two centuries—a mother, two grandmothers, four great grands, and eight great/great grands—who by law and blood I can call…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My boyhood home away from home was an old Trappist monastery in Northern Utah which closed in 2017. The Huntsville abbey lives on in many interesting…

By Gary Topping– The writer Wallace Stegner founded a famous creative writing program at Stanford University.  Some of its alumni were illustrious: Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Tom McGuane and Ken…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Forty-plus years after graduating from the University of Notre Dame, I now see that the professor/student relationships of my college years really were rather transactional—a rapidly…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– A recent New Yorker article examining how the pandemic changed all of us made me wonder…what’s different in my life compared to four years ago?  Defining…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– “You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by, and so become yourself, because the past is just a goodbye.”…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– “Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky.” – John Lennon Even a casual reader can discern…

By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My grandfather Don O’Brien (1891-1963) was a writer too. For roughly the last decade of his life in the mid-1900s, he wrote a newspaper column several…