Phyllis Barber is a writer living in Denver, Colorado. She writes about the West, the desert, the Mormons who played a significant role in settling the West and creating the person she's become, and about matters of the spirit with its familiar and unfamiliar reaches. She's been writing award-winning stories, articles, essays, and books for over thirty years, in between being the mother of four sons, teaching creative writing, riding her bicycle, traveling the world, reading a wide spectrum of books, and serving as a community volunteer.
She is the author of seven books, including a novel, two books of short stories, two books for children, and two memoirs, the first of which (How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir) won the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1991 as well as the 1993 Association for Mormon Letters Award for Best Autobiography. Her latest book, which is titled Raw Edges: A Memoir, has just been released by the University of Nevada Press. It is a project that took twelve years to complete, and her hope is that it will be useful to others who've traveled the sometimes challenging path through marriage, divorce, and coming to terms with one's self.
She's currently finishing up a collection of essays titled Searching for Spirit about her experiences among shamans in Peru and Ecuador, Tibetan Buddhist monks in Lhasa and Sikkim in North India, Baptist congregations in Arkansas and South Carolina, with goddess worshipers in the Yucatan, and at an LDS (Mormon) welfare cannery in Colorado. Several of these essays have been published by upstreet, Agni Magazine, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and Sunstone: Mormon Experience, Scholarship, Issues & Art.
Phyllis Barber's desire as a writer has always been to write words that touch people's hearts and minds, even as she's appreciated written words that have touched her heart and mind and enriched her life. She believes in wrestling with the challenging issues of being alive and often takes risks by writing frankly, unblinkingly, about the raw edge of things. She's come to believe that writing in a deeply emotional and honest way exposes the connectedness of all human beings.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A beautifully written memoir of a Mormon girl growing up with a hunger for high-culture within the confines of Las Vegas, the indisputable bathysmal depths of American low-culture. Winner of the Associated Writing Program Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and deservedly compared by other critics to Annie Dillard's exquisitely crafted An American Childhood, one of my very favorite autobiographies.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In this account of her Mormon childhood in Nevada in the 1940s and early '50s, Barber notes that at age 12 she began "to feel rumblings inside that I might exist as a separate entity from my family." That premonition was gradually realized after her family moved from the sheltered government-town ambiance of Boulder City, where her father was a Hoover Dam employee and a Mormon official, to "another world called Las Vegas." A piano prodigy, Barber relished preparing for her featured roles in Mormon socials, but it was during her high school years in Las Vegas that she explored a larger, less inhibited world. Barber recounts how she became a member of the Las Vegas Rhythmettes, and her disappointing meeting with visiting maestro Leonard Bernstein, with self-deprecating humor and a youthful brio in a memoir that captures a vivacious girl's efforts to express herself within contradictory milieux. Barber, a professional pianist, teaches in Vermont College's graduate writing program.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent insight on the youth of a orthodox mormon girl,
By A Customer
This review is from: How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (Associated Writing Programs Award) (Hardcover)
Phyllis Barber allows the reader to gain a intimate view of the clash between values of 1950's Las Vegas and her family's vallues of Mormonism. Barber struggles to use her talent of rhythm in a city celebrated for the excesses of entertainment versus her family's definition of proper use of talent within the confines of her Mormon culture.
Barber uses the symbolism of marriage to both worlds to best explain the dilemna she is in. To Bobby Jack ( a current boyfriend) marriage meant a wheezing minister, ye
2.0 out of 5 stars
How I Got Cultured,
By
This review is from: How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (Paperback)
I remember listening to Phyllis Barber at the English Reading Series and being intrigued by her story. I thought about how she seemed to have strayed from her Mormon upbringing and then came back to it a number of years later. I also enjoyed listening to her read descriptions of natural landscape, some of which were also in the pre-reading. So I bought her book, How I Got Cultured, to learn more.
I also like Barber's style of writing. I enjoy the sort of sarcastic, over-exaggerating method she uses to paint pictures of places and things. Some of this style showed in her speech at the reading and at least one example shows up as early in her book as the introduction, where she refers to her family moving from Boulder City, Nevada just "twenty-five miles away to another planet called Las Vegas". Another example of this over-exaggeration can be read in the chapter about the Russian winter dancing studio where she describes a lady as being "tiny enough to live in a playhouse". This style of writing and speaking fits my own personality and so it caught my attention while doing the pre-reading and also during the reading. It goes along with Barber's style of discovering the world; most people don't break from their traditions as drastically as she did in order to discover the world around them. They simply read books or go on vacations. I am somewhat that way myself, if not so much in reality then in my mind for sure. Some people call this thinking outside the box. Like Barber, I sometimes experiment with living outside the box in order to see the world from a different perspective. I enjoyed reading Barber for these reasons.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
And the point is?,
By Turtle (California Coast) - See all my reviews
This review is from: How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (Paperback)
My favorite genre is memoir and I read them voraciously. Having been born in Las Vegas in the mid 1950's to a mother from a large Mormon family, I excitedly dove into Phyllis Nelson's story. Aside from having greeted Leonard Berstein at the airport, (and this wasn't particularly compelling) I found nothing particularly interesting about her life story. I can see where her writing may be of interest to her family members and immediate community, but for the rest of us, what's the point?
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