Dayna Patterson is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and a full-length collection of lyric prose and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, The Fourth River, Hotel Amerika, Mom Egg Review, North American Review, POETRY, Passages North, Rock & Sling, Ruminate, So to Speak, Sugar House Review, Sunstone, Sweet Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Zone 3, and others. She is a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry and the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online journal publishing literature at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Patterson earned her BA in English with a French minor at Utah State University (2004), her MA in Literature from Texas State-San Marcos (2008), and her MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University (2017), where she served as the managing editor of Bellingham Review.
Patterson has been a Sustainable Arts Fellow at Mineral School Artist's Residency and has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. In 2018, her hybrid piece “Contents” was a Best of the Net finalist. Her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Trees” was awarded an honorable mention in the 2019 Janet B. McCabe poetry contest. She won first place in the A Mother Here: Art and Poetry Contest, and she won first place in Segullah’s 2017 and 2019 poetry contests. In 2019, her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Cosmolatry” was a semifinalist in Tupelo Quarterly’s poetry contest, her poem “Our Lady of Lengthening Days” was a finalist in Sweet Lit’s poetry contest, and her poem “God the Mother Speaks of Matriphagy” was an Orison Poetry Prize finalist. Along with her co-editors, Tyler Chadwick and Martin Pulido, she was honored with a Special Award in Publishing from the Association of Mormon Letters.
Patterson was born and raised in Logan, Utah.
Works
Self-Portrait as Miranda, A Green Girl
Mother Has a Degree in Exterior Design
Mother Has a Degree in Exterior Design
See how she offsets the Prussian blue of the bay
by its opposite on the color wheel,
the splendid burnt orange of a just-so sunset
And see how that lemon wedge of sun
draws the eye,
makes the colors pop
And over here—see how she’s hung drops of dew
like a little string of holiday lights
on a spider’s web
And see how the spider’s pendulous body
droops like a gold earring
on the web’s lobe
She’s not afraid to use
every shade of green:
forest, shamrock, olive, jungle
She adores red:
hoodoos she hordes like knickknacks
in the cupboard of a Utah desert
Look up—see how she mixes and matches
edgy patterns of birds that verge on chaotic
with classic clouds and bolts of blue
And look how she arranges
all those migrants into Sanskrit
to make a prayer wheel of the sky
From If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020).
May Day
May Day
In a western town in the foothills of the Wasatch,
folk still gather on the green adjacent the church
to flower-wreath crown their festival queen.
They come in overalls and scraped-clean boots,
straw hats and hard vowels. They come in cotton
dresses and petal-plaited hair, scrubbed faces
and gleaming hope. They come to watch the young
circle the May pole. Ribbons in primaveral colors
weave, unweave. And county kin surround them
clapping hands, stomping feet, keeping rhythm, this
ancient beat of bloom, harvest, snow, and bloom again,
all hunger and hard times like heavy winter quilts
stowed away in cedar chests, all the cold, for a time,
forgotten in their queen’s hummingbird smiles,
in the deep dimples of the dairy farmer’s son.
From If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020)
Bluebird’s Chocolates
Bluebird’s Chocolates
“[In 1868], Richard Cadbury introduced the first ‘chocolate box,’ containing chocolate candies and decorated with a painting of his young daughter Jessica holding a kitten in her arms; he is also credited with the invention of the first Valentine’s Day candy box.” —The True History of Chocolate
I land a post-mission job at Flick’s Club, my cousin’s shop that rents out bowdlerized films. If you’ve been longing to watch Last of the Mohicans, but couldn’t because church rules forbid R-rated movies, now you can, knowing all the swears and sex and gratuitous violence have been carefully scrutinized and cut.
I stand at the checkout counter on a slow day, watching a movie. I don’t remember which movie. Perhaps it’s Last of the Mohicans, the part where Daniel Day Lewis bids farewell to his love under a crashing waterfall: Stay alive! I will find you. Maybe it’s this moment that Charles walks in, a guy from church I’d been dating, tall and dark. His eyes, I later learn, such a deep brown I almost can’t tell where his irises end and pupils begin. He gives me a chocolate box from Bluebird’s, a local confectionary, where once, on a class field trip, I watched a woman patiently hand-dip coconut creams in a pot of tempered chocolate, her skilled fingers drizzling a signature on each.
With the chocolate box, Charles hands me a letter, then dashes out the door. Shy boy. The letter is a love letter:
I was overjoyed when I saw you at church a few months ago. I began searching through all of the theaters within a fifty-mile radius in order to find the perfect play to watch during the perfect date with someone so elegant and beautiful.
I’ve discovered that besides being beautiful, you are also fun, smart, caring, and deeply spiritual.
I wake up each morning terrified that it may have all been a dream, but then I see your beautiful smile at school or church and breathe a sigh of relief and joy.
Me? Beautiful? Hardly anyone comes in for a flick, so I read it over and over between bites of chocolate: raspberry cream, caramel, cherry cordial. When I drive home that night, I’ve memorized the letter. All the chocolates are gone.
PROSE EXCERPT from my essay “A Life in Chocolate,” originally published in Sweet Tree Review
Bibliography
Book (Lyric Essays & Poetry)
- If Mother Braids a Waterfall, Signature Books, 2020.
Chapbooks
- Titania in Yellow, Porkbelly Press, 2019.
- Mothering, Flutter Press, 2011.
- Loose Threads, Flutter Press, 2010.
