My husband David first met the Englands in the Bay Area in 1967, when all three were members of the Palo Alto Ward. Gene, of course, was already known as a thinker and a doer, and he could always be counted on to move a class from rote repetition into meaningful discussion and thinking. My […]

I had an interesting experience with Gene England that I often tell the writers I work with. I was fortunate enough to take Gene’s LDS literature class, and later he served on my thesis committee, since it was a collection of personal essays. (John Bennion was my advisor and I can’t say enough good about […]

Gene was so many different things to so many different people—a Don Quixote espousing idealistic causes, an empathetic counselor, a brilliant teacher of Shakespeare, an essayist par excellence, a voice for the oppressed, a crusader in the original sense of the word (one who takes up the cross of Christ), and a friend in time […]

I met Brother England during the summer of 1981 while a student at BYU. I had written my first play—a drama called Digger concerning young Joseph Smith, his involvement in money-digging, his 1825 trial and his courtship of Emma Hale. Controversial stuff—supposedly. But other students in the theater department loved my script. My writing teacher […]

We love you, Gene. You are to me as unambiguously and unassumingly fine a person as Hardy’s description of a character in “The Woodlanders”: “He was a good man, and he done good things.” You’re as close to a living, breathing saint as I’ve in sixty years known—as many of us have ever known. And […]