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In Our Lovely Deseret
Mormon Fictions

Edited by
Robert Raleigh

Signature Books
© 1998 Salt Lake City

CONTRIBUTORS

[P.287]PHYLLIS BARBER has published five books, including How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, which won the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 1991 and the 1993 Award for Best Autobiography from the Association of Mormon Letters. Her next book, Parting the Veil: Stories from a Mormon Imagination, is forthcoming from Signature Books. She teaches in the Vermont College M.F.A. in Writing Program, and has three grown sons and an Australian shepherd named Ivan the Wonderful.

BOB BRINGHURST is addicted to corporate life. He's tried to break away, but it just keeps pulling him back in.

JOANNA BROOKS is a fourth-generation Angeleno, the descendant of handcart pioneers, Basques, and Okies. Her poetry, fiction, and critical theory have appeared in Race Traitor, Zyzzyra, Suitcase, South Dakota Review, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She is currently completing her doctorate in American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

THOMAS BURGESS lives in Salt Lake City these days with his wife, Tamara. He drives an economy car to and from work each day, listening to the radio on the way.

[p.288]RON CARLSON is the author of five books of fiction, most recently The Hotel Eden (W. W. Norton, 1997). He was born in Logan, Utah.

DAVID BRANDT COOPER is a nom de plume.

KATHRYN S. EGAN is a professor of communications at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Previously published writing includes: The Principle (Randall Books) and numerous scholarly articles. She was a Media Watch columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune, and won Utah Writing Competition awards for fiction in 1993 and 1995.

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of Altman's Tongue (Knopf, 1994), The Din of Celestial Birds (Wordcraft, 1997), Prophets and Brothers (Rodent Press, 1997), and Father of Lies (Four Walls Eight Windows, forthcoming). He teaches at Oklahoma State University.

DEREK GULLINO has published stories in several journals and magazines. "Sleuths" is a portion of his novel Wasted Seed. He is a returned Mormon missionary. He lives in New York City with his boyfriend.

DAWN HOUGHTON, a Salt Lake City, Utah, resident and Marilyn Monroe devotee, has written for Salt Lake City magazine and City Weekly. Her poetry has appeared in Georgia Review, Wind Magazine, and Black River Review. She holds a master's degree in technical writing from Westminster College, Salt Lake City.

HELEN WALKER JONES is the grandchild of four Utah natives who immigrated to Canada. She spent her childhood in a small Mormon town, Raymond, Alberta. She has published in numerous literary magazines around the country and in Harper's. A former English teacher, she is currently a video producer and the mother of two grown children.

[p.289]WALTER KIRN grew up in rural Minnesota. He converted to Mormonism at age twelve and was active in the LDS church until age seventeen. He has published two books: My Hard Bargain, a collection of short stories, and She Needed Me, a novel. He lives in Montana.

LEE ANN MORTENSEN has won a fellowship from Poets and Writers and awards from the Utah Arts Council. She has published in Ploughshares, The Mississippi Review, Quarterly West, Inscape, and The Student Review. She is currently an assistant professor at Utah Valley State College, Orem.

PAULINE MORTENSEN is a pseudo-writer living in Orem, Utah. She spent the first twenty years of her life playing in the mountains of Idaho, and the last twenty years being married in Utah, where she has accumulated two adopted sons, several superfluous degrees from assorted universities, a mountain of used books and rejection slips, and an immense desire to go home.

LEVI S. PETERSON is a professor of English at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. He is the author of two collections of short stories, The Canyons of Grace (1982) and Night Soil (1990); two novels, The Backslider (1986) and Aspen Marooney (1995); and a biography, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (1988).

KRISTEN ROGERS writes, edits, works, plays, and goes to church in Alpine, Utah.

DOROTHY SOLOMON, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children, learned the fictional skill of "lying while telling the truth" growing up with her fundamentalist, polygamous Mormon family, which was plagued with roundups that threatened prison for her parents and foster homes for her siblings. Her published writing includes: In My Father's House (winner of the Utah State Publishing Prize), Of Predators, Prey, and Other Kin (a first-place winner of the 1996 Utah Original Writing Awards), and stories, essays, and poems in [p.290]a variety of periodicals and anthologies. She has served as fiction editor for Quarterly West and poetry and fiction editor of Utah Holiday. She also compiled and edited Inside Out: A Guide to Creative Writing in the Classroom. She lives with her husband of thirty years and their children in Park City, Utah.

JAN STUCKI lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and two daughters. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals, and the story published here won the Sunstone Foundation's 1996 Brookie and D. K. Brown Memorial Fiction Contest.

JOHNNY TOWNSEND is a college English instructor in Louisiana. He has previously published fiction in Christopher Street and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He lives in New Orleans.

ROBERT HODGSON VAN WAGONER received first prize in the 25th Annual Utah Original Writing Competition. He has published in The Best of Writers at Work, Carolina Quarterly, Metaphor, Modern Short Stories, Rough Draft, Sunstone, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He twice won the Brookie and D. K. Brown Memorial Fiction Contest, sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. He lives in Ogden, Utah, with his wife and two sons. "Staying Away from Blake" is from his novel-in-progress, Dancing Naked.