The Days Are Gods (American Lives) - Softcover

Stephens, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803243545 ISBN 13: 9780803243545

Publisher: Bison Books, 2013

Synopsis

“I called the bishop of the local ward, and he put the date of your move into the church bulletin, and these gentlemen came to help,” Brady, the real estate agent, says. Welcome to Wellsville, Utah. Good-bye, L.A.

Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move that is far more than a shift in geographical coordinates. With husband and dogs in tow, she searches for an authentic connection to this new community, all the while knowing that as an outsider she will never really belong. And yet precisely as an outsider, Stephens has a unique perspective on belonging, one that colors her accounts of attending her first small-town rodeo, living in the thick of a thriving Latter Day Saints religious community, raising goats in her laundry room, and observing the town’s racialized Founder’s Day battle reenactments. In her frank and particular way, Stephens shows how the culture of memory, as our inheritance, offers a balance to our brief attention spans and our brief lives.

About this title

About the Author

Liz Stephens received her PhD in creative nonfiction. A winner of the Western Literature Association s Frederick Manfred Award and a finalist for the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Western American Literature, and South Dakota Review.

Reviews

Dissatisfied with her life in Los Angeles, where she served snacks on Hollywood television-commercial shoots, Stephens longed to be a writer. So she applied to graduate school, and, when accepted, she and her mate Christopher married and moved to Wellsville, in mountainous northern Utah, into a century-old house with a barn, milk house, and room for horses. She discovered her mostly Mormon neighbors to be tolerant and gracious to outsiders, an identity that Stephens downplayed by dressing local, covering her tattoo, and attending rodeos and community breakfasts. Local children asked to borrow her bathroom or ride their horses in her pasture. Within a year, she was pregnant and questioning the future impact of her life and the migration of other urbanites into the nearly pristine valley. Should she leave this place that had won her heart? Filled with rich description and personal stories, Stephen’s focused memoir recounts days of important self-discovery. --Rick Roche

Edition details

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803243545
• ISBN 13: 9780803243545
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216