When I Was Red Clay

33rd Annual Reading the West Book Award Winner for Memoir, 2023 Foreword INDIES Award Silver Winner, LGBTQ+, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist for Memoir and LGBTQ

"Readers will find hope and peace on these beautifully written pages."—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

A young person's story of growing up gay in a rural Mormon town and the wild places where he found refuge.

This intimate record lays bare one person's experience growing up in a rural Mormon community and struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with the religious doctrine of his childhood. Weaving together prose, poetry, and stories scrawled on the margins of high school notebooks, Jonathan T. Bailey encounters truth-seeing owls, anachronistic gourds, and the hard-edged realities of family and church. In When I Was Red Clay, he navigates desert landscapes, mental health, and the loss of faith with unflinching honesty and biting humor.

Jonathan T. Bailey is a conservation photographer with a background in cultural resources. Author of the literary memoir When I Was Red Clay: A Journey of Identity, Healing, and Wonder and the photograph and essay collection Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape, his work has been published in Archaeology Southwest, the Salt Lake Tribune, Indian Country Today, and elsewhere. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.