On the foothill above my home there is an overflow water pipe that is attached to the tank for our small-town water source. A quarter of a mile below, the pipe drains in a cascade into the Highline Canal. From the canal there is a small turnout that […]
Wallace Stegner. Maurine Whipple. Levi Peterson. Brady Udall. There are a few others, but it’s a rather short list of authors with works vying for the title of Great Utah Novel. Of course, coronating such a subjective title is nigh impossible, but there are clear contenders. Karin Anderson’s […]
Just a few chapters into the book I realized I was spending more time annotating and thinking about what I had read rather than actually reading words. I believe it’s a good thing. Thinking. Especially if you’re thinking about words written by Terry Tempest Williams. “I hear my […]
THE NOMAD’s Issue 4, “Breakthroughs,” is more about the through than the break. There are few explosive moments, not many trumpet blasts. Instead, the issue gathers fiction, memoir, lyric essay, prose poem, and poetry—fifty-four pieces by twenty-seven writers—around breakthrough as passage, as a moving through. The variety of […]
Don Quixote had his Sancho Panza. Jo had her Laurie. George and Lennie had each other. Heck, Wilbur had his Charlotte. Throughout the canon, there is a long line of literary duos who inform their stories on a rigging of loyalty that can be stretched to its limits, […]
Lance Newman is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. His best-known work is an edited collection, Grand Canyon Reader (University of California Press, 2011), and he has published an extensive list of scholarly books and articles, many of them about […]
For most artists, “Don’t quit your day job” is less the personal criticism a speaker may intend, and more a generic necessity. On its own, an artist’s craft is unlikely to provide a living, and the readymade judgment that “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” makes […]
Rachel White’s poems are strongest when she takes on the role of activist, so it’s appropriate that her chapbook, The Velvet Earth After Rain, begins with a formal sonnet dedicated to Edward Abbey, patron saint of anti-social nature lovers and environmental activists. She has said of her writing, […]
Time and Chance, Katharine Coles’ plucky tenth collection of poems, offers riches to any reader. Elegant elegies to her late parents and a delightfully wicked one to an ex—“Sestina in Prose: Three Dreams” and “Degas Dancers”—and a superb breezy commentary on butterflies, “A Note on the Apparent Lowering […]
“There is a sign in my grandfathers’ workshop that says this: 180 degrees is half a circle, but also a line.” Readers of Lindsey Drager’s new novel, The Avian Hourglass, spend more than a few pages in the front yard of that workshop, and glimpse its contents, workbenches […]
Photographer, researcher, and preservationist Sheila Nadimi has been honored with the Utah Historical Society’s 2025 Outstanding Achievement Award in recognition of her decades-long project Eagle Village, which documents the site and memory of the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City. The award acknowledges Nadimi’s extraordinary service in preserving […]
Our stories are our bodies. Our bodies are our legacy… So writes Sarah May, a local artist and community organizer known for her multimedia collaborations with Great Salt Lake. May is a master of ecosystem-assemblages. In the backseat of her car you will usually find a box of […]
He lived every second of his life for acclaim while pretending it was merely this unexpected, unwanted byproduct of his oh-so-authentic and eccentric cutting-edge art. Like he would produce that art whether or not he got the veneration. Bollocks. Everything he did he did to be adored. That’s […]
Not unlike the historical epoch from which it emerged, What Falls Away is a novel that looks back in anger, while it looks ahead with hope. As in our lives, the anger is aimed at a greedy, patriarchal order that refuses to yield power, while the hope is […]
In considering the stories collected in David G. Pace’s American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor, I keep thinking of lineage. Not priesthood lineage but the literary kind. Mormon writers—excuse me, Latter-day Saint writers—have inherited the problem of genre writers through the ages. Each generation of […]
If you never thought to burn down your father’s house, or to murder him in his sleep—included here as a free psychic bonus—Michael Gills’ collection of 11 stories, accurately labeled “short,” may not be for you. If you were so fortunate as to grow up in a perfectly […]
“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.” With those words, Aleksandar Hemon introduces readers to the voice of a cipher, the mystery man at the center his novel The Lazarus Project. This might also be a […]
Too many immigrant stories in America are about innocents who come here seeking a new life, only to run afoul of hostility and violence. Think of John Lennon, citizen of the world, harassed by the government and then shot down in cold blood on a New York City […]
“I was taught from a young age that the earth was sacred,” is how Stacie Shannon Denetsosie’s The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories begins. “Yet, every two weeks or so, I’d back my little truck up to the edge of the Divergent Dam and throw our garbage into […]
