Biography
A native of the Utah desert, I write personal and historical essays and fiction about people struggling with that forbidding landscape. I have published a collection of short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (Signature Books, 1991), and three novels—Falling Toward Heaven (Signature Books, 2000), An Unarmed Woman (Signature Books, 2019), and Ezekiel’s Third Wife (Roundfire Books, 2019). Another novel, Spin, is forthcoming from BCC Press. I have published short stories and essays in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, Hobart, Palaver, AWP Chronicle, Utah Historical Quarterly, Journal of Mormon History, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Best of the West II, High Country News, English Journal, and others. Essays are forthcoming in Journal of Mormon History, Literature and Belief, and a collection of Mormon ecological writing, Blossom as the Cliffrose, to be published by Torrey House Press. I am completing a collection of essays about my Bennion ancestors, who have ranched and lived in the western desert of Utah for six generations.
I am an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University, where I teach writing fiction and creative non-fiction. I have twenty-five years of experience leading outdoor writing programs that use the writing of personal essays to promote student growth. I have developed Wilderness Writing, a course taught in connection with a Rec Management professor; students backpack and experience the outdoors and then write about what happened. Literature and Landscape is a program where students study the British novel and Shakespeare and then hike through the landscapes where Romantic, Victorian, and other writers lived; in the fall students write essays (spiritual autobiography) about their experiences. Integrated Natural History is an interdisciplinary program for freshmen who get credit in biology, freshman writing, Utah History, and RecManagement while they explore Utah. Insects, Writing, and Art is a program where biology education students and others live in an isolated region (last time at Lytle Ranch in the Mojave Desert) while they collect and study insects with access to an on-site lab; they use writing and drawing to learn about the insects. During the last program we created and published a field guide to insects in the Mojave Desert.
I live in Provo with my wife Karla, a psychotherapist who is also working on a novel. We have five children and four grandchildren.