KARIN ANDERSON
KARIN ANDERSON is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and heretic, as well as the author of Things I Didn't Do, What Falls Away, and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She is also co-editor of the anthologies Blossom as the Cliffrose and Utah Lake Stories. Her work has appeared in Dialogue, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin.
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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
THINGS I DIDN'T DO
A novel
What makes us who we are? Things I Didn’t Do is tour-de-force of character, an intimate and epic reckoning with past, place, and the people who shape the course of our lives.
It was the day that changed Ryder Mikkelson’s life: the day he fell from a loaded pack mule high in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah. He was seven years old, and some things would never quite be the same. The way he walks. How he rides a horse. The way he looks at a family photograph. Things I Didn’t Do is both the story of a lifetime and the story of how we make our lives. In writing that is fiercely intimate and expansively lyrical, this novel explores the experiences and revelations that—in a single moment—can change our understanding of ourselves, shift how we relate to the people around us, and reverberate far into the future.
"Anderson is a brave, compassionate storyteller, and this is an extraordinary book."
—SHELLEY READ, Go As A River
WHAT FALLS AWAY
A novel
What Falls Away is a novel of family, art, and the raw process of healing. Cassandra Soelberg, pregnant at seventeen, was cast out by Mormon patriarchs of her community. Returning to her rural Utah hometown after forty years to care for her senile mother, she meets a young man with an uncanny resemblance to the father of her never-known child. Drawn back into traumatic scenes of young adulthood, she must reconcile with her past in the fiercely beautiful landscapes that shaped her.
"A powerful novel that will resonate with anyone who has returned to a place they no longer recognize as home."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
BEFORE US LIKE A LAND OF DREAMS
A novel
Before Us Like a Land of Dreams follows a disheartened mother traveling an evocative route through the arid West. As her narration fades, the ancestral dead speak directly: a ragged Mormon boy yearns after a Shoshone family. A defeated polygamous wife shuts her mouth for good. A hoarder's queer son demolishes the artifacts of his lonely Idaho childhood. Descendants of British squatters sustain family delusions until a devastating suicide shatters their royal dreams. An elite colonial clan gradually awakens to the stark blue of the Great Salt Lake. The dead yield no answers, but they conjure vivid mortal moments set in iconic—and diminishing—American places.
"Anderson’s fictionalized journey through time was prompted by her mother’s declining health, her son’s hospitalization, rampant wildfires plaguing the region, and a beloved country severely divided. A work of universal appeal."
—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
BLOSSOM AS THE CLIFFROSE:
Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild
Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild features original poems and prose by talented writers who are faithful, non-faithful, believers, heretics, converts and de-converts, dragged in or forced out of the Mormon faith. This dynamic collection demonstrates the breadth, complexity, and diversity of a Latter-day Saint legacy of commitment to natural place and challenges us to examine the myriad ways our own deeply rooted heritage shapes our personal relationship with landscape.
“Meditative and energizing, fierce and loving, balanced and rhythmic. An invitation to welcome faith and nature, and to embrace the tensions and beauty that spring from every crack and cranny along the way.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS