Julie J. Nichols

Julie J. Nichols {[email protected]} is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Literature at Utah Valley University, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of Pigs When They Straddle the Air (Zarahemla, 2016) and is at work on the first in a series of novels set in various underground Salt Lake communities. She is on the editorial board of Weber: The Contemporary West as well as Fiction and Personal Voices editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She lives in Provo with her husband; they are grandparents to fourteen beautiful children who live all over the western United States.

Discerning Between Truth and— | John Bennion, Spin

Articles/Essays – Volume 56, No. 2

What would I do if cast out of my life with nothing? Forced to ask ourselves this question in the first two chapters of this genre-bending, disturbing novel—John Bennion’s most complex yet—we get, early on,…

A Superior Alternative

Articles/Essays – Volume 56, No. 2

I’m an Aries with my sun in the sixth house, which means, according to astrology, that since the moment I was born, health has been my top priority. I had a hard time believing that…

Lapsing into Daredevilry | Shawn Vestal, Daredevils

Articles/Essays – Volume 50, No. 1

It’s a hard truth: you have to be damn smart to be a writer of good fiction. If you’re dumb, forget it. You have to hear words in your head—and who doesn’t? But you also have to know how to put them together in a sentence that’s not only grammatical but original in its context, truer than any other sentence could possibly be. Then you have to do that with paragraphs and chapters in the service of a whole whose shape knocks readers right out of unconsciousness, makes them alive, blasts their eyes open so they see the world new.

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives

Articles/Essays – Volume 25, No. 2

Dialogue 25.2 (Fall 1992): 75–96
The personal essay, unlike personal journals, letters, and oral histories, is not an artless form. It transforms the raw material of personal experience in the double crucible of carefully chosen language and the light of mature retrospection.

Without Number

Articles/Essays – Volume 39, No. 4

And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. . . . And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose. Moses…

Eternal Families: Persecution Day or Rapture? | Jenn Ashworth, The Friday Gospels

Articles/Essays – Volume 46, No. 4

In his introduction to the 1996 Signature publication Tending the Garden, Gene England refers to “President Kimball’s 1977 call for a literature that includes the full range of Mormon experience: ‘struggles and frustrations; apostasies and inner revolutions and counter-revolutions . . . counter-reactions . . . persecution days . . . rapture.’” I love that list—persecution days and rapture, yes!