The Days Are Gods

Author: Liz Stephens Series: American Lives

Shows how the culture of memory, as our inheritance, offers a balance to our brief attention spans and our brief lives

Product Unavailable

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Shows how the culture of memory, as our inheritance, offers a balance to our brief attention spans and our brief lives

Description

"I called the bishop of the local ward, and he put the date of your move into the church bulletin, and these gentlemen came to help," Brady, the real estate agent, says. Welcome to Wellsville, Utah. Good-bye, L.A.

Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move that is far more than a shift in geographical coordinates. With husband and dogs in tow, she searches for an authentic connection to this new community, all the while knowing that as an outsider she will never really belong. And yet precisely as an outsider, Stephens has a unique perspective on belonging, one that colors her accounts of attending her first small-town rodeo, living in the thick of a thriving Latter Day Saints religious community, raising goats in her laundry room, and observing the town's racialized Founder's Day battle reenactments. In her frank and particular way, Stephens shows how the culture of memory, as our inheritance, offers a balance to our brief attention spans and our brief lives.

Critic Reviews

“"With her own twist, Liz Stephens joins fellow writers Terry Tempest Williams and Cheryl Strayed on the trail of women writing the American West. In this fine debut memoir-wrought in language that is witty, melodic, and wise-Stephens insinuates herself among the landscape in such a way that the reader may gather pieces of more than one puzzle."Geri Lipschultz, We Wanted to Be Writers”

"Liz Stephens's exquisite memoir, The Days Are Gods, tells a fascinating story of the search-for-self in unfamiliar territory. This literary debut is a pure pleasure to read." - Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer "Acutely self-aware, in indelible prose, Liz Stephens finds a future in America's past: not re-enactment, but re-creation, through the hard work of life-and-death responsibility. And in ultimately realizing she cannot be of any one place, Stephens gives an evocative voice to the values and vision that shaped the country." - Judith Kitchen, author of Half in Shade "Liz Stephens writes in the tradition of westering women, from Isabella Bird to Pam Houston, about a place, its people, and the animals, wild and domestic, that lead their parallel lives in a quiet northern Utah valley. The Days Are Gods is shimmering, compelling, and accurate to the bone." - Mary Clearman Blew, author of Jackalope Dreams "This first book shows Liz Stephens to be an important writer who doesn't romanticize the West so much as reveal its pockets of sorrow, its raw and blemished beauty, and the dignity of its denizens. The Days Are Gods is alluring, clear-sighted, and immensely readable." - Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte "The Days Are Gods is a reckoning: with the land, with history, and above all with oneself. Stephens gives us a memoir about living as fully and generously as we can while our time under the big sky lasts." - Eric LeMay, author of Immortal Milk "A stimulating search for self and place set against the vast backdrop of the American West." Kirkus Review, January 2013

About the Author

Liz Stephens received her PhD in creative nonfiction. A winner of the Western Literature Association's Frederick Manfred Award and a finalist for the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction Award, her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Western American Literature, and South Dakota Review.