Marilyn Abildskov
Photo by Matt Felix
Bio
Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country and the recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Writing Residency, and the Utah Arts Council. Her essays and short stories have been published in Ploughshares,the Sewanee Review, Story, Bellevue Literary Review,the Southern Review, the Sun, The Best American Essays,and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA Program at Saint Mary's College of California.
Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts for this unexpected and generous gift of time and money. I intend to use these resources to continue drafting and revising Newfound Facts, a collection of linked short stories set in and around Salt Lake City, Utah. These stories witness the lives of in-between Mormons who are neither billionaires nor pioneers nor Instagram polygamists but whose ordinary lives are cast between belief and apostasy, who hear, in their living rooms and driveways and backyard pools, echoes of the Deseret. Informed by my own experiences of the region and drawn by the indelible approach of writers like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, my aim is to tease out the threads of place and character, interrogating their insuperable and everlasting bonds.