Millie Tullis

This first “Martha Dreams” poem surprised and haunted me; it pulled me to keep writing. I wrote more dreams for my ancestors and placed them in the book alongside more research-rooted poems and personal poems. In two poems titled “Reenactment,” I described participating in Trek as a teenager. I wore a bonnet and long skirt I sewed myself. I wore Martha’s laminated name, it “hung low on my chest / like a medallion.” In a patriarchal culture, women’s lives are deeply impacted by the narratives they inherit—narratives about their purposes, their work, their sexualities, their bodies, their identities, the shapes of their lives. Writing this book was one way of wrestling with some of these inheritances, uncovering and examining the threads that lead me back to my earliest Mormon women.

Read the rest of my blog post about the origins of These Saints are Stones on the Association for Mormon Letter’s blog!