When I Was Red Clay: A Journey of Identity, Healing, and Wonder
33rd Annual Reading the West Book Award Winner for Memoir, 2023 Foreword INDIES Award Silver Winner, LGBTQ+, and New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist for Memoir and LGBTQ
"Readers will find hope and peace on these beautifully written pages."--LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
A young person's story of growing up gay in a rural Mormon town and the wild places where he found refuge.
This intimate record lays bare one person's experience growing up in a rural Mormon community and struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with the religious doctrine of his childhood. Weaving together prose, poetry, and stories scrawled on the margins of high school notebooks, Jonathan T. Bailey encounters truth-seeing owls, anachronistic gourds, and the hard-edged realities of family and church. In When I Was Red Clay, he navigates desert landscapes, mental health, and the loss of faith with unflinching honesty and biting humor.
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Become an affiliate"Utah's Emery County maps hard ideological boundaries over some of the harshest landscapes of the arid West. Even so, the stratified cliffs, seeping recesses, and crustal sinks testify of lush and various inhabitations, eon upon eon. Utterly here, Bailey confines us to a temporal body untenable and ecstatic, hypersensitized to the play of surface and interior, opacity and revelation, hostility and intimacy. This kind of writing can only emerge from the awful beauty of always-yet-never Home." --KARIN ANDERSON, author of Before Us Like a Land of Dreams
"When I Was Red Clay is honest as acid and proof that nature can provide." --ADVENTURE JOURNAL
"Touching on current events and topics, from conservation and immigration to suicide and autism, Bailey has penned a thought-provoking memoir. The wilderness of deserts in Utah and Arizona are their own characters...Readers will find hope and peace on these beautifully written pages." --LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)
"Bailey's moving testament of resilience is sure to satisfy readers of nature writing and autobiography
alike. Fans of Terry Tempest Williams and Robin Wall Kimmerer should take note."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Bailey's evocative, candid memoir explores spirituality, heritage, and the lives and landscapes we choose to inhabit. Offering hope to disenfranchised LGBTQ+ youth through its testament of self-acceptance and recovery, When I Was Red Clay also stresses the need to find new and 'open-armed communities' when old worlds are no longer sustainable." --FOREWORD REVIEWS