Salt Folk

Finalist¿, Short Fiction, Association for Mormon Letters Awards (2024)

Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah's past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer's reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.