There are, after all, Mormon women writers in these communities too:  Mormon women with their own rich stories to tell.

Thanks to a friend we met at our reading in Tempe, we have been invited to visit with a woman named Marylene and her friends in Colorado City.

Holly Welker, Susan Scott, Lisa Hadley, and I are listening to Led Zeppelin and talking about the Word of Wisdom as we pull off the 389 into Colorado City and cross the bridge over Short Creek.

Women of all ages in FLDS-signature pioneer dresses cross the streets, while young men in long-sleeved jeans shirts and pants ride ATVs through the red dust at the edge of the road.

We meet Marylene and her sister Irma. Earlier today on the phone, I spoke to Marylene about our project to collect the writings of Mormon women and archive them at the University of Utah, and she has brought us a short type-written essay about her life, which we accept with gratitude.

We follow them first to the Colorado City dairy (where we sample the famous squeaky cheese curds), then to the home of another woman named Priscilla, who is standing out back frying Utah-style scones in a deep fryer.  She offers us sizzling hot scones with powdered sugar and home canned pear jam.

Marylene, Irma, Priscilla, and a fourth woman named Ann invite us to tour their town in a big white family van.  For more than an hour, they drive us through Colorado City and Hilldale.  They show us large family homes, the award-winning Masada charter school in Centennial Park, the mercantile, the town birthing center, the churches, the park against the mountains where FLDS families are playing softball in the dusk, the empty lots where Bishop Fred Jessop once brought a small collection of zoo animals to entertain the local children.  Only a few ostriches are left, squatting in the red dust.  The town is still trying to recover from the reign of Warren Jeffs, and the SWAT teams and truckloads of media that came with it.

Our van stops in front of the little school house where the men and women of Short Creek huddled when hundreds of heavily armed law officers came to raid the town in 1953.  Priscilla and Marylene were young children when it happened, and Irma was born while her mother was in state custody down in Phoenix, Arizona.  They tell us of the children the state of Arizona tried to foster or adopt away from their parents, of the years it took for families to be reunited, of the way the fear the raid brought on has shaped the lives of their communities.

Holly asks them if they see any similarity in their situation and the situation of gay and lesbian families whose marriages are not recognized by the state.  The women nod their heads.  “Yes,” says Priscilla. “They are both issues of civil rights.”

Priscilla, Irma, Marylene, and Ann are all members of the Centenial Park Action Committee. Their goal is to make sure their voices are heard in the political and media debates that surround their small communities and the practice of plural marriage. In the long run, they hope to overturn the 1877 Supreme Court decision known as “Reynolds” that outlawed polygamy and declared it an “odious” “Asiatic” practice.

“We know we have a long road ahead of us,” says Priscilla.  “It’s like the first suffragettes and it took them their whole lifetimes to see women have the vote.”

The hour grows late.  We exchange hugs and phone numbers and email addresses with these women, our long-lost Mormon kin.

“Thanks for not being afraid to come to see us,” says Marylene before getting into her white Buick and guiding us back through Colorado City to the 389.

Tonight (Thursday), the Our Voices, Our Visions tour will continue at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Friday at UVU, and Saturday at the University of Utah. For full info, see mormonwomenwriters.blogspot.com.

Yesterday, Susan Scott, Lisa Van Orman Hadley and I crossed the desert from San Diego to Tempe, talking and laughing all the way about things Community of Christ members and LDS folks have in common like ancestral visions and deep connections to Mormon places.  As well as the things we don’t, like frog-eye salad and the commitment pattern.

In Tempe, we met with essayist Holly Welker and poet Danielle Dubrasky at the home of Judy Curtis, an LDS woman who started writing poetry in her 50s. Judy is a master gardener, and after this wet winter, her yard is alive with Indian paintbrush and holly hock and fragrant citrus trees and century plants.

We met forty more Mormon women last night at our Tempe reading, including a strong contingent from the Exponent.  Together, we laughed about girls who do cartwheels in Primary and stories about polygamy traded around the fire at Girls Camp.

Today, we’re hitting the road for southern Utah, passing through the twin towns of Colorado City and Hilldale on our way.  On the dashboard, we have a pink pioneer bonnet and a rock we call our peepstone.  If we get lost, we say, we’ll put the peepstone in the bonnet and try to figure out the right road.

All of us writers on the tour are unconventional Mormon women–with lives as complicated as women’s lives can be.  But we are moving through the desert, through the Book of Mormon belt, from home to home of Mormon women who take us in like kin.

When and where in Mormonism do you feel like you most belong?

For more info on the next stops of the Our Voices, Our Visions tour in Cedar City (Thursday), Provo (Friday) and SLC (Saturday), visit mormonwomenwriters.blogspot.com.

The Our Voices, Our Visions Mormon Women’s Literary Tour is hitting the road. It’s the first ever literary tour by and for Mormon women, featuring eighteen Mormon women writers– younger and older, new and prize-winning, unorthodox and orthodox—giving readings at five universities from Claremont University to the University of Utah.

And it all began yesterday when Susan Scott, a fifth-generation RLDS / Community of Christ woman writer, arrived at the San Diego airport from her home in Ontario, Canada.

“I have a confession to make,” I told Susan as she climbed into my car. “I’ve never really talked with an RLDS woman before.”

“And I’ve never really talked with an LDS woman before either. Isn’t it amazing?”

Throughout an afternoon walking with my daughters on the shores of La Jolla—Susan is, after all, from Canada; she needs to see some beach—we trade questions about the larger Mormon tradition we share.

“For us, Independence, Missouri is the center of everything,” she tells me.

“That’s kind of true for us too, actually,” I tell her. “I grew up expecting to go back to Missouri some day. Did you grow up with the Second Coming?”

“Yes.”

“Is it like our Second Coming? With the end times, then Christ’s return, then the millennium, then Satan being loosed again, before the final judgment?”

“Yes.”

Susan tells me that when she was 18, she eloped with the cute musician from RLDS church camp to an RLDS commune in North Carolina. It was called Zion’s Depot.

“You had RLDS communes?” I ask, jealous.

“It was the 1970s. And I was very dedicated. Wasn’t that what we were supposed to be doing? Giving away all our worldly possessions and living the faith?”

It’s dinnertime now. The sun is setting behind my flowering nectarine tree, and my daughters are drawing with colored chalk on our patio.

“You have blessed oil, do you?” she asks.

“Yes, we call it consecrated oil.”

“At the commune, one of the big debates was using blessed oil to heal the cattle.”

“We definitely have blessing cattle stories!”

Tonight, joined by poet Elisa Pulido and fiction writer Lisa Van Orman Hadley, we’ll start with a reading at Claremont Graduate University hosted by Claudia Bushman. Tomorrow, we’ll drive across the desert to ASU.

We’re hitting the road, hoping to learn more about the tradition we call home, and looking forward to meeting you along the way.

For full details on where to see the Our Voices, Our Visions Tour this week, visit mormonwomenwriters.blogspot.com