Our guest for the hour today is Utah author David G. Pace whose debut novel Dream House on Golan Drive is published by Signature Books. It is the year 1972, and Riley Hartley finds that he, his family, community, and his faith are entirely indistinguishable from each other.He is eleven. A young woman named Lucy claims God has revealed to her that she is to live with Riley’s family.
Her quirks are strangely disarming, her relentless questioning of their lives incendiary and sometimes comical. Her way of taking religious practice to its logical conclusion leaves a strong impact on her hosts and propels Riley outside his observable universe and toward a trajectory of self discovery.
Set in Provo and New York City during the seventies and eighties, the story encapsulates the normal expectations of a Mormon experience and turns them on their head.
The style, too, is innovative in how it employs “Zed,” one of the apocryphal Three Nephites who with another immortal figure, the Wandering Jew of post-biblical legend, engage regularly in light-hearted banter and running commentary, animating the story and leavening the heartache with humor and tenderness.
David G. Pace is an essayist and fiction writer located in the Mountain West. His work has been published in, among other periodicals, the literary journals “Quarterly West,” “ellipsis…literature and art,” “Alligator Juniper,” “The Christian Science Monitor,” “American Theatre Magazine” and as a chapter in a book of biographies. His unpublished collection of short fiction “City of Saints: Stories of the Mormon Corridor” recently took a prize at the Utah Original Writing Competition. He holds an MA in Communication/Rhetoric and has won five writing awards including one for Dream House on Golan Drive. He is the literary editor of 15 Bytes Online Arts Magazine.
