Millie Tullis, George Mason University alum and Editor-in-Chief of literary journals Psaltery & Lyre and Exponent II and author of microchapbook Dream with Teeth, recently released her debut poetry collection, These Saints are Stones. The book, which served as their MFA thesis in 2021, examines the life of Tullis’ great-great-great-grandmother Martha, who married her stepfather at 16 years old, becoming a sister-wife to her own mother. Through dreams, letters, site visits, erasure, and semi-autobiographical poems, Tullis constructs a complicated exploration of her family’s past, which has largely gone undocumented.
Tullis was invited to read from her book at Fall for the Book 2026 . In connection with the event, she spoke to So To Speak about writing toward the untold histories of women, especially when such little about their individual lives can be found.
Ella Stott: This collection is beautiful, and I was really interested in the weaving of your ancestors’ stories, your own stories, and that of other women in your family. I’m wondering what the inspiration was behind the project. How did you come to it?
Millie Tullis: That’s a good question. I feel like it was kicking around in the back of my head for a long time. In undergrad, I was doing more nonfiction, and I was writing a little bit about Mormonism, and I think, looking back, Mormon culture and gender was always mixed up in a lot of things I’ve written in the last ten years. So the broad, general area didn’t surprise me, but I remember when I was moving out to grad school and had a little bit of distance, that changed the way I wrote about it too, which was really helpful. No one in my poetry cohort—most people weren’t even from the West or anything, but nobody had a Mormon culture-ish background, and that was really helpful for me as a writer. It was really interesting to know what was interesting to them and also to know what was accessible to them.
More specifically, this family dynamic—I knew my grandfather had mentioned off-handedly at a family party one time that we had an ancestor who was married to a mom and a daughter, which is a horrifying but confusing piece of information. I didn’t look into it for a long time. I knew what side of the family that was, and I knew that there were polygamist ancestors, and I grew up hearing a lot of pioneer stories, but not those ones. I spent a while avoiding looking at that, too—being sort of interested but not wanting to crack that open.
The germ of this book sort of started in my second year [of the MFA]. I was in Sally Keith’s Poetics of Wandering class, and that class was great, but it was also very useful because we had weird prompts that shook stuff loose. I was trying things out that were a little bit less in the zone I was usually writing in. The first poem I wrote was in that class, and it was the poem on page 66 [“Martha Dreams”]. That was really helpful because it was a really weird poem about a dream that my ancestor had, and I know a little bit about her. It was an interesting poem, and I was like, “Okay, I can kind of try Keith writing a little bit—in that vein.”
The original draft of this also had a lot of other kinds of branches of the family, like pioneer polygamy and stuff. I ended up narrowing it for comprehension. This dynamic is already so weird, so let’s just focus on this. There were also a lot of fairy tale poems and name-focused poems. I was pulling from other sorts of myths, like Saint Anne because there was an ancestor named Anne—or Agnes. It was really fun to write in all those directions, and even reading it now, I can see that there’s fairy tale motifs here, but I ended up zooming way in.
ES: I know that poems in this collection were published in other venues and in your chapbook. Did you know when writing those that they would be part of this bigger picture, or how did you decide to include them?
MT: Pretty much almost all the poems in here were written in this project. A handful of them were written after the MFA—really only a handful, like the letters came later. That was something new I tried. Section 2 is these fictional epistolaries, and Section 4 is erasures of those. I love erasure, but erasure is really hard, so by creating the poem and then erasing my own poem, I could kind of do what I wanted to do. I had some text, but I ended up fictionalizing and erasing. Those came a little bit later, and the Brigham Young Memorial part came later because that was after I was in Utah, but most of these were written as part of this project altogether. I did edit a fair bit after the MFA, but most of them were written when I was really obsessed with this one thing.
There was a point where I felt like that obsession let go of me a little bit, and I was sure there would be tweaks, and there were, but at that point, I was like, “I’ve kind of written it. I’m not consumed by thinking about this all the time. I’m ready to write something different.” That was really interesting. It was a really strong experience to be creatively obsessed about a project and then to get to a point where I had sort of written what I’m going to write about this. It’ll get tweaked, but I’m not producing. I’m still writing poems about Mormonism and stuff, but they are different than what this was.
ES: You mentioned in the notes of this collection that you didn’t have a lot of primary documents to work with, especially with the women you write about. You didn’t want to write specifically about their thoughts, feelings, and memories, so I’m wondering what you see as your role in telling these untold stories of women.
MT: I’m not a fiction writer for a lot of reasons, and I felt like I also wanted to be cautious. I think well-intentionally, a lot of times, when talking about marginalized history, there can be this idea of “giving a voice to the voiceless.” I really think that wasn’t what I wanted to do because I wasn’t giving anybody a voice. Their voices existed, and part of that can be an excavation, and there was digging, but there was nothing there for me to find at some points. I do have other ancestors that have more documentation, but Martha, who I’m thinking of specifically, there’s nothing. I mean, she had a bunch of descendants and made things, like other kinds of texts. Like, “Here’s a quilt she made.” There were multiple kinds of texts, but I don’t have any of those texts; I don’t have anything she created. I think speculative spaces gave me a really helpful leash, but I didn’t want this to be a straight-up historical fiction or something, where I’m like, “Here’s a version of this.” I feel like, in some ways, this work is more kaleidoscope-y, too. It’s like, “here’s a bunch of sort of versions of these things,” but I don’t want the reader to forget that I ultimately just don’t know very much. I think the erasure is a helpful part of that here too in keeping that frame around it, where the silence and the gaps are core even while I’m also creating around them.
ES: I was really interested in that section of the book, with the more dreamlike writing and the erasure poems. How did you decide to move into that space as the book went on?
MT: I started with a dream poem, but I ended up sequencing it, thinking about, specifically, that people already don’t read poetry that much, and that I’m writing something weird and confusing for me and in general, so I was like, “I need to ground it.” Part 1 is still definitely poetry, but it’s more historical and grounded. It’s giving you some information before things get a little weirder stylistically. So writing it, all of those—Part 1, Part 3, and Part 5—were all jumbled together, and I ended up creating distinct sections to help with not losing people. I felt like I’d done some weird stuff, like the erasures are a little bit odd, so then Part 5 could be a little more open. A lot of the dreams were not even labelled who it is. They’re sort of more open and porous, which I think is helpful, too. Part 3 is more autobiographical-ish poems and more about growing up in Mormon culture as a girl. When I was writing, those were the poems that I was less interested in, but I think those are a really important element. Those are also grounding poems, so people get what’s going on a little bit more than if I’d started with a bunch of dreams.
ES: A lot of poems were named after places or had the narrator in specific places. What do you see as the importance of these specific places, especially in Mormon culture and in the lives of your ancestors?
MT: There’s so much to say about the history of Mormonism and places. Utah has a lot of unique landscapes, but it’s also such a unique mix of cultural elements and spaces. I’ve lived in a couple of other places, and in general, I’m just very interested in what makes a place feel like itself. I grew up in Northern Utah, but most of my ancestors were from Southern Utah and Eastern Nevada, and those are really different places. Those are really different landscapes—really different spaces. It’s deeply mysterious how much we’re impacted by our landscapes, but I think we really are.
On a more practical note, too, I was just surprised by—I mean, I missed my family—but I was surprised by how much I missed the landscape when I left Utah. That was a big love of my life that I didn’t know.
ES: In a world where Mormonism is increasingly part of pop culture, with different shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives or Real Housewives of Salt Lake, do you see your book working with or against these common narratives?
MT: I feel like there is a world where if I was better at and more willing to be good at social media, I could probably have sold more books just because of timing. I’m pretty well-versed in reality TV that’s based in Utah, and the shows are a really interesting mix of real and surreal and complete nonsense. There are germs of cultural things that are really interesting that do come up in those shows, but the way they talk about feminism or culture or Mormon history or whatever, they’re not wrong, necessarily—sometimes they are—but it’s just really, really flat. It’s really not complicated—not nuanced.
I read a lot of Mormon history and Utah history for this, and then I read a lot for my next project after this that’s also very much, like, Mormon Utah women, and it is all super complicated, and I do hope at least this book feels really complicated. It’s not interesting or helpful to say, “Polygamy was bad. Here’s a book of poems.” Those wouldn’t be interesting poems. I do think polygamy is horrific, not because it’s non-monogamous, which is fine, but because it’s inherently male-centric. It’s so slanted. It’s such a crystallization of these power dynamics, but I also know that people’s lives within that were really complicated, and Martha wouldn’t necessarily have thought this was a tragedy or horror. I don’t know. I was leaving how messy that lived reality was more open.
It’s on the mind. It’s a strange time to be interested in Mormonism and be on the Internet.
ES: When writing this, I know you had to confront some uncomfortable things about your family. Just finding out this situation with Martha marrying her stepfather and being a sister wife with her mother—there’s a lot in here. You even open with who everyone was named after in your family, too. I’m wondering how you handle that and what you learn from that—what this meant for you.
MT: That’s a good question. That’s a big question. I have a hard time putting into words what I learned from writing this because this was a huge project for me, and it happened over a long time, and then it kicked around for a long time before sending it out to be published. I think that writing this also helped me realize how much of a coward I was. In a classroom, I’m like, “I can grapple with really thorny stuff,” but having it be my own family and the publicness of wanting to publish it—that genuinely felt really scary, and it felt really uncomfortable.
Also, interpersonally, I didn’t know if my family was going to be weird about it, and that made me sad. I graduated in 2021, and it came out this year, so there was quite a while, but I think the timing was actually really good. I sent it out right after I graduated, and I’m glad, in retrospect, it didn’t come out earlier, even just for the fact that my family was really ready and open and super supportive of it, and I think that a couple years earlier—not that they wouldn’t have been supportive—but it would’ve been more complicated, maybe. That was a non-issue, but interpersonally, it felt like a big step for me as a writer. It’s like, “I mean it, and I can stand by it.” But it was a really strange book to write. There are a lot of people related to these people, and they would all write really different books about it than I did.
ES: What do you want readers to take away from this book?
MT: From a poet audience—I do have a Mormon audience, which is really cool too, and they have a really different context for this. [The book] offers different things to somebody who reads a lot of Mormon history but not a lot of poetry or somebody who reads a lot of poetry but not a lot of Mormon history. For a general creative writing audience, I hope that it’s a useful exercise in thinking about poetic imagination and history making. I love archival work, and I think it’s also key to know what doesn’t get kept and what doesn’t get preserved. Trying to visualize what we don’t know while we’re visualizing what we do is a really important exercise, especially in thinking about non-white-male narratives in history.
I had one person tell me—they have a Mormon history background—that after she read this, she went to her bookshelf, and she was like, “I have these thick books on my shelf that are pioneer ancestor history that people in the family had written. I grabbed one of these, and it was my Danish great-great-great-grandfather. I’d read it before, I’d looked at it before, but after I read your book, when I looked at it, there were 100 pages about what this man did and his mission and his family and his narrative, but at the end of the book, there was one page for each of his wives. I was so mad, and I’d read it before, but I didn’t go looking for that. Your book made me much angrier.” That is really nice. That’s something I would want for a reader: noticing things that we often don’t notice.
ES: What’s next for you in writing, editing, thinking about these things, thinking about other things?
MT: I actually have an answer, which is nice. I am still doing stuff in Mormon feminist spaces. I edit a quarterly magazine, Exponent II, that’s Mormon feminist, gender minorities—that’s really cool, and I get to work with a lot of people. We publish people who have written a lot, and we also publish people who want to write a personal essay about their life but have never done that sort of thing before. That’s a really meaningful thing to do. I really enjoy that, and I feel like “Mormon” is a much broader term: “Ex-Mormon,” “Post-Mormon,” “Active,” whatever. That’s been a really nice community space. I have a chapbook coming out at the very end of the year from CutBank, which I’m super excited about. It’s all really different poems than this, and it’s called Elementary . I’m doing final touches on that right now. There’s still a little Mormonism for sure. Of course.
Millie Tullis (she/they) is a writer, editor, teacher, and researcher. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. These Saints are Stones (Signature Books, 2026) is her first full-length collection. Millie’s digital micro-chap, Dream With Teeth, was published by Ghost City Press in 2023. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Stone Circle Review, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Millie is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre and Exponent II. Raised in northern Utah, she lives and works in upstate South Carolina.