Concretely, this is the story of Kayleen navigating the death of a parent and coming into her queerness in 1989, and Emily traveling west with the Mormon pioneers in pursuit of true love and some kind of God, a hundred years earlier. Both stories are united by the myth of the Bear Lake Monster, a Latter-Day Loch Ness who stalks the edges of this world.

But most of all, these are stories about how we live knowing we will lose the people we love.

The Emily story is based on the experiences of my own great-great grandmother, named Sarah-Emily, who traveled from England to Utah in the winter of 1856. Her party was snowbound for almost the entire last leg of their voyage - Sarah-Emily actually pulled her ailing brother, in a rickety handcart, the last 400 miles to Salt Lake City. The origins of Kayleen are a little more complicated. She lives somewhere between my own experiences with coming out, my Dad reading The Hobbit to me as a kid, and the seismic grief that informs this entire project.

And the Lake Monster?

I suppose I think that if there are Lake Monsters in this world, if there is fantasy and magic in something as simple and immovable as a glacial body of water, then maybe the people we love never really leave us.

Maybe, when we’re not really looking, the answer is lurking in an ancient lake somewhere reading Hustler.

- Zoe Maltby