“I grew up in Provo in the 60s and 70s and always felt out of place. I’m out here in the American West living in totalizing culture that was shaping my identity into something I would wake up to, look in the mirror and didn’t recognize. It felt like I was in a fishbowl, looking at the broader world through literature. I remember that the books that really struck me were those from writers who came from similarly strong subcultures. ‘My Name is Asher Lev’ by Chaim Potok was transformative to me. It’s about an orthodox Jewish kid growing up in Brooklyn and figuring out that he didn’t fit right, and then how painful that was to exit. Same thing with James Joyce; he left Ireland, left Catholicism and never went back, but he also never wrote about anything else! They were in a bubble in this big ocean, trying to figure out where they fit in. It’s only when you rub up against that bigger culture that you could have a conversation about who you might be.

So, that struggle is what my books are largely about: identity. I am unapologetically a Mormon writer. For me, it’s not really about theology or the institutional church; it’s about the culture. That’s where people can enter the conversation about who I am, and that’s what I want to both critique and celebrate. I’ve done the coming-of-age novel and a collection of short fiction. Right now, when I’m not writing about science for the U, I’m working on a historical fiction novel based on the lives of my great-grandparents. It’s set in the Utah Territory in the mid-to-late 1800s during the struggle to achieve statehood. It’s more of a family saga, but it’s still about a subculture bumping up against the bigger culture and figuring out who they are, both as individuals and as a discrete people in the broader American story.

I grew up hearing this story about my great-grandfather. He was a sheriff in Panguitch who died mysteriously at age 40, alone, in the basement of a building. It’s a murder mystery not because of his death, but because of the murder of his good friend—also his niece’s husband—who was killed execution-style in the streets of Panguitch. My great-grandfather was tried for the murder (and acquitted) in a very long, very public trial. Plus, this didn’t happen that long ago; I got to see where his office was, the little jail cell in the corner, and imagine him as this tortured fellow who couldn’t get over this trial and it drove him to end his own life. It turns out that the story I was writing was actually about my great-grandmother, who spent the rest of her life not knowing for sure how or why her husband died. This woman moved with her second husband to Mexico, where her polygamist father was hiding from federal agents after Utah finally became a state in 1896. She lived in all these vast territorial places and buried four children within six weeks of each other. How do you deal with that kind of death in your life? I mean, who were these people? They were just staggeringly stoical and brave.

America is this great melting pot where nothing melted, right? It can feel segmented as we’re all trying to cling to these handholds of who we are. But we’re all in the same bucket of gumbo, and I think fiction is one way to discover our place and reach each other. We’re not homo sapiens, we’re homo narrans; the meaning of our lives isn’t available to us until we tell a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

—David Pace, writer, College of Science

This story originally appeared 12/4/2025 in @ TheU