Hello
My Name is Amy Wadsworth
I grew up in Millcreek, UT just a few houses away from the tall pink house my polygamist great-great grandfather built. From birth, I was raised on the stories that came from my Mormon pioneer roots, most of them revealing the darker natures of my mother’s lineage. Upon my retirement from a long career in education, I began my first novel, Resolution, based on the titillating scandal of my great-great grandfather’s second wife who ran away with a horse doctor and left her six children behind for the first wife -- my great-great grandmother -- to raise. In the course of my research, going over letters and journals and historical accounts written by children and grandchildren, I came upon a number of stories that I had never heard. Stories that filled me with a shuddering understanding of what life would have been like married to my great-great grandfather.
The Salt Lake Valley of my 1950’s childhood was filled with stands of cottonwood trees and wide green horse pastures. The housing developments that would ultimately consume the open spaces were just beginning. I lived in the house my mother’s grandfather built, surrounded by my numerous uncles, aunts and cousins, the generational vestiges of the first Bailey family to settle along the cold waters of Millcreek. It was easy as a young girl to envision this place as it must have looked one hundred years before. Sadly, there was little reverence for the houses that sheltered my ancestors, but the memories remain, captured in the sepia photographs and the echoes of my mother’s voice recounting the stories of the people who lived along the narrow dirt lane that dropped off the hill into the world of the Bailey clan.
My father, a professor at the University of Utah, never belonged to Millcreek as my mother did, but he succumbed to her dream of restoring the Victorian house for their six daughters. I was the fourth daughter.
I went on to marry — later divorce and remarry, become a mother, teach high school, become an elementary school principal, then to found and direct the Salt Lake Arts Academy, a charter school for 10 to 14 year-olds. I always promised myself that once I stopped running schools and raising children, I would return to my love for writing.
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