The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is an excerpt from Apostasies by Holli Carrell (Perugia Press 2025).

PATTERNS

The church I was born and raised in has always observed a selective
history. As a girl, I am taught to view facts with suspicion. A fact is
always suspect, secondary to faith, negligible.

In 2014, the Mormon (LDS) church publicly disclosed for the first
time that Joseph Smith—the founder of the “only true and living
church”—married “between 30 and 40 wives” during his lifetime.
This admission from the organization’s all-male leadership came
after a century of denying the fact.

The total number of Joseph Smith’s wives rises or falls like algebraic
sums depending on what you consider a reliable source. For the
LDS church, valid voices and testimonies only come from those
who believe.

I, a nonbelieving woman, will forever be unreliable.

Holli Carrell (she/they) was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives in the Midwest, where she recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals.

t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.