We Call Upon the Author to Explain—Millie Tullis

This month we had the honor of speaking with Millie Tullis on their poetry collection These Saints Are Stones out now on Signature Books.

In Millie Tullis’s new poetry collection, These Saints Are Stones, a faithless daughter is haunted by her third-great-grandmother, Martha, a woman who married her stepfather at sixteen and became a sister-wife to her own mother. Tullis cannot stop uncovering details about Martha, who left no written history behind, and her silence permeates this collection, which is rife with gaps and fragments, scraps of memory that blend with dreams. Sparse and spare, these poems echo the red desert landscape where the speaker’s ancestors lived and died, where she hunts for graves among the rocks and confronts a past she can never fully know. After all, like a sampling of lace, the cloth of women’s history is more hole than thread.

Ada Wofford: This collection is a family history told through poetry. Why did you feel that poetry was the best way to tell this story?

Millie Tullis: I was—and am—interested in the particular plasticity poetry offers us, especially the line’s flexibility. Line breaks can create a lot of possibility and open up different kinds of space within a poem. Poetry has plenty of room to knit multiple answers, incomplete answers, unresolved questions, images, and ideas all together in a small space. A poem can start in one place and end up somewhere else; a poem doesn’t necessarily need to offer closure or have a traditional beginning, middle, and end. I know a lot of what I’m describing isn’t exclusive to poetry (experimental prose can also be up to a lot of these things), but for me, poetry’s flexibility is helpful, especially when working on a small scale. It gives me a lot of permission.

So, poetry was a good fit for the research I was doing. Despite Mormons having a lot of family history records, I knew so little about women’s lives in my family history, because so little was recorded by women, so little of what was kept focused on women. I was finding a lot of gaps. I was doing a lot of speculative imagining. Writing these poems, I often felt like I was magpie-ing many small bits of information and arranging them into a little nest of images and information, a poem. And even in the less speculative poems, the poems about my own childhood or factual family history, the push to keep things very concise, to go small, was a helpful creative limitation. Many of these poems feel like an exercise in zooming in, in valuing the everyday details of historical lives. Poetry let me go small, stay on the micro.

AW: In the opening poem, “God Sees Everything” you play with language, stretching it to its limits, turning “everything” into a verb, “but sees / can’t be / the word / for how / God everythings … do you need / a body / to house / a verb.” The Gospel of John famously opens with the line, “the word was God.” I am unfamiliar with Mormon writings, but is your poem alluding to this passage from John? As someone with a literary interest in the Bible, I read the use of language in this poem as an illustration of the absoluteness of God, that he can “everything,” change a pronoun into a verb, and likewise, as God, he can “house” that verb of “everything”; and thus, the question of a body housing a verb can be read as questioning if the demands of Christianity are humanly possible. Can you please speak to this idea and your use of language in the poem?

MT: Thank you so much for this careful consideration of “God Sees Everything!” This poem opens the collection, and is placed before section one, so I see it as a kind of framing poem. It’s my most Mormon theology-y poem in the book. It does allude to “the word was God.” It is also playing with that idea of absoluteness and what language can stretch to cradle, where language fumbles. I am interested in the physicality, the literalness, of Mormon God. The origin story for Mormonism begins with Joseph Smith (the first Mormon prophet) having a vision of God and Christ in the woods at fourteen years old. In the version of Smith’s vision that I was taught, God and Christ have very clear, physical, male bodies. So, this poem is asking about that physicality: can it make sense for God to be physical, to verb in some of the ways that I verb? To see like I see? Mormonism also carries the idea that as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become (though this is debated now and not official doctrine.) How women, non-binary bodies, and the divine feminine fit into this embodied theology is fuzzier.

AW: In the Notes section you write, “These poems are part of my attempt to picture what I could not picture about their [your Mormon women ancestors] lives.” In the opening poem, “God Sees Everything,” you write, “Mormon God / has eyes / pupils / a tiny God / shaped window / for Picture / to crawl / through.” Are these two passages related, or am I reading too closely? Is this collection the “picture” that has crawled through the “tiny God shaped window”?

MT: Absolutely! I love the way you put that: the collection is the “picture.” “God Sees Everything” is very much about the act of looking. Picture is the verb at the heart of this collection. Writing these poems was an exercise in imagining and failing to imagine. I was testing the limits of what I could know (historically, through research) and what I could picture (the limits of my own imagination).

How much can I picture, or understand, what it was like to marry your stepfather, to live as a sister-wife with your mother, to carve out a life as a pioneer teenager or woman in a very rural, very patriarchal, 19^th century Utah community? I can gather information, I can know some things, but I can’t imagine my way into knowing.

In a later poem, “Helpmeet,” I tried (and failed) to imagine a specific moment: the conversation that must have happened between Alice and David when it was determined, somehow, that David would marry Martha, his stepdaughter. Several family narratives claim that David marrying Martha was Alice’s idea, but I could not wrap my head around that fact—that horrible detail. I couldn’t make that narrative real in my own mind. “Helpmeet” ends with a failure of imagination. “But here / my imagination / breaks. / The words / won’t come / out / of the mother’s mouth.”

AW: In the poem “After” you speak about ancestors that your relatives were named after, “My first sister was named for the pioneer / who hit a hungry Paiute / in the back of the head with fire / wood … No one is named / for my grandfather’s great grandmother / a pioneer girl / who married / her mother’s husband.” The first thing that popped into my head, of course, was Shakespeare, “What’s in a name?” But also the idea of shared memory, when a group decides on the connotation of a name or word, whether it’s good or bad. After researching and writing about your family’s history, what are your thoughts on shared memory/perception and the meaning of names?

MT: Thank you so much for this question—I love thinking about names. Names, and the legacies of names, have continued to haunt my poems after this book. As you said, I think names are such connotation-rich bits of language. There are very complex and very personal reasons names get picked. I grew up hearing about the ancestors we shared names with. What’s in a name is still a good question, all these years later. I also think about: what does a name point to? What does a name carry?

I love that names are thoroughly everyday language. Names are used so frequently, we rarely think about what the word really means, what it sounds like. So, it’s interesting to linger on a name and look longer at this heavily-repeated part of your personal language, your family language. Names have layers—full names, middle names, nicknames, married names. I grew up in a family who gave out a lot of nicknames and those names carried stories, information about our family group and relationships. I hold an MA in folklore as well as an MFA in poetry, and my interests in names and family stories certainly reflect the intersection of those interests.

I was really honored that an earlier draft of this book won honorable mention in the Utah Original Writing Competition in 2021 for a book-length collection of poetry. Shauna Barbosa, the judge, was particularly interested in the naming focus. Barbosa said this about the manuscript: “Precious are the books that make you question what and who exactly is stirred when your name is called.” That sentence has stayed with me; I’m deeply grateful for it.

AW: In one poem you write, “there is no one alive who remembers / the color of her hair / there is no one to correct me.” Can you speak about the responsibility that came with writing on behalf of the dead and how you navigated that as a poet (as opposed to as a historian)?

MT: This is a question I wrestled with continually while writing this book. Earlier, I spoke about poetry’s particular flexibility—how the line can lend itself well to imagination, to questions, to more than one answer. Again, speculative space was really important to me working on these poems—and creatively energizing. I tried to be clear about when I was writing about things I knew and when I was writing about things I wondered or imagined. The dream poems all play a very important role in opening up that speculative space. I also tried to keep facts/imagination somewhat clear in my organization of the collection. The first section is pretty factual; the final section is pretty dreamy. The middle section is more confessional, drawing the connections between this history and more recent maternal family history. This section also touches on my own Mormon childhood, which was still full of pioneer narratives, costumes, and culture. This is where “Work,” the poem you quoted, comes in. As a church activity for young girls, we made ancestor dolls. “I made my namesake / working from mind / rather than picture.”

AW: The poem, “What I Miss About Believing” is so sad yet so beautiful at the same time. It’s just three words, “singing / with / others.” Is this poem an erasure? I ask because of the use of space in the poem. Also, I know these are poems about your ancestors, but how much of you is in this poem? Despite how short it is, as a reader, it felt very personal and very powerful.

MT: This poem isn’t an erasure, but you are right that it evokes that form and visually connects with the erasures in section four. In general, white space is important to a lot of these poems—for pacing and to show gaps are as central to the poems as language. That’s something I love about erasure. Erasure invites us to consider what is kept, what is left behind, what is lost; erasures are historical texts—they have a relationship to a former form. Erasure felt important when working with so much forgotten and buried history.

Thank you too, for the other part of this question. I’m so grateful to hear these poems felt personal and powerful. While few of the poems are directly about me (outside of section three, which has quite a bit of me), writing this collection was very vulnerable, very personal, for me as a writer. Part of this is the intensity of the material—I was wrestling with such a complex and difficult section of my family history, one of my origins, for a long time. I also think that our obsessions, our questions, tell on us. I’m sure it tells you a lot about me that I wrote this book, did the research, asked these questions in these ways. David and Martha and Alice have many descendants; I’m sure any of them would have written a different book, asked different questions, found different pieces to hold on to.

AW: And lastly, is there anything I didn’t touch on that you would like to speak about? Any new projects we should be on the lookout for?

MT: Thank you for asking! I have a chapbook, Elementary, coming out from CutBank very soon. The editors and designers there have been amazing to work with and I’m so excited to have this project out. I’ve been working on the poems in Elementary for a long time; some of them began right after These Saints was finished.

Elementary is stylistically very different from These Saints, but there are some interesting thematic connections. Elementary is also thinking a lot about inheritances, gender, memory, about the many layers of education children receive. And I’m writing new poems too. After several slower poem years, I’ve been writing more and more in 2026. I’m excited and grateful for that.

These Saints Are Stones is available through Signature Books

Millie Tullis (she/they) is a writer, researcher, and the Editor in Chief of Exponent II. These Saints Are Stones, her full-length poetry collection, was published by Signature Books in 2026 and Elementary, a poetry chapbook, is forthcoming from CutBank. Millie’s work has been published in Sugar House Review, Stone Circle Review, Moist Poetry Journal, and Western Folklore. Raised in northern Utah, they live and work in upstate South Carolina. Find more at millietullis.com.

Ada Wofford (they/them) holds MAs in both English (Rochester) and Library Studies (UW-Madison). In addition to working at a rare book shop, they are an associate poetry editor at Sundress Publications, the editor of We Call Upon the Author to Explain, and the non-fiction editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Their writing has appeared in The Blue Nib, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Autostraddle, Capable Magazine, Sundress Reads, and more. Their chapbook, I Remember Learning How to Dive, was published in 2020, part of which earned them a Pushcart Prize nomination.