Things I Didn't Do

Ryder Mikkelson's life changed forever the day he fell from a loaded pack mule high in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah. He was seven years old, and some things would never quite be the same. The way he walks. How he rides a horse. The way he looks at a family photograph. Even so, Ryder grows up surrounded by the love of friends and family, cultivating his talents and building a life he's proud of. But ghosts never fully depart. Years later, when Ryder's twin daughters return home from college with unsettling news, long-buried questions resurface, and Ryder must face truths he has spent a lifetime avoiding.

In writing both fiercely intimate and expansively lyrical, Anderson crafts a story of a man haunted by memory, grappling with identity, and undone by revelation.

Karin Anderson is the award-winning author of What Falls Away and Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. She is a gardener, writer, mother, wanderer, and self-described heretic, as well as the co-editor of the acclaimed anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild. Anderson has been recognized by the Reading the West Book Awards (fiction longlist), the Brigham Young University-Charles Redd Center for Western Studies (recipient of the Clarence Dixon Taylor Historical Research Award), 15 Bytes Book Awards (fiction finalist), and the Association of Mormon Letters Awards (fiction winner for What Falls Away). Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Dialogue, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback. A former professor of English at Utah Valley University, Anderson holds degrees from Utah State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. She hails from the Great Basin and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.