Every novel begins with a question the writer can’t stop asking. For me, the question was this: What do you owe a place that shaped you — even if that place would rather you kept quiet?

I grew up in Emery County, Utah. Castle Dale, the small town at the center of The Lund Covenant, is based on the landscape I know best — the San Rafael Swell, the high desert, the Mormon communities where everyone knows everyone and silence is its own language.

The novel follows Gill Lund, a photojournalist who returns to his hometown after his father’s death. He plans to stay three days. What he finds — hidden water caches in the desert, a secret network of humanitarian aid, and evidence that someone destroyed it all — keeps him longer than he intended.

A Novel About Witness

At its core, The Lund Covenant is about what happens when a man trained to document other people’s conflicts has to decide whether to document the one in his own backyard. Gill has spent fifteen years behind a camera. He knows how to frame a story. What he doesn’t know is whether he’s willing to be in one.

I wanted to write a novel that took the American West seriously — not as backdrop, but as a character. The desert in this book is not a metaphor. It’s the ground people walk on, the thing that shapes their decisions, the reason some stay and others leave.

What’s Next

The Lund Covenant is available now. You can order on Amazon or follow the serialization chapter by chapter on Substack.

I’ll be sharing more here about the writing process, the landscape that inspired the book, and the questions that kept me up at night while writing it. Thanks for reading.