Fountain Green man launches
publishing company with release
of first book, ‘Dead on the Corridor’
By Suzanne Dean
Publisher
Nov. 16, 2017
FOUNTAIN GREEN —A Fountain Green man has launched a small publishing company, published his first book and is getting ready to publish a second one.
Now James Mitchell is soliciting short manuscripts from aspiring writers for a future collection of stories about life along I-15 from southern Nevada through Utah and into southeastern Idaho.
This “landlocked center of the America West” is sometimes known as a “Mormon Corridor,” Mitchell says.
Mitchell, who has a master’s degree in public administration from Utah State University, has worked for the Utah Department of Workforce Services in various capacities for 14 years. He has also been a correspondent for the Sanpete Messenger.
Mitchell still works for the state. So he does his a lot of writing and editorial work on nights and weekends, including in hotels when he is traveling around the state for his job.
“It’s a chore, but I really love it,” he says. “Before now, as hectic as life may be now, it was more hectic in the past. We were raising small children… (Until now) there just hasn’t been a good time to really dig in and write, and to learn what I needed to know.
“Life is still pretty busy, but I’m 41 years old now, and if I wait until life ‘slows down’ before I go for it, I might be waiting until I’m dead, and ‘dead’ is a little bit too slow for doing anything, I think.”
He calls his publishing business Anderson Publishing LLC, because, he says, it is an ancestral name, and it sounds “literary.”
The first book published by Anderson Publishing, a book written by Mitchell himself under the pseudonym James Elliott, is titled “Dead on the Corridor.”
It is a collection of nine portraits of different fictional people and places along the Mormon corridor. All of the stories deal in some way with death—literal, emotional, spiritual or psychological, he says.
When he finished the book, he began to see a common thread in all of the stories. “Clearly I had written a book about Mormons, though not necessarily a book about Mormonism,” he says in an author’s note on the Anderson Publishing website.
“I do not believe it was an accident that they came together this way. I am a descendant of Mormon pioneers, and the symbols, priorities, dialect, and even the food and mannerisms of Utah Mormonism are all a part of who I am.”
The book is available from Amazon in paperback for $10.95 and as a e-book for $2.99. “It received excellent reviews from pre-press reviewers who were LDS, ex-LDS and never-LDS,” Mitchell says.
The second Anderson Publishing book, scheduled to be out this month, is “The Jeweled Pendant,” which Mitchell describes as “a clean romance in the fantasy genre.” The author is Allison Brown, also of Fountain Green.
He says “several others are in the works, including a memoir written by a woman whose crazy childhood is a jaw-dropping tale.”
The book for which Mitchell is soliciting manuscripts, which at this point he refers to as simply the “Anderson Anthology,” will have some similarities to “Dead on the Corridor.” It will be a collection of stories set in the Mormon corridor within 100 miles of I-15.
In fact, to get an idea of the style Anderson Publishing is seeking for the collection, the company’s website refers writers to “Dead on the Corridor.”
The website says the tone can be “light-hearted or sad or terrifying.” But the stories need to prompt the reader to “contemplate at least of few of (his or her) long-held basic assumptions about other people.”
A variety of topics and works in various tones are welcome, the website says, “as long as they invoke something deeper than mere humor or sentimentality.”
For information about the Anderson Anthology, go to http://www.andersonpublishingcompany.com/p/blog-page_43.html.
Mitchell has set up a website specifically for his first book, “Dead on the Corridor.” That address is http://deadonthecorridor.authorjameselliott.com.
