POST-MORMON STORIES

How the Past Set My Writing on Fire

After years of abortive drafts, finding compassion for my younger, misguided self was the key that finally unlocked my memoir.

Elder Bill Shunn outside Bonners Ferry, Idaho, 1987. Photograph by Tim Bishop, from the author’s personal collection.

I was arrested in 1987, when I was a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary. For terrorism. In Canada, of all places. But even before that…