To the Stars with Hemelein Publications

A guest post by Joe Monson, Managing Editor of Hemelein Publications. Joe explains the origins of the speculative fiction publisher, and describes the recent initiative, Legacy of the Corridor, which publishes speculative literature by current and past authors from the Western “Mormon Corridor”. 

The beginnings of Hemelein Publications lay in Life, the Universe, & Everything (LTUE), the annual science fiction and fantasy symposium that began at Brigham Young University in the early 1980s. I’ve volunteered in various capacities at LTUE since 1989 or so, even meeting my (then) future wife there and getting married two weeks after co-chairing the event with Lee Allred. I’ve held many different positions at LTUE, too, from regular volunteer to program book to vendor hall to guest liaison to chair. I’ve been a panelist and a presenter. After so many years of learning and growing because of the symposium, I wanted a way to give back.

The original faculty advisor for LTUE was Marion “Doc” Smith. After he died in 2002, we lost Betty Pope (a long-time librarian at BYU who created a specific call number for science fiction and fantasy) and Marjorie Wight in 2003, then Linda Hunter Adams in 2016, followed by Jonathan Langford in 2017. Losing so many of the original instigators and supporters of the symposium caused me to think of ways we might memorialize them while also benefiting LTUE. Thus the LTUE Benefit Anthologies were born.

When I originally proposed the idea to the committee, they weren’t all that interested in having yet another time-intensive thing to do each year. I can understand that, since I’ve done a fair number of the jobs for LTUE. It’s a lot of work to put on a conference like that each year, with a lot of volunteer time spent throughout the year on the various required tasks. Pulling together an anthology every year is also a lot of work, one that I decided to tackle myself.

Thankfully, I had help. Jaleta Clegg graciously agreed to be my co-editor for the series. Marny Parkin asked to do the interior layout and typesetting. And my amazing wife often helps out with editing, opinions, and other things that make everything pull together each year. It’s truly a team effort each year as we review the submissions, edit the stories, determine the story order, decide on cover art, and so on. I truly appreciate the amount of work it takes to put together an anthology now that I’ve done it several times. It’s a lot of work!

After putting out two of the benefit anthologies, I offered to edit an anthology of winners in the American Fork Library summer fiction contest. I now have a second one of those in the works. Hemelein decided to start putting out other works, too, including Hemelein Classics, a series of collections of classic stories—long and short—from 100 or more years ago. That got us thinking about what else we could do, and I remembered Washed by a Wave of Wind.

Back in 1994, M. Shayne Bell, one of the founders of the symposium and a great author of long and short fiction, put together an anthology of Utah science fiction writers. Washed had stories by Bell as well as Dave Wolverton, Carolyn Nicita, B. J. Fogg, James Cummings, Diana Lofgran Hoffman, Bill Shunn, Mark Worthen, Diann Thornley (now Read) , Melva Gifford, Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury, Ginny Baker, Charlie Harmon, Elizabeth Boyer, Dave Doering, Glenn Anderson,  Lyn Worthen, Pat Bezzant (now Castelli), Michaelene Pendleton, and Orson Scott Card. You probably recognize a number of those names. Some of them went on to become well known in the genre field.

I had pitched a follow-up volume to a publisher, but they weren’t really interested. The idea sat simmering in my subconscious for a few years. In late 2020 or early 2021, it occurred to me just how many local (Intermountain West area) genre writers we have, some of them international best sellers and others good but not yet as well known outside of the area. 

We have a really amazing heritage in writing in this area, especially compared to the population. Many of them write short fiction of various lengths, and I thought it would be fun and interesting to put together individual collections of their works to help highlight all of them, famous or not. Whether it’s something in the water, in the air, or something else, we have an amazing legacy that needs to be shared. With so many amazing tools that make a publisher’s job easier, I can’t think of anything more exciting than shining a spotlight on individual creators in this area.

Thus the Legacy of the Corridor project was born.

We’ve published two so far (D. J. Butler and Emily Martha Sorensen), and we have six more tentatively scheduled for later this year. The next three will highlight Lee Allred, Lehua Parker, and Harriet Stark (ask me about that novel from 1900 sometime), and we have more in various stages of planning scheduled through 2023. We are looking for additional projects to tickle our fancies, too. We’d love to hear from you.

Books in the series:

1. The Florilegium of Madness by D.J. Butler (collection, July 2021)
2. Dragon Soup for the Soul by Emily Martha Sorensen (collection, December 2021)
3. Down the Arches of the Years by Lee Allred (collection, April 2022)
4. Sharks in an Inland Sea by Lehua Parker (collection, June 2022)
5. The Bacillus of Beauty by Harriet Stark (novel, July 2022)
6. TBA (collection, August 2022)
7. In the Haunting Darkness by Michael R. Collings (collection, October 2022)
8. Title TBA by Emily Martha Sorensen (collection, December 2022)
9. TBA (collection, April 2023)
10. Title TBA by Jaleta Clegg (collection, June 2023)

Joe Monson loves reading, books, and butter mochi. He has worked at a couple dozen different jobs during his life, including translating and editing Engineer into English.