Cicily Bennion

Writer and essayist

Growing up, I used to read books under the desk in class. Now I write them. But not under the desk. Mostly on top of the desk. Sometimes the couch.

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You mean I don't have to pretend these stories are fiction?

In my last semester of college, I needed three more credits to graduate and registered for "Intro to Creative Nonfiction." Like Saul on the road to Damascus, that first week of class was an epiphany: I did not need to write pretend fiction with protagonists who looked and acted and sounded just like me. There was another, better way. I've been reading and writing essays ever since.

In 2020, I graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from Brigham Young University. From there, I went on to a PhD program in English literature and creative writing at the University of North Texas. At UNT, I continued my studies in nonfiction, this time with further specializations in true crime and spiritual writing. I graduated from that program in 2025.

I'm currently seeking representation for my first book, Necessary Grief. In short, it's a book-length essay about faith and violence. Less briefly, it's a lyrical retelling of the story of Moses woven together with the true story of a family physician in Lovell, Wyoming who was convicted in 1985 of sexually assaulting female patients. Like any good essayist, I bring myself to the work, too: the death of my father, my struggles with prayer, and my reflections on growing up just twenty miles from Lovell in the decades that followed the doctor's conviction––it's all there on the page.

My essays have been published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Pleiades, the emerging writer's section of Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. These days, I live in Luxembourg with my husband and two young sons. And because life is funny, lately, after the kids are in bed, I've been trying to write fiction.

Things I've Written

Dark Sky

In 2017, my husband Nathan and I were fanatical in our search for real and complete darkness. In our apartment in downtown Salt Lake City, we shut the blinds tight against the streetlamps and headlights outside. We placed black electrical tape over the blinking lights of the wifi router, the smoke detectors.

Case No. 4262

It was a sweltering Texas afternoon when the court documents came in the mail. I’d been checking daily, walking to the mailbox with my young son. He was only fifteen months old, but he, too, was prone to restlessness in our small apartment, and so these daily trips to the mailbox had taken on a sort of adventurous quality. That sense of adventure was amplified by the fact that I was expecting something. I was pleased when I opened the box and found the plain manilla envelope.

Heart Mountain

The photo was taken in 1943, but I recognize the landscape I was raised in; I would recognize it anywhere and often think that I do: a single glimpse of sagebrush, or silos, or low, dusty mountains, and I’m home again. The place where I grew up is still mostly farmland, and the mountain on the horizon is, of course, still there.

Glorious, Golden, and Contemporary

For essayists writing today, Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay is not only influential, but inescapable. The anthology, published in 1994, has never gone out of print, and in the past twenty-eight years sold thousands of copies, becoming a staple in the classrooms and bookshelves of nonfiction lovers everywhere.

Goodnight Moon

Surely, in his two and a half years of living he’s seen the moon. But he looks at it now like it’s the first time. He knows it, yes, but only from his books on the shelf, the ones I read on nights I’m home for bedtime, when the sun is on the horizon and the blinds are closed. He presses his nose to the glass. The moon is a celebrity; he can’t help but gawk. I sit to soak up his wonder, plant a kiss on his cheek, and point out a few stars in the sky––dim glimmers in this dusky

The Thought of Us

I would love nothing more than to unpack, to move out of our in-laws’, to sleep on my own mattress instead of the one in the spare bedroom upstairs. It is a mattress that has lost its integrity on the edges; it slopes down towards the ground and I spend my nights gradually sliding off.

Whoa

There are entirely too many pickup trucks and police in Wyoming. In this landscape, the horizon never gets any closer, it only changes shape. So I blew a sizable portion of my paycheck on a speeding ticket in Shoshoni. Officer Broadhead said I was going too fast; Officer Broadhead said he was like, whoa.

Watermelon in Jerusalem

In 1962, my grandpa lost all his crops to a July hailstorm. It was Friday the 13 th . Acres of barley, beans, corn, and beets looked like they had never been planted. My grandmother wrote that hail stones the size of golf balls piled up on the lawn and ran down the lane. That fall, my mom, ten years old, went back to school and, at her parents’ bidding, asked her teacher if she and her sisters, Heather and Julie, might be excused for part of the afternoon to help in the cafet

About Boredom

I am, for the most part, a boring person. This is not a good thing to say at the outset, I know, but I think it needs to be established. I am happily married, which is boring. I am squarely and securely a member of the middle class, which is also boring. I have no pets, I do not dye my hair, I eat spaghetti at least once a week: all boring.

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