About the Artist

Marylee Mitcham was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1943. She received a B.A. in English literature in 1967 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She and Carl, her husband of forty years, currently reside in Golden, Colorado, where he teaches Nature and Human Values at the Colorado School of Mines. They remain in close touch with their four children and seven grandchildren. 

Much of Marylee’s early writing grew out of Catholicism, the church she belonged to until she became a Mormon about sixteen years ago. From 1972 to 1982, she and her family lived as members of a small community of Catholic couples devoted to a life of contemplation and simplicity. Her book An Accidental Monk, about her domestic search for God, was published by St. Anthony Messenger Press in 1976. Her articles, essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Commonweal and CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review). She wrote a novel in the 1980s. Twenty years later, following her conversion to Mormonism, she rewrote it, and she calls it a “Mormon post-modernist novel.” So far her manuscript has not found a publisher, owing, she thinks, to the fact that “my style and tastes and spiritual concerns are not mainstream.” 

When she can, she retreats to the small house she and her husband built on the deserted site of a frontier mining camp in the pinyon and juniper country of southern Colorado, a locale which Marylee finds spiritually sustaining. This site furnishes the artifacts from which she composes her art—broken glass, stones, pieces of brick, and a variety of other objects. Her search for these artifacts has led to what she calls “wonderful surprises.” She considers her art a spiritual exercise which keeps her in conversation with God and the land.