I Remain Yours. Secret Mission Love Letters from My Mormon Great Grandparents 1900-1903

I Remain Yours documents the past through the present by re-directing the epistolary form as a mode of cross-generational communication, exploring the reality that love and writing remain long after the end of the individual life span. Cottle collects actual postmarked love letters from 1900-1903, sent secretly between her great-grandparents while her great-grandfather returned to his parents' homeland of Sweden to serve a Mormon mission, and weaves in her own responsive love letters back to her deceased great-grandparents, written during a self-imposed 2 1/2-year mission to understand the gifts and weights of her inherited creativity. In addressing her lineage, both literally and figuratively, Cottle realizes there a fine line between the dead and the living, her past and her future families, as well as within the links of predetermined loyalty and destiny.

"With its innovative epistolary structure, Katherine Cottle's I Remain Yours provides a fascinating window into Mormon culture-at a time when Americans have reason to be more interested in that than usual."
-Madison Smartt Bell, novelist, author of All Souls' Rising & The Color of Night

"An American story."
-Clay Goss, playwright, Author of Homecookin'