In preparing for Nicole Wilkes Goldberg and James Goldberg to share about their recent book, “Latter-Day Sikh: From a Guru’s Feet to a Prophet’s Call,” at our centennial lecture, we interviewed the couple about their writing process, how they hope to introduce LDS and Sikh communities to each other, and how they used autoethnography as the central method to tell about the life of James’ grandfather, Gurcharan Singh Gill.

Where are you from, and how did you come to write this book?

James Goldberg: I was born in Utah as a BYU baby, but grew up mainly in Ohio. My family is Jewish on my dad’s side and Sikh on my mom’s, so I grew up saying that I was Jewish on one side, Sikh on the other, and Mormon in the middle. I grew up in a family culture where we were Latter-day Saints because that’s where we went to church, and that became an anchoring identity — but we saw that as totally compatible with other faiths. I grew up believing that Guru Nanak was like a prophet just before the church was organized; he was an example of God speaking to a people in a time and a place. We observed Jewish holidays and connected our Jewish heritage to our LDS theology, extending it backward into Jewish history. 

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: I was born in Southern California, but my parents moved to Utah because it had become too expensive, and I grew up there. I went to school in St. George and then attended BYU. After that, I moved to the Florida panhandle for a few years, and then came back to go to grad school at BYU, and that’s where James and I met. I was recently divorced, with my three-year-old daughter, when we met, and the Gill/Goldberg family all welcomed me in really beautifully. I had felt weird being like a divorced, single mom at BYU, and it was a challenging experience. That is when James and I had a class together, and we would talk a lot. 

At one point, I had this beautiful Indian cookbook, but it made me cry because it was so complicated! When James heard about it, he went, “No, no, I know how to help you. I can make this with you, and you can learn the real way.” His invitation to join and learn extended to his family’s treatment of me as well. His grandparents were just lovely, you know, they never had any judgment. I would bring my daughter and my nephews to family gatherings because my sister had to work evenings, and we would trade off babysitting. They were so welcoming and supportive. They treated my daughter like their own, and it was beautiful. The Gills just showed up for each other and were always there for one another. 

James Goldberg: I’m the oldest grandson, and it was really hard for my grandpa when I decided to major in theatre for my undergrad. He protested, “But you’re good at math! You can do math, you have options!” So when I was a grad student, and I began bringing someone home who was really bright, with Nicole’s personality, and so responsible as a single mom, my entire family was so excited. They said, “Here’s our theatre grandkid, but maybe he will be okay, and things will work out!” They were thrilled, and after meeting Nicole, my grandpa had a lot of respect for her. They are really close, and he actually asked her to write his life history because of who she was and her graduate work. He wanted his story to be a bridge between the Latter-Day Saint and Sikh communities. So, he asked Nicole.

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: My graduate program focused on non-fiction English Literature, while James’ was creative writing. I was studying American literature, specifically memoir, life writing, and autoethnography. Even 16 years later, there is still not much research, yet many people talk about and are interested in autoethnography. My work informed much of my approach to this book, how James and I wanted to approach this project, and how we shared Gill’s story. He wanted us to tell the story of his family and his life through his religious experiences, and to share his personal history. Autoethnography examines an individual’s life as part of a larger whole, and we wanted this book to showcase how Gill’s experiences were representative of both LDS and Sikh communities. 

How did you choose to write this book, and what was it like to write it together? 

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: It was not easy. First and foremost, this was created from a deep love and respect for the people in the book. I didn’t know James’s great-grandparents because they passed away before we met, but James has really deep connections to them and was better able to navigate that linguistic barrier. My graduate work, centered around Emmanuel Levinas, feels connected to the love and compassion that Guru Nanak shared, that we are always looking at other people in terms of their humanity and who they really, truly are. So this book was both personal and profound scholarship, but we relied heavily on firsthand stories, records, letters, and interviews to ensure we were telling the story right. Then, James and I would research beyond those primary sources to explore broader cultural contexts.  

James Goldberg: Yeah, and part of the autoethnographic toolset is weaving those two together so that you do have both. It doesn’t just because it’s a historical or personal story. You asked us about the challenge. It was nice to work with Nicole and co-write challenging passages. I grew up with this family and our stories, and my grandparents always told us this comedy about how they got married illegally in 1958. They were persistent and figured out a way through, and they got married even though it was illegal at the time. And if Nicole and I were to write the story only that way, we wouldn’t be actually telling the whole story, because of how unjust and harmful the laws were at the time. Nicole said at one point, “This is not a comedy.” 

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: That was actually for both of us, the hardest chapter, because we had initially thought we could write the courtship and marriage chapter together and tell it anecdotally. And then, as we were doing more research, and I was getting more information from the family and from their journaling the period as well, I suddenly realized,

“Oh my gosh, this story of their marriage is so much more complicated.” I spent summer 2023 grieving, because I kept being reminded on a personal level that so many people think my amazing, beautiful, wonderful children and husband shouldn’t exist–and that was being perpetuated through religions, state laws, and federal laws. It was tough emotionally, and I had to decide that in this story, it couldn’t be told by villainizing everybody, but we also didn’t want to ignore the full history. 

James Goldberg: I think it’s nice to have the pairing of both of us as authors. Of course, I grew up around these stories, so they have a certain meaning to me. Still, then Nicole would help and say, “What does this look like from the outside?” or, “How do we bring these elements together so that we are telling a more complete historical story, but one that is still true to Gill’s self understanding?” We wanted subjectivity to be a strong influence, and passing drafts back and forth and talking things through helped us capture the best of both of our subjectivities as we approached this topic.  

How did you balance telling Gill’s story and the story of Sikhism as its own tradition within the context of his relationship to Mormonism?

James Goldberg: Nicole and I are both novelists, and in a novel that you are working on, the exposition is essential. What do you need to set up about this fictional world? But you don’t want what’s called the info dump, right? And just say, I’m going to give you information. You work it into your characters’ subjectivity. And so with writing his history, we really tried to use those, those same kind of novelistic tools, where we give you information, not before the character experiences it, but in some character’s scenic context, right? Yeah, so like when he is learning from his aunts, that’s when we tell you about the five K’s, right? We don’t just tell you at the introduction, because the reader wouldn’t have the context. We introduce both Sikh and Latter-Day Saint beliefs within the moments they were relevant to his life. 

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: It’s the same idea in non-fiction and ethnography as in fictional work. You have to ask, “how would this character see this?” We know Gil because we talked with him and have his records. We knew how he experienced events, and as we entered the space of our subject, we wanted to show how Gill’s experience of learning about the plan of salvation, for example, differed from that of someone who grew up LDS. He’s just not going to see it the same way, because he came from outside that tradition. So we needed to give the whole space for the connections he was making and the feelings he was having. 

James Goldberg: We wanted to accommodate both LDS and Sikh audiences. We know the primary audience is Latter Day Saints, but there are a lot of South Asian people, who in the 1950s were really early for US immigration. So that’s an interesting angle for people who are curious about it. I also have an extended family who are curious about what Gill’s life was like from his point of view. We wanted to show how he layered both traditions to create something significant to him, like his understanding of the plan of salvation. From his telling, we knew that moment was important to him, and we tried to draw on all aspects of his spiritual background to give the reader insights into how each piece of LDS and Sikh theology was relevant and connected to him. Hopefully, you can read the text in either direction, bringing a lot of Latter-Day Saint knowledge or gaining a better understanding of Sikh concepts, whichever way.

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: We always wanted to give room for both religions. We have too many conversion stories that are, you leave behind everything you grew up with and then go. That oversimplifies the story. Gill grew up in India and then settled in the US. Going from growing up in a dharmic religion and then joining a Christian religion is incredibly different. So we were constantly navigating the assumptions that others might make about his process and background. We knew there was no getting around that, but we wanted to make sure that his background and his family always remained the focus of the story, because of Sikhism’s emphasis on celebrating the role of the family, which felt so connected to Gill when he learned about the plan of salvation. 

What do you hope readers take from this book?

Nicole Wilkes Goldberg: I hope that readers have a sense of hope and a renewed faith. Whatever their faith is-whether they are coming from Sikhism or Latter Day Saint theology or any number of theologies, I hope that people have a greater sense of living their lives truthfully. That’s what I would hope.

Join us on December 4 at 7:00 pm in the Albrecht Auditorium to hear more from Nicole and James about this critical intervention into Mormon Studies!