Happy Valley connects my family's past and present, but every family has a past it’d rather hide. You hear family secrets from adults in hushed tones growing up: Divorce, betrayal, suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, poverty and death. How could this be my family? As a sheltered suburban kid from a religious home, this taboo history clashed with my understanding of my self, my parents, and my predecessors.

This story actually begins in a small town Wyoming bar. There, my father, a married Mormon man of five, former coal miner, and mobile home dealer, began a love affair with my mother, a much younger impressionable woman whose alcoholic father committed suicide. An unexpected pregnancy ensued, leading to a debilitating divorce from his first wife and a second marriage with five more children. With only a high school education, my father provided a comfortable suburban, middle-class life in Arizona, then Texas, then Oklahoma. At age 11, I awoke to my mother shrieking at the abrupt, premature death of my father. Eighteen months later, my mother committed to a troubled new marriage with a family friend who had seven children of his own and moved to Happy Valley in Utah. Now, my sixteen siblings are parents with children who are the heirs to this colorful and convoluted family history.

Families are messy institutions, whose lines are blurred by blood and law. Historical unpleasantries are swept under the rug and sometimes erased from memory. My family now lives a seemingly normal, modestly privileged suburban life - where the fading American Dream offers a safer, quieter future with ever increasing home values. It’s the perfect escape from an irksome past. However, Happy Valley embraces this forbidden history by chronicling the everyday personal lives and relationships of my nieces and nephews as they come of age in the waning days of the American suburbs. Through portraits and unscripted moments, an intimate, quirky, and slightly dystopian narrative links one generation’s tangled history with another’s that is yet to be written. 

For more information, please contact Brian Shumway at:brian@brianshumway.com or visit: brianshumway.com