Bela Petsco, a native of Queens and an LDS convert, has authored Mormon short stories. "The Mustard Seed" appeared in Twenty-two Young Mormon Writers (ed. Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert, Provo, Utah: Communications Workshop, 1975). His Master's thesis, a combination novel story collection, Nothing Very Important and Other Stories appeared in 1979 (Provo: Meservydale Publishing) and was reissued in a trade paperback under Signature's Orion Books imprint in 1984. The novel was hailed as a milestone, the first view of missionary life from someone born and raised outside the Wasatch front. It was to be the second in a trilogy about Mihaly Agyar. The first novel was called Salem, a chapter of which appeared with that title in BYU's literary magazine the Wye in 1974 (8-12). Petsco destroyed and rewrote the manuscript for Salem more than once. He also writes poetry. "Carved in the Soft-stone of a Tomb" was published in Sunstone, January 1987, v.11, n.1, as part of Dennis Clark's article "Poems for the Natural and Social Worlds," p.20-25. Though silent for much of the ‘90s Petsco recently completed an opera libretto about Joseph Smith's last days, "And on to Carthage."