I have devoted my life to fostering the power of story and facilitating the power of community to hold our stories. As a leader in personal writing and a teacher of creative nonfiction, I companioned thousands of people to claim their life stories. For twenty-five years I traveled the world teaching The Circle Way, a collaborative dialogue practice. Now in my 70s, I interact globally through podcasts, videos, and emeritus mentoring in my bodies of work. And I just published my debut novel!

This story insisted I write about the years before I was born, insisted I locate the characters in a Montana home front, using my grandfather’s homestead to house the fictional Cooper family— insisted I explore the question: What might they teach us about social upheaval, democracy and authoritarianism, and making sacrifices for common good.

In my childhood, freed from Minnesota schoolyears, I gorged on honeycomb weeks of August, family reunions, and harvesting Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey. I wandered between bee yards and gardens, gulping the mythos of “the Old West,” cowboys, ranchers, farmers, Charlie Russell paintings, buttes and arrowheads. No one spoke of Native land displacement, nor that the old Fort had been in Indian school or explained the ramifications of the Homestead Act. But now— a more complete history is finally coming forth. And being white, being settler, being part of the land-grab and genocide of American expansion, my story needed to both reckon with that past and reattach us to the best of our lineages.

Writing fiction requires an ability to slip skins, to imagine and convey a broad range of life experiences and perspectives. In writing this legacy novel, I was compelled to bring Montana’s original citizens into the story, to give them voice and presence. A Piikuni tribal member advised me throughout on Indigenous character development.  Three veterans of World War II and Vietnam advised me on battle realities and trauma. An ER doctor read the medical scenes. Beekeeping cousins read the scenes in the yards and honey house.  And until just weeks before his death at 98, my father helped me envision the town and landscape as it was in his youth. I collected an entire bookshelf of amazing research I am excited to revisit to write more about how that era bounces to our era.

Now it’s your turn to slip skins into the stories that emerge from our being together.