A Hmmm in the Chaos

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In these tumultuous weeks of autumn, 2025, I have been thinking about the generations in my novel, The Beekeeper’s Question. The impact and uncertainty of a faraway war rocks the community of Pigeon River, Montana in 1942-43. The young are swept into the situation, into the pressures of living through. Chapter 2 ends with a scene in the Philadelphia train station where Franklin Cooper is leaving for deployment and Maire, his bride, is standing on the platform among other women and families. (p14)

“At 30th Street Station, she buried her face in his jacket, nervously twisting the brass button bright on olive-green wool. Franklin heaved his duffel onboard and jumped up behind it. His hand reached through an open window. Maire’s hand reached from the platform. The hiss of brakes releasing. Rail cars jerking. Fingers slipping. His hand waving among dozens of finger-tipped branches reaching from the train. He was a soldier. She was his wife. It was their war.”

Though circumstances are different, I hear a similar tenor of concern, endurance, determination to make a life in the midst of it all, in conversations with mid-life nieces, nephews, and our daughter. These conversations focus on the practical, applicable, manageable: How do I stabilize my employment? Get to the right place to make it through? Cope with rising costs for housing, cars, insurance, food, education? What’s going to still be in place when my children are grown?

And then there are the elders in the story: Doc, Leo, Josie. They are the holders of perspective and life experience. Doc and Leo talk about the edgy moment of their arrival, how the Homestead Act gave them land and title, how the Indians had been forced into reservations, and then how the presence of the Indian School and the suffering of Native children awakened them to history and social consequences they still grapple with decades later.

Doc, the only woman in her medical school at the turn of the twentieth century. Leo, carrying on a life-long discussion with the bees and the Bible. And Josie Shines the Light, attached to the spirit of the land and the soul of her people, protecting knowledge forbidden by colonization.

In a scene in Josie’s lodge, tucked in the backcountry hills of the reservation, Leo is crediting her with saving his adopted son’s life. (p128) Josie responds, “Your son owes his life to his own spirit and to Iistapatapiop, Creator. We who serve our people know each one must swim their own river. Jesse was drowning when he arrived, but he was reaching for the surface.”

Regret twisted Leo’s heart. “In that season of loss, I too was near drowning. I was not a good father when he needed me most.”

Her eyes bore into him. “He needed you most on the day he was born. You took him as your own. You gave him a name, a family, a childhood.”

Our circumstances are different, but in the peer conversations around me, I hear a similar awareness of how we both hold and cannot hold the generations behind us. These conversations focus on where we can exercise empowerment, protect moral values, take care of grandchildren, leave our stories for a future we will not see.

At a recent panel for community authors, one woman said into the crowd, “This is a book I keep in my car. Whenever I’m in the ferry line or waiting somewhere, I pull it out and read whatever pages come open. I need these people. They are spiritual guides from their time to our time.”

And now we can have it in the magical voicing that Alyssa Keene brought to the story. Join us for the reader Zoom, and a merry conversation on the spoken and written word.

SHORT – The Beekeeper’s Question Audio Sample Video

Bees and Buzz, Honey and Magic

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The next reader’s zoom call is May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific. Link at the end of the blog.

The first photograph of me, I am three months old, lying on a baby blanket in my baptismal dress on the lawn at my grandparents’ house. July, Montana, the buzz of bees pollinating raspberries and garden vegetables. My little body is stretched over summer-warmed grass.

I do not remember this in the comb of memory, but my body knows. Whatever ceremony has just occurred in the little Methodist church my grandfather stewards, the one occurring in this photo is the land itself binding me to this place.

That autumn, my parents will drive east to New Jersey where my father will continue post-War university studies.  I will spend my childhood in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota. I will never reside in Montana, but the West will always feel like home, and the Baldwin family will long identify this homestead as its spiritual source.  What Jeannine Ouelette calls, “a cartography of self.”

The summer I am five, we take the train from Indianapolis to Great Falls so my father can work the honey harvest, and my mother can join the daughters-in-law putting up garden produce for winter. Here my Montana memories begin. Picking raspberries, running through irrigation water, sucking honeycomb, and bees. Bees. Bees. Finally allowed to ride out to the bee yards in the honey truck with my grandpa and an uncle, I watch them work hives amid the buzzing swirl.

On our way back to the homestead, one loose bee, caught in the truck cab, stings me on the hand. I remember the sharp pang of it, my howl of surprise. My grandfather plucks the stinger out and sucks my thumb to draw out venom— his hands a calloused tenderness, his lips a blessing. He tells me, “Brave girl, Chrissie, you’re a real Baldwin now.” I am carried into the kitchen, turned over to the women, baking soda applied to my sting. There is supper around a family table, ice cream on the porch steps. Stories float like pollen in the evening air.

If this sounds like origin story to The Beekeeper’s Question: it is.

Over ten years—with so many variations of story shifting into place—the constant was the vocation of Leo Cooper, a combination of Protestant theology in the human community and the “protestant ethic” of hard-working bees. I drew upon memory rising through the summer visits that immersed me in the family mythos. I created story out of my DNA—those mitochondrial snippets that fed a synthesis of personal history beyond my ken—and from hours spent watching bees in action—asking for their guidance.

I studied A.I. Root’s tome, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, 1930 edition—the book my grandfather had propped on the bookcase next to his King James version of the Old & New Testaments. I read Tammy Horn’s BEES in America, How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (University of Kentucky, 2005). I read The Hive, The Story of the Honeybee and Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) by Bee Wilson.

Honeybees were brought to America by early English settlers in 1620. “European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers.”  (Let alone, Old Testament references to the land of milk and honey.) The Indians called them “white man stinging flies,” their arrival linked to westward press of colonization. And one of the cultural compatibilities that supported the horrific importation of Africans into American slavery was how deeply interwoven cows and bees were in many African societies.  “As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing.” (p19 Bees in America)

Bees came into the Baldwin family in 1915 when a neighboring farmer was drafted into World War I and offered his hives to my grandfather for the duration. The man lived, but wasn’t interested in the bee business after the war, so the operation became “Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey.”  It grew to 500 hives spread out in a 50-mile radius that supported his eight children through the Depression and paid for college educations.

Homestead from the story

A lot of what Leo Cooper says in the story, comes from conversations with my father, Leo Baldwin, recalling his youthful years in Montana during his elder years living nearby.  He died in 2018, the book shaped enough that I committed to finishing it.

And then I came across Jacqueline Freeman’s profound gem, Song of Increase, Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World (Sounds True Press, 2016) and was introduced to the shamanic aspects of beekeeping. See her interview with Seth Godin here. I wish I could have had these conversations with my dad.

A lot of what Maire Cooper experiences in the story comes from Jacqueline’s book, and The Shamanic Way of the Bee, by Simon Buxton (Destiny Books, 2004) which introduced me to the long lineage of Bee Priestesses, the Melissae. The interweaving of bees with Celtic shamanism was in Maire’s blood and in the story, Leo’s bees awaken that within her.

And then there’s Sara Leedom, a global storycatcher honoring the Indigenous ways of beekeeping. Sara showed up in my memoir class to write about her travels to remote honey hunters. While I stayed home and wrote, she attended international bee conferences, including one in England that brought her in contact with the Melissae.

So, there’s a lot to think about, and a lot to honor in the lineage of bees. On these warm May days, I’ve been greeting the bumblebees diving into my rhododendron blossoms and yesterday I parked by a bee yard just to listen to the hum. Wherever you live, watch for them, and watch out for them. And if you’ve read The Beekeeper’s Question, join the zoom and join the buzz. Here’s the link: Saturday, May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific.

If you have any trouble, contact: christina@christinabaldwin.com

May there be love and honey in all our days.

The Beekeeper’s Question: a book is born! .

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Welcome to this blog community and readership. May you find respite and thoughtfulness and a sense of traveling among known and unknown companions, trusting there are many of similar mind and heart journeying through life’s complexities.

 

Butte photo: Rebecca Dougherty. Cover design by Olive Elizabeth Black, Hey Olive Studios.

This moment, amid all else that is happening, I am celebrating the release of the historical novel I’ve been working on for twelve years. In 2012, I had an idea for a story about a beekeeper’s family living in Montana during World War II. But our business, teaching The Circle Way, was still taking most my time and I was shepherding other writers through “The Self as the Source of the Story.” In 2014, I read fifty pages to friends around a campfire, and they shouted— “What happens?! Finish it…” I began interviewing my father, then in his nineties, who lived nearby: tell me about our family business, Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey, how your father got his land, the absence/presence of the Blackfeet, rural life in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, the impact of the war. Over many hours at his kitchen table, my father allowed me to harvest his early life experience for the story. He died at age 98 in October 2018. I vowed to finish the book.

Summer in the village of Langley, WA.

Two years ago, the same New York literary agent who sold my first book in 1977, took on the novel manuscript with great excitement. She submitted it to thirty editors—and such is the state of publishing today that only nine even responded. Each editor made thoughtful comments, while not quite buying. Their reactions inspired me to rework, tweak tension, trim, and craft, craft, craft. (Well, crafting words is my favorite activity!)  Last spring, when I turned 78 years old, I took the book back into my own hands.  Launching a book is a 3–4-year commitment: I have energy now. I have community support (you all) now. And I sense that the story is relevant to large swatches of the reading public: now. I chose Sea Script Book Company in Seattle/Langley, and IT’S HAPPENING!

The Beekeeper’s Question,

Love and Honey, War and Reckoning, a Novel of World War II

It’s 1942 and World War II looms over the lives of the Cooper family: a son in the fight whose pregnant Irish war bride arrives in this isolated Montana valley; a son married to a Blackfeet woman whose return tears open racial tension just when people must work together for the war effort. Their father, Leo, a philosophizing beekeeper and local preacher, models a vision for what the community might become.  His colleague, Jereldene “Doc” Jesperson, holds the valley together, curing bodies and tending souls. And Josie Shines the Light, a Blackfeet grandmother, must rely on Leo and his son to safeguard her granddaughter in the troubled settler valley.  This is a dramatic family saga of generations daring to ask the questions that shape their destinies; a story of enduring love in an era of American life that still echoes in society today.

Post war baby boom #1

All these years of writing, it’s the echoes that fascinate and frighten me: how pundits comment on the similarities of 2020s America to 1930s Germany. Then and now, the world is counting on the USA to be a global leader, to shine the beacon of the Statue of Liberty, to hold steady the global wheels of commerce, progress, and vision in the crises we face. It’s a huge task to ask of a nation and her citizens. We needed story then to inspire; we need story now to sustain. We need stories that remind us how ordinary people find extraordinary capacities in themselves because that’s what circumstances require.

Sometimes we have to go back in time to see the time we are living in. This story insisted I write about the war before I was born; insisted I locate the characters in a Montana home front, using my grandfather’s homestead and vocation to house the fictional family.

In my childhood, on honey-scented weeks of family reunion and harvest, 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— being white, being settler, being part of the land-grab and genocide of American expansion, the story needed to both reckon with that past and reattach us to the best of our lineages.

In writing a 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 on Indigenous character development.  Three veterans advised me on war and trauma. An ER doctor read the medical scenes. Beekeeping cousins reviewed the honey harvest.  And until just weeks before his death, my father helped envision the town and landscape as it was in his youth.

I wrote this book for you, for us. I wrote for all kinds of thoughtful people, known and unknown to me, and to each other, who populate this list. I wrote it for your book clubs, your friends and families, your church groups, your ancestors and your descendants; a touchstone story that calls us back to the best of ourselves and fosters conversations about who we need to be in our circumstances.

The Beekeeper’s Question is as luminous as sunlight through a jar of honey. In her sweeping new novel, Christina Baldwin courageously explores the traumas that shape us and the connections that heal us. These pages skillfully traverse individual stories, cultures, landscapes, and history. Through this powerful story we discover that community, an expansive sense of love, and—yes—the language of the bees, can grace us with interconnection between Self and Whole. In the current political and ecological moment, Baldwin’s message is as urgent as it is beautiful. –Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted, Mozart’s Starling, and other titles

This is the beginning of many conversations…in writing and responding. I am excited by all that I discovered in this process, and how relevant it is to our lives 80+ years later. I am eager to continue bouncing between times, reflecting together the slipstream of life.

As a reader and member of this blog community between now and October 15—you may order the e-book for $3.99 (reduced from $9.99). This discount includes YOUR BOOK CLUB—please pass along this title for consideration, and all members of your club, your friends and family may use this discount.

I have priced the print book at $20.00—keeping it simple, keeping it affordable. Click here for the book’s page on my website, for an excerpt, Amazon access, etc.

I will host a special zoom call on Saturday November 9 to discuss the book with readers, and to honor those who have taken the effort to write reviews. Everyone on this list will receive announcement to register and a zoom link for that conversation.

Local book signing scheduled for Langley, WA on October 18, 4-5:30 at Langley United Methodist Church, 301 Anthes Ave.  A celebration of community: This is a book about a village…

When the light is right, we may see the angelic energy that overguards us always. War is horrific. Then, now, here, there. Pray for peace, for democracy, for stamina to carry on.