My life so far: 29,220 days and counting.

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Remember the Reader’s Zoom this Saturday April 11!  CLICK HERE to copy zoom link or to sign in on Saturday morning. Dialogue and discussion with Colleen O’Brien, author of Baited, a thriller based in Glacier National Park. We will talk about Nature and Place as characters in our stories. Starts @ 9:00 AM/Pacific US time—you can do the math.

And on April 16, 2026, I turn 29,220 days old. You can do the math. It means I was conceived on a hot August day with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the trauma of WWII, floating molecules in the breath of my young parents. It means I was born on a spring morning in Montana when millions of my grandfather’s bees were hurling themselves from hives to clover buds and war crimes trials were starting up in Europe and Japan.

These 29,220 days are the time blocks that built my life. I have awakened in any number of moods on these days. I have wasted days, raced unthinkingly through hours as though life was an endless Instagram scroll. I have been brought to my knees with grief and awe, flung myself passionately into love and writing and work. I have made mistakes, bad choices, unwittingly caused harm, and wished I could roll back time. I am walking a yellow brick road with most of the bricks behind me and a decade that curves into terrain unknown.

And here I am, turning 80 years old.

I enter this birthday with profound gratitude. Still here. Still healthy and cogent. Living with a beloved partner and

Ann & me among the 8 million protesting.

held within—and contributing to—a loving community. And I have the stamina to keep practicing my passion for stories, for writing, for creating spaces where stories can be respectfully shared.

 I’m starting a Substack column called Backstories, because at 80 most of my stories are back there, trailing behind me, swirling around me, awaiting articulation into the unimaginably huge conversation humanity is having at this time.

Standing on this threshold, I have the audacity to pray for 3,650 more days. Another 1/8 of life and, in my aging body and eldering years, I vow to live ever more consciously. I not only want my remaining days to count, I want to literally count them. I want to see each sunrise as a copper coin and to deposit that penny at sunset into a pottery jar marked “Prayers for Change.” Or maybe I can construct a calendar filling one wall where I cross off each day, noting some gratitude, no matter the internal weather of my emotions or the terrors of the wider world.

I am old enough now to know the preciousness of time. I step into this decade with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose. And on the day I depart—whenever and however that comes— I want my last word to be “Thank you.”

April 17—my first day of being eighty.

I received this as a gift and no designation of who it might be from. Whoever you are, thank you. I will plant many more words in this vase.

If you want to help me celebrate, the best gift you can give me is to go online and deposit good reviews for any of my books! They don’t have to be long or intricate, a few words to encourage the next reader. “I read Seven Whispers 20 years ago and it’s still on my bedside table…”  Or, “Life’s Companion is my favorite journal writing friend and teacher.” Or, “My book club loved The Beekeeper’s Question. Don’t miss this story!”

All these titles are on Bookshop,  Amazon, and in BookClubs.com. Please love on Alyssa’s amazing audio in Audible or Libro or Spotify–wherever you have downloaded it. You can recommend it on Instagram and follow me @ChristinaBeeTrue and on Facebook as The Beekeeper’s Question by Christina Baldwin.

And Thank YOU for being part of my journey and letting me be part of yours.

Pray for PEACE. Pray for JUSTICE. Pray for the children whose days are just starting that they may live in a new world we insist into being!

Saving the World: Saving the Stories

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Niece, nephew, and sister.

We have work to do to save what we most value in our world.  Well, we try. Keep trying. Keep reaching for each other. Managing our griefs. Across America people are activated. We will not stop. And we invite those who are wondering/wavering to join in. For decades of my life Minneapolis was my home. I know these streets, this weather, and the kind of people Minnesotans are. My family that still lives there is on the streets. Again. After George Floyd. After Melissa Hortman. After Annunciation Catholic School. Now, Renee Nicole Good.

On January 11, Simon Rosenberg, in Hopium Chronicles wrote:  “The world is deeply unsettled now. We don’t know how all this is going to turn out. We could lose, or we could win. But we will not win unless we understand the nature of the conflict we now find ourselves in and organize ourselves to win it. 

“To do this our Democratic leaders and all of us must far more consciously see themselves not just as legislators or party leaders or grassroots activists but as actors in a global battle for freedom and democracy. We must come to see ourselves as heirs to the American Revolution and the Post WWII Four Freedoms global system that made freedom – not dominion – the founding organizing principle of our country and the world, and recognize that it is our obligation, our responsibility, to lead this global fight – as we have for 250 years. We must be warriors for the middle class and working people, AND proud American patriots fighting for freedom and democracy here and everywhere – for our Founders declared that our inalienable rights included not just the “pursuit of happiness” but “life” and “liberty” too. And we must summon the power of those great American patriots who came before – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Dr. King – and other global freedom fighters – Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela – to inspire us in the years to come.”

Norman Rockwell illustration of the Four Freedoms

While writing The Beekeeper’s Question, I kept asking: “What have they/then got to teach us/now?” A lot, it appears.  I continue leading conversations about the values, theology, and moral code implicit in the story and in the country at that time. In his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt, laid out his vision of global human rights and the need for America to step onto the world stage and take up moral and military leadership in a world falling into fascism. (Remember that WWII started in Europe in September 1939, and by 1941, Hitler occupied the continent, leaving Britain to flight on its own while Churchill pleaded with the US to get involved.) When the US did enter the war eleven months later, it did so to carry out Roosevelt’s vision. And when the Cooper family listened to the radio, and dealt with the challenges of their community, they were informed and inspired by the Fireside Chats broadcast by their president. They were given the courage to do what must be done to wage the battle for freedom and democracy.

And here we are, dangerously abandoning the structures that have held some kind of global order together all the lifetimes of those of us alive on the planet. We find ourselves in a multi-faced “war” of myriad conflicts and bloody battlegrounds and “we don’t know how all this is going to turn out.”

At a library author panel last November, a women in the audience announced, “I want you to know I carry The Beekeeper’s Question in my car. Whenever I am in the ferry line or a waiting room, I read a few pages. I need them with me. They give me courage.” What a marvelous moment—to know the story is fulfilling my intention for it in the world.

The history of WWII has pretty much been written, but the stories continue to rise. In recent conversation with Alyssa Keene, the novel’s marvelous audio narrator, she used the word “blueprint;” that the actions, bravery, willingness to risk of people who lived during WWII provide a model for our own actions, bravery, and willingness to risk now. Alyssa has completed writing the first draft of her grandfather’s experiences being rescued by the French resistance and secretly passed to safety, so another blueprint is coming.  And things that were lost or disregarded keep coming to light.

Last summer, a tiny ad appeared on the local e-list: “1940s postage stamps, anybody want them?”

I do.

A little collection I could paste into signed copies of The Beekeeper’s Question, alongside letters I had made up between the characters of the separated newlyweds. Maire was writing from Montana where she’s gone to live with her father-in-law. Her soldier man, Franklin, was billeted in Northern Ireland and then fighting in the North Africa campaign. Letters—crossing the Atlantic in a mismatched timeline, crumpled into mailbags, riding the bowels of ship conveys (40% sinking rate in the early years of the war,) communication missing or repeated or uncertain of reception. This was how it was—the best that ordinary people could do. Sure, I’ll take those stamps.

I arrived to find this woman clearing out her garage, getting ready to move. I tell her why I want the stamps, offer her a copy of the book. We chat about that long-gone era of our parents’ generation. “There’s this box,” she says,  “War letters between my parents. My father’s Army memorabilia, photos, ration books, military instructions for an occupying Army. I don’t know what to with it all.” My eyes got large. “You want it?”

I do.

The box is sitting in my backyard office. I haven’t read the letters or tried to organize them by date (all those helpful stamps with postmarked dates were cut off and dumped into a little plastic bag, so the chronology of the envelopes is gone). I have sorted out some interesting booklets (see photo) and asked if Molly Guptill Manning, who wrote the acclaimed, When Books Went to War, and who curates the exhibit “The Best Read Army in the World,” if she wants them. I’ll find an archive that wants the letters.

I reached out to my friend and sister/writer, Gretchen Staebler, for advice. She has a published memoir about her years dedicated to caring for her mother (who died at age 100) and living in the house of her childhood—including everything her parents had ever saved. Including their World War II correspondence, and her father’s family’s war correspondence—a boxed cache of over 1500 letters. Eventually, she edited the letters into a privately published volume. She let me read some to help set the tone of letters between Maire and Franklin. We remain in a long dialogue about what impact the letters had in the moments of their exchange, in the lineage of a family, and where these might be deposited for a future we cannot imagine to find and explore.

Gretchen appeared with me on the January 17, readers zoom to talk about letter writing in the 1940s, the work of cataloguing and archiving, and how the realness of these exchanges reaches through time. 

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

Hear Ye, Hear Ye–AUDIO is up!

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Front Cover

The audio version of The Beekeeper’s Question is ready for your ears! It went live on Audible September 8, and there is a one-week sale—so order now. The book is also available on thirty-four other audio distribution channels—Barnes & Noble, Chirpy, Spotify—wherever you like to download audio books—you can find it. In the next couple of days, I’ll be make arrangements with Kingfisher Books in Coupeville, WA so you can order through an independent bookstore—but because of the shortness of the sale (Audible sets these things)—I wanted to get word out to you all as soon as possible.

To get the audio into your library loaning system put in a request through Libby or Overdrive—whatever they use, and they can order it.

Rehearsing for Shakespeare–so many words!

Who wouldn’t want this bright energy reading you a story?!

The voice of the story is local actress and voice coach, Alyssa Keene. In just the last six months, Alyssa has been a shining lead as Golda in Fiddler on the Roof, and Island Shakespeare Festival’s production of As You Like It. She brings professional quality and a deep empathy  into the book’s voices as she immerses herself in the complexities of accents, genders, and narrative. And we will both be on the Readers’ Zoom call November 22nd: what it was like to write it/me, what it was like to read it/her. And then—what it was like to listen to it/you all.

So now, The Beekeeper’s Question is available in all formats.  More unfolding in this relaunch and celebration of the book’s first birthday.

Autumn presentations and classes!

Inkspiration—on September 27, I am part of three presentations by journal writing pioneers–myself, Tristine Rainer, Jamie Pennebaker, and series organization Kathleen Adams. For registration and more information go to The Center for Journal Therapy.

Story circle Network—on October 4, Writing from the Heart, Virtual Conference, I am presenting in the midst of a great line-up on “Shaking your Family Tree for Stories.” This day is a bargain—early bird discount until September 26.

For a longer dive into the power of story, writing your own story, and “Storycatching for the times we are living”, my five session zoom class, sponsored through Natural Transitions Network on the five Thursdays of October is a rich opportunity.

MOST OF ALL –THANK YOU, for all the ways you support this creative, circle-ly, story wandering life of mine. And to know that my writing and teaching continue to be meaningful, well what a blessing. And finding meaning is a blessing we create together—shared experiences of life and story and bearing witness. The world is hurting and cruel, and wonderful, and inspiring. We’re in it together. And as Doc says in the book, “We’ll figure it out.”

Artwork used with permission: Queen of the Bees… she who puts honey in our hearts.

Becoming “Doc”

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It’s a marvelous sign when readers of The Beekeeper’s Question so identify with characters they want to become like them. For several months now I have had the honor of conversing with book club members, both in person and on zoom—mostly women in their 60’s/70’s—inspired by the character “Doc,” as a role model of practical older woman wisdom.

For those who haven’t yet read the book, Doc is Jereldene Jesperson, a seventy-something, unmarried country physician serving the rural community of Pigeon River, Montana. She is the friend of widower, Leo Cooper, the local parson, beekeeper, and father of sons, one in the war, one in the valley. The Cooper family, in which Doc is an honorary auntie, is central to the story and to the community’s ability to make their way through the early years of World War II.

Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

Leo’s bee yards

Author, creativity coach and blogger, Sally Fox recorded an excellent podcast of me when the book came out last fall. (Click here to listen.) Recently she posted a blog about wisdom keepers and their important roles in the very real drama of our times. She writes:

One such wisdom keeper, Jereldene Jesperson, known to everyone as “Doc,”  stood out to me after reading The Beekeeper’s Question, a powerful novel by acclaimed Northwest writer Christina Baldwin. Set in an isolated Montana town in 1942, it tells the story of a family and community dealing with divides.

Doc is the family doctor—the only one the town could get. Though she arrived as an outsider, she tends to the bodies and souls of the valley with an open heart, caring even for those who once distrusted her. Over time, she becomes the wise woman people turn to in times of crisis.

I felt moved by her wisdom, comforted by her presence, and left the book feeling like we needed more Docs—seasoned by life, and able to offer their practical wisdom when the world seems to be running off the rails. You can find them everywhere if you know what to look for:

  • They are often older, though some are wise beyond their years.
  • They have known heartbreak but haven’t grown cynical. They still believe in goodness.
  • They observe deeply, understanding that no one is perfect. Their compassion bridges divides.
  • They don’t pretend to be above anyone. They burn their toast, drop dishes, and occasionally forget to put oil in the car. They get lonely and angry and sometimes need to talk themselves down from a high horse.
  • They love to laugh.
  • They are not easily rattled but will speak truth to power in a clear, no-nonsense way.
  • They have experienced life and death and understand the brevity of our time here.
  • They mentor and support others, grieving losses, celebrating victories.
  • They believe in America’s core values yet acknowledge how rights have not always been applied equally.
  • They know when to offer a hug, mug of tea, or spoonful of honey.
  • They love without concern for racial, cultural, or gender differences.
  • They bring perspective, a steady light in the storm, a reassuring shoulder. And a voice that says, “We’ll figure it out like we’ve always done.”
  • They have faced loss and aren’t afraid to love again.

The list reminded me how amazing it was to bring Doc to life; to put good words in her mouth and good actions in her community role. Readers ask me who she is modeled after, and the truest answer is  “the best of you/me/us.”

And Leo… well, he is based on the best aspects of the men in my family–men I would call “the stewards” of  masculinity, who can both tend and defend. He is seasoned, seeking, and rises again and again to cope with the challenges his family, congregation, and bees face in uncertainty.

This is true wisdom: femininity combined with fierceness: masculinity combined with tenderness. Leo and Doc are a team that brings physical and spiritual comfort into the room, serves tea with honey to the suffering. They show up, face into difficult conversations, counsel the younger generation, love the babies and children, hold onto their values. Right now, I see their faces everywhere in the protests rising across America. We are becoming Doc. Becoming Leo

My oldest cousin–age 95, marching in protest. Doc indeed!

I notice how a large proportion of  the protesters are white-skinned and grey-haired. Some people are lamenting, “Where are the youngers?” They’re busy–trying to survive financially, reassure their children (and each other), hold onto meaning in a world where meaning is shattered daily. Our job–the elders–is to get out there and raise our voices. Our generation is responsible for a lot of this mess: so it’s our responsibility to call it back. And it’s time to use our white privilege to stand in front of those being targeted: immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and to make alliances, to reach out, open dialogue, stand fierce, stay tender. As Doc and Leo reassure each other, “We’ll figure it out.” That’s our job now. See you there–in our communities, making good trouble.

Trauma and Transformation

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Life is full of challenges. We grow by baby steps, facing risks, being supported by older/bigger/wiser folks around us. We learn to handle stress, expand our capacities, discover our resilience. And all this prepares us when challenge becomes trauma. Trauma is injury or emotional distress caused by events that overwhelm our ability to cope. Abuse, assault, battle, betrayal, drastic injury or illness: we do not wish traumatic events upon ourselves or each other, but they happen. We are triggered into trauma when events beyond our control veer out of control.

We are also fascinated by trauma—especially when it’s not our own. We seek out stories that allow us to travel vicariously through the drastic edges of human experience, cheering for people to learn, to thrive, and to show us the way. We understand that trauma is a hinge-point: it will make us or break us. The ‘hero’ comes through trauma incorporating wisdom; “I have suffered and here is what I learned.” The ‘villain’ uses trauma as a wrecking ball; “I was wronged by life, and you shall suffer for it more.”

Writers embed trauma in stories because trauma is embedded in life. In the formative years of writing my historical novel, The Beekeeper’s Question, an editor told me, “Do not protect your characters. They must make bad decisions, costly mistakes, hurt each other and choose what course their lives will take. When in doubt, make it worse.”

“Make it worse” became a mantra writing scenes for the story. World War II is happening: trauma is everywhere. I had to write about this within the perspective of that time. The US Army in the North Africa campaign (where the young soldier, Franklin, is sent) applied what was called “forward treatment,” shipping overwhelmed soldiers to a field hospital putting them into an induced sleep cure for a week, and then, supposedly rested, sending them back to the front. Though trauma has always accompanied soldiers home from war, society didn’t address it as a collective issue, just sent survivors to their families and communities and hoped they’d carry on.

After the Vietnam war, the 700,0000 American servicemen and personnel who required psychological help, taught us that unaddressed trauma escalates in delayed response. The persistence of what was named “post-Vietnam syndrome” led to defining Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and opened up the study of trauma. My friend Michael Orange, a Vietnam veteran, helped me “make it worse” for the character of Franklin Cooper, the beekeeper’s son confronted with war, battle, and physical trauma.

Trauma is also present in the experiences of the women in the story: sexual assault, miscarriages, beatings, deaths of loved ones. Maire, Franklin’s wife, suffers from nightmares and anxiety. Willow, her sister-in-law, carries both the spiritual wisdom and intergenerational trauma of her Blackfeet people. In fact, women are twice as prone to PTSD as men but their trauma, often arising out of domestic life, is persistently discounted as an aspect of being “the weaker sex,” and enduring “women’s conditions.”

For those who have read The Beekeeper’s Question, I will be hosting a dialogue with Michael author of, Embracing the Ghosts, PTSD and the Vietnam Quagmire, and his wife Cynthia author of, Shock Waves, A Practical Guide to Living with a Loved One’s PTSD on the role of trauma and PTSD in the book. The ZOOM is MARCH 22, 9:00/Pacific—do the math for your time zone as needed. Click here to register. This takes you to my email–ask and I send you the zoom link.

The 1940’s has many echoes of then to now, and those echoes only grow stronger. I found a tee-shirt on Etsy printed with the slogan: “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it right now.”

Trauma is a catalyst. It shifts our lives—ready or not. The person we become depends on the choices we make in response to trauma. The same is true for communities and countries as we collectively respond to war, oppression, natural disaster, regime change. We become how we respond. The year 2025 is exposing trauma from the personal to the global—and we cannot avoid it. We are in a hinge-point of reckoning.

Image from social media.

As an American born just after World War II, I have been steeped in the mythos that mine is the “greatest country on earth,” that we are forever the righteous victors. I have been steeped in arrogance that American character, our delusions of the self-made (white) man, should be a model for all of societies. We are Americans: we can do anything we want, and the world will be better for it.  Evidence to the contrary disregarded. Welcome to our reckoning.

We are living through a huge shift in how we be human on the planet. We are collectively deciding whether we descend or ascend in our basic nature. Reckoning at this scale is terrifying. No matter how much we read, scroll through news sources and analysis, we cannot get true perspective. We are small and the issues are huge. We are embedded in the moment like tiny pieces in the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle. Yet anyone who does jigsaw puzzles knows even the tiniest missing piece impacts the whole. We are needed—everyone of us—to stay present and play our part, to fit ourselves into the pieces around us, to make a pattern and a story within the perimeters of our lives.

Americana Art Enterprises: The world’s largest commercially available puzzle called What a Wonderful World is an 8′ (2.4m) tall by 29′ (8.8m) long 60,000 piece world map.

It took me ten years to channel the enormity of World War II through the microcosm of Pigeon River, Montana and the lives of the Cooper family. And now I am challenged, in my aging years, to live through this crisis in the microcosm of Whidbey Island, Washington and my own life and community. As I stagger out of winter’s shock, in the greening of early March, I am determined to use every added minute of light and each unfurling bud to rise, to meet trauma with transformation. I take the tiny piece of my life and snap it into connection, find the adjoining pieces, and act with trust that the whole picture will emerge—whether or not I live to see it.

Page 101, The Beekeeper’s Question: it is August 1942.

Rocking on porch chairs waiting for night breeze, Leo whispered into the dusk, “This war is a three-headed dragon, each black mouth round with teeth, consuming young men.”

“That’s surely the strain of it,” Doc peered skyward, “We don’t know what will become of them. Or us. Or our country.” Caged between the Big and Little Dippers, Draco the Dragon writhed in the night sky. … Doc stared at the cosmic expanse of the Milky Way.  “You’re the local preacher and I’m an old country doctor, what can we do?”

            “Help people live through the sacrifices required of us now.”

Even if you’re a rusty, one-legged scarecrow, you have a job guarding tulips. Let’s go…

Echoes Then to Now-Part 2

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Morning. The trees receive the touch of sun and birds that have huddled in their branches after Monday’s windstorm, and Tuesday’s humanstorm, shake their feathers and head to the feeder. I watch over the rim of my laptop, out my living room window. Take a ragged breath. Nature is wordless, but people are chattering—wildly trying to make story, to find a way to fit what just happened into the narrative we thought we were living. The turn we thought we were in toward a better country, just before the bus went off the rails and over the mountain side. Mourning.

The thing is, we cannot make immediate sense/story after a detonation this huge. We try, because disorientation is uncomfortable. Terrifying. It’s hard not to wake up this morning with the haunting sense that America 2024 just became Germany 1933. But because we know the historical scope of fascism, even in this dire situation, we can make different choices and pull ourselves out of this wreck.

I made an offer, when my book came out, that early readers of The Beekeeper’s Question are invited to gather on zoom this coming Saturday November 9. This offer stands. 9:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 Mountain, 11:00 Central, 12:00 East. Since the invite is to readers who have completed the story, there will be plot reveal discussion. This session will be repeated January 18, 2025.

The video of the Langley book launch, is on the book page. It includes a slideshow of Montana and the 1940s, was attended by 150 people.

We will talk and listen to whatever people want to say about the book, and that time and this time.

Gather if you are moved to be in this circle. I send you love and honey to soothe your heart.

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.