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!

Place as a Character in Stories

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Next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11, 9:00 AM Pacific.  See details at end of post.

The Body knows where it belongs. There seems some configuration in nature between the dropped fawn and the grassy knoll that receives it, between the river and the salmon that returns from the sea, between the bee and flower and darkened geometry of the hive. And even in my human blinders, I have experienced this for myself.

I was born in Deaconess Hospital in Great Falls, Montana and carried home to the rural homestead where my grandparents had homesteaded thirty-six years earlier. I was the second generation of Baldwins born on that homestead edging a tiny town. The first photograph of me I am four months old, July, my christening day. I am on a little blanket on the grass, torso sprawled, head lifted (cobra pose they call it in my senior yoga class).

Belly on the ground, on ground that still calls me, ground that holds my grandparents, parents, various aunts and uncles in the Sun River Cemetery. The Blackfeet here count ancestors going back ten thousand years. It will take me half a century to begin to reckon with the thievery that made this place a place I thought I belonged.

from Wikipedia

It was when I went to Europe, particularly into the English countryside, walking among the standing stones of Avebury, I had a different sensation of belonging. The ground came up through the soles of my feet, shaking me like lightening. I was filled with a kind of Earthy energetic programming. Though my Enlish ancestors immigrated to America in the late 1700’s, I immediately thought: this is what ancestral linkage feels like! This is what Native Americans feel when they walk the land we call Montana. The land they call Niitawahsin.

When I wrote The Beekeeper’s Question, the story demanded I “go home” to love and reckon with the place of my birth. Though fictional, the characters, the vocations, the struggles, the social issues all stream out of the place I come from. And everything happens in place, under the buttes, in the dry winds, the weather, the ways Montana shapes people’s characters.

Last fall I discovered Colleen O’Brien’s book, Baited, a mystery/thriller based in Glacier National Park and the small town of East Glacier, inside the borders of the Blackfeet Reservation. I enjoyed it both for the storyline and for O’Brien’s amazing use of place. Well—she lives there. She’s taught at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. She’s well acquainted with the Park, the rangers, the Blackfeet, the tensions of then and now. She stocks Beekeeper’s Question in her store, Glacier Park Trading. Seemed like a match.

We connected recently and decided to share the next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11 (9:00 AM Pacific—check your timezone) to talk about PLACE as a character.  I am an author born in Montana who has always been a visitor and not a resident. Colleen is an author born elsewhere, now a resident. The books are our debut novels after careers in nonfiction. Should be fun. Click on the live link, above. Put on your cowboy hat and join us.

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. 

Story in the Week Between Time

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NEWS for BEEKEEPER’S QUESTION READERS: Next Zoom call, January 17, 9:00 Pacific, etc. ZOOM LINK–CLICK HERE. Focusing on words from home: the importance of letters, pocket books, and the military press.  Now also available, CLICK HERE FOR November’s interview with Alyssa Keene, narrator of the audio edition.

 

The celebratory days are waning: Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa. Here in the North, it’s raining or snowing and the still imperceptible “return of the light” inches forward one more minute of sunrise at a time. The furnace is doing yoga breathing, recirculating warmth in my quiet house. We’re eating leftovers and cookies. I didn’t get cards out… Anticipation, which fueled the first three weeks of December, floats in the corners like stale incense.This liminal space is tiring. I  want life to tidy up.

Sometimes I cannot sleep unless I get up and write in my journal.

Sometimes I cannot write because the days are so packed with experiences, I cannot process one thing before another piles on top of it.

Sometimes I cannot process my personal life because I am overwhelmed by our collective lives and the trauma that accumulates in actual and vicarious ways.

Sometimes I sit by a small lamp in the otherwise darkened house and cry a river of emotional debris.

Ann and Vivi

Then I make a cup of calming tea, give thanks for the roof over my head, for the return of electricity after a two-day outage, for the steady recovery of my beloved from surgery, for the strength of community and friends, for my own stamina. I take a breath, here/now in the pause between one year and the next. I know the consumer world is crazy with post-holiday sales, the media full of retrospectives and predictions, but I want slowing down, touching in, space for my own contemplation. In this space between, I claim time to spin the wooly jumble of too-muchness into a narrative thread I can stitch into the new year. I take a breath. I write.

Not beautiful pages of inspiration or poetics—just shifting the accumulated overload to the page and book. And then I can take these narrative threads and begin to knit my way forward into January. Every year I notice how my mind weaves experience into story. My story. The way I say what is happening—to me, in me, around me: to us, in us, around us. History is what scholars and victors say happened: story is what it is like to live on the ground.

My collage for 2026

These are strenuous times to be living on the ground. Our primary task is to not be ground up, not be crushed, but to persistently proclaim our own perspective, to take our place in the story and believe in our individual and collective voice. Our stories, whether left shimmering in the electronic blogosphere, or stashed on paper in letters and journals, become a treasure for our own life review, for grandchildren, for archives, for the mystery of the long clock that ticks beyond our lives.

When I look into the well of the world and am faced with so many things I cannot fix, or address, or even touch from the boundaries of my life—I return to the storyline to reclaim empowerment, for myself and for others.

January 2nd, the local Write Café returns. Friday mornings at the senior center, twenty+ of us gather with our journals. We say hello, settle in, read the circle agreements, light an LED candle in our centerpiece. Jeanne or I read a poem. People choose any phrase that starts them off. We write in silence for thirty minutes. Then a round of gentle checking out before we exit into our lives until next Friday morning. There is a core group always welcoming new people. Versions of this are now happening on other mornings in other coffeehouses, hosted by members of the original group. The format is simple, replicable, and community- building.

January 24th, I am hosting a fundraiser for a local love of mine, Healing Circles Langley. People are invited to join in “Shaking Your Family Tree for Stories.” I’ve done a version of this several times on-line and am excited to bring a roomful of folks together to explore how we harvest stories from our lineages. Not only is storycatching a rich personal experience, but it also leads to stronger community. Communities are shaped by the stories of inhabitants: the story of the collective is held together by the stories individuals bring to it. So, the greater number of individuals who are engaged in honoring, writing, telling their own stories, the stronger we are as citizens of our community spaces. We stand strong in the truths of who we are, where we come from, what we have arrived at this place and time to contribute, and we see this same strength in the diverse stories of those around us.

January 28th I am taking these narrative threads to another level, teaching a five-week course, “Storycatching for the Times We Are Living,” for the Natural Transitions Institute. It is a deeply gratifying series and the stories shared at the end of the autumn cohort were touching and gorgeous. I am delighted to be repeating the offering.

  • Class 1:Storycatching for the Times we Live in.
  • Class 2:Narrative Arc in a Time of Chaos.
  • Class 3: Story as Sacred Activism
  • Class 4:Living a Mythic Story in the Midst of it All.
  • Class 5:Celebration, witness, and commitment to our words. (In a large cohort, this class will be repeated in week 6 so that every voice may be heard.)

Writing, teaching, bearing witness to one another is what I know how to do. It feels good to step into the new year able to continue sharing this life-long passion.

Thank you for coming along… for the ways you hold onto and spin your own narrative threads, and for the gifts you offer to the world from your own skills and passions.

My quote for the year is attributed to crusty old, trusty old George Bernard Shaw: “This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead off a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

See you in the burning brightly!

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

Hanging onto the thread

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The sky is streaked with lingering light.

Mid-October 2025: Before going into the storyline that I’ve been noodling on the past few weeks, I want to acknowledge the huge hingepoint we are in: Portland and Chicago under siege by the US president, Gaza in tenuous ceasefire and hostage release, Ukraine shouldering into another season of war. None of this goes away. All of this breaks our hearts one way and another. Pause. Breathe. Keep an open heart.

Moonset, early morning facing west.

In Chapter One of my book, Storycatcher, I write, “Life hangs on a narrative thread. … The thread is slender, but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream in words.” Never have I felt this more than true than now. I am swinging over the unknown while the threads coming at me are a tangled mess of broken narratives, soundbites, AI concoctions, manipulated information, reels and threads and phone-held videos—some of them helpful, amidst all that is not. Some of them the warps of lies. The lies are the hardest to deal with—the assumption that I will simply turn over my own thought process, moral code, and reality to whatever they say is true.

Every autumn for 30+ years this backyard maple has turned golden yellow… this year it is turning crimson red.

It’s a mystery.

In this whiplash environment, in the debris field of narrative, the battle of the story wars rages. And I am doing my best to hold on to the storyline that is my life, one thin thread-of-selfhood stitching my way through these times.

Greenbank Farm– early morning dog walks.

I am repeatedly challenged to ask myself, “What is my storyline in all this chaos? How do I articulate and live out what is most important to me? How do I hold myself to purpose on a daily, even hourly, basis? When I wander, where do I go to find my thread again? Journal writing? Dog walk? Weeding the garden? Tea with a friend?

Many days, this constant need for self-redirection is strenuous practice. My capacity to put “mental arms” around huge quantities of information and story and to synthesize incoming data into coherence has been a lifelong gift and challenge. As I age, and as the quantity of incoming stimulation explodes around me, the double-edged nature of being a synthesizer becomes ever more apparent. This is my skill: and it requires focus in the midst of all the peripheral data and story.

It is exactly a year since The Beekeeper’s Question came out, and I realize how deeply that writing project and  background research held me to a core sense of purpose. Waking in the mornings, I would project myself into the hours of the day and look for writing time, research time, hours to fit my life with the Cooper family, the Shines the Light clan, and the wartime lives of folks in Pigeon River, Montana, into my life with my beloved partner and family, dear friends, and the lives of folks on Whidbey Island, Washington. My author question remained: What have they, then, got to teach us, now, about how to live through times of social uncertainty and war without assured outcome?

My parents & grandparents, aka: Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

People ask me: “What’s the sequel? How do Maire and Franklin, Jesse and Willow move through the postwar years? Why don’t you write the lives of Flora and Drum? Or Boyd’s journey through the war… Are you doing a screenplay?” Of course, I still have big dreams for this book and the potential that it could be a dynamic mini-series. And the reality is that a book is like a baby—it needs daily feeding, tending, reminding other people it’s still here. The Beekeeper’s Question is now a toddler, and I am holding its hand and walking with it into a wider world.

She who tends and translates the hummm of the hive.

 

This autumn I am also teaching on-line, offering lectures, co-hosting our local writing café. These activities counterbalance the many ways I feel incompetent dealing with on-line promotion, bookstore introductions, booking podcasts, or seeking reviews. It would be easy to give up–but I am the servant to the story. I spent ten years dedicated to this book. These incredible people live only the page and in the audio. They kept me going through DT’s first presidency, the pandemic, and most the years of my seventies. They are counting on my stamina to keep them alive. But now that I’m in the piecemeal tasks of book maintenance, I often feel lost as a writer.  I want my core back— I want a sense of holding onto the thread.

 I do not know if I will be able or willing to take on another huge project. In six months, I will turn eighty years old. I am basically strong, healthy, dealing with small health challenges, nothing life threatening. I can recite huge quantities of story and background research on World War II, beekeeping, Celtic Shamanism, labor issues in the 1940s, etc. etc. and then forget for a few seconds why I walked into the kitchen. Overall, okay. More than okay. Thriving in a serious hearted way.

Friends on the road. Friends in chemo and radiation. Friends in the hospital. Late Dahlias and prayer candle… going 24/7.

Meanwhile, three things I know to be true about myself. One, writing is a lifeline. Writing is spiritual practice, activism, tribal—and I will continue this never-ending story as long as I have fingers and mind.

Two, Nature is my holy place.  I need daily contact with earth/air/fire/water. Geranium in a flowerpot, a tree pushing up the sidewalk, beach stones rolling under the wave action remind me of the planetary interdependence to which I belong. Everywhere I have traveled, Nature is the biggest marvel and my touchstone. I am so grateful to live where I do—a modest house nested at the edge of wild.

Leucistic doe eating apples in the roadbed.

Three, my life is seated in community. I put my time and attention into loving engagement. I show up to community needs—from tending aging neighbors, to demonstrating, to facilitating places of repose.  I am getting ready for whatever shall be asked of me in all these crises. Loving the folks in front of me, steadying myself and staying strong.

Watch for surprises–like a rooster escaped from the chicken yard crowing his freedom.

So, holding onto the thread means touching the ground I stand on, for some time every day. It means staying in the swirl of reciprocity with people around me and in connection through channels like these. And it means that every day between now and my birthday I am going to write something—short or long, I don’t know, but to keep putting who I am to the page, to discover what passion and projects remain mine to do.

“Life hangs by a narrative thread.

This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are,

and where we come from, and where we might go…”

If we can make the path by writing: write.

The heart of the world is always expressing itself… even the fir needles beg the wind to shape a heart in my meandering path.

READER ZOOM CONVERSATIONS RETURN ON NOVEMBER 22. 9:00 AM PACIFIC/NOON EASTERN…  This session will be a dialogue between Christina and Alyssa Keene, the actress who narrated the audio version of the book.  On Audible and 30+ other distribution networks–including Libro. You can buy it through any local bookstore that has an audiobook account.

Read/listen.

Join in for a delightful conversation.

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.

The Baldwins and the Coopers—multiple Leos.

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Second reader’s ZOOM, for folks who have finished my novel: The Beekeeper’s Question. Live conversation was held on January 11, with a special treat: Baldwin cousins, including men now 80s/90s who worked in honey harvesting, and our matriarch cousin, 95-years-old, with family memories from that era. 

In a long-ago writer’s group of mixed genre projects, I asked a friend who was novelizing her family history why she was writing fiction instead of memoir. Her answer, “Because with fiction I can offer my lineage another way out, alternatives they didn’t take.”

Her comment burrowed deep into my writing mind and inspired me, decades later, to borrow vestiges from the life of my grandfather, Leo Baldwin, and my father, Leo Baldwin Jr., and the small Montana town where the family ran “Baldwin and Sons Beeline Honey” for over 50 years. If you have recently read The Beekeeper’s Question, this locale and bee business is sounding familiar. And if you have visited the book page and watched the Langley Book Launch video you will see photographs of the actual homestead, town, and family members posing as stand-ins for the place and characters in the book.

I taught memoir and autobiography for thirty-plus years, wrestling with students over issues of integrity: How much can be shifted and still be considered true? Can I combine characters? What if people are still alive? What if the rest of my family doesn’t agree, or know, or admit to the realities of my story? What do I have the right to write about other people?

Well, a lot of that is solved by declaring a story is fiction and stating on the copyright page: “The characters do not represent actual persons, living or dead. All opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.”

Well, mostly. There was a female doctor in the valley in those years. She was a close friend of my grandparents. However, Doc Jereldene in the book is my creation. Why she moved to the valley and her character is sourced from my imagination. The rest of the towns people are all imagined—Gertie, Belle, the Pocket, Torgerson, and Sivertsen families. The Shines the Light family, emerged out of hours of cultural and historical research.

Rev. Leo Cooper, well, he bears a lot of resemblance to Rev. Leo Baldwin. And while I placed the story within the house of my grandfather’s life, I had to break free of reconstructed half-memories, and source Leo Cooper from writer’s mind. Leo, the character, was brought to life to fulfill what the story required and to be what his sons and daughters-in-law, and the valley needed him to be.

My greatest hope for this work of fiction, and the role of fiction in general, is to offer readers “another way out.” Reading a good story allows us as readers to consider choices and consequences that play out in the drama of plot and illuminate alternatives. The Beekeeper’s Question provides a storyland in which we get to vicariously struggle with issues of racism, morality, love, violence. We are invited into imaginary communities in hopes we learn from these fictional characters how to live in our own communities. Reading allows us to imagine ourselves in the world of then and there, and prepare ourselves for how we will speak, listen, and act in the world of now.

I have been reading works of fiction for seventy years. I know that memorable characters, from Caddie Woodlawn and Little Women, to a thousand adult novels, all contribute to my sense of how to be a human—especially, how to be the kind of human the story of my life requires, and what “the valley” of these times need me to be.

More soon. Keep reading…

Request for Allyship

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NOTE: This blogpost is archived as part of my writing list. It contains a time-sensitive request that went past on December 13,2024. However, the educational aspects of the story remain relevant, and the community will be informed as the court system makes a decision. Thank you to readers who wrote letters and emails. Some of you shared your words in the comments or emails: such thoughtful, compassionate outreach. And thank you to those who just read with curiosity. All open-hearted, thought-provoking, call and response, and quiet contemplation is welcome here.

I knew writing The Beekeeper’s Question would require reckoning with the injustices of western settlement. Despite my birth into the territory of the book, in childhood I was taught almost nothing about Indigenous people or the history of the land on which my grandparents homesteaded. I had to read and research to educate myself enough to write Piikuni characters into the story. And I needed a Blackfeet cultural advisor willing to confront my cultural blinders and help me fulfill my intentions for accuracy and respect.

It took me three and a half years to find such an advisor.  A friend-of-a-friend introduced us. We started texting in a stream of words like a river already flowing. She shared realities of Native people today, and elucidated history from the Indigenous perspective.  She told me of the harm done to her grandmother at the Fort Shaw Indian School. I told her my grandfather had been a teacher there. Their lives may have intersected: now ours were intersecting. We decided our ancestors wanted healing.

Grand Entry, No. American Indian Days, July 2019

The characters of Jesse, Willow, Gramma Josie, BB, Darrell, Aunt Aggie, the council, and little Drum all contain bits of her education, guidance, and validation. Nato’kssin, my friend.

Now her extended family needs allyship.

Many readers ask me what to do about the issues raised in the story. Here’s something immediate: You can help one family confront one tragic death. You can write one letter to a court in Montana, asking that the life of a young Indigenous woman, Mika Westwolf, be valued in the justice system, and that the young woman who killed her in a hit and run is held accountable.

I have written this story before in my blog post: “Because it’s all still happening.” Mika Westwolf was killed as she walked alongside Montana Highway 93 on the Flathead Reservation, heading home late at night on March 31, 2023.   When Popular Information ran Mika’s story, and Amy Goodman picked it up for Democracy Now, the death of this young woman and the tragedies of many Native families came to white-eyes attention.

The woman who hit Mika is named Sunny White. She named her little children Aryan and Nation. The combination of vehicular homicide, white supremacy, and hate-crime brought the FBI into the case. Her auntie describes the scene this way: “The newspapers keep saying “crash” there was no crash…she ran off the road to run Mika down in cold blood and drove away… the police caught up with her hours later, passed out in her rig,…when they woke her she is recorded in the police cam yelling “I’m going to prison forever pls don’t arrest me.” Well that tells everyone she knew what she did and intentionally left Mika to die alone…later she changed it to “I thought I hit a deer.” It’s ridiculous to be charged 45-yrs and have charges dropped to five yrs in a plea agreement… we need letters, just one paragraph, or email, or phone calls saying white people are watching this and care that the family gets justice”

Here’s what I am saying via email: I have been following this case since it received national attention in the spring/summer of 2023. Any event like this is a complex tragedy, but Sunny White must be held accountable for vehicular homicide, for child endangerment and other charges. The justice system needs to validate the loss of Mika Westwolf to her family and her people. Standards of sentencing need to be observed without prejudice, and a signal sent to Indigenous citizens that Montana law takes their harm and disappearance and deaths seriously.  Thank you. Christina Baldwin, Montana born.

This is what Mika’s mother wrote on Facebook and the www.MikaMatters.com website.

“On the morning of October 30th, 2024, in Polson, Mt the pre-conference trial hearing for Sunny White was held. That morning, Sunny White pleaded guilty to “vehicular homicide and incidents involving another person.”

White was also charged with two counts of criminal child endangerment and one count of criminal possession of dangerous drugs, which were dismissed as part of the plea deal. Sunny White was under the influence of fentanyl and meth when she struck Mika with her vehicle leaving her on the side of the road.

The total sentence could include up to 40 years in prison with substantial fines. If the stars all aligned in White’s favor in her sentencing, White would only receive five years or less. This is not acceptable to me or my family.

We, the family of Mika, initially hoped for a jury trial. We wanted to bring more visibility to Mika’s case and continue to pressure Lake County to work (as it should) with no racial biases. This is one of the many issues that we, as indigenous people, still have to still face, in this country, in 2024!

I am asking you that if you care about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and my daughter’s case to please write a letter to Katie Campbell (Sergeant of the Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Board). It is Katie Campbell’s duty to write the final report for Sunny White’s sentencing, that the judge will read. We hope that with our families’ testimonies (at the sentencing), and the letters that you will provide; Sunny White will receive the maximum amount of years and any chance of early parole will be denied. …  In the end, my ultimate goal is to get justice for my daughter, Mika, and try to get the sentencing laws changed in the state of Montana. Right now, the penalties do not work in favor of the victim. People get more time for theft, burglary, and drug convictions than taking a human life.

WE NEED YOU. If you care about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and my daughters’ case to please write a letter to Katie Campbell (Sergeant of the Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Board). 

Please write letters, email, or call:
Katie Campbell
Sergeant, Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Bureau
kcampbell2@mt.gov

Office: 406-872-6254

36235 Kerr Dam Rd Polson, MT. 59860

Victim Impact Statement please include at the top of your Statement

  • Primary victim’s name: Mika J. Westwolf
  • Defendant name(s): Sunny K. White
  • Date of crime: March 31,2023
  • Location of crime: North of Arlee, MT near Mile marker 20

Deadline is December 13th, 2024 (Her mother says to send letters and emails beyond that date as well.)

Once upon a time my grandfather, a newly ordained Methodist missionary, was assigned, as his “Christian ministry” to participate in the torturous “re-education” of Indian children. And once upon a time the descendants of a surviving Indian girl and a “re-educated” parson met to tell a story. Mika’s death became part of our story beyond the book. And writing Katie Campbell is part of my commitment to restitution and healing beyond the book.

View of butte and “Pigeon River,” site of The Beekeeper’s Question

I know this is an edgy request, but this is an edgy time. Do what feels right in your heart but do something. Maybe for Mika, maybe for some other cause. We are called to courage and engagement. Now, more than ever.

 

 

 

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.