The Baldwins and the Coopers—multiple Leos.

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…