My Story.
The first story I remember writing was in grade school. The subject: my “friend” the opossum, a beastly looking creature who for some reason chose a magnolia tree by our back porch for his daytime naps. I can still see him, hanging there by his tail, nose pointing to the ground, like some furry indicator that my life would at times feel inverted—and that this upside-down viewpoint would eventually come to feel perfectly normal.
Not long after that elementary-school story earned me an A (did it, tho?), my parents packed a small U-Haul with a few of our possessions and the cat, and we moved to Mississippi and set up housekeeping on a live-together church community. My dad was dealing with (figurative) post-war demons and this group was, at the time, all about casting out what they believed were literal ones.
I spent my teen years in this church group, married into it, and began raising a family. I missed a lot in the seventies, living the way we did, and to this day I still have pop culture gaps (ask me about the time I got put on the spot at karaoke and didn’t know the tune to Ride, Sally, Ride), but I don’t regret the way I grew up. I mean, I still rock at milking goats, hauling water, and transplanting fields full of tiny lettuce seedlings.
But as we all know, life is all about change.
So, at the age of twenty-four, I found myself moving off the community, toddler and baby in arms. I was back in “normal” society—or as we called it, the “world.” I probably felt more upside-down during this period than ever before. But the human spirit is nothing if not resilient, and eventually (following lots of therapy) I began to feel at home in my new life. Follow many years—and untold changes—later, I had the good fortune to land in a job that allowed me to tap into both my love of writing and my deep experience with groups. I became an Organizational Change Manager, which is essentially a role that helps companies achieve needed-but-difficult change. It’s all about the people, see, and growing up as I did, in a family of three-hundred, I get people.
But as much as I love my work, that story stuff just kept knocking at my door. I wanted to write a novel. And I wanted to show, after living in and leaving the kind of group called by those outside of it a cult—what that life was like. What was wonderful about it, and what was absolutely not.
This was a tough book for my debut into fiction. The story is deeply personal to me, and at times I felt like I was scraping at my soul. My main character, Micah, is braver than I am. But I finally decided that if she could do what she did in the story, I could do this. I could write this book, using my own name, and speak my truth. The story is fiction, but informed in many ways by real life.
I hope you enjoy it.
The back porch of our house in Virginia. The opossum that started my literary career hung out in that little magnolia tree in the corner.