a reading, and conversations

I just returned from two weeks at Holden Village, a community dedicated to faith, justice, hilarity, and simple living located in a remote mountain valley in the North Cascades. The painful encounter I recount in the first pages of Stepmother happened there, and so did the moments of reconciliation I describe in chapter nine.

While at Holden, I did a short reading from the book at the weekly Open Mic. Over the next couple of days, several villagers sought me out for conversation. A woman in love with a man with children wasn’t sure if she could deal with the complexity of stepmothering; should she continue this relationship? A man wept when he told me about his daughter’s initial rejection of her stepmother, his new wife–and his hope that a better relationship is now emerging. One friend borrowed the book and read it the next day. Her own experience had been quite different from mine because her stepchildren were adults when she first met them, but reading about my experience and learning from my research helped her to reflect much more deeply on this still puzzling part of her life, she said, and she was grateful.