Who Am I? Fall, 2022.

You are each the hero of your own story

Joseph Campbell

Here I am, in my fish earrings and being all mattery.

I’ve been asking my classes this question for years now. This year I finally have an answer.

Who am I? I am a story: Rather, I am a series of stories. Imagine, if you will, that we are standing together on the front porch of my little house. All the things that make up my life are in my house, but I am more than those things. There’s a story here, a story that begins, “Once upon a time, a woman and her son moved to Milton Freewater. It wasn’t where they wanted to go, but there weren’t a lot of choices. They had to move because the story they had been living in Gresham had become unhealthy and dangerous to their bodies and souls….”

We look to the left, and there is a little brick house, with a younger woman and a younger boy standing out back in front of a door leading into a daylight basement. Water pours out of the door, soaking the woman and boy’s feet and legs. There’s a story in that house, too.

Beyond that stand the burned ruins of a townhouse just outside of Medford, Oregon. A young woman and a baby lived there before the fire.

We walk down the front steps and look down a whole row of houses disappearing into the distance. As we look, we realize that the house next door isn’t the only one with water around it—a river weaves between and around some houses. Some stand in the desert, where there is NO water.

The woman and the boy don’t live alone for much of the time. Other people move into their stories, and tell stories of their own which shape the woman and boy’s stories. Sometimes the stories are happy; sometimes sad.

Understanding who my son and I are now means understanding who we have been in the past. It means knowing the stories in which we lived.

Understanding who my son and I are now means understanding who we have been in the past. It means knowing the stories in which we lived.

Me in the fish earrings, 2022

So who am I? I am the sum of all of my stories. I am also the foundation upon which every story in my future will rest. I build from here, and from now.

But what does this mean in practical terms? What does this tell you about me? Here are a few ways that seeing my life as a story will shape our time together:

I believe things should make sense. If they don’t make sense, I need more information.

I believe life has a beginning, a middle, and an end—but the beginning rests on the foundation of others’ stories. My story, in turn, will serve as part of the foundation of stories yet to come. 

Your story is exactly the same. What does that mean? It means that each of us matter. A lot. I matter to you. You matter to me. That just leaves one question: How will we matter to each other? Because we are here in this room together, our lives have become linked. What will that mean to each of us?

I believe that while we cannot control all of the events that find their way into our lives, we can choose how we use those events in shaping our stories. Joseph Campbell has it partly right: We are indeed the heroes of our own stories—but we can be far more than that. We can be our own storytellers, too—and in choosing how we tell our stories, we choose how we will see our lives. 

Have you ever felt like you were waiting for life to begin? Have you ever experienced something so painful that you thought your life was over? I have.

Again me

We can choose when we see our beginnings. And we can choose when we see our endings. Have you ever felt like you were waiting for life to begin? Have you ever experienced something so painful that you thought your life was over? I have. And yet here I am. And the reason? I’m a part of my son’s story. I’m a part of my community story. And now I’m a part of your story. More important, I’m still exploring my own stories. I’m telling my stories, and in telling them, I’m learning who I am.

And that brings me to the last point I’ll make here—The part of me that sees life as a story has offered me a way of surviving another part of myself. I live with clinical depression and anxiety. Those are part of my story. Learning to understand how those factors became a part of my story, and learning to understand what parts of my story help me to claw my way through those dark times, has been a huge part of understanding not just my story, but my parents’ story, my grandparents’ stories, and even my great-grandparents’ stories. 

 I won’t go into great detail here because I am quite literally writing a series of memoirs and a screenplay on the subject (I told you I was all about the stories), but understanding that part of my story means that I have a set of tools to offer others who grapple with those particular challenges. I’m not any kind of mental health professional. But I am the granddaughter of an amazing man who also grappled with depression and anxiety—and who also saw his life as a story. You’ll hear a lot about my Grandpa. Here’s the first thing you should know. 

 My grandpa was the person who taught me how very important one person can be in another’s life. He taught me that I mattered, that I was an important part of his story. He taught me that when depression and anxiety strike it’s important for all of us to understand that while we might not be able to “fix” those things (if we should even try—and more about that later, too) but we can sit beside each other in the darkness. We can offer a hand in the dark. We can offer our ears. We can offer simple care. We can understand that loving each other means that sometimes we go to dark places together, just so our friends and loved ones, who must travel those dark paths, don’t have to travel alone.

We can understand that loving each other means that sometimes we go to dark places together, just so our friends and loved ones, who must travel those dark paths, don’t have to travel alone.

and me once more

 And the payoff? The last lesson for today? No matter how very final those shadows may feel, they do not have to be the end of the story. If we can hold on, the sun will rise again. The clouds will part. The failed exam will become part of our story rather than our agonizing present. The lost love will become part of our history or herstory—and we will learn to love ourselves and others better for the experience. We will remember that we matter. And that others matter to us.

Read Full Post »

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Here’s part of how I said “good bye” to Leroy.

When The Boy and I first moved to Milton Freewater we came under duress; our home in Portland had flooded and the landlord chose to do nothing–for a month. We lost everything, including our health. We came here because houses were cheap and the weather was dry. We came to start again.

But a funny thing happened. We acquired our House Leroy. It turned out that he, like me, had roots in the Valley. It turned out that we had complementary skills. It turned out that, against all odds, we became a family, in a town made for families. Those first summers The Boy had a whole neighborhood of kids to play with. Our little old house rang with shouts, laughter, and occasionally tears.

We had come to Milton Freewater to start over. What we discovered was that those old roots we had still had a little life in them. We took evening drives through pale evenings, past peach, pear, and apple orchards. I started doing a project for the local historical society. Those evening drives took on a timeless quality. Some evenings it almost felt like the road had carried us back to when we first drove it, back in the sixties, when summers were hot, corn came in the husks and often included ugly little worms, tomato fields and yes, strawberry fields, stretched forever.

It was, for those few years, a life out of time. The Boy progressed through the school system. He competed in track. He played football. He played the tuba. Life wasn’t always easy–2008 happened, and 2009, and there were signs that the world was changing, but it was out there, beyond the borders of our town, and our lives. In our world, we went to football games and track meets and solo festivals and jazz festivals, and we drove through quiet evenings, and then we sat on the porch in the golden light, and talked, or listened, or just felt the breeze on our faces.

And then we lost the House Leroy, and it was just The Boy and me, and we tried, but we both knew that losing Leroy was a grievous wound. The timeless world in which we had lived had shattered beyond repair. Driving the old roads became too painful because the history that we had built, that connection to the past that had shielded us like a golden bubble, had shattered beyond repair.

There were some bad days, months, years. We struggled. We developed coping mechanisms. I developed diabetes, sleep apnea, cancer. The Boy developed depression, anxiety, and cholinergic urticaria. But still, we coped. We still fought for every bit of joy we could find. But for me, there was the sense that we were on borrowed time.

And then came last December. The university where I teach, and where The Boy was finishing up his first degree, got hit with a cyberattack, just before finals week. And we coped. All of us on campus. Finals were re-vamped or canceled. Papers came in as hard copy, rather than uploads. Grades had to be entered when that part of the system was liberated. When winter term started we were still coping. And then halfway through the term, we had snow. Then we had a warm stretch, and all of the snow accumulated in the mountains came rushing down into the valley. Water was everywhere. The Boy, the cats, and I had to evacuate to a Travelodge. We took litter boxes, three changes of clothes for each of us, the gaming systems, the computers, our cell phones, and The Boy’s tux and tuba; he had a concert that weekend.

The Valley rallied. Schools shut down and high schoolers filled sandbags for frantic homeowners. People with big rigs helped people without. Local construction companies carried gravel to washed-out roads. We managed. When the cats, The Boy and I returned home it was to find that though homes at the bridge end of our street had had to be sandbagged, our little old house sat high and dry on its little hill. We breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into our home.

And then, just a few weeks after the flood, the Corona Virus reached Washington, and then Weston, a little town about fifteen miles away. The uncertainty has been hard. What’s happening? Will there be a vaccine or not? If we get sick, what do we do? Where do we go? How do we pay the mortgage? I work in the “gig” economy; I don’t have the luxury of sick leave or unemployment insurance. I have only what I earn.

Advice started. Wash your hands. Keep your distance. Closures started. Schools and businesses in California and Seattle. And then word came that our university was closing early. All finals would be administered online. Next term will start not on a busy, lively campus, but in silent rooms where teachers will speak to screens.

The Boy had his last concert–it was the swing band, and he had a solo and rocked it. He had his last presentation and rocked that, too. He’s graduating this term, but there will be no ceremony–just a quiet acknowledgment, and a quiet party at home.


When we came to Milton we slipped back in time for a few years. We lived in a beautiful, twilight eternity. And then the bubble cracked. We lost Leroy. The Boy and I got sick. The world around us got sick. Politics, which for a while allowed us Hope smacked it right out of us. It became a foul, cynical, vicious thing, a cruel joke, and endlessly, openly, corrupt.

Even for people like us, in quiet backwaters, the stench of our dead and rotting system has become unbearable. The cyberattack, the flood, and now the Corona Virus pandemic are all symptoms of a world breaking down around us. We have always had crises, but in the past we took pride in stepping up and meeting the challenge, not just endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning. We have reached the point where the center no longer holds, and where even our quiet lives have become unrecognizable.

We have a president who, rather than enabling our own world-class scientists and systems to work effectively in combatting the virus, tries to make it into a money-making opportunity. Though overwhelming numbers of us support Medicare for All–something the virus has shown is in all of our best interests–we are saddled with a Congress refusing to act on our wishes and in our best interests.

The only solution on offer is to wash your hands and hide in your house. The thing that should make all of us stronger–our national self, our friends, neighbors, towns–is the thing that might well sicken or kill many of us. I am washing my hands. I am hiding in my house. I’ve worked from home for decades, so I know the moves. But contracts are being canceled as events are canceled or postponed. If I lose too many more I’ll be in serious trouble.

So what’s the point of all this? No matter how this comes out, I think we have reached a watershed. Colleges and universities will go back in session. The companies that survive the closures will re-open their doors. Children will go back to school. But I think something has irrevocably changed.

That beautiful golden bubble? The bubble in which for a while we lived out of time? That’s gone. It’s not even shards on the floor. The pace and magnitude of crises are accelerating, spinning us ever onward to that moment of freefall. The past wasn’t perfect. But there were certain things upon which we felt we could rely. Those things are gone. The center has not held. Yeats may have been writing about events he was around him; he might have been writing about our times as well. If the beast has not yet reached Bethlem, he has certainly programmed it into his GPS, and is no longer slouching, but speeding through the night.

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Read Full Post »

Free is Good…Yet ANOTHER UPDATE November 27

Today’s the last day to download Past Lives: A Journey free. Tomorrow, November 24, we’ll have a complete change of pace, when Redeeming Stanley: Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and Above All, Payback becomes the free download. Stanley’s been popular since he first met the public way back in 2009 (and won Audiolark’s Best of the Best e-books award, incidentally). Stanley is, of course, available in paperback and Kindle (and for free from November 24 to 28!), but he’s also available as an audiobook from Audiolark. He’s not free there, regrettably, but he’s still a darned good deal. So go on, download…download…

Available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon

November 19-23: Past Lives: A Journey
This is a tiny little collection of short stories that grew out of a series of past-life regression exercises. The stories are poetic, evocative, and thought-provoking, from the girl trapped in the desert to prove a point to the mistress who has discovered too late that relationships can be transforming to the milkmaid who lacks the courage to fight back to the woman who discovers that she has lost something she never realized she had–and in redeeming her present rewrites her past and her future, these are stories about love, what it means, and how we find it, lose it, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, discover it again within ourselves.
Reviews Download FREE November 19-23 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

November 24-28: Redeeming Stanley: Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and Above All, Payback
This little book right here is the reason I sometimes am startled to find myself turning up on Alternative Porn Sites. I think it’s the “bestiality” in the title. Which is warranted, but it’s the sort of warm, fuzzy bestiality that sort of slips by, only later provoking a double-take and a “Whoa, did she really go there?” Why yes, this book does indeed go there. It’s a fun, unlikely story about a collection of characters who really should have mutual restraining orders–old gods, the born-again christians who try to Save them, self-described Babe Magnet and armchair explorer of the female psyche Weldon Frame, The Freak, Satan, the Whore of Babylon, the Coppess (body by Frigidaire) and some trucker in a Peterbilt and a gimme John Deere cap. It won a “best of the best e-books” award back in the day, and has continued to sell steadily ever since. Also, reviews keep popping up from time to time, so word on the street is that it’s still a fun, funky, “guilty pleasure” sort of book, ideal for anybody who has discovered that she’s been dating in the shallow end of the gene pool, decides to stop, and learns that sometimes things can get a little messy. But funny. Book clubs like this one. I think you will, too.
Reviews  Download FREE from November 24-28 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

November 27-December 1 Good on Paper
Once upon a time, a king named David got the hots for a steamy little number named Bathsheba. Lucky for David, Mr. Bathsheba was busy being one of David’s best generals, so Bathsheba was home all by her lonesome…

See where this is heading? Of course you do.

So does Sarah Conrad, reluctant Bible scholar and unwilling paramour of televangelist Pastor Jimmy Jay Rayburn. It’s a destination she knows well. But the destination is only the beginning. Sarah doesn’t wind up sleeping with an aging “man of God” by accident. Eldest sister Elaine’s minister husband isn’t divorcing her on a whim. And middle sister Elizabeth doesn’t vanish in a fit of pique, leaving a dead dog, a roomful of blood, and Sarah and youngest Conrad DJ behind.

The Conrad children survive by keeping up appearances. But it costs them. When family patriarch Dan Conrad is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the children come home to help appearances are no longer enough, and tensions rise. When somebody winds up murdered the Conrads are forced to unravel their past in order to survive their present.

Set on a family farm in a fast-disappearing slice of America, Good on Paper is first and foremost a story in which to lose one’s self–readers consistently comment that they “couldn’t put it down.” But beyond that, the story raises questions. How do we determine who is “good?” How do we decide what is real? Do we respond to the victimization of others, and if so, how? How do we integrate a painful and abusive past into a vibrant and creative present and future? Above all, this story leaves readers wondering, with DJ Conrad, “…what it is about our family, our church, our society, that allows abusers to not only survive, but thrive.”

By turns infuriating, hilarious, magical, frightening, and lyrical, the Conrads’ story captures the paradox lying at the heart of abusive relationships, as well as the courage, honesty and humor that the Conrad children use to survive.

Tracing the Conrad children’s journey to healing and resolution makes for a powerful and haunting read, one that should appeal to a many, particularly those interested in understanding how the pain of an abusive past can become the fertile soil from which a rich, meaningful future can spring.

Reviews  Download FREE November 27-December 1 (it’s always free to Amazon Prime members)

So that’s what’s happening–don’t be shy about downloading, and if you like the books, we’d love it if you’d post a review or response on Amazon–or even write about it here! I’ll be reposting this from time to time, to just keep everybody updated on what’s going on, free-wise. Happy holidays!

Read Full Post »

Read Bodie Parkhurst Books for Free

For the next five days, Amazon is running a promotion on Bodie Parkhurst books–five titles can be downloaded and read for free. Free is good, but it’s not forever. Download your free copies today.

So here’s the deal, if you’ve been waiting to sample until the price was right, now’s the time. Here, for your information and delectation, is a list of the free titles, and what you can expect from them. For more information, visit the links at the top of the page, or check out Amazon’s “search inside” function.

Here’s the list:

Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and above all, Payback  The winner of AudioLark’s Best of the Best E-books contest in 2009, Redeeming Stanley is the cautionary and hilarious tale of Weldon Frame, his ex-girlfriend Annie, and what happens when they get all tangled up with the Old Gods, who have taken new jobs and are living just outside of Los Angeles. Check out the Amazon reviews for reader responses.

Benchmarks: A Single Mother’s Illustrated Journal  A memoir about mothering–and single mothering, specifically. It’s a warm, lovely book that challenges a lot of assumptions about what single parenting is, and is not.

And while you’re at it, check out the Benchmarks Baby line of mom and baby stuff at Magic Dog Press’ CafePress store.

Good on Paper  A book full of farmers, and staunch christians, and witches, and smart-mouthed women, and magic, and televangelists who sleep with the wrong women. Most of all, it’s a great story, narrated by four women, each of whom has a very different take on life. It’s terrifying, hilarious, magical, sarcastic, and poetic by turns. Set in a slice of America that’s fast disappearing, this is first and foremost a good story–a story in which to lose yourself–but it also raises questions worth asking about the links between abuse and fundamentalism, and about the nature and goal of healing from a painful past. So–a good story, with a sting in its tail.

Past Lives: A Journey  A small collection of short stories that grew out of a foray into past life exploration. While they don’t provide empirical evidence for or against the idea of past existences, they do make good reading–and they raise some interesting questions.

Force of Nature a sweet, sexy short story, just for mature readers, all about love, romance, magic, sex, and cows. And Russell. You don’t want to miss Russell.

Read Full Post »