Decades ago, in an amazing college course entitled, “Initiation Mysteries in Literature,” two eccentric and brilliant professors led us in the study of the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck as a visual map of esoteric wisdom. It gave me an early respect for “back stories:” how knowledge embeds itself, hides in plain sight, and continues to inform. I have moved on in the study of Tarot and enjoyed other renditions, especially the work of my friend Joanna Powell Colbert., but imagery from the Rider-Waite deck still cycles through me. This summer I have been haunted by the Five of Cups. The illustration shows a cloaked figure staring at three goblets tipped and spilled onto the ground. The traditional interpretation states: Sadness, loss, grief, despair, regret, trauma, heartbreak, unwelcome change.

Yikes! That’s a lot of discouragement—but familiar! All these emotions have been spinning on the roulette wheel of my heart as I track what is happening, if not in my immediate life, certainly close by. World on fire, rivers in flood, unbearable heat, the cost to everything—humans, animals, plants and planet. Some mornings I can hardly catch my breath between sorrows and outrage.

Waite deck Five of Cups

But despite this dire list, The Five of Cups is not a card of collapse: it is a card of choice. Right behind the figure are two upright goblets that still hold wine or water. The image is a reminder that what we focus on shapes our experience. “Turn around!” I want to shout at the bowed figure— “Three are lost, but two remain.” And that seems an appropriate mantra for tending my/our mental health and well-being in the current state of the world. Things are happening that cannot be undone, but all is not lost. When we turn around—we discover the full cups that remain in our personal lives, in our communities, and in the wider world.

What still “runneth over” in my life? Where is abundance overflowing? How do I offer my largesse to those whose cups are empty? And when my own cup tips over, what and whom do I allow to fill me again?

These are not idle musings, but serious questions that I face morning by morning. All of us are vulnerable to life’s perils. Like in the background of the card, the river is wide… and we need bridges over troubled water. “Choose,” is my first word of the day; a negotiation between malaise and resilience.

Three are spilled. I am an oldering woman with most of my life already lived. But I am still determined to contribute. It is quite a spiritual practice to keep an open heart and hold a steady beat. Discouragement is a slippery slope, and I have made a vow to use my eighties wisely, to muster my energies to uphold the common good. Choose—is sometimes a shout, sometimes a whisper.

Two are full. Right now, in this moment, I have strength to meet the day. When I dedicate myself to pouring out whatever is left in the two cups, I am energized rather than discouraged. My head is not bowed in despair, but in gratitude, and I stand with the lessons learned long ago and still relevant today.

What has been lost and what remains in your life?

I’ll be write here.

READER’S ZOOM, CANCELLED FOR AUGUST—It’s summer, folks are vacationing, or busy, or coping with weather, or caught in disasters. Sending prayers into this world on fire, rivers in flood, unbearable heat. May we continue to pull together even if the world is pulling apart.

And the author did great. At my first presentation, I met the Sun River Valley book club that came into Great Falls for my lecture at the library (video link here) and then we all went out to a restaurant for two hours of amazing conversation. It was my first chance to sit with people who live in the territory of the story, whose families lived in the valley at the time of the story. People embedded in rural culture and landscape, knowing the landmarks, the weather, the field roads that I dared to write about from research and memory. They could be specific in ways that delighted me. They said I got it right.

Glacier Park Lodge was a smaller audience, but people stopped by and bought books or used QR codes to order e-books and audio. Vacation readers carried the story east, just as the train carried our forbearers west.

On Saturday morning I drove out to Sun River, visited my family graves and stopped by the farm of the Parker family. Ralph Parker was my father’s best friend in high school. His wife, Ethel, still alive at 103, is the last. Those August childhood trips, we’d visit this farm, parents on the porch, kids ruff and tumble playing.

This Saturday morning, overcast and cool, I sat at their kitchen table and listened to them reminisce about their parents, my parents and “the Rev,” my grandfather. They bought copies of the book for every sibling. M. held the book to her chest, hand on the photo of the butte that loomed around us, and said, “People write up family histories, but to have a story in our valley… well, thanks for choosing this place.”

“Of course,” I said, “It’s the only place the story could have happened.”

And then, behind the wheel of my rental car, I headed into the storyfield. It had recently rained, and the countryside and buttes blushed green. I took to the back country highways astonished at the expanse, the emptiness, the big sky, antelope, deer, coyote.

I am playing Alyssa Keene’s amazing audio of the book in one ear. The miles unfold in a timelessness of ribboned blacktop. I drive down Doc Russell Road and stop by the house with the hives stacked out back. At the fort I put my hand on the trunk of the cottonwood where Willow prayed. I drive by bee yards where Leo and Maire worked. I’m on the same highway where Jesse and Leo took the turnoff to Valier. Around me, undulating countryside and the spine of the Rocky Mountains. Coming onto the Blackfeet Reservation, grazing cattle and horses and the clustered buildings of family allotments. I touch the territory of the story from one end to the other.

My whole body is vibrating. My mitochondrial DNA is spiraling with the land itself. I am fresh rain on dry soil. I am dinosaur fossils and bison bones plowed to the surface. I am beehives and clover fields. I am farmhouses and cattle, wheatfields and sugar beets.

I share this because there is an alchemical interaction that occurs in writing. There is, at some level, an agreement that the story is writing the writer while the writer is writing the story. Fictional characters are energetic entities. They come when summoned. They coalesce, make relationships and have experiences the writer only discovers by writing. They argue back. If the writer veers too far off course, they stop the story. We may call it “writer’s block,” but I think it’s also “character rebellion.” (That happened to me several times, and once I listened to them the story advanced.)

I am listening again today. The story is writ. The book is published. The novel is making its way in the world. Yet, here I am, inside an interactive experience where the land, the vistas, my words/the characters’ words spool into my ear in the magic of Alyssa’s voice. I keep reciting, “Accept and allow.”

Sunday afternoon, I swing by the cemetery one more time. I intended to lie down on the bones and ashes of those ancestors resting here, but the rain that has hung back these days now storms around me.

Caged in the car, I write in my journal, the cemetery smeary through the windshield. And the thought arises: there is one character in the story who does not have a voice. She’s a baby. Her only line is “mama…” And then, I hear Flora speaking softly in my heart…

They are all gone now, of course. And I myself am an old woman. My father used to say, “Folks will study this war, write about it, analyse what happened for a hundred years.” I didn’t believe him then, the years of my childhood so forward-looking, but I see now it is true. I have decades of history running in my veins, and the hard knowledge of what has become of America, the farmlands, the tribes and tribal lands, the ties of community and family, the waning of things they cherished, the rising of things they could not imagine. Both good and bad. Advances and retreats. The writer finished the book, but the story does not end. One day the writer will end. I will end. But the story goes on and that is our comfort.

We are crying now, Flora and I. Thank you, baby girl, for growing up to be me.

I turn on the car and head into the city and the airplane home.

Upcoming Events:

Turning Points: A Story Exploration with Christina Baldwin- Sunday July 12th 6-9 PM EDT

You are the North STAR of your Life. Story is how we weave life experience into a narrative thread that explains our past, organizes our present, and guides our future. Using a visual of a five-pointed star and simple instructions, Christina Baldwin, has helped thousands of people identify turning points in their life stories and reflect on the impact of moments that define them. Based on her classic book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, this three-hour workshop will give participants a chance to work with the StorySTAR, explore a turning point, and understand how to further delve into the context of life-changing events. A combination of lecture, conversation, writing time, and small group harvest.

Get your tickets to the workshop here!

NEXT BACKSTORIES READER ZOOM: JULY 11 @ 9:00 AM/Pacific, 10:00/Mountain, 11:00/Central, noon/Eastern. Here’s the link: click for your time. We’ll talk about traveling, about homecoming, and that mysterious interweaving of writer and characters. OPEN TO ALL.

I live on ground once occupied by the Snohomish tribe, one of many peoples who lived alongside and paddled through the Salish Sea. When the ice melted, the people followed. When the forests grew, the people made Long Houses. When the rivers flowed, the people fished returning hordes of salmon. The people are still here. I’m the newcomer.

I was born in Butte country, boxy formations of sedimentary rock that protrude above plains of soil and bedrock in the Rocky Mountain Front. In 1910, my grandparents homesteaded on land that had been occupied for 10,000 years by the Amskapi Piikuni, people of the greater Blackfoot Confederacy that stretched from Yellowstone into Alberta and Saskatchewan. Here is a map of that land when 20,000,000 bison ranged, and the people followed.

Below is a map of Montana drawn up by officials in the Homestead Acts. This “giveaway” of the continent’s public lands was originally based on the desire to prevent plantation development and enslavement as the country expanded westward. The drive was to give the common man (and woman, and immigrant—but not the Negro or Indian) the chance to own and produce livelihood on small acreage. On that level it seemed a democratic ideal—only the “lands” the government divided to sell were the traditional homelands of hundreds of sovereign Indian nations and required massive displacement and genocidal policies.

In the closing scene of The Beekeeper’s Question, a neighbor rancher is driving the young soldier (Franklin) from Great Falls into the countryside to meet up with his wife and family. It is late autumn, 1943. …”The modern landscape splayed out before them in a grid of homestead lines, irrigation ditches, railroad tracks. Boxy grain elevators and church spires poked the sky, and clustered farm buildings invoked a litany of names Franklin had known all his life. But something much older lay just below the plowed surface: a wilder land, a freer people, and the symbiosis of bison and grass that sustained a culture ten thousand years long.” (p359)

Read the Beekeeper's Question

How it is now is not how it’s always been. How it is now is not how it will always be.

End of June, the book and I are going home to touch this scene, and this feeling, to kneel on the ground with humility, grateful to be passing through. I am going back to butte country to stand in the winds of change. I am going to offer events at the two ends of the story’s territory: Great Falls and East Glacier. I am standing my ground to more widely introduce the story and share what it was like to research and fictionalize this place, my family, and to create new people wholly out of imagination. And I am going to Montana to listen, to discover more backstories, to bring more voices into my heart. Find some of the voices of Montana here, in these snippets from the Life in the Land film.

You’ll be hearing about my trip as I go. Send me questions if you like. I’ll be write here.

When I was a child, we often spent several weeks in August at Fort Shaw, a tiny town thirty-five miles out of Great Falls where my grandparents had homesteaded in 1909. When I was a child in the 1960s, after the men brought in the honey crop—my grandfather, father, and assorted uncles—and the women canned the garden— my grandmother, mother, and various aunts—my family of six would enjoy one last dinner at the big table and then pile into the station wagon and head into the 1000-mile drive back to Minneapolis. The littler kids were tucked into the “far back,” my mother, folded along the back seat, would rest up for the midnight shift. Dad and I would sit up front. My job: keep him awake. I pestered him with questions: “Tell me about the buffalo jump. Did you ever have a horse? Did you ride it to school? What was the town like then? Were there blizzards? What’s a chinook wind? What’s the scariest thing that happened to you? What was the best?” He would drive, and I would listen. Backstories of rural life in the 1930s and 40s.

It’s not that I filled the novel with specific family anecdotes, but all this storytelling created a nutrient rich mental mulch that fertilized my capacity, decades later, to turn history into fiction. Our little piece of Montana grounded the story and the lives of the characters. Weather, seasons, local history, farming practices, the balance of insularity and vulnerability between these rural communities and what was happening in society at large.

I was born in Montana but have never lived in Montana. And my father, while obviously nostalgic about his youth, spent his adult life in big cities and big organizations. Yet, he dreamed of return. Told me that one day he wanted to get on a horse and follow the railroad tracks all the way home. At age eighty-six, he drove himself from Silver Spring, Maryland to Whidbey Island, Washington, (2500 miles!) and moved into a condo ten miles from my house. We picked up the backstories as easily as we had those hours driving into summer dusk and dark. I worked diligently on early drafts of the book, taking chapters to him for review, especially the details of life in Montana before I was born.

And between 2006 and his death twelve years later, we returned by car and plane back to his birthplace, to wander through memories and visit his sister, a gentle matriarch who lived to 103. I finished the book in 2024, and now in June 2026, the book and I are returning together to the ground from which it sprang.

Celebration lights inside me at this thought, and also, sweet grief. When my father was dying in October 2018, the last words I said to him were, “I’m gonna finish it, Dad.” So, I will visit the small sunburnt cemetery alongside Sun River where there’s a headstone marked simply: BALDWIN. There lie the caskets of my grandparents and the urns of my father, an uncle, two aunts all nestled together. In neighboring graves, more aunts and uncles, a cousin or two. And Doc.

I will read some passages to my ancestors and give thanks that I have been allowed to carry this gift of story into the world.

The Coopers—in the story—are not the Baldwins. When people ask why I wrote fiction instead of memoir, it’s because I wanted freedom to tell a story that could veer from reality, a story that might lead readers to our better natures. There is something to be celebrated about this time-period and the ways that communities faced the Depression, then the War. Some of this emerged in my father’s stories and in the larger family history, but I did not want to lionize or demonize my own family. There are also issues of genocide, both the people and the bison, that my family, and many settler families, did not deal with, or even acknowledge. I grew up in the romance of the pioneer, looking for agates and arrowheads with no understanding of the ground I was standing on. I needed fiction on the page to confront the fiction of my own history.

I needed Montana. I needed to shift narratives. I needed to find my own ways to speak what happened so that I could bring the reader to what happened. So, now The Beekeeper’s Question and I are traveling home. I am excited to show my slide show, to talk about the book, and equally excited to listen to Montana voices.

I have two presentations scheduled, 6:30 PM Thursday evening, June 25 in Great Falls at the Public Library, and 7:00 PM Saturday evening, June 27 in East Glacier at the Glacier Park Lodge. The presentations honor the two families who carry the story: the Coopers and the Shines the Light clan. They honor the communities on which the story stands: “Pigeon River,” and the Blackfeet Reservation. If you’re in the area—come and bring friends. If you haven’t read the book—click below for print, e-, or audio.

Young lovers, old friends, a butte-shadowed valley and a North African battlefield: two Montana families face loss, prejudice, violence and redemption in the uncertainty of 1940s America.

That’s the story—and then there’s the story behind the story. The presentations share how Montana itself is a character, how the land and its people are inseparable, and how themes of resilience, settlement, the Fort Shaw Indian School, and a sense of moral code get families and communities through hard times.

I appreciate so much that some of you have chosen to become paid subscribers and support my ability to keep bringing my voice to you, and to creating a community of call and response. This slide show of backstories that informed the book is the kind of in-depth engagement I want us to have, and while building readership I want access to remain open to all.

Aging is privilege. Just ask my friend Lynne who died at 42, or my cousin Claudine who died at 60, or any number of people who are candles in our hearts—cancer and other uncured diseases, car wrecks, even addiction and the desperate heartbreak of suicide. People we miss, times we miss, memories that travel with us.

Also ask my grandmothers. One dropped in the street from heart attack walking with her husband to get lunch after their doctor appointments. Her last words a surprised whisper, “Leo, I think I’m going…” She was 80. My age. My other grandmother had a magnificent 100^th birthday party and then outlived three of her four children in the next five years. She would call and tell me, “I think Jesus has forgotten to come get me…” Or ask me, “Can I come live with you a while, so I can die? It’s too noisy here, too much bustling about.”

My mother, who lived to 96, used to say, “If you make it through cancer alley, between 60-7O, and don’t step off the curb without a good look, you’ve likely got another 15-20 years.” I’ve been lucky so far about the cancer thing. I look both ways crossing the street. I’m aiming for 90.

The words and pictures of these women shimmer in my mind and heart as I step into my eighties. MY eighties: mine to make do with, to complete the sense of my life as an arc. In writing, I call it bringing the rainbow to ground. I am focused on that rainbow: writing this blog, a film treatment for The Beekeeper’s Question, bits of life review I’m calling Mosaic, online teaching and tending a busy personal life.

The words in the above paragraph that are the most significant are “mine to do with…” What privilege to live with enough security, health, and modest resources to design my days. To bloom—like the marvelous and aged plants around me—the 100-year-old Doug fir that towers over our house, the 40-year-old rhododendrons and crabapple tree, and even the 25-year-old Christmas cactus that always blooms on Mother’s Day. These “old ladies” of the plant queendom endure winter winds and cold. They don’t complain. They bloom back into flower every spring. They are my teachers. For my primary job at this age is to not squander this blooming, to be strategic, to hold focus, to turn my face to the light and stay rooted in the ground of my being. And to acknowledge that life is changing—not only in me/us, but all around me/us, and our conditions for life are both strong and fragile.

There is a Celtic invocation spoken this time of year in the Olde Ways across the northern hemisphere when days lengthen. The dedicated stand in Nature to greet the morning light, and say into the landscape around them, “Oh Lady, thy light is the field. Oh Lady thy breast is the hill. Pour it out for me, my Lady, and I will take all you offer.”

Morning light, the month of May. I stand on my front porch, watching reflected sunrise shine across the mountain tops. Grandmother fir rises behind me and the rhodies have my back. And I vow to receive what Spirit offers, and to pour out all I have left to give in return.

How are you blooming this spring?

What are you pouring out of yourself?

What sustains you in this?

Where is beauty?

Breathe with these inquiries. Share a backstory if you like. And as Rita Wilson invites us, let us gather up all our past selves, have tea with our “community of angels” and take the next step and the next.

I’m write here

.

Backstories intrigue me because they answer questions like: What happened before we find ourselves in a situation, a choice point, a crossroads? What happens afterwards? How does this moment influence us?

Everything we do, all the uncountable yeses and nos, “change our lives forever.” We may not even notice, or it may take us years to notice. When the consequences of something become clearer, that’s when I want to untangle the narrative thread that leads to now.

I am a writer. I have had ten nonfiction books published, and recently, a novel. There’s backstory to this career—hundreds of backstories. Here’s a few I remember…

I am lying on my bed with my chin on the windowsill and staring into the woods at the edge of the yard. It was spring, probably Saturday since I wasn’t headed to school or church. A deer came over the rise: I saw her. She saw me. I composed the following poem: The deer move on dainty feet/across the dewy lawn, /the buck the leader of his fleet/followed by doe and fawn.” A snippet, but it rhymed so it must be a real poem.

I can feel the pinch of pencil between my fingers and thumb, the glide of my palm over the fibers of wide-lined school paper. To hear words that rise not from a book, but from inside my own mind is magic. I decide to be a real writer. I have a library card. I am reading Caddie Woodlawn, and Beyond the Paw Paw Trees. Reading is magic: writing is even bigger magic. I guard this thought so no one tells me I can’t, or I’m not good enough, or whatever a grownup might say that stops a dream.

On my twelfth birthday I start a diary—three lines, tiny spaces, five years to a page. Entries ranged from “the mashed potatoes were lumpy” to “I like John. Don’t tell,” to “Mom keeps bossing me and I’m not a little kid,” to “there are so many atomic bombs, I hope nobody blows up the world.” Then in eighth grade we read Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. Weeping with grief and identification, I create a tiny cubby-hole of my own under a workbench in the corner of the basement and start a real journal.

Sixty-six years later, still writing.

Backstory is noticing how memory is sticky—not just a thought, but a thought attached to the body, to place, to emotion. A backstory gathers things around it, a pencil and paper, the little book with no room to really say anything, and then suddenly the long-dead Dutch schoolgirl whose voice survived against all odds hands me a blank notebook.

In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for seventeen days in the middle of my junior year of high school, it seemed actually possible that the Soviet Union and the United states might blow each other up. I took a metal banker’s box from the basement, filled it with my copy of Anne Frank’s diary, some pages of my own diary, newspapers with large type threatening headlines, a Bible I got in first grade, and buried it all in the woods behind our house. In the event of nuclear holocaust, maybe someone would dig this up in the far, far, future and hear the stumbling thoughts of two girls, two wars, two timelines.

In 2007, when I wrote Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, I told this backstory. At the end of every chapter, I listed writing prompts and questions—I designed them for the book’s readers, but of course they were also for me, for finding backstories. And one question has never left me:

What do we leave in the Earth for the future to find?

Stories.

Even though they are not artifacts, stories record life. Ordinary lives. Our lives. What it is like to live on the ground while history happens. Substack is one such repository, a huge banker’s box full of buried treasures—a trove of stories, essays, journalism, information, misinformation, a broad spectrum of “free speech,” the edges of which make others wince. So don’t go there. If we want free speech for ourselves, we have to tolerate an environment in which it is allowed for others. I do not approve hate speech or tolerate verbal violence, I’m focused on creating safe haven for our backstories, our truths and struggles and triumphs.

I am a life-long writing teacher, supporting people to claim their stories, and through writing turn tragedy into triumph, victimization into victory. I belong to communities of practice where we craft meaning out of the overwhelming flotsam and jetsam of the story field and find ways to deposit story legacies. Meaning-making is important work: it’s how we follow our moral compass. And backstories guide us to “true north.”

I have been present at so many miracles, so much healing. I have always taught with people sitting in a circle, where we are all writers who read our stories to the center, using our voices as sacred flame. Story is ritual in the circle: one speaks or reads and the others listen.

Years ago, a young widow came to my seminar to write the death scene of her husband. After reading, she said, “There is a sound in me that is his death… I could never utter it.”

“If you are ready, you can utter it now,” I said. Fifteen women held the space. She made a groan that screamed and rolled in the room, and as it subsided others in the circle picked up the tone, sounding a harmonic chord that vibrated through all of us. We got up, walked with her into the meadow outside our teaching space, gave the chord to the ground, the sky, and let it linger into silence. Together, we put that story in the Earth for the future to find.

Storycatching is sacred practice. We do it alone, writing our backstories. We do it together, sharing our insights. This Substack is where I offer my words, welcome comments, and join in community.

I’ll be write/right here.

Curious about my work?

My major books are below. My website has many resources, videos, podcasts, and years of archived blogposts. www.christinabaldwin.com.

If you know someone who would like to join this Backstories newsletter, please share it!

Share

If you would like to check out my books, simply click on the cover below to purchase your copy!