Christina Baldwin’s historical novel, The Beekeeper’s Question, published last October, was inspired by her grandfather and father’s lives, portraying the struggles of a rural Montana family living through WWII’s impact on their town. “I borrowed my family’s locale and occupations as a stage set and set the characters free to make their own story,” she said while we chatted in her office with a view of the Salish Sea.
Nationally recognized as a pioneer teacher and author in journal writing and memoir, with eight published books in this field, the novel is the result of Baldwin seeking a new creative challenge for herself as she turned 70. That was 2016, and after twenty-five years collaborating with her partner, Ann Linnea, to reintroduce and modernize circle facilitation, and co-authoring their book, The Circle Way, A Leader in Every Chair in 2010, they transferred their teaching resources to The Circle Way and prepared to retire. “I had this story roaming around my head that wouldn’t let me go,” she recalled.
Branching into fiction for the first time, Baldwin explored threads that influenced her life. “I taught a memoir class for 32 years and mentored hundreds of stories of survival as people came to the classes determined to turn trauma into art.”
When Baldwin taught workshops at Aldermarsh retreat center in Clinton, her corgi, Gracie, was allowed to be a member of the group. Baldwin reminisced, “I noticed how she identified a writer who was struggling emotionally in the moment, and would quietly sit next to that person, and they would calm down.”
What was the source of that calm?
“It raised the question: What is it that watches over us in our lives and comes to us when we need it? Many people answer that question through religion, but I was seeking something even broader. Some kind of spiritual guardian that just shows up in life. If we notice, it is always present to us.” In her teaching moments, the dog embodied that presence; in the novel, it became the bees.
“So, I started writing a story about a woman’s life from the perspective of dog after dog after dog,” Baldwin recalled. “I decided to start in the 1940s with the expectation that every chapter would be a different dog. But the 1940s wouldn’t let me move forward. The family and the era took over.”
Meanwhile, her father, Leo Baldwin, had moved to Langley at the age 86. “After a long career on the East Coast, living in the village, hanging out at the Commons Cafe & Books, attending Langley United Methodist Church, awoke in him all these recollections about growing up in a village in the middle of Montana,” Baldwin said. “In the book, the character of the preacher and beekeeper, Leo Cooper, is based on my grandfather and on the stories my father brought to life from that time period.”
So arose Baldwin’s second question as a writer: could this story help contemporary readers by modeling what it takes to live a moral life in immoral times? “I believe our ancestral lineages hold a moral code that we need to keep translating from the times they lived in to the times we are living in. The echoes from then to now get more and more pronounced. And through story we can step out of the present to gain perspective.
“I wasn’t writing a memoir of my family,” Baldwin noted. “I kept the beekeeping, the preacher-ing, the landscape of west-central Montana. And I kept the history of a cavalry fort at the edge of the town which had been turned into an Indian residential school from 1882-1910. My grandfather’s first mission was to teach at that school.
“In 1910, my grandfather’s considered the treatment of the Indian children he was supposed to ‘Christianize,’ the most unchristian behavior he had ever witnessed. It changed his theology and sense of social justice that has trickled down through the family.”
This personal connection also gave Baldwin a theme for the book and the need to educate herself about the deeper issues of western settlement, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and to weave it all into the timeframe of her story.
The nearby Blackfeet reservation is real, and to bring it to life in the novel, Baldwin visited the Montana reservation.
“It took me three years to find someone in the tribe who was willing to have a relationship with me,” she recalled. “I found a Blackfeet cultural advisor. I told her ‘…I want to bring your language, your culture, and our shared history respectfully into this story.’ I could not have done what I have with this story without her. She is acknowledged in the book, but not by name. She went to her elders and asked how they would like this represented. They said they wanted honor given to all the Piikuni people.”
This interwoven history forms the foundation in which Baldwin’s imagination weaves her tale: In autumn 1941, an Irish immigrant woman falls in love with Leo Cooper’s son, Franklin, a newly enlisted soldier stationed on the East Coast. Pearl Harbor happens. The United States enters WWII. They marry. Franklin is called to duty overseas. His wife Maire—pronounced Moor-uh—now pregnant, travels to Montana to stay with her widowed father-in-law who at first knows nothing about her. He teaches her about bees and rural living.
In The Beekeeper’s Question, the Cooper family is the protagonist.
“I didn’t want a lone hero story. A situation like the war activates drama and trauma for everyone. I wanted the family to be the protagonist,” Baldwin said. “So, in writing this story, everyone is in challenge and struggle. Old issues surface. People are stressed and grieving. Outcome is uncertain. They have to work together. In dreaming the plot, the Cooper family, the townspeople, all come through their struggles to make an arc of growth. They shift from where they started from to where they end up. In writing, I call that ‘making the rainbow and bringing it to ground.’
“In a story like this everyone has personal growth except the villain. The role of the villain is to personify evil or psychosis where a person is so entrenched they will do anything to get their way. They, then, and us, now, are confronted with choices about how we live embedded in the history swirling around us.”
Acknowledging that her grandfather’s family benefitted in the early 1900s from the Homestead Act of 1862, by being gifted nearly free land that was part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Baldwin spoke about how white people lived with their conscience at the time.
Additionally, WWII revolutionized the country at the time and forms another strong thread in the novel. Baldwin asked her characters how they got through the war. Her own father served as a conscientious objector.
“What were the challenges? I dove into the level of research that was required. My father kept saying this was a HUGE revolution in American social history,” Baldwin added. “Most books are about the drama of the battlefield, but I became fascinated with what happened on the Homefront.”
She quoted from a scene in the summer of 1942 between Leo and his friend Doc, an older single woman practicing medicine in the rural Montana valley. “Doc and Leo are rocking on the porch chairs, staring into the wheat and clover fields that edge the town. Leo says, ‘Philosophy, music, architecture, literature, democracy…I will not accept fascism as the final outcome of Western civilization.’ But they don’t know what to do. They feel the dilemma in their aging bones. We are in that question again today.”
Since its October launch in Langley with 150-plus attendees, The Beekeeper’s Question is gaining appeal with book groups. Baldwin just returned from Arizona and attending the Tucson Festival of the Book. She visits with book clubs around Puget Sound and on her travels. She joins in discussions on Zoom. Because of readers’ interest, Baldwin also hosts her own Zoom talks in alternate months for “…readers who have finished the book and want to do a deeper dive into the issues raised. My blog deals with those issues as well.” Her upcoming call on May 10th, will focus on bees and shamanism.
To learn more about the book and about Christina Baldwin’s world, Christina Baldwin’s webpage. The book is available at local bookstores, on Bookshop, and Amazon. It’s in print, e-book, and soon in audio.