An Introduction

If you're here, there's a good chance you are familiar with my earlier work, a book I published in 2013 called Circling Back Home: A Plainswoman's Journey.  It was a collection of nonfiction essays about my life las a rancher's wife, my heritage growing up on the plains of South Dakota, and the perennial struggles of a mother raising a large family and just learning life's lessons. 

For many of my readers, the book inspired a kind of nostalgia for a "simpler" time. It's a draw I see all around me today - a yearning to go back to an earlier time when values weren't quite so diverse, or at least to a place where people mostly think the same. 

That book was never written to be nostalgia, and indeed, the questions I struggled with in the book about my family's history and patterns are questions that remain largely unresolved today. If I've learned anything after writing Circling, it's that the essential questions of one's life come back, in various forms, and just when you think you have the answers, you are back facing the question again. 

So, this blog is another attempt to circle back.  I suppose there are several reasons to write. 

* Like many writers, I have a constant conversation with myself about the topics in this blog. Writing these conversations is one way to find some clarity and a path out of the muddled thoughts. This blog, then, is an intensely personal conversation with myself. 

*  I don't like a lot of the things I wrote about in Circling.  As I wrote that book, I was unduly influenced by the opinion of my then-husband, Shawn, and I was not always truthful or authentic in my writing.  This blog is now an attempt to circle back and correct some of the things that were left unsaid, or outright changed, in the 2013 book. 

*  My life has completely changed since the book was published.  I'm now divorced, and estranged from some of my kids.  I live in town, by myself - such a change from the woman who wrote and appeared in the essays in that book.  I'm writing because the book now feels false, and I need to re-establish who I am as a writer. 

* I'm a pattern person, and although I was unable to foresee what happened to me, and my marriage, I am now seeing similar patterns in my professional life and in our culture.  And I would like space in this blog to examine some of those patterns and extrapolate what I can from them. 

*  I hated the word "Plainswoman" in the title of the book -- it was selected by my publisher, the South Dakota Historical Society Press, in an attempt to, I think, make the book seem more Laura Ingalls Wilder-ish.  Now, I am intrigued by the plainswomen I meet in my reading and research - women who, like my grandmothers, sat on the margins of society.  I wasn't comfortable with that role in 2013.  I'm still not - but here I am, a woman outside of the margins of my religion, my family, my community, and my culture.  I think I would like to explore this role more and see what it has to offer before outright rejecting it. 

This blog will be a work in progress, meaning that I will be rewriting and changing the entries as I go along.  If you feel like commenting, please do - your questions may help me further define my point and clarify my thinking.

And if it will bother you that I unravel a lot of what I wrote in Circling, please pass on by.  I won't bear you any ill will for doing that.