WHO WAS SHE? When I discovered that my birth culture, Mormonism, was based on disadvanteged values, I stopped attending church meetings and functions. The reaction was immediate. Everyone I knew looked at me like a freak and treated me like a traitor. It was years before I understood the emotional violence caused by this kind of abandonment. As sentient beings we transfer our inner thoughts and feelings into physical form. That’s why we have thoughts that lead to ideas that lead to words and from words communication, automobiles, antibiotics, and books. I discovered there is good medicine in the pen. My own survival demanded that I transfer my experience and feelings into physical form. I wrote a nonfiction book. The experience was healing and left me wanting more. I wrote a memoir. That experience was also healing and left me wanting still more. The editor and teacher Jessica Morrell said, “fiction is written in the language of the heart”. I realized I needed to expand my expression, show rather than tell, what happens in life. Stephen King said, “In fiction we show the truth behind the lie.” I wrote a fiction. After it was published I went to Salt Lake City and entered it into a library of books for sale where a bunch of Naughty Mormons where holding a convention. Two days later I was on my cell arranging for a return flight to SeaTac. That’s when the lady, I had never seen before, spoke to me. “What do we do now?” We were in the near empty foyer of a hotel. I turned to see a pleasant looking lady with a pained expression standing behind me. I was baffled. Was she talking to me? “Hang on,” I said to the person I was talking to on my cell. “We’re you talking to me?” I said. That’s when I noticed the blue cover of the book – my book – she was holding. “What do we do now?” she repeated. A spike of angst ran through my gut. Still baffled, I told the person on the other end of the call I would get back to them and hung up. “Do I know you?” I offered. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said. I learned her life was upside down. Because of what she knew she couldn’t participate in church services anymore. Her neighbors stopped talking to her. Her husband was a good Mormon. He left her. I had written a suspense fiction in a Divinci Code cultural genre, but Mormon not Catholic. Obviously she had read it. At the time I wished this story had been made up. Now I understand she is living free of Mormon patriarchy and doing well.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 16:59:35 +0000
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