Author Talk with Christina Baldwin

The Great Falls Public Library welcomes Seattle-based author Christina Baldwin to the library, where she will talk about her newest book The Beekeepers Questions.

The book is about young lovers, old friends, a mountain valley and a North African battlefield: two Montana families facing loss, prejudice, violence and redemption in the uncertainty of 1940s America.

This story focuses on the Homefront because most of us live away from actual battlefields but are compelled to pay attention to images of suffering and raw story unspooling in real time. They listened to radio broadcasts and read newspapers; we stream global reality into our devices. In the early 1940s, the US was madly shifting from Depression-era isolationism to global leadership and fighting force. The outcome of the war was uncertain.  It was, in the living of it, a far more volatile, strenuous, and tenuous transition than myths have made of it since.

Baldwin was born in Montana into large families of English/Scots-Irish (dad) and Swedish/Norwegians (mom). Tucked among buttes and farmland, her grandparent’s homestead and honey business drew generations of descendants back for summers harvesting the garden, the honey crop, and imprinting on the land and vistas of the west.

Growing up in the Midwest, Christina’s heart always faced the mountains. She loved wind in her face, cowboy boots, reading and journal writing.