Author Event: Saturday, November 4, 2023 from 11am to 2pm
Please join us on Saturday, November 4, 2023 from 11am to 2pm when author Marleen Ramsey will be signing copies of My Mother Told Me Stories.
The story starts in the voice of 10-year-old Megan as she remembers the adventures of growing up in Walla Walla, a town in the southeastern corner of Washington State in the early 1960s. Megan has the usual struggles of growing up that most children have, but her concerns are complicated with the reality that she is half-Japanese and half-White. She also struggles with one concern that is unique to her and that is to understand why her mother is overly-protective and hovering, so different from the mothers of her friends. The mystery grows when she discovers pictures of her mother standing with a little Asian girl that she had never seen before in front of a drab and desolate looking building somewhere in an empty and arid landscape. On the back of the picture is written, Minidoka, 1943.
The second section of the book is written in a third voice narrative of what Megan’s mother, Hitomi, experiences after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the heart-breaking disruptions that turn her life upside down. Hitomi’s pre-war life is destroyed and she must re-build her future from the ashes of the past. This is a story of ordinary people, focusing centrally on one woman’s experience of extreme discrimination and disruption of her life. But it is also a story of surprising kindness, generosity, and friendship, of forgiveness and reconciliation, and the enduring love of family.
The final chapter of the book resolves the mystery of the sister Megan never knew she had and Hitomi’s reconciliation to the tragedy and loss she experienced during her incarceration at Minidoka.
About the author:
I.M. Ramsey has worked in a variety of roles in counseling, teaching, and administration at the collegiate level and feels very fortunate to have spent her entire professional career in academia. She retired in December of 2017 from teaching and her position as Vice President of Instruction (VPI), Chief Academic Officer (CAO) at Walla Walla Community College. Her primary research interest has focused on the impact of empathy and forgiveness and the relational dynamics between perpetrators and those who extend forgiveness to them.
My Mother Told Me Stories, is her first novel with the story based upon the themes found in her South African research of apartheid political perpetrators who received empathy and forgiveness from family members of their victims. I.M. Ramsey lives in Washington State and enjoys spending time with her husband, their daughters, sons-in-law, and three grandsons, a.k.a. “the three scampering squirrels.”