Penelope’s Odyssey

This contemporary Penelope wastes no time weaving and unweaving tapestries while awaiting news of her disappeared husband. Instead, she struggles to strike a path to her future after Odysseus abandons her. A single mother of two, living in poverty, and wrestling with undefined demons, Penelope charts her own course of self-discovery to learn the hard truth about her family and her Native American roots in a telescopic odyssey of stories-within-stories featuring women in search of identity and meaning. Her personal journey requires her to make sense of the tragedy suffered by her Tribe and the imposed assimilation that robbed her of her culture. The fictional tribal history portrayed in the novel is based on the little-known true history of an Eastern Pomo Tribe that dwelled on the shores of Clear Lake, California for thousands of years until the Tribe was annihilated in 1880.

The narrative loosely follows the plot and more closely follows the themes of the Odyssey, remaking Homer’s classic in a modern setting and telling the story from the point of view of the wife Odysseus left behind. This talereminds us that humans have grappled with tough questions and challenges since before Homer’s time, reaching back thousands of years to the days when indigenous people first gazed at the night sky in wonder. Penelope’s Odyssey explores themes of oppression, displacement, survival, forgiveness, loss, hope, love, righting past wrongs, and, ultimately, what it means to come home in the world.