Based intermittently on a true story, parts of STONE CREEK WOMAN are coincidental to the personal life of Sage Sweetwater.  As a spousal-abuse survivor herself, she wrote this "medicine" novel to heal herself through the many hours of research, and has helped immensely in her individual growth, giving her a purpose outside herself.

Sage Sweetwater lives in the Wet Mountains of Colorado with her white wolves.  She has raised wolf cubs, beginning a proper socialization for them before offering them to women who wished to begin a healing process, and for women who wanted an alternative companion.

SYNOPSIS

In honor of the Sacajawea dollar coin, STONE CREEK WOMAN represents feminist frontiers.  The lesbian character Stone Creek Woman is a half-breed modern-day Sacajawea who leads groups of battered women on a therapy trek to alpine refuge across Colorado's western frontier via llamas to get themselves back into the primal element of life in an undiluted, natural environment.

Her eight-day medicine camp teaches alternative healing and the survival of women's societies, self-sufficiency, and sweeps female sexuality out of the closet through the healing activities of nature.

The character Sage has left her abusive marriage and returned to her Colorado hometown.  She is a battered woman who feels like she is a remnant, a surviving trace, a wounded woman looking for a new start at Stone Creek Woman's medicine camp.

A lesbian friendship comes about between the character Sage and a lovely Norwegian woman in the group.  Lilliehaun is a harpist who has recorded a CD live from the fishing piers in Norway and in a reindeer meadow.  She is a visiting composer in the Aspen Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado to promote her music so she can finance permanent residency in the United States for herself, her gifted eight-year-old daughter Anastasia and her daughter's tutor, Inga.

These are the main characters: Stone Creek Woman, CopperJade, Tanner Jo, Blue Corn Woman, Sage, Lilliehaun, Anastasia, and Inga.

Sage Sweetwater weaved them colorfully into a manuscript with six chapters, a chapter for each hole of a traditional Native American flute; one hole for each of the four directions, a hole for skyward, and a hole for earthward.

These are the chapters; Shared Blessings, Endangered Species, Sacred Shelters, Canoe Medicine, Moving the Pack, and Reintroduction.  Sage recorded the words, knowledge, and images with a confidence needed for STONE CREEK WOMAN to find its way to battered women and all other women.

These are the sections of a bookstore STONE CREEK WOMAN will be shelved; Psychology, Women's Studies, Spiritual, Native American, and Lesbian.

Sage wrote STONE CREEK WOMAN for the same reason it can be categorized; for healing value, for message narration, entertainment for the female soul, and as a Native American instrument, the flute, which accents her words in a "song" of nature worthy of a meaningful listening experience.

This is where Sage plants her seeds, waters her paragraphs, harvests the knowledge, and conjures conversation with her agent; in a discarded, leaky canoe she sealed with pinion pitch and filled with peat and perlite and food spikes nourishing good literary soil, where she borrows and plants kindly, her final healing word to battered women; "Karvanukanu."
 
 

Excerpt
COVER BLURB

A battered woman's life depends greatly on the ability to detect and respond to change. The slightest shift in the scent carried by the wind alerts battered women of the predators.

Survival of the fittest favors those women who are keenly aware of stimulus change. Women have inherited this biological olfactory radar, but few respond to it. When the balance is tilted, nature accepts us.

The more battered women face down their conflicts and seek out their own solutions, the more inner freedom and strength they will gain and energy is available for more positive efforts.

Think of it as when you were a little girl, wading through the piles of autumn leaves. STONE CREEK WOMAN is a cornucopia of crisp metaphors which will dramatically change the dull color of a battered woman's life and transform her into a brilliance of precious gold and fiery red.

Warm, healing metaphors pour like fall apple cider. The message narrations are entertaining and cautionary, written for and about women, which contain useful truths and teaches the survival of women's societies.

STONE CREEK WOMAN is a messenger of beauty, calm, and smile. Gifted with the healing arts, a women's study with the self-taught wisdom to prescribe outdoor medicine, spinning new wisdom, weaving old ways, and dyeing battered women into colorful bolts of sturdy material, offering women a spiritual trek across lands of many cultures.


EPILOGUE GIVEN BY SAGE SWEETWATER

I was pleased to learn upon completion of this novel that there is a proposed nonlethal seal hunt which will be done by combing baby seals, not clubbing them to their violent deaths.

It is recommended that the baby seals be combed for their fur and not clubbed in the annual seal hunt in Canada.

New regulations will allow the sealers, as the hunters are known, to brush the immature seal pups to gather their hair from their snow-white coat, which in the past has been illegal to disturb or gather a nursing seal pup's molting hair before 2 1/2 weeks old, but perfectly acceptable to club it to death a few weeks later, which is a cruel practice in dire need of revision.

Also of note is that European companies that have an interest in importing the seal hair will not buy it unless a conservation group verifies the product is cruelty-free and was obtained in a nonlethal manner.

Upon learning this, it makes this novel STONE CREEK WOMAN all the more worth writing. Whether it is battered women or clubbed seals, we will not tolerate injury, trauma, or death.
(Sage Sweetwater)