By Gwyneth Hyndman
As a trauma therapist who routinely sees new patients from around western Montana, Gyspy Soul Ray knows what the expectations are when she first greets them in her office.
“They are expecting me to have a broom skirt and braids,” she laughed and added: “That’s my mother.”
Named after a line from the 1970 Van Morrison hit “Into the Mystic,” Ray pointed out that like all newborns, she was at the mercy of her parents’ quirks and had no input on what ended up on her birth certificate. This is just one of the backstories Ray goes into, in her newly published memoir, “Gypsy Soul: Memoirs of a Hippie Kid,” which was inspired by typed letters from her mother, Dynah, - who at 76, is still living in a solar-powered cabin outside Frenchtown that she built with her husband decades ago - and Ray’s daughter, Morgan, who wanted her grandmother to fill in the blanks on history gaps from Ray’s unusual upbringing on a farm with her two older brothers.
“I’m not a writer - but I definitely have a story to tell,” Ray said, about her journey into self-publishing, which had a definite learning curve that she navigated with the help of a network of friends, including one in Seeley Lake who bought the first 50 copies of her book. Ray said the initial idea began after her brother came to visit one weekend, and they started trying to explain what it was like growing up on a “hippie farm,” just west of Missoula. “It was ‘hey remember this?’ ‘Remember that?’ And then there were several questions [Ray’s daughter and her brother’s daughter] were asking that we just didn’t have the answers to.”
Her mother is only able to write and receive hand-written letters - so that was how Ray’s daughter and niece communicated with their grandmother.
Ray was inspired by the project that unfolded. Then when the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic hit, she had her chance to write about it.
She finished detailing 67 memories, using illustrations of her mother’s handwritten letters and photos from her own albums, a month before her 50th birthday on Jan. 21, 2022.
The process, she said, was very much what she might have easily prescribed to her patients, which include Montana State Hospital and Montana State Prison staff as well as law enforcement.
“Many [staff] have a heavy load of work trauma, and they’ve never had a chance to process it.
“All mental health issues are rooted in trauma,” she said. “At the end of the day, what we’re working on is ‘what is the cause?’
“As a trauma therapist, you can imagine how [my upbringing] ties into this. Writing this was therapy for me. I grew up in such a wild lifestyle - it’s unbelievable to me now. A lot of crazy things happened - and I’m okay. I also made sure to talk in the book about why I am actually okay.”
Some of the chapters speak for themselves: “Swinger Party Turned Stepdad” and “The Cocaine Scavenger Hunt” are just two examples.
Ray also goes into detail about losing her father to a drug overdose when she was in 8th grade and of losing a brother to alcoholism in her late 20s.
“One comment from a reader was that she had to keep turning the pages because she didn’t know if she was going to laugh or cry at the next story,” Ray said, adding that she discusses the roles that adverse experiences and trauma play in resilience.
“The book ends when I’m 18, and I do a paragraph at the end - ‘Where are we now.’
“This book is for people my age who were maybe raised in a different lifestyle,” Ray said. “I just wanted to be normal. I would have loved my name to be Michelle or Jennifer.
“But Gypsy Soul is part of who I am. I’ve accepted it.”
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