Catherine Sanders Bodnar
Your Author
An adventurer and lifelong conservationist, Catherine captivates historical daydreamers and thrill-enthusiasts with sharp details, carefully researched history, and an untold story of the Pacific Northwest.
"You hear things, you go looking, and ghosts show themselves. They take shape. They take names, and maybe they tell you their stories."
Ben, Losing June
The story of
Catherine Bodnar
Many learned skills, particularly the love of research and travel writing, converged to prepare Catherine for writing Losing June: Coming of Age at the Foot of St. Helens. After finishing her courses for her doctorate in English lit in the early eighties, she worked for magazines. First, as editor-in-chief, she oversaw Charlotte magazine for two years in North Carolina; then she moved to New York City to become Travel Editor at Gourmet magazine, while freelancing travel stories for Food & Wine, ELLE, Glamour, and Brides. In ’87 she returned to University of South Florida to complete her dissertation on Nathanael West and the Literature of the Grotesque.
In ’89, with Ph.D. in hand, she taught in Pennsylvania at Juniata College then moved to Vermont in ’91 to teach at Johnson State College for fifteen years, after which she took early retirement. She then taught journalism as an adjunct at St. Michael’s College for four years.
On a hunch, Catherine began researching the Pacific Northwest, particularly Spirit Lake, Washington, intrigued with the Native American legends and history surrounding Mount St. Helens. She remembered her childhood images of the outsized wildness of the place where her family spent the summer of 1959. Her aunt and uncle managed a beloved rustic resort called Harmony Falls Lodge, where generations of families had vacationed since the late thirties.
The deeper Catherine researched the crimes taking place from the 30’s through the 60’s in Portland — and in most Northwest coastal cities — particularly the kidnapping and prostitution of young girls termed “white slavery”, the more she thought about the volatility of the volcano that would soon blow and annihilate miles of this ancient wilderness as a convergence of disaster. Catherine began drafting the thriller taking shape in her mind, weaving her brother James and other family members into a story infused with Native legends, with the spirits of the lake, the ghost wolves of the dense forests, and the loss of it all as James searched for his ten-year-old sister, leading to his bloody deed that he mistook for manhood.
