Neither spring chickens nor doddering old dames, cowriters Rebecca Christian and Katherine Fischer joined pens to write That’s Our Story and We’re Sticking To It. Accumulated from over forty years of combined writing and publishing experience, this collection of articles and newspaper columns promises to leave you laughing—and crying.

The book offers a range of topics and tones: “Feng Phooey” questions whether it really matters which way the commode faces; “Fessing Up” celebrates all those things we delight in privately but deny publicly—from moon-walking in the grocery store to harboring a love of Jean Claude Van Damme movies; and “If It’s the Thought That Counts, Guys, Then Why Don’t You Use Your Heads?” warns men to avoid giving Veg-O-Matics, fishing poles, or French maid aprons to women for Christmas.

Whether these slice-of-life articles appear in national venues (The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and National Public Radio), or regional newspapers and magazines (The Dubuque Telegraph Herald, The Des Moines Register, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), readers have clamored for years, “When’s the book coming out?”

Rebecca Christian is a Des Moines-based writer who currently works full-time as a copy editor for a design magazine. She began writing a column for the Telegraph Herald in 1990, and lived in Dubuque from 1989 to 1997. In addition to writing the column, she is a playwright, and has authored and co-authored several books on cooking and travel.

Carolyn Jessop is the author of Escape, the dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist polygamist sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her children.

Born into the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a polygamist Mormon sect based in Colorado City on the Arizona-Utah border, Carolyn Jessop was forced at age 18 into an arranged marriage with a man thirty-eight years her senior who already had three wives. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children with him, despite suffering life-threatening illnesses during her pregnancies.

In the middle of the night on April 21, 2003, she and her children crept out of the home they shared with her husband’s six other wives and fourty-six children. Five hours later, with the help of her brother, they arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah. Carolyn had $20 to her name, and was forced to live in a series of “safe houses,” followed by a shelter for battered women. Since her escape, Carolyn Jessop filed for and won sole custody of her eight children, and has succeeded—despite enormous challenges—in building a new life for herself and her family. She is the first woman ever to be granted custody in an FLDS case. She lives in West Jordan, Utah, with her eight children.