Shonna Milliken Humphrey
Authors of
Dirt Roads and Diner Pie (Central Recovery Press, 2016)
Show Me Good Land (Down East Books, 2011)
Shonna Milliken Humphrey is the Maine-based author of the novel Show Me Good Land and memoir Dirt Roads and Diner Pie. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, and Down East magazine. She played a key role in the posthumous publication of The Afterlife of Kenzaburo Tsuruda written by Elisabeth Wilkins Lombardo, and for two years, she was a food writer for The Maine Sunday Telegram.
Books by Shonna
Dirt Roads and Diner Pie (Central Recovery Press, 2016)
Told from a wife’s perspective, Dirt Roads and Diner Pie is the story of one couple’s struggle to confront the long-reaching effects of childhood sexual abuse.
Musician and former lead singer of the United States Air Force Band, Travis James Humphrey lived for thirty months in a culture of childhood sexual abuse while studying at New Jersey’s prestigious American Boychoir School. After his tenure, Travis buried his memories deep. Years into the marriage, these memories began to surface and threaten their relationship. In an effort to resolve the problems, Shonna and her husband hit the road and navigated their way through the treacherous terrain of mental illness, sexual dysfunction, and shame. She details their journey within a month-long road trip throughout the southeastern United States taken shortly after Travis made his experience public.
While the effect of child sex abuse informs nearly every aspect of their shared life, it does not define their relationship. That is the message Shonna offers: Sexual trauma may dominate, but it need not define the relationship.
Praise
Dirt Roads and Diner Pie is filled with irony and humor, as well as heartbreaking, compassionate honesty. This is a story told with grace, and in Shonna’s wise and loving words, it sings.”
—Morgan Callan Rogers, author of Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea
“Reading this book was a rare opportunity to follow a couple on the brink and to sit in the backseat of a last-ditch effort road trip to salvage their marriage. The love Shonna Milliken Humphrey has for her husband is evident in the tales of their journey, as is the exhaustion, frustration, and fear that stems from feeling helpless day after day. She presents an important reminder that the partners and family of childhood sexual abuse survivors are not on the sidelines: they are on the front lines. Humphrey also reminds the reader of the power of love, courage, commitment, and the willingness to walk through the darkness rather than run away from it. I appreciate that it wasn’t happily ever after in the end, because past trauma never goes away. However, those living with trauma can learn to love themselves, and in the case of this story, so can their partners.”
—Brennon P Moore MS, CTT, CADC-II, LPC, The Refuge-A Healing Place
“If shame is the most toxic emotion, compassion and humor are the most powerful antidotes. Shonna Milliken Humphrey delivers both. Simultaneously soft-hearted and ferocious, she is the ideal guide to lead us across the broken ground of child sexual abuse.”
—Hannah Holmes, author of The Well-Dressed Ape and The Secret Life of Dust
Show Me Good Land (Down East Books, 2011)
Show Me Good Land is the debut novel for author Shonna Milliken Humphrey. Likened to work by Carolyn Chute and Cathie Pelletier, Show Me Good Land details four lives, each connected to a rural northern Maine community by the same gruesome murder. Odie Hollander solves the murder while spending time in jail on a domestic violence assault charge. Miles Compton, gay, is a listed sex offender after having a relationship with an underage student. Emmett Pratt manages the local gas station and is accused of killing his aunt. Rhetta Ballou is driving home after leaving town as the teenaged mistress of her high school teacher almost two decades ago.
Show Me Good Land looks hard at constructed social norms, especially those in the confines of an isolated, poor, rural area. Is violence ever justified? Abortion? Underage sex? Underage gay sex? No character is fully good or fully bad, and the pleasure of this book's reading lies in discovering where individual moral lines are drawn.
Praise
"..rich sadness of Shonna Humphrey's characters, her haunting portrait of a bewildered, isolated community, reminded me powerfully of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio."
—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Empire Falls
"a murder mystery, a gentle romance, a wry, ironic comedy...a love letter to Aroostook County, Maine, its potato farmers and meth addicts...A remarkable debut...Spellbinding."
—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There
"..a true and utterly distinctive American voice, full of the grit and texture of place, compassion and authenticity. Every page feels real."
—Joyce Maynard, author of The Good Daughters and At Home in the World