Unfixed, a memoir
Empress Editions has acquired the world rights to Unfixed: a memoir of family, mystery, and the currents that carry you home, set to release in bookstores everywhere on October 14, 2025.
Pre-order your copy today! And when you choose to order through the publisher you’ll receive early bonuses and goodies.
Unfixed is a sweeping narrative of a woman’s inner journey into wholeness, despite physical and psychological derailments along her path. Through visceral, immediate prose, imaginary correspondence, and poetry, Kimberly revisits the unnerving circumstances of childhood in the 80’s and 90’s when the New Age movement redefined marriage, health, and sexuality. Finding her own salvation in the self-improvement dogma, she replaces grief, confusion, and uncertainty with magical-thinking and perfectionism long into adulthood until her body breaks and family secrets emerge. When her paternity, health, and very self become tethered to a nervous system unmoored, Kimberly is forced to lean into a steadiness of spirit where the incomprehensible becomes imaginable, and the possibility that frightens her most becomes a doorway into peace.
Presenting life experiences in single layers and then deep, looping complexities, Kimberly weaves her own fluid becoming into a larger ancestral story of past and future, calling in extraordinary lives both intimate and distant. As she reckons with a myriad of unknowns, she learns more than she ever expected to know, ultimately discovering a surprising kind of healing that embraces a wild and untamable life.
Preface
Maybe some are born with a magic wand and they are here to learn about the boundlessness and possibility within one life. Others are born with a mirror and must find the magic and possibility within the confines of what they’ve been given.
From the mystery of night into the greater mystery of day
So that night, sandwiched between star and beer cup constellations, I am conceived.
Two fathers
Mom walks in the room and sees Charlie and me staring at each other through a phosphorescent screen and stops in her tracks. The three of us hold a brief, televised communion.
Lake Winnebago
Fertilizers and pesticides have steadily polluted these waters, suffocating the natural balance of aquatic life. But innocence is bliss. To me, the warm stench and the bobbing balls of neon blue-green are an integral part of childhood. They are childhood. My senses are at once assaulted and surrendered to Lake Winnebago’s reckless cycles of life and death.
Refuge
While looking for an empty seat, the red in my cheeks deepening, I pictured my refuge at the bottom of the lake. Cold, silent, peaceful.
I didn’t know you were already there.
The Open Marriage
One night, while mom tucks me in, I ask her what “Y APE OU” means. She says it was their way of saying “I LOVE YOU” but “LOVE” combines Agape, Philos and Eros— divine love, friendship and romance. “When we fell in love, we wanted it to be more than a romantic fairytale and bigger than what the church expected from a good Christian couple.” She laughs when she tells me this and adds, “Be careful what you ask for.”
Mysterious waters
Born a circle, we live ourselves into lines and then relinquish them back into a circle.
Pain
The summer of my twelfth year, while scanning mom and dad’s growing self-help library, I grab a book titled Dying to Live, by Tolly Burkan, the founder of the international fire-walking movement. In early June, the family attended his workshop in Canada and on the last evening, the attendees were invited to participate in a fire walk. It sounded like ma…
Boobs
It’s only when I stand upright that my face begins to burn, and not from the blood that pooled in my upside-down skull. I am the only girl in the line without a bra.
Keeping up appearances
I fight by shrink-wrapping my emotions, sensations, and needs . I dull myself under the restriction of breath. I faintly feel the compass needle in my blood, its agitation, it’s waywardness. It doesn’t know where to land so it defers to solitude, an aloneness that can’t be abated by the presence of another.
You belong to the mystery
I want nothing more than to fit in with my family, especially to be accepted by mom and dad. And not because I feel like they’re the “cool crowd” and I admire all their qualities, rather I’m terrified of my own truth and the consequences of it surfacing.
4/3 on Highway 43 @ 5:43
April 3, 1993 Dear Charlie, This morning, April 3rd at 5:43, on Highway 43, dad’s car collided with a Mac truck. He’s dead. I feel numb. I feel nothing. Earlier today mom, Eric and I were at the Cancun airport. She led us outside to a pink, flowering bush and knelt down in the dusty earth. She asked us to join her.
Deviled eggs and angel food cake
Friends and acquaintances fold out into the foyer like a black river threatening to wash me away.
Marlboro Reds
I wonder how much time has passed since his fingers grazed these white tips. I have a sudden and secret impulse to hold every cigarette in my hands. I want to press them to my cheek, shove them in my mouth, make whatever is left of dad a part of me.
Love dub, love dub
In my imagination, we are still driving. No, flying. In the damp, oily stench of the garage we listen to the hypnogogic clicks of the engine. One machine and two time-keeping muscles are joined in the dream state. One longer click. One shorter one. One longer, one shorter. Lub dub, lub dub. Love dub, love dub.
Sturgeon food
We sit for a long time in silence, letting the canoe drift and sway. The water is still and we could conceivably sit here all night without ever drifting back to shore. Below us, prehistoric, scaleless sturgeon wonder about the shifting black shadow above them. Dad’s remains won’t be the tasty snack they anticipate.
Dad, you know where
During winter break, I return to Wisconsin. Familiarity is a comfy old blanket that smells of mold. Dad is still everywhere. Six months is not long enough for our cells to stop reaching. One morning mom receives a phone call from Mrs. Haack, my high-school Interpersonal teacher. Mom’s shoulder cradles the phone as her eyes shift from me, back to the emp…
Blue Jamaica
Early sophomore year, I fall in love with Alejandro “Ale” Plesch. We meet during the first month of Introductory Mandarin Chinese, fatefully paired for a vocabulary exercise. I had already been watching him. His lean, athletic build would cross the classroom every morning—skate-board tucked under one arm—and my eyes would secretly usher him to his seat.
The scream
Mom interrupts and asks if I’d like to roll down the window.
“Sure.” I say, wondering if she’s even listening. “Why?”
“I think you need to scream.” She replies, reaching her warm hand into mine.
A year of questioning
While the outer landscape is filled with adventure, my inner life is restless, unsatisfied, always searching. Looping thoughts poke at a pervasive sense of uncertainty. What’s my purpose? Was that a sign? What does this mean?
My questioning is obnoxiously loud under the silent, assured gaze of the Alps.
Because the universe said so
One year of questioning leads to another, and another. My former plans for life are abandoned on transcontinental jet trails. I become a wanderer. I have little sense of what I want except for the universe to tell me what I want. I no longer ask dad to show me the way since I envision his atoms fully dispersed and riding cosmic currents. Dad is now the …
The Scarlet D's
“Usually five to ten years or so following the death, when that child or adolescent is now a young adult, we start to see problems. And in many cases, these problems are physical. The body breaks down under the stress of unresolved grief.”
A two-headed monster
I feel violent helplessness in the act and then soft connection afterwards. Looking in the mirror, eyes bloodshot and watering, I dialog with this undone version of myself. Who am I? What do I want? Below the questioning, I am just seconds, a-fraction-of-a-second, away from the answer. I feel reckless but honest. Out-of-control but vibrating with newness and possibility. I hear you Kim! I hear you at last!
Dear Google, who am I?
July 13, 2003 Dear Charlie, Almost everyone owns a home computer now. Sometimes I stay up late, laptop my divination tool. The curser blinks in the empty search bar mocking my own vacancy. I type “Who am I” but Google thinks Christian rock youtube videos are my answer.
Wolfman and his cub
But it’s not all singing and dancing. When clouds blow in and obscure my proverbial honey moon, Syd frightens me. Syd is unfixed, always will be, and I’m not ready to meet that in myself.
Pretty poison
Near the end of my second year at NUNM, a cosmic 2x4 strikes and sends me back into uncertainty. Dave and I are sound asleep. And then not. Startled awake by cellular alarm bells, I sit up and ask Dave to get some water. Something isn’t right. When he returns, I am unconscious, lying in my own urine and excrement. While a black hole squeezes me into sing…
When uncertainty meets beauty
Now, with camera in hand, I am not robbed, but invited into the moment. I can finally say what my body is longing to say. Composition, light and Bresson’s “decisive moment” reveal the lush, visceral collision within.
CPR
The bedroom windows are wide open and a cool, Pacific Northwest summer breeze feathers my skin. Morning light reminds closed lids of time and opposites. The day prior my friend took her son to swimming lessons at North Portland Rec Center. While her boy flung pre-adolescent limbs through heady chlorine, she snuck into the equipment closet and snapped a few photos of “Timmy and the gang”—plastic, unemployed CPR dummies scattered about in eery repose, waiting to be rescued.
The body knows
This uncertain darkness—not the light and fallacy of my conscious self—is a refuge for truth and harbinger of my becoming.
A violent kiss
Together, we were right-side up in the upside down. But time and circumstance want to test this delicate balance.
A crack in the foundation
After two fentanyl-filled days at the hospital, I return home with a five-inch pelvic fracture and six weeks of bed rest ahead. But prescribed stillness for bone healing can’t stabilize a dangerous fault line that begins to carve through my identity.
Who's your daddy?
Seven weeks later, Dave and I deliver my crutches to Goodwill. One foot in front of the other, bones consent to gravity, but I’m afraid. The center of my body feels fragile — a primal din unnoticed (ignored?) until the animal’s cage broke. I feel timid. Protective. Dave and I are emotionally worn too. During bedrest, I was one-too-many-dependents for a …
I think I can, I think I can
I tell Dave first. I need his body, his surety, his gravity. For as long as I can remember, I’m more stable in the world when I’m physically attached, flesh-on-flesh, to another life form. As a kid, mom and dad were my hosts, arm or hip pressed parasitically into them. In junior high, when I learned this behavior wasn’t cool or even acceptable, I became…
Do corpses float?
But the image of my other father, shipwrecked and mummified at the bottom of a cold, desolate landscape—this one is hard for me. And grieving someone I never knew feels wrong, indulgent, senseless. There’s no where to put this black hole. I fall into its singularity, befuddled as I reach grief’s limit, transforming itself and anything it consumes into a cloud of infinitude.
Forever stamp
An unsettling mystery surrounds Charlie’s death, but I sense it lived in him long before, through his creative voice and the maverick spark that fueled it. I need more information. His narrative is piecemeal, like an old film-strip with too many lost frames.
Have You Seen?
He intuited his own flesh and blood was roaming the planet, enough so that he wrote a song about it. The line “to know that it never will be” puzzles me though. How could he be so certain? Was he reflecting on his own desire (or lack-thereof) to be a father? Or was the mother in a situation she couldn’t escape?
Or is it something more, a sense that his own life would end too soon, that when the truth finally surfaced, he would already be long gone?
Welcome
I reread my family’s words, their easy, unassuming kindness, and I feel myself reflected back. I return to what is most true and solid. I know these people. I’ve known them for as long as I’ve lived. There has simply been a clogged pipe between us and now warm waters are gushing through.
Dark mystery
While going through Charlie’s home after his disappearance, his siblings also discovered on a shelf, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. This succinct guide for starting a new identity includes chapters on planning a disappearance, arranging for new identification, finding work, establishing credit, and pseudocide (creating the impression of one's own death).
My head spins. Like Shrodinger’s cat, Charlie is trapped in quantum possibility. He is both alive AND dead, and our grief boxed in eternal uncertainty.
Flashing red
My body makes no distinction between fear and excitement. Disney or doom, cells respond all the same. I lose words, my core trembles, senses question, sleep evades.
Long ago is all around
When the sun sets, I drive to the city center and park a block from the bar, ignoring the spot out front. I need some time to put sneaker on pavement. A walk along one city block isn’t enough to integrate past, present and my imminent future but it at least paves the way.
Eighteen foot swells
Charlie’s life ended on eighteen-foot Lake Michigan swells. And now, I join him. By early April, occasional dizzy spells churn into an unremitting tempest. Unlike ocean swells and their corduroy predictability, our inland waves aren’t driven by tides, refuse directionality and change on a dime. Our waves threaten disaster. Our waves take life.
Grafting a family tree
The tiny, twelve-hundred square foot cabin is so storied I can almost hear its own beating, knotty pine heart. I enter—the space around me familiar but distant, aching like a phantom limb.
Foreshadowed ferry
As eyes drift close, the last four days patch themselves into four decades, shape-shifting nature into an updated nurture; REM back-stitches wide loops between past and present, mending holes, reinforcing frayed seams.
A Tincture of time
I search, seek, chase—the illusion of a fix never further than the shape I hold my mouth. But the pursuit compounds the suffering. I am stuck inside a Chinese finger trap of my own making. After six weeks of strain-counter-strained hope, the physical therapist—questioning the accuracy of my diagnosis—sends me on my dizzy way, no better than the day I started.
Surrender and defeat vie with each other in stifling shades of grey.
Truth hurts and heals
I am an ouroboros, eating my existence within the renewing embrace of the feminine.
Peace that passeth understanding
I stop wishing for a cure and start envisioning peace in the storm. And most days, I’m baffled—surrendering completely to my symptoms and allowing them to run their course feels implausible. It’s like trying to undo millions of years of biological hardwiring: when a threat is perceived, fight it, fix it, flee from it. I find little relief, but unlike everything else I’ve tried, this practice puts me in relationship to myself, exactly as I am, not some distant possible me once I’m cured.
Little yeses
Like the still-fragile shoots of spring, each yes a reaching memory of sun, and the sunniness of reaching.
Let go
Can grief and awe, bewilderment and wonderment exist within one moment? My brain short-circuits trying to process the argument of emotion.
Emptying
But the paradox of a self more defined is that she is then free to undefine. As I incarnate, magical thinking gives way to magical presence—a state of solidarity and wonder not for what could be, but with what is. And like the water under my feet, what is changes, moment, by moment, by moment—the details of an identity drops of rain in a bestowing, ancient origin.
Unselfing
I unfold the balled wad of paper, scanning, scavenging, seeking out clues to unveil a more complete sense of self. But my fist grows tired and sweaty…
When broken is the fix
Can grief, fallibility, failure, impermanence and brokenness be the very healing we seek?
The Substack Symbiocene
“The impact of shouting from the rooftops when you discover a writer who makes your heart sing or inspires you, who shows you what’s possible, is massive. When you celebrate them you spread the love and that’s not a figure of speech, that’s a literal translation of what happens. The world becomes a better place. Your world and theirs.