About

Regan Byrne Palmer worked in publicity for Simon & Schuster, Minnesota Department of Human Services and Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She has written for a number of newsletters, co-founded and edited Turtle Quarterly, a literary magazine. She was a Preliminary Judge for the 31st Annual Minnesota Book Award. A recent essay appeared in St. Paul Almanac Volume 13. She has studied fiction with the Loft Literary Center, One Story, and participated in an annual poetry workshop culminating in public readings. She has completed three novels, the most recent, The Fool: Reversed, explores the use of tarot in a family of clever and conflicted women.

Current Project

Three generations of women in three timelines use tarot to understand their lives. 2007, Valerie Hanson is ten years older than her mom was when she died. And midlife is smacking Valerie around: job loss, an ill friend, irrelevance, and a broken ankle. If Valerie wants to enjoy her grandkids after raising three kids on her own, then she has to forgive her mom for dying young and leaving her impoverished. She should start with her diet, but she won't. Her daughter, Ashley, suggests a hobby, like tarot, which Valerie's mom did almost as often as she ate. Ashley is full of suggestions and one warning: Valerie is forbidden from infecting Ashley's kids with diet culture.

1954 Iris, Valerie's mom moves to Santa Fe right out of high school to become an artist. She keeps letters and sketchbooks Valerie will later discover. A glamorous friend introduces Iris to Tarot and a married art lover.

Alex, Valerie's ex, resurfaces after 22 years. Alex is in need of forgiveness and quick cash, but somehow manages to edge out Valerie in their kids' affection.

Convinced Ashley's husband, Kelly, stole the one valuable thing her mom owned: an antique turquoise collection, Valerie chases Kelly over the 35 W bridge as it collapses into the Mississippi. Valerie assumes Kelly is safe as she and a gentle stranger, Sal, attempt to help the survivors. Although Valerie never liked Kelly, she feels responsible for his death.

1954 Iris learns to make the pottery, which called her to the region in the first place, but is heartbroken when she finds she's no good at it and returns to painting.

As Valerie and Alex team up to help Ashley after Kelly's death, Valerie's attitude toward food continues to erode her relationships.

During the covid pandemic in late 2020 Olive, Valerie's granddaughter, pulls one tarot card a day, often Strength, makes art, and dyes her hair green in Valerie's basement. Eventually Ashley gives Valerie an ultimatum --- either the diet stops or she never sees Olive again.

2021 Olive struggles with bullying and takes comfort in Iris's artwork.

1955 Iris is pregnant with Valerie and builds a fragile future for herself and the baby.

Suffering panic attacks, isolated from her sick friend, and ruining her new relationship with Sal, Valerie finally seeks therapy; the thing Ashley has been begging for since childhood. Unlocking fond memories of her mom's love, creativity, and resilience in her old letters, Valerie fully embraces tarot, comfortable clothes, and pizza. And cancels her subscriptions to fashion magazines. She marries Sal and they start a successful janitorial business.

Work

Featured

Lyle in a Landslide

When Minnesotan Lyle Holloway steps off the boat on the dock of San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala, she doesn’t know she’s headed toward both an actual landslide and a figurative one. Her arrival is meant as a surprise for her boyfriend, who is in the small town on a temporary work assignment studying soil conditions in the surrounding mountains, but before she has a chance to fix her hair and change into clean clothes, she overhears him with another woman. On a morning hike to watch the sunrise over famous Lake Atitlan she is swept toward disaster and the beach below in a series of massive landslides, more than likely caused by her ex’s experiments.

Her recovery keeps her in the small town, where the glut of American tourists dries up after news of the landslides. She stays long enough to grow attached to the people who helped her survive the landslide and the women who teach her to weave. She basks in the hospitality of the locals and her attempts to repay kindness with charity backfire in big and small ways.

Saddled with a concussion, mounting debt, tuition, and lost work hours, she struggles to get ahead or even back to where she was before the landslide. Raised by a strict accountant, Lyle knows how and why to keep a budget, but she refuses to become her mother. Every move she makes, every designer handbag or enameled skillet she sells won’t stop her downward spiral. After time away from her cubicle Lyle chafes at the return to corporate life. And she can’t escape the expectations of her family --- her mom wants her married, her younger sister wants cousins for her own children, her dad wants everybody to calm down.

When the small town in Guatemala finds its way to Minnesota in the person of a local minister expecting Lyle to come through with promised money for the victims of the landslide, Lyle must learn she can sell just about everything to keep from humiliating herself.

A Dandelion Crown in Winter

George Obermeyer had always been a compliant son—if a little preachy and full of himself. But when he ends up in the hospital during his junior year of college suffering from frostbite and delusions, he refuses to do what his mother wants. While she pushes for medical intervention to avoid scandal in their blame-and-shame Catholic community, George accepts his visions as a sort of communion with an unnamed entity. Despite his family’s concern, George slips away, convinced his situation is spiritual not medical.

After George’s disappearance, his father writes unsent letters documenting the quirky ups and downs of the large family George has left behind. Despite certain gifts that may or may not be related to George’s behavior, his four siblings don’t entirely believe in healing touch, prophetic dreams, or ESP. But they know enough to keep quiet about them.

For decades, George, completely separated from his family, works at food shelves and homeless shelters—a calling he finds both soul- and ego-gratifying. This monastic life is upended when a ghost from a car accident years before appears and sends George home. With George’s return, the Obermeyers must reconcile their past.

Spanning the thirty years of George’s disappearance, A DANDELION CROWN IN WINTER is part ghost story and part family saga with a snaggle-tooth sense of faith.

Turtle Quarterly

In 2008, I cofounded Turtle Quarterly, a multi-genre print and online literary magazine. We published emerging and established poets, writers, essayists, and artists from Minnesota and across the country including: Sharon Chmielarz, Marya Hornbacher, Diane Jarvenpa, Kathryn Kysar, Mary Moore Easter, Lynne Rossetto Kaspar, Joyce Sutphen, and Connie Wanek.

I hosted public readings, which were held in local coffee shops, libraries and cafes, and accompanied the publication of each issue of TQ. We built a subscription base of loyal fans, both contributors and friends of TQ. Originally established to publish and distribute the work of a small group, TQ quickly grew, submissions flooded in, and TQ entered into the public conversation.

Other writing

I have taken writing classes at the Loft Literary Center and was part of a long-term poetry group. My writing has appeared in Tangletown News, and On the Move, for which I was Guest Editor in Winter 2001, as part of Melpomene Institute for Women’s Health Research. I also wrote successful grant proposals on behalf of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts for the McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation. At the Minnesota Department of Human services I did technical writing and also revised and updated social service brochures and manuals. As a publicist, I wrote and prepared press releases, media tour pitch letters, and press kits for Simon & Schuster Trade Publishing Group.

More about me

I grew up in family of English majors. Both of my parents were journalists. My mom, in particular, was a strict editor. We were never allowed to bury the lead and even rarely allowed to use slang in conversation. It took me decades to overcome her critique of my childhood stories and claim writing for myself.

Perhaps in reaction to the repression she placed on her own writing, my mom loved to tell fantastic tales whenever she was caught off guard or in a relaxed mood. These were not campfire ghost stories. No, my mom told her stories as a reporter would—who, what, where, when, why and how—with a thirst for the macabre. Stories of cabins in the woods disappearing for decades, apparitions from purgatory come to warn of danger, and a vision of Mary who left an indentation on my mom’s hospital bedcovers after a near-fatal fire accident. All of these stories mixed with the stories I learned in Catholic school and in church. My parents made no differentiation between the fantastic of faith or my mom’s personal beliefs. I grew up with the conviction that all tall tales were created equal. The evidence of this appears in all of my writing.

I was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I attended Catholic school. I graduated from Creighton University with a BA in History, which also included a year of study in Paris at La Sorbonne. After finishing my degree, I moved to New York where I worked for the publicity department of the Simon & Schuster trade division. I married and returned to Minnesota where I did freelance publicity work, worked for the Department of Human Services for the State of Minnesota, and began what would become years of volunteer work with the homeless. I worked as an intern for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, eventually transitioning to paid staff as a membership, marketing and publicity coordinator. After the birth of my first child, I entered a training program to become a docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where I led tours and workshops for twelve years. I took my first writing class at the Loft when my second child was still an infant. I wrote, prepared tours, and volunteered while raising my two children.

I continued to work on my fiction, both short and long, eventually exploring poetry as a way to sharpen my short fiction pieces. I participated in a poetry workshop run by Tim Nolan, which met for over a decade and held public readings, most notably as part of the Carol Connolly reading series. During this period, I wrote two unpublished novels and competed in the 3-Day Novel contest.

As an outgrowth of the poetry workshop I co-founded and edited Turtle Quarterly, a literary magazine. I worked as a volunteer reading tutor as well as in other capacities in my children’s schools. I work as a volunteer for the Hennepin County Library system. My essay, The Guitar Lesson, which recalls taking lessons with my dad when I was a child, will be published in Fall 2021. I am currently querying my novel, The Fool: Reversed and continue to write fiction and poetry.