The Richest Harvest of a Tumultuous Cowboy Life

Riding With Hope and Resilience by Marlene Wilson is a down home country memoir detailing her life as a working lady cowboy, rancher, and survivor of personal challenges as a successful woman working in a male-dominated industry.

The story begins with Marlene reflecting on a major honor—being inducted into the British Columbia Cowboy Hall of Fame, a recognition of her and her family’s four generations of ranching history. The memoir explores her early life growing up on a ranch with historical ties to the gold rush, her love of trusty horses, loyal dogs, moo cows and ornery bulls.

Marlene shares valuable lessons about surviving and thriving learned through facing down dangerous cattle, horseback riding injuries, wildfires, overcoming addiction and staying sober, healing from childhood trauma, broken relationships, and the death of her children. She also contended with emotional traumas, including feelings of inadequacy and early incidents of sexual abuse, which influenced her struggle with self-worth and personal relationships later in life.

Through divine intervention and some luck, she found a way to rebuild her life and credits her recovery to moments of spiritual awakening and support from others who helped her overcome addiction and self-destructive behavior.

Her heart warming book is packed with real-life-tested wisdom and ways to stay calm and loving, no matter what crazy thing the herd of animals (or humans) is doing.

For us at Family Movie Story Books, we couldn’t be happier. We love helping people share their story in books and movies that inspire their loved ones, friends, and the world.

After consulting us in May 2024, Marlene’s book publishing process was a high speed six month chase. Marlene wanted to have her book printed and available for purchase by her fans in December 2024. Usually detailed biographical books take at least ten months to a year to publish, given all the steps required and how busy most people are.

To top it off, even though she was 78 when we got started, Marlene was still a hard working cowboy, everyday riding her horse out on the range at a nearby ranch. Because we were so inspired by her story we did many evening online sessions, reviewing and rewriting her text. Because a few previously-burned ranch owners were suspicious about how hard cowboys actually work they would sometimes challenge Marlene when she invoiced them for tending their cattle herds.

To be prepared for those testy moments, Marlene kept a notebook with her and everyday out amongst the herd she would scribble crytic notes. “Fixed fence.” “Found one pair (cow and calf)”. “Put out salt”. “Rounded up 100”. “Cut fallen tree. Cleared road.” “Escaped fire”.

Marlene had had several generous friends help her transform those notes into a basic manuscript. While that text was a good starting point it hadn’t yet risen to the point where many of the paragraphs could survive my “So What?” test. What do I mean?

After publishing and producing dozens of family history and corporate films and books over the years I had dealt with many clients who tried to tell me that “We’ve got to get all that information into the project.” I understood their want to be thorough and not miss anything crucial. But in the modern day with so many other things to view on one’s phone, whatever content makes its way onto the pages of a non-fiction family history book or into a life story documentary must be interesting, educational, inspiring, and occasionally funny. In short: A fact by itself is not a story.

For Riding with Hope and Resilience to be more than just a cowboy’s checklist, it needed to contain stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needed to have foes and heroes and breathless moments. It needed to have love and fear and anger and sadness and triumph— all the things that we love when we read novels or go to the movies.

Those countless sessions that Marlene and I spent on Zoom were joyous, her in the Okanagan-Thompson area of BC and me in Greater Vancouver. It turned out that every cryptic happening in her text held great drama, heart wrenching pain and joy, and a continuous flow of the delicious dilemmas of human living that had been Marlene’s inner life.

Many times we cried together. She was sometimes recalling something painful from her past for the very first time. For me I was deeply empathizing with her feelings and simultaneously being in awe of her brave vulnerability. Marlene determinedly and purposefully reached deep inside and pulled out the richest harvest of her tumultuous cowboy life.

Marlene’s fans can’t buy her book fast enough and they are already telling us how inspired they feel reading Riding with Hope and Resilience.  I’m so glad for her. But the icing on the cake for me is knowing that Great Grammy Marlene’s book is printed and ready for her two twin great granddaughters to read and be inspired by. That thrills me beyond words.

Well done, Marlene. Thanks for the ride!

To flip through some of the pages of Marlene’s book and order copies click this link.