When Bathsheba Monk was going through boxes while moving three years ago, she found one of her writing projects. It gave her a sense of deja vu, in more ways than one.

“I hadn’t read it in 29 years. I forgot I wrote it. It seemed pretty good,” says Monk in an interview at an Allentown coffee shop.

She also noticed similarities between the time she wrote it and current events:

“It is pertinent to today. It shows the seeds of what is happening now, things still going on, like the banning of books, the rewriting of history, and the Disneyfication of our culture,” she says.

Monk revised the manuscript as a graphic novel, “Memories of the Year 2000” (190 pp.; Blue Heron Book Works; paperback $18; 2024), adding cut-and-paste combinations of photographs, clip art, and her own rudimentary drawings. The woman pictured on the book cover would seem to be Monk, but she used her friend Pat McAndrew as a model.

The story is a colorful and rambling one. The beginning was inspired by Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground,” as the narrator opens with “I’m a sick woman … a menopausal woman.”

Throughout the book, the narrator uses a lot of estrogen, female sex hormones. Monk says they were recommended for many things at the time she wrote the story, before people became aware of the side effects.

The narrator is a historian for a prestigious university in Boston that is getting rid of its history department. Monk received a Master of Fine Arts from Emerson College, Boston.

In “Memories of the Year 2000,” the narrator is chosen by the fictional World Foundation of Bill Gates (CEO, Microsoft, 1975 - 2000) and Michael Eisner (CEO, The Walt Disney Company, 1984 - 2005) to do a rewrite of history with Gates as a hero.

The original story was not plotted out. “I had a friend who was dying of AIDS. I wrote it in installments to entertain him. I wasn’t sure how it was going to end,” says Monk.

Among the many happenings, the narrator is visited by her daughter X3, is sent to a state penitentiary to be punished for homelessness, travels with a shape-shifting companion named Wan, and even has a few conversations with God.

Some of the events, including a visit to an alligator farm, are based on Monk’s real-life experiences:

“I was in a shop, and I said that I thought making things from alligator skins was illegal. The owner said, ‘Not if you raise them for meat.’ I thought their alligators were fake, so I poked one with a stick.” They were real.

Unlike in the book, however, she was not swallowed by one.

Jerry Springer (1944 - 2023) makes an appearance in the book. Springer was notorious as the “king of trash TV.”

“In the nineties I had never owned a television. My parents offered me a microwave or a color TV, and I already had a microwave.

“It was large, although not by today’s standards. One day, Jerry Springer came on, talking to a woman whose mother had sex with her boyfriend. I did not realize the depths to which we had sunk.”

Monk was born in Bethlehem and attended Liberty High School. She left the Lehigh Valley when she was 17 and returned in 2004.

December 2024 was the 10th anniversary of Blue Heron Book Works, the publishing company she founded which offers a variety of services for authors.

Monk is the author of “Now You See It ... Stories from Cokesville, PA,” “Nude Walker: A Novel” and three books in a mystery series featuring the sleuth Swanson Herbinko.

“Literary Scene” is a column about authors, books and publishing. To request coverage, email: Paul Willistein, Focus editor, pwillistein@tnonline.com