The Story of Margaret Bendet

About Margaret Bendet

What I most enjoy is telling my stories and helping other people tell theirs.

One of my pivotal moments came at fourteen, sitting on a drainage pipe with my friend Terry Shurig beside the I-40 access road that runs through North Tulsa. It was Saturday afternoon, we were bored, and our solution was to ride our bikes to this spot so we could chain smoke. While creating the habit it would later take me years to drop, I glared at the flat, dusty, unrelieved Oklahoma landscape and made myself a promise: I don’t care what else my life is, it’s got to be interesting.

And it has been. Over the years I’ve been a newspaper features editor, a Hindu nun, a suburban housewife, a Congressional press aide; I’ve hiked in the Himalayas and brought earthquake relief to villagers on the Deccan plateau; I’ve interviewed American rock stars, Indian holy men, Hawaiian kapunas, and I once committed myself to a state mental facility so I could write about what it was like to be a patient.

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