Director of development Sarabeth Anderson said she was trying to come up with a way to commemorate Domestic Violence Awareness month in October that would really drive the issue home with people when she met Thompson, a new volunteer and author of an agroterrorism thriller called "Deadstock."

"I can write," Thompson told her. "What do you want me to do?"

A story for every October day

Anderson answered that her dream would be to publicize the stories of 31 Iowa survivors of domestic violence, one for every day of the month, complete with names and photos. It was a radical idea for an organization that had worked hard to protect survivors from the press to guard their privacy and safety.

Thompson jumped at the chance.

"I had gotten counseling myself for three years after my domestic violence situation ended in 2002 from the battered women's shelter here in northwest Iowa," she said.

"I owe them a lot. They saved my life."

The coalition sent an e-mail to its 28-member programs across the state asking for names of victims who might be willing to tell their stories publicly. Thompson was amazed at the response.

She predicted maybe 10 percent would be willing. She said, 80 percent to 90 percent of the women she got in touch with agreed. They ranged from young college students to women in their 70s, teachers to stockbrokers, single mothers barely making it to well-off suburbanites, survivors who had escaped their abuser decades ago and a survivor who had received another call from her abuser just the month before.

Emotionally difficult

A former reporter for the Spencer newspaper, Thompson spent last summer interviewing and photographing the women. She sandwiched that around her full-time job doing publications work for a Minneapolis commodities broker.

"I couldn't do more than one interview a day," she said. " It was emotionally difficult to experience. The women told me things they had never said out loud before. When I took photos at the end, we were both exhausted."

By the time she had finished transcribing all the interviews, putting events in chronological order, then editing the stories, she had "hundreds and hundreds of hours" invested in the volunteer effort, Thompson said.

Among the exhibit's 31 stories is Thompson's.

A self-described academic star as a kid, she wrote that her abuse began shortly after she moved back to the Midwest at age 36, fleeing a bad marriage. She was working as a reporter at the local paper, she said, when she met a guy who worked at a gun shop.

One night, she came home after they'd been fighting and he slammed her against a wall. The last night they were together, she said he yanked a phone out of her hand so she couldn't call for help, grabbed her hair, threw her to the floor and put his hands around her neck.

In her self-profile, Thompson answered the question every victim of domestic violence has been asked and has asked themselves: Why did you accept this?

"You know if a complete stranger came up to you and put their hands around your neck, you would go absolutely ballistic," Thompson wrote. "You'd be screaming for the cops, you'd be fighting for your life, you'd say, 'This maniac!' But when someone you love does it? Confusion! It's actually very fascinating. It's so irrational."

Pervasive violence

Thompson and Anderson hope the exhibit highlights how pervasive domestic violence is, both in society as a whole and in Iowa.

"We really wanted to show people that if they had a picture in their mind of an abuse survivor, this would shatter that picture," Anderson said. "We wanted people to know it could be the person sitting next to you at a movie theater or across from you at a business meeting."

The exhibit is only going to be at Des Moines Area Community College for one day, then it moves to Bettendorf, with Thompson following in a recreational vehicle. She has a book coming out next fall featuring the women she interviewed called "31: Thirty-one stories of domestic violence survivors in America's Heartland." Proceeds from the book will go to the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Thompson said being part of the project has changed her career path. She used to write fiction. Now, she said, she wants to devote her time to writing more books like this.

She already has three follow-up "31" books in mind on:

- Elder abuse.
- Child-abuse survivors.
- Interviews with abusers.

"I expect every October in my future I will be driving somewhere in an RV doing photo exhibits and book tours," she said.

mchallen@dmreg.com