By Gwyneth Hyndman

As a trauma therapist who routinely sees new patients from around western Montana, Gyspy Soul Ray knows what the expectations are when she first greets them in her office.

“They are expecting me to have a broom skirt and braids,” she laughed and added: “That’s my mother.”

Named after a line from the 1970 Van Morrison hit “Into the Mystic,” Ray pointed out that like all newborns, she was at the mercy of her parents’ quirks and had no input on what ended up on her birth certificate. This is just one of the backstories Ray goes into, in her newly published m...