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THANK YOU for being a part of our next book. It means the world! Read more about our funding model and “why’s” below.

About Junkyard Princess

What does the average twelve-year old girl know about cars, grease, or making a quick buck? Absolutely nothing. But with a little memorization of car jargon and a huge dose of bravado, this girl became a master of a rusting world.

Junkyard Princess is a coming-of-age memoirella by Robyn Saunders Wilson about working in her father’s junkyard during the 1980s, where she learned about love, mullets, teenage runaways, and the occasional junkyard dog. 

Robyn’s story recounts her displacement from the safe confines of Orange County, California, to her father’s new empire in the middle of the California High Desert. At first, the new business is a lark, but eventually she’s drawn in to service hawking auto parts amidst a motley assortment of fugitives and refugees. Too young to know better, she somehow misses that the people around her may be slightly dangerous—they were, after all, recently released from prison or on the run from their countries under mysterious circumstances. And when the rise of meth use takes hold of the area, a new flicker of danger threatens to strike its match on the Saunders’ junkyard kingdom.  

The years continue and she becomes better at selling things she knows nothing about. So good that her parents leave her to run the show while they take vacations. Left without any real role models and lost among kids her own age, Robyn fakes her way through her teen years by mimicking the only adults she knows: soap opera stars and characters plucked from Danielle Steel romance novels. Through this pretense she is able to shapeshift while keeping her true identity—a shy, naive child—under lock and key. 

All empires must collapse and all little girls must grow up. But first, there is love to be found, music to discover, and womanhood to shirk from. Junkyard Princess explores familial bonds and inherited histories, empty gas tanks, and that sweet spot of redemption that only comes from a life of observing and choosing differently. 

About Robyn Saunders Wilson

Robyn Saunders Wilson is a non-fiction writer based in Salem, Oregon. A graduate of Portland State University’s Professional Writing MA program, she has split her time as a communications consultant, bike shop owner, mountain bike coach, and community activist, but mostly a writer of stories–true and otherwise. 

One day, long ago, Robyn found herself slumped in the driver’s seat of her red jeep (Jeep’s name: Beth) while waiting her turn in a Jiffy Lube drive-thru. More specifically, she waited for a guy named Jim (his name was embroidered in blue on his work shirt), to get rolling on an oil change. He was not moving fast. She shifted in her seat trying to dodge the sun burning her eyes. A deep discomfort took over and the knowledge that she wasn’t supposed to be there. No “reputable car person” goes to one of these oil change palaces of convenience. “Reputable car person.” Was that who she was? That sounded wrong, too. And with that label in mind, Robyn began to chase her identity, following a thread she didn’t know needed to be pulled; a family history that she had never really questioned until pen hit paper later that night in a memoir class at Portland State University. And with that, JUNKYARD PRINCESS was born.

Robyn’s work has been published in Pile Press, House of Huckleberry, Press Play, and Annabelle Magazine, amongst others. JUNKYARD PRINCESS is her debut book.

About Banana Pitch Press & Why We Chose This Book! 

Banana Pitch Press is a non-profit 501(c)(3) indie press specializing in novella-length books: the novella, and what we’re dubbing memoirellas and collectionellas. 

We publish books with interesting one-line pitches and work with writers who have a creative vision other publishers might not be down for. We crave unapologetic writing that doesn’t fit all tidy-like into one genre. Banana Pitch is especially drawn toward memorable stories with humor, a touch of weird and with something to say. 

Which is precisely why we selected Junkyard Princess as our next book. We were immediately drawn into Robyn’s voice, and a fascinating world of old cars, rusty men, and a coming-of-age told in a way we’d never experienced before. The story starts off with an immediate problem our narrator is faced with: what will happen to her when she has to leave the Disneyland-like streets of her Orange County home and is plopped in the middle of seemingly nowhere? And when twelve-year old Robyn dons her first uniform, a blue ringer t-shirt with a patch with her name embroidered in red cursive, everything changes.

After school each day she begins “wandering the sea of broken machinery, following winding paths of sand through injured and beaten auto bodies, gingerly tip-toeing on broken glass, rubbing my fingers across dented fenders and smooth molding…” 

Well, we were hooked. Immediately. It’s one of those books we’ve been thinking about and referencing ever since we started working on it.

Like all good stories, Robyn’s story is not merely an interesting setting or a unique character. There are difficulties she and her family must navigate. Soon she learns how her father’s histories and troubles were passed down to her generation, and the next. Junkyard Princess is all at once heartwarming and heartbreaking. We learned a lot about cars and greasy empires; we got to experience the world of 1980s Southern California, and we both laughed aloud and cried silently throughout the process of reading this story.

With that, we are so thrilled to have the honor of publishing Roybn’s debut book, and need community help in order to make it possible. Thank you so much, we are stoked for you to get to read this book!

Why now?

We are living in a time that is all at once exciting and daunting and important for artists — especially women. As Toni Morrison so famously said, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal." 

Through stories, we have the power to change people’s perspective, and there is a lot of perspective-shifting that needs to happen in our world right now. One life-changing way we are able to offer the type of emotional change our communities need is by raising empathy. We need to see our fellow humans as fellow humans, to get them in a way we might have otherwise not seen. If we know people on a personal level, it’s harder to judge them, right? And we can get to know each other through storytelling. 

Junkyard Princess explores themes around substance abuse, mental health, familial tragedies and the struggle to work as a woman in a male-dominated atmosphere. There are so many learning moments in this memoirella, all wrapped in compassionate, funny and can’t-look-away storytelling. 

How we’re funded

With grant funding for the arts at an all-time low, this nonprofit press is fully funded by crowdfunding. We’ve had two successful campaigns so far and we need community help to get our third book out into the world for its pending publication date in Spring of 2026.

This time around, we decided to not use a traditional crowdfunding website. They’re complicated and take a fat cut of the proceeds. We value your donations so much and want as much of this money as possible to go to our books and the creatives who make them happen.

Remember: All donations are tax deductible. We are an Oregon-based 501(c)3.

• 33-1296290 for your tax write-off pleasures

THANK YOU!

— Michelle Kicherer, Founding Editor

with Robyn Saunders Wilson, author of Junkyard Princess