Upsetting Day: Renovo Storytellers

When you hear "the worst something ever," it's usually cheap hyperbole or a cheaper insult. There's hardly ever a clear way to quantify "worst," and if there was it would be different for different people. But I have a rare treat for you, objectivity. I found The Worst Writer Ever, and I can prove it.

I can prove it again, I should say. I reviewed a Donna Kshir book before. Donna Kshir is the woman who furiously transcribed the stories of a chubby idiot claiming to have dozens of world championship karate kills, then published it before she had a chance to fact check it. Or spell check it. And it's not the only time she's done that. I have a book where an alcoholic made up 350 stories about getting drunk, laid, and arrested and Donna printed every single one as fact. You could blame a fart on a spaceship, and Donna Kshir would call your biography Toot From the Stars: The Story of the Secret Agent I Met At the Bar Who Never Farts.

But this article is not about Donna's credulity and spelling. Some of it will be, but mostly it's about how she has managed to fail at every aspect of the creative process, often in ways that should be impossible. So let's go. We're going to look at four books from her 2020 Renovo Storytellers series, each glorious fuckups in their own way.

Renovo Storytellers: Folk and Fairy Tales is a collection of modern fables from the region of Renovo, Pennsylvania. You know, folksy wisdom of small town Real Americans. You're right to be worried, but it's not going to be as racist as that sounds.

Donna is a multi-hyphenate, and isn't shy about it. She is her own cover designer, a credit not really worth fighting for when you've centered Default Font over a random photo of your kids. She's also her own publisher, which is specifically not a brag in the book industry. I honestly think she did this to bury her partner's credit. Sandra Potter may have been the editor for this series of books, but Donna wants the reader to know how little Sandra did. She's not even subtle about it. Look:

Twice in the first paragraph of the first intro, Donna says nothing here has been edited! Then what was the point of this?

More like Fucking Nothing: Sandra Potter. Psh.

I didn't know a person could have an opinion on this, but I own nine of Donna's books, and I think dedications might be the thing she's worst at. Here she dedicates a sloppy collection of nothing to any person who has ever been to Renovo, a dubious honor for a loosely specified group. And she's not done. After the Dedication, she also includes an Acknowledgements, and she's still so mad at Sandra that she forgets what that means.

I acknowledge how goddamn Sandra didn't do anything. Again, I hope these words honor the memory of how Sandra Potter didn't do anything. We haven't started the book and its Cover Designer, Interior Designer, Author, and Publisher have already told us four times how it didn't have an Editor. I also highlighted the passage "keeping the history of our small town alive," because that will be a funny thing to consider as we read, as it will never, ever do anything close to that.

To be fair, this rambling, repetitive dedication is an improvement from her earlier work. Let me show you the dedication from A Story of Survival, a miserable abuse fantasy about 150 pages long (Donna doesn't usually remember to add page numbers):

So maybe you see the problem. On some days Donna is too generous and dedicates her book to everybody she's ever met. And on other days she dedicates the dedication to destroying Sandra. Let's keep going, though; because there's more introduction to get through.

To add context to these folksy and authentic tales, Donna includes a history of her hometown. She does it the way every good writer does, by copying elk migration facts from Wikipedia.

By now she's restated her thesis almost as many times as she's complained about Sandra. These are important stories handed down by the wise ancestral people of Renovo, and they must be preserved. So let's see one of them.

Let future generations remember this precious tale from Renovo. It's a page-and-a-half story about two boys in a graveyard. Their names are a couple random sounds, you don't need to worry about it. Let future generations know we're not married to Bobo and Coco. It's what they do you need to worry about, which is squirm while a stranger calls them strapping and asks if they need to pee. Donna Kshir thinks this is a story of "great importance," and since it's the first story, maybe the most importance.

As you can see, editor Sandra Potter preserved its originality and accuracy by pasting it straight from the email she got from peepeeman65@gravekeeper.com. What a wonderful time capsule for future Renovians. I'm not going to leave you hanging. Here's the rest of the story.

Oh my god! The horny graveyard stranger was the ghost of Harry Houdini the entire time! A man not associated with Renovo, Pennsylvania in any way! Also, what? Also, headstones don't usually have faces. Also, was there no room for him to do a little magic? Or an escape? Also, are you sure he died in 192? Is this a time travel twist on top of a ghost of Harry Houdini twist? Is the pee plotline going to get wrapped up? I fucking dare future residents of Renovo to have a more shameful moment in their history than this.

The next four entries in Renovo Storytellers: Folk and Fairy Tales are terrible poems. They're the kind of poems any third grade teacher could get by telling their students they have until the end of this cigarette to write a poem. Two of them are by Donna and she knows less about rhyme and meter than Harry Houdini knows about talking to kids. The other two are by Bob Shank, the esteemed author of "The Adventures of Bobo and Coco." They're reverent love letters to a baseball field, but I'm making it sound too sane. If you asked a sign language interpreter to watch security footage of a third base coach getting strangled, they would say, "The victim is reciting the baseball poems from Renovo Storytellers: Folk and Fairy Tales." We're not even going to look at them. Shame on Donna Kshir, Bob Shank, and all the people of Renovo who allowed them to write poetry. Let's move on to a cute children's story!

Well, this sounds nice! They're puppies, and they have names! Let's hear more about these puppies.

Hold on. What the fuck? This is the Three Little Pigs. This is just a housewife changing the Three Little Pigs to stray dogs. Why would this be important for history to preserve? If I told this to my daughter as a bedtime story, she would say, "Save that knockoff shit for your second family, you hack piece of trash."

Maybe it's not as bad as it looks. Maybe she will adapt it so the big, bad dog catcher is interesting in some way.

No, he's still got weird blowing powers and he's using them to blow down the puppy houses. This is the dumbest shit. This is something an evil scientist would check a box for if they took out your brain and asked you to write a story. This is putting a hat on a Robocop and saying, "The tales of Hat Robocop which I did invented are been handed downfrom genneration to generation."

The dog catcher quickly became tired from exhaustion? You loose ape, did you just say "the dog catcher quickly became tired from exhaustion?" Forget about the half-assed Three Little Pigs reskin, Donna. You're supposed to be a writer, Donna.

So the dog catcher has fairy tale wolf blowing powers, but also the thumbs and ladder abilities of a human dog catcher. So he easily climbs into the house. However, the clever puppy has put a safety pin near this point of entry, a plan revealing safety pins as another thing the author doesn't really understand. The dog catcher steps on the pin and immediately knows he will never outsmart this puppy. This is a trained animal services worker with the lung capacity to destroy anything less than a brick house with his breath, and he gives up after 2% of a Home Alone trap? If one of my bedtime stories ended like this, my daughter would stab me with a safety pin and say, "I wanted to see if soulless monsters could bleed."

Oh no, what's this next fucking thing.

Donna has rewritten Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, only she's removed all the conflict and red noses. Now it's "Roger" the reindeer and the only thing happening is he wants to pull Santa's sleigh. A full 40% of the first page is Donna restating this. No joke, I genuinely don't know how you could be worse at anything. This is a dumb shit remembering zero details of a very famous story, and somehow getting all of them wrong. This might not even be plagiarism. This feels like someone with total amnesia lost in a Hallmark store and discovering in real time they are a basic bitch. You know what? Let's read the whole thing. On to Page Two in the two-page saga of "Roger the Reindeer."

Oh, good! Donna remembered something about a glowing nose. So to recap, Roger the Reindeer, who is not Rudolph, wanted to pull Santa's sleigh and then did. Also, he had a glowing nose. It was unrelated to the plot, but something about it felt important to the author, her head injury still leaking cerebrospinal fluid. To the people of Renovo, Pennsylvania, my condolences. This story is so much less than nothing at all. It's the saddest thing Donna has ever written and at least seven of her books are fake domestic abuse memoirs. I should look up who edited this piece of sh– oh my god, you're not going to believe this. It was that Sandra Potter. She is the worst.

By the way, that's the book! We're done! I'm worried you don't believe me, so I scanned the table of contents, its hilarious lack of page numbers staring Donna in her dumb face the whole time:

This was meant to be a collection of Renovo's rich legacy of fables and folk stories, and it ended up being a ghost pervert campfire story, four last-minute poems from an adult literacy class, and the haunting ruins of three public domain children's stories. If these words were printed on bathroom tissue, sewage treatment workers would ask, "How did a toilet paper company let this go to print?" And I think I made another non-joke, because you might really ask that. There doesn't really exist another industry where standards can be this low. The food equivalent of Renovo Storytellers: Folk and Fairy Tales would be five people's toenail clippings in a wet Subway wra– no, that doesn't help. Okay, try to imagine if your mechanic was as bad at his job as Donna Kshir is at reindeer stories. He'd walk out in a diaper and say, "I wanted to fix your car and wanted to fix your car, the motor is namedGinger and Ginger saved Christmas. Who told you you could look at me while I was pooping?"

Let's move on to another in the Renovo Storytellers series, Words from the Heart. It has the same creative team, which means Donna Kshir did her own Cover Design again. I didn't know she was such a talented illustrator! I'm something of a designer myself, so I filled the negative space next to this image of her book's cover with an unrelated drawing I found on Deviant Art.

We can skip the dedication, acknowledgement, and introduction since Donna copy-and-pasted them in from the last book adding only one new paragraph to tell us it contains "raw and unedited poems, letters, and short stories written by Renovo writers." So once again, in your face…

Most of Words from the Heart is poems by Donna Kshir and Bob Shank, who are as sincere as they are shovel-headed. They are simple without being wise, writing with the full confidence of the stupid. Every idea is profound, and every fleeting emotion is a trauma dump. For instance, Bob set out to write a love letter to poetry itself in "Read the Book." It starts with a man handing a book to a woman at a bus stop. For some reason, it's filled with pictures of starving and deformed children. Let's pick it up after the starving and deformed children…

They open this book of local poems with a poem about how poetry is everything. It's pictures of dying children. It's photos of breastfeeding. It's pictures of the author with a halo. It's so everything a lot of ladies mistake poets for GOD. This is something a loudspeaker says to Batman when he's hunting a poetry-themed murderer. How do you even follow something like this? Oh, Jesus, you're going to regret asking that.

"Be Persistent" is Donna Kshir's favorite kind of story– an anonymous and unverified story by a clearly troubled lunatic. It's about a non-Christian girl who took a pro-life stand by refusing to drive her mother to an abortion. She saw it as murder, and would not allow it! So anyway, she drove her mom to her abortion…

After a backwoods demonstration of situational ethics, the doctor ended up being late, so the mom had the baby. Was it the majestic power of prayer? Only time will tell. I'm just glad everything turned out well for Anonymous and her mother and sister. Oh, fun, there's more!

I don't want to tell Sandra Potter, Editor, how to not do her job, but if I was putting together a collection of cute family and sunset poems, I would probably add a content warning to the sudden crime report about a dead mother's child getting molested by her son-in-law. Or maybe I'm being too hard on Anonymous. Maybe this story has a point. I'll let her finish.

That's it!? The sex criminal got away, but everyone's really hoping God will do something about it? Again, this was called "Be Persistent." Why? Is that advice for someone? It's a story about a woman with shaky principles converting religions while her life gets torn apart by chaos. I don't think we need to worry, though. Anonymous Submission definitely doesn't exist. This is 100% the kind of person Donna Kshir would make up. But that takes us back to why? Why write this? Why would any person share this with anyone, and I'm asking that as someone doing that! I don't know if this is right, but "Be Persistent" is like finding a naked woman fleeing through the woods and saying, "You have to dream to believe. Hi, I'm Corey Feldman, and you're my new bass player."

After reprinting some of the poems from the last book, Donna showcases the work of a new writer, Isabelle Esling.

This one looks like it's going to be a simple morality play about a… let me make sure I get this right… "renomed" top model learning to be less superficial. Ugh, fine. So this beautiful woman who is beautiful and enjoys being beautiful meets an ugly man. He's so ugly it's implied he might not even be a man. And yet he has… again I want to make sure I get this right… "a very intense glance." Fine. Pretty close to normal human language, ladies. Let's see if someone from Renovo has finally figured out how to end a story.

Oh. Okay, so the model tells the ugly guy, "If I had your face, I would beg for death," and he tells her real beauty is not making fun of ugly people. She agrees instantly and decides he is INDEED "one of the most beautiful persons" she has ever met. Guys, I think this one is okay! As a beautiful dick myself, I tend to identify more with the renomed woman's point of view, but aside from the 41 spelling and punctuation errors, lack of plot, stilted dialogue, and childlike understanding of things, I don't see any problem here. By Renovo standards, this is a 2.7/10 story! Let's ruin it. Let's shit aaaaaaall over it.

"Preserving Our Freedom to Worship" is a white trash disaster. It seems to be a letter-to-the-editor Donna Kshir wrote to a high school paper to complain about them removing a prayer from their Veteran's Day event. It's a collection of half-remembered talking points from a war on Christmas Donna Kshir never came home from. And it is so goddamn smug. These are worm-eaten arguments and she slaps each one on the table like it's a three inch dick. "Um, it's called the first amendment? Maybe you haven't heard of it?" It might be the longest entry in the book, and as you can imagine, the stakes soon spiral out of control.

Not praying at a high school Veteran's Day event is how we get crime! War! And speaking of Donna and Donna, it's not fair to Donna! You let everyone else express opinions! Why not Donna, from the bleachers of this high school during this one event on this one day? Again, look at the crime. I'm no crime scientist, but certainly some of it can be traced back to this. Or maybe not. Honestly, this doesn't seem like "book" material. This seems more like something you scream at a Target security guard as he pulls you out of the store for attacking a pride flag.

Oh fuck, it's still going…

As if the stakes couldn't get any higher, Donna tells this high school paper if they do not stop breaching her Constitutional rights, the very Lord our God will abandon His creation. This is Intercontinental champion levels of crazy. She went from baby's first separation of church and state argument to "I'm going to tell God and the President on you" in five pages. Because, and I should have mentioned this earlier, in addition to all the other things, Donna Kshir is an egomaniac. She is an author the same way a motel owner hiding a camera in a toilet is a filmmaker, and yet look at this shrine she has built for herself.

That's from the "honors" section of Donna's website. It includes all the awards, accolades, and positive comments she's ever received, which isn't a lot since she pastes overlapping blocks of unedited text across print-on-demand Amazon books. So she's padded the page out with a list of every place her name has appeared… every photo she's ever taken… every local reporter who asked her about a recent bat attack. Clicking on this site was legitimately a darker horror reveal than finding out Harry Houdini died in 192 and wanted kids to pee on him.

Next book!

This one is Renovo Storytellers: uh… The Legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps? Okay, let's see what the fuck is going on here.

Guys, I think Donna Kshir published her 7th grade son's history report as a book. This book is facts about the Civilian Conservation Corps copied from three different websites (see fucking above) and nothing else. Adorably, Donna cites them as "sources," and more adorably, she got the URLs wrong. I had to find them myself, in seconds, by searching for any single string of text. You have to see my point by now. Without getting into the ethics of plagiarism, is it possible to be worse at writing than this? This woman went to a boring government site about statue dedications, took out all the pictures, and self-published it as her book. There are 8-year-olds assembling mustaches for Adalt Mushrom Plumber Halloween Costorm who take more pride in their work than Donna Kshir.

To her credit, Donna did remove a lot of context and shove some commas around in the Evolution of the CCC section:

See, she made it her own! These fascinating facts changed from "The Forest Reserve Act allows President Benjamin Harrison to create 17 forest reserves over the next three years. This is in stark contrast to the government's longstanding push towards privatization of land" into "The Forest Reserve Act allows the president to create forest reserves". It's worse, but shorter! Actually, this might have been the work of Editor: Sandra Potter since this book doesn't brag about being unedited. Which means Donna was right and Sandra does suck.

The whole book is this; I'm not kidding. She Googled the Civilian Conservation Corps and Sandra made it dumber and less readable. Let's do one last book, Renovo Storytellers: Christmas Memories.

This should be an easy one. Folksy stories about togetherness and joy from an author finally brave enough to call the holiday season "Christmas." I don't see how Donna could fuck this up.

Instead of pasting in her standard dedication, Donna accidentally pasted in the PDF of an entire different goddamn book.

Thanks to Donna's inability to do a single thing right, her collection of Christmas memories starts with Sally Ann Johnson's The Complete DIY Herb Drying Guide in its entirety. I don't even know if this is Editor: Sandra Potter's fault because the book's credits were replaced with Sally Ann Johnson's The Complete DIY Herb Drying Guide.

It goes on for 25 pages, and I know this because Sally Ann Johnson used page numbers. It has a few unappealing recipes, gardening tips too basic to be considered information, and it's the best thing Donna Kshir has ever published.

Within full view of the other book's ISBN, Donna's book starts hers with a dogshit story about some loggers in 1872 who had a nice Christmas. And I might be overselling it. An ordinary time was had by all, the godforsaken end. That's Donna's Christmas opener. The rest of the book is four stories exactly like it, one of which she "sourced" from an Air Force blog, and it's perfect. A lifeless little collection of indescribable nothing stapled to someone else's work, possibly on purpose, maybe because she's a fucking idiot. The Worst of All Time, and I dare anyone, be they from Renovo or above, to try to dethrone her.

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