Tag: Rivera Sun

It’s four in the morning and my heart is in my throat again. The presidential election in November fills me with nothing but dread and despair.  On the one hand, we’re facing a candidate who spews hatred, advocates violence, and peddles sneakers and bibles while facing astronomical legal costs for his fraud, lies, sexual assaults […]

“Heir Apparent” – Chapter One of River Dragon This is an excerpt from River Dragon, Book 5 in the Ari Ara Series. You can get River Dragon through our Community Publishing Campaign. Gritting her teeth, Ari Ara waved to the crowd, a fixed smile plastered on her face. The horse fidgeted beneath her, sensing her discomfort […]

By Rivera Sun Love is in the air . . . or at least occupying the airwaves this week, selling chocolates and roses and candlelit dinners for two. But this romantic love is just a thin slice of the feast of love that exists in the human heart. And when Valentine’s Day rolls around, I […]

We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable. Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of […]

… by Rivera Sun If you enjoy this Solutionary Climate Fiction Story, you will also enjoy Ghosts & Gleaners. … “That crow lady’s back.” “She’s more buzzard than crow.” “Magpie, I’d say. Always on the lookout for shiny trinkets.” Peering through the grimy window, clutching identical mugs of steaming herbal tea, the three workers watched […]

Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun From Sept 25-27, thousands of Indigenous Colombians marched in Bogata, calling for an end to paramilitary violence in their regions. They also voiced support for social reforms to alleviate poverty, pointing out the systemic connection between economic hardship, drug cartels, and the violence. It’s a connection that many places worldwide […]

This post was originally published on Waging Nonviolence. Twin Cities Nonviolent, one of the sites with our Nonviolent Cities Project, held two environmentally-themed musical actions as part of their 12 Days Free From Violence. On Sept. 30, the symphony group Classical Uprising performed “The (Uncertain) Four Seasons,” Vivaldi’s classic with a climate twist. On Sept. 25, another […]

Nonviolence News Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun If you zoom out to a distant vantage point of human history, you can see the arc of the universe bending toward a certain kind of justice. If we secure a future for humanity, historians will look back on these times and identify them as an era in […]

A Decade of Literary Resistance With The Dandelion InsurrectionCan you believe it’s been 10 years? The Dandelion Insurrection has been lighting up readers’ imaginations for 10 years. It’s hard to believe this golden yellow book has reached a decade of circulation on this maddeningly tumultuous world. It was written as Snowden made his revelations about the […]

Nonviolence News Editor’s Note From Rivera Sun Looking around the globe in this week’s Nonviolence News, it’s evident that people are gripped in “struggles of survival”. The demands are sensible, reasonable: people want safety from brutal repression, they want wages that pay the bills, and they want a planet they can live on that won’t […]

Kids ask the darndest things. On a virtual Author Q & A with a school classroom that read The Way Between, I was asked the question: what do I think about ChatGPT and AI novels? Rather than tear off on a long-winded rant about the long arcs of automation and tech capitalism’s lack of concern […]

This article was originally published on Campaign Nonviolence’s Community Page on Waging Nonviolence. It is reposted with permission. “Aren’t we supposed to sing beyond the choir?” This question recently came up during a training, the person’s eyebrows drawing down into a perplexed expression. On the screen, a diagram of the Spectrum of Allies – a […]

Originally published by Campaign Nonviolence (in collaboration with Nonviolence News) on Waging Nonviolence. Nonviolent action is an art, a science and a toolbox for making change. With over 300 methods of waging struggle — from street art to strikes, boycotts to blockades — and millions of people engaging with it, nonviolent action is innovative, unexpected […]

When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.  For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.  They modeled […]

I have a new rule: any day that’s warmer than the historic average is a day to take climate action. In Northern Maine today, the temperature is a nippy 31 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s still cold, but the historic average is a frigid 14.4 degrees.

Ari Ara Wins Silver Nautilus Award!Desert Song is the second novel to win this social justice fiction honor. Great news! Desert Song has just won a Silver Nautilus Award – the second book in the Ari Ara Series to be honored in this way! The Nautilus Awards are for socially-engaged fiction and I’m tickled pink to have two of […]

by Rivera Sun, Editor of Nonviolence News If you want to make change, think outside the protest box. It’s easy to get hung up on protests. We’ve heard about them, they’re highly visible, and they’re relatively easy to pull off. The problem with protests is that – all too often – they’re easily ignored. Creativity […]

Can Peace Novels Make a Difference? You bet.Build peace by helping Ari Ara’s new novel reach thousands of new readers. It’s Launch Day for The Lost Heir! It’s also Memorial Day Weekend. The sound of motorcycles rumbles in the distance. The RVs are lumbering up the highway. The barbeques are firing up for the season. And, the war […]

by Rivera Sun It’s rare to hear business magazines admit the power of nonviolent action. As the editor of Nonviolence News, a service that collects and shares 30-50+ stories of nonviolence in action each week, I often see business journals minimizing the effect of activism. Usually, industry tries to conceal the impact nonviolent action has on […]

Note: This chapter is excerpted from The Lost Heir:  An Unruly Royal, An Urchin Queen, and A Quest For Justice by Rivera Sun. You can purchase the book here. And find the eBook version here. Hours later, exhausted and happy to her bones, Ari Ara slipped through the side gate of the House of Marin with Emir. […]

A Poem by Rivera Sun Learning words for landscapeplace-terms in the language of geologyan incantation linking my wayward soulwith tenterhooks and spiderwebshair-thin roots and curling pea shoot tendrilsanchoring my humanity to this earth:tuckamore, vly, chockstone, fen. Can you feel the wilds awakeningwithin you at their sound? Stirring like spring,fertile and feral:hummock, loess, nickpoint, pediment,oxbow, portage, riprap, scarp. […]

By Gayle Morrow I am not a devoted fan of the fantasy genre so did not expect to care for this first in a series work by Rivera Sun. Instead I was captivated almost immediately. The premise is a “lost heir” of a dead queen turning out to be a pixie, fairy-like young girl; fairly […]

A Review by Rivera Sun “When everyone knows how to plan, you start to get strategic behavior.” These words from Ivan Marovic serve as my mantra as I facilitate trainings in strategy for nonviolent campaigns. When I met Marovic at the James Lawson Institute in 2014, he impressed upon me that everyone should understand strategy, […]