Year: 2021

It snowed, finally. We’ve been waiting for months, restless and agitated. Have you ever seen your child settle more deeply into slumber after you tuck them under the blanket? That’s how it feels here. I live in the high-altitude desert of Northern New Mexico. Deserts often invoke images of Saharan sands, but this desert sprawls […]

This is an excerpt from The Crown of Light, the fourth novel in the award-winning Ari Ara Series. Find it here. Note: The Paika are a group of clans that live in the Border Mountains between the two nations of Ari Ara’s world. In this scene, Ari Ara, after being taken hostage by them, agrees […]

This is an excerpt from The Crown of Light, the fourth novel in the award-winning Ari Ara Series. Find it here. Note: The Paika is the name and title of the elder who leads the Paika clans. In this scene, she offers some advice to the lovestruck, 15-year-old Ari Ara. The Paika teased out her braid […]

This is an excerpt from The Crown of Light, the fourth novel in the award-winning Ari Ara Series. Find it here. “Tell her the first Alaren tale, great-grandmother,” Finn cajoled, tossing a grin in Ari Ara’s direction. “The one about the Paika Huntress.” “I have told you many times,” The Paika chided Finn, “they are not Alaren […]

The Ari Ara Series Challenges The Glorification of Violence & WarWe need these stories now, more than ever before. In a culture addicted to violence, your support of Ari Ara’s novels is powerful. Ari Ara doesn’t just live in a utopia of peace. She and her friends challenge the culture of war. They use active […]

Today, a child was born, tiny hands curling and unfurling with the startled shock of cool air on wet skin, oxygen flooding into newly-opened lungs as she cries upon entering this strange new world. This child will likely live to see 2100. The date hangs, inconceivable, futuristic, but now within the span of a single […]

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 […]

It’s outdated. It’s dysfunctional. It’s hated by most of the populace. No, we’re not talking about the line at the DMV. We’re talking about the Selective Service and the military draft. For decades, young men have had to register. Now, congress is considering expanding draft registration to women.  Here’s a better idea: let’s abolish the […]

By Marissa Mommaerts “Winds of Change,” the third part of the trilogy that began with The Dandelion Insurrection, is so rich that I simultaneously want to share it with every visionary changemaker I know, while at the same time rereading it over and over until I absorb every drop of wisdom, hope and strategy into […]

A young Kansas grain farmer and I were riding on a train through Iowa when the subject of the climate crisis came up. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a multigenerational Midwest farming family. I’d grown up on a potato farm in Northern Maine. Both of us spent our teenage years in overalls. We […]

A continent-wide snow storm swept across the United States last week. From Seattle to Baton Rouge and from Dallas to Minneapolis, people grappled with road closures, shutdowns, power outages, and freezing temperatures.  From sea to shining sea, ordinary people stepped up to take care of one another. My brother volunteered to snowblow the Seattle offices […]

8 Magical Stories Of How Peace Literature Changes Culture – And Lives By Rivera Sun Four hours per day, six days per week, I take action for peace. It may not look like your typical nonviolent action – I don’t hold signs or block the gates of military bases. The way I wage peace is […]

Image via Today, “Could The COVID-19 Memorial Become Permanent?” Four hundred lights stretch along the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Each represents one thousand people in America who have died of COVID-19. It is only in their absence that we have space to acknowledge the dead–there is not enough space beside the pool for that […]