Shout!

My second story to be published this year is in the resistance anthology “Shout,” a collection of poems and stories that ask hard questions about who we are, who we’re becoming, and how we might be able to change both. The book’s just become available for sale. Part of the proceeds from sales will go to Raices, Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU.

My story, “In The Days of El Dorado,” contains an account of the Age of Gold–roughly our own time– as it has survived in the folklore of a small society that is living with the fallout of our choices and making rather different choices of their own.

Is writing fiction a useful response to the devastating choices we are making now about how we treat each other and the world we share? I don’t really know. But writing fiction, like growing food and reaching out to neighbors as I can, is a small thing that keeps me a little saner and helps me hold onto the possibility that we could come together and choose better.  Reading other people’s stories has sometimes given me glimpses of insight and of hope in a dismaying time. I hope to be able to pass that on.