The Cancer Test She No Longer Has to Dread

 

Cedar Valley News
June 27, 2026
The Cancer Test She No Longer Has to Dread
By Aisha Khalid

She came in for her blood pressure, and I brought up the other thing the way I have learned to, gently and near the end, so it does not feel like an ambush.

She is fifty-one. She has not had a Pap test in nine years. I have asked her three times now, at three visits, and three times she has given me the same answer. I know, she says. Next time. She says it kindly, almost apologetically, and then she changes the subject, and I let her, because I have watched what pushing does.

She is not careless. She is the opposite of careless. She raised two children, manages her mother’s medications, and has not missed one of her own blood-pressure appointments in a decade. What she cannot do is put her feet in the stirrups and let me do the rest. Something happened to her once, in a room like this one, and she has never told me what, and she does not have to. The table is the wall. The science was never the wall.

I think about her more than she knows, because she is the one the numbers are about. More than half of the women who develop cervical cancer in this country were never screened, or were screened so rarely it did not protect them. The disease is not outrunning our medicine. It is finding the women our medicine made it hardest to reach. It is finding the women at the wall.

For years, we called these women noncompliant. We wrote the word in their charts and moved on. We built the one thing able to save them around a table half of them could not climb onto, and then blamed them for staying away.

For most of my career I had nothing to offer her but a kinder version of the same request. Come in. Lie down. Let me. This year I have something else.

There is a test now she can do herself. A swab, in private, in the restroom down the hall. Ninety seconds, her own hands, her own pace. No stirrups. No table. She does not have to put on the gown, or the face a woman puts on to get through it. She brings it to the front desk, we send it to the lab, and it looks for the virus behind nearly all of this cancer. It is accurate. When I told her, she went quiet. Then she said, "This is all? This is all.”

She did it before she left. Nine years, undone in a minute and a half, in a bathroom, with the door locked and no one watching. She came out holding the little tube, and her face was not relief exactly. It was closer to anger, the particular anger of a person who has just learned a wall she lived behind for years had a door in it all along.

I have done this work for twenty years, and I have learned to watch who comes with the women. Some come alone. Some are dropped at the door and collected after. And some sit in the chair beside the exam table for the whole of it, holding the coat and the worry, asking the questions their wife is too frightened to ask. Those are the husbands who stay. They do not always know what the staying is worth. It is worth more than they will ever be told. No one is born knowing what the chair is for. A man learns it by sitting in it. And his wife, every time, knows he is there.

The woman with the high blood pressure will have her result in a week or two. The odds are heavily in her favor now, because she came in, because she finally let herself be reached. I did not save her. The swab did not save her. She saved herself. We only opened the door for her.

Somewhere in this town, a woman is standing behind a wall tonight. A test she dreads. A call she has not yet made. If this is you, I want you to know the wall has a door in it now.

Go find the door.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you have been standing behind a wall of your own, or love someone who has, the group is a good place to talk it through. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the cervical cancer screening statistics and the self-collection test described in this editorial are real.

The Media Kit

 

The journalist says, “Send me everything I need.” The author who is ready changes the conversation. The author who isn’t loses it.

The email arrives on a Tuesday morning. A podcast host, a newspaper reporter, a blogger — someone with an audience your book needs to reach. They’ve heard about the book. They’re interested. They want to know more.

They write five words: “Send me everything I need.”

This is the moment separating the author who is ready from the author who is not.

The unprepared author scrambles. They dig through files looking for a headshot taken three years ago on a phone. They write a bio from scratch, then rewrite it because the first version runs four paragraphs and says nothing useful. They realize they have no cover image in a format the journalist can use. They send a follow-up asking what resolution is needed. The reply takes two days. By the time it arrives, the journalist has moved on to a different story. The opportunity came and went, and the author never saw it leave.

The prepared author responds in twenty minutes. Headshot attached. Cover image attached. One-page bio attached. Three talking points attached. Contact information at the bottom. Everything the journalist needs to say yes, in one email, before lunch.

 

What a Media Kit Contains

A media kit is not complicated. It is a folder — digital or physical — holding five things.

A professional headshot. Not a vacation photo. Not a snapshot cropped from a group picture. A clear, well-lit image of the author looking like someone who takes their work seriously. This image will appear beside every article, every podcast listing, every event flyer. It is the author’s face to the public. It should look like it was chosen on purpose.

A high-resolution cover image. The journalist or event coordinator will need this for their website, their social media post, their newsletter. If the image is too small or too blurry to reproduce, it will not be used.

A one-page author bio. Not the story of your life. The relevant facts: who you are, what you write, what qualifies you to write it, and where readers can find your work. Written in third person so the journalist can drop it directly into the article without rewriting.

Three to five talking points. The ideas, themes, or questions making the book interesting to an audience beyond readers. A journalist does not want to summarize your book. A journalist wants an angle — a reason this story belongs in front of their audience today. The talking points give them one. Write them as questions the journalist can ask you. Make their job easy and they will make yours easier.

Contact information. Name, email, phone number. The person the journalist calls when they have a follow-up question at four in the afternoon.

Five items. One folder. Built once. Used for years.

The Author Who Sets the Standard

I tell writers all the time: if you want to see what steady, meaningful engagement looks like, look to Mary Ann Poll. She’s not just a writer — she’s active. She’s a charter member of Author Masterminds. She maintains a podcast, Real Ghost Chatter. She shows up for interviews, contributes to discussions, and responds to readers. She doesn’t disappear between books.

Mary Ann is ready. When the call comes — the podcast invitation, the interview request, the event coordinator asking for materials — she doesn’t scramble. She sends the kit. The conversation moves forward. The opportunity becomes a feature, an appearance, a connection reaching readers she would never have found on her own.

This is not talent. This is preparation. And preparation is available to every author willing to spend one afternoon assembling five items into a folder.

Build It Now

The media kit is not built when the opportunity arrives. It is built before the opportunity arrives. The author who waits for the email before assembling the materials is the author who replies two days late to a journalist who has already moved on.

Build it during the production window. Have the headshot taken. Save the cover image in high resolution. Write the bio. Draft the talking points. Put them in a folder on your desktop where you can find them in thirty seconds.

The next time someone says, “Send me everything I need,” you will. And the conversation will not end with your email. It will begin with it.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the authors who show up prepared reach further than the ones who scramble.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

The Revolution Ended a World of Bowing and Rank

 

Cedar Valley News
June 26, 2026
The Revolution Ended a World of Bowing and Rank
By Dan Larson

The historian died less than a month before the party he had spent his life explaining.

Gordon Wood was ninety-two. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where the first shot of the Revolution was fired. He died in early June, struck by a car in a parking lot in Rhode Island. He won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and he taught at Brown University for forty years. He understood the founding of this country as well as any man alive, and the bunting for its two hundred fiftieth birthday was already going up when he died.

I took my worn copy of his book down from the shelf the night I read he was gone. I have read it more than once. I wanted to sit with it again.

Here is the thing Wood spent his life trying to make us see. The Revolution looks tame from the outside. There were no guillotines. The same men of property ran things before and after. A visitor from France might have wondered what the shouting was about. But underneath the calm surface, Wood argued, something enormous came apart.

He meant the end of deference. Before the Revolution, a man knew his place and kept it. The common man removed his hat when a gentleman passed. He stepped off the path. He addressed his betters as his betters and did not meet their eyes. Society was a ladder, every man stood on his rung, and the rungs were ordained. The Revolution broke the ladder. After it, a farmer could meet a gentleman’s gaze and owe him nothing but the courtesy one man owes another.

We think the Revolution was about taxes, or about which men would govern. Wood showed it was about something deeper and stranger. It dissolved a whole world of rank. And here is the part he was most careful about: it ran further than the men who made it intended. They loosed a flood of plain equality they could not have recognized and could not call back. The founders were not the calm masters of what they began. They were swept along by it, like the rest of us.

I have been thinking about Wood this week for a second reason. Someone I respect wanted me to agree, with the Fourth of July approaching, the founders were on our side. Godly men, he said, who would be at home in our pews. I understood the wish. I share the affection underneath it. But I could not say yes, and Wood is part of the reason.

The founders were men of the eighteenth century. They are strangers to us. They held convictions we would find bracing and convictions we would find appalling, and they did not arrange their lives to settle our arguments. When we drag them onto our side of a fight they never heard of, we are not honoring them. We are using them. We owe the dead better than to put words in their mouths they never said.

This is, in the end, a question of honesty, and honesty is something my faith takes seriously. The commandment against false witness does not expire when the witness is dead and famous. To honor the founders is to learn them as they were, not to recruit them as we wish they had been. Understanding is its own form of respect. It is harder than admiration and worth more.

Wood gave his life to the harder thing. He read these men so closely, for so long, he could tell you how they bowed and argued and how little they agreed. He resisted, to the end, the easy comfort of making them into a mirror.

The flood they loosed is still running. The idea of it, no man owing another his bow, every man meeting every other on the level, is larger than any party trying to own it this summer. It is the actual inheritance. It is worth understanding before we celebrate it.

So this year, before the fireworks, open one of them. Or open Wood. Read as a stranger trying to understand a stranger. The bowing ended because people finally looked. Look.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you have a history book you keep meaning to open, or a founder you would like to understand better, the group is a good place to talk it through. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Gordon Wood, his death, and his books referenced in this editorial are real.

The Flag a Fourteen-Year-Old Orphan Drew

 

Cedar Valley News
June 25, 2026
The Flag a Fourteen-Year-Old Orphan Drew
By Chloe Papadakis

Last month, I ran a small contest for the children of Cedar Valley. We are decorating Main Street for the Fourth, and instead of buying banners, I asked the schools to have the kids design them. I expected a few dozen entries. We got more than two hundred. They are taped across the whole wall of my office right now, every one of them, because I cannot bring myself to take a single one down.

Choosing among them is the hardest part of my job. Every drawing is somebody's whole heart, handed across a table to a stranger, hoping. You learn, doing this work, how asking a child to make something is no small thing. It is a kind of trust. You are telling them their hands matter.

I have been thinking, this week, about a contest like mine, held almost a hundred years ago, with much higher stakes.

In 1927, the Territory of Alaska did not have a flag. The governor decided the children should make one. The American Legion sent the rules to every school from the coast to the Interior: grades seven through twelve, design a flag for Alaska. Local judges picked the best, and the finalists went to Juneau. More than a hundred designs came in. Most were what you would expect from grown-up instincts handed to kids: polar bears, gold pans, the midnight sun.

The one they chose was the simplest. Eight gold stars on a field of blue. Seven of them, the Big Dipper, for strength. The eighth, the North Star, for the future of a place hoping to become a state. The boy who drew it wrote a sentence to explain the blue. It was, he said, for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, a small wild flower, the kind which blooms where almost nothing else will.

His name was Benny Benson. He was fourteen, though for most of the next century people believed he was thirteen, because he was an orphan and the records of his life were so thin even his birthday had to be corrected, by historians, almost a hundred years later.

He was an Alaska Native boy, Unangax̂, from a village on the Aleutian chain. His mother had died when he was small. His family lost their house to a fire. His father, unable to keep his children, sent Benny and his brother to a home for orphans. He was living there, with almost nothing of his own, when he picked up a pencil and drew the night sky he looked at every evening before he slept.

The territory adopted his flag in May. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the boy's design became the state's. In 1969, it flew to the moon. Benny lived to see it, and said, later, it was the biggest thing ever to happen to him. A flag a fourteen-year-old orphan drew at a small wooden desk, carried up off the earth entirely.

I learned all of this because of where the flag is going next.

This summer, for the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, every state was asked to put one thing into a capsule, to be sealed in Philadelphia and opened in the year 2276. States sent coins. They sent letters from governors. One sent a piece of a fusion reactor.

Alaska sent a copy of Benny Benson's flag.

Out of everything Alaska could have chosen to say to the people of the future, it chose the drawing of an orphaned boy. Not the oil, not the gold, not the mountains. The thing a child made when somebody thought to ask him.

So here is what I will be thinking about on the Fourth, watching all two hundred banners flap above Main Street, none of them taken down. We spend a great deal of energy deciding which grown-ups get to speak for us. We forget, most of the time, to ask the children to make anything at all.

When we remember, they hand it back with both hands. And every so often, one of them hands back the very thing we turn out to need for the next hundred years.

Ask them. You never know whose flag you are holding.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about something a child in your life made which you have never been able to take down. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Benny Benson and his 1927 Alaska flag design are real, and a copy of it is Alaska’s contribution to America’s Time Capsule, to be sealed in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026, and opened in 2276.

The Battery on Her Lap

 Cedar Valley News

June 24, 2026
The Battery on Her Lap
By Lars Olson

A man set a cordless drill battery on my counter this morning and asked if I had the same one in stock. I did. But I looked at the one he brought in first.

The pack was fat. Not cracked, not scorched. Fat. The flat black case had begun to bulge at the seam, the way a can does when something inside it has gone wrong. He had not noticed. Most people do not. He told me it still worked. He was right. It did still work, and it was also a small fire waiting for a reason.

I have sold a great many batteries from behind this counter. The lithium ones came in slowly, then all at once. They are in the drill. They are in the leaf blower. They are in the doorbell camera, the headlamp, and the little silver pack a man keeps in his truck to jump a dead car. They are the most powerful thing most people own, and they are the thing most people respect the least.

I told him to leave the swollen one with me. He shrugged. It is just a battery, he said.

It is not just a battery. A lithium cell holds a remarkable amount of energy in a very small space, which is the whole point of it, and which is also the danger of it. When a cell is healthy, the energy comes out slowly, on your terms, through the two posts on the end. When a cell is damaged — dropped, punctured, charged too hard, worn thin — the energy gives it all back at once. Engineers have a calm name for it. They call it thermal runaway. There is nothing calm about it. The cell swells, vents, and then it does not stop getting hotter, because it is feeding itself.

The swelling is the warning. The fat pack on my counter was the part of the failure a person can still see.

In April, the federal product safety commission reissued a recall for a wireless phone charger, a small, flat power pack you press to the back of a phone. The model is the Casely Power Pod, E33A. They had recalled it once already. They had to do it again because people kept getting hurt.

One of them was a woman in New Jersey. She was seventy-five. She was charging her phone with the pack resting on her lap, the way any of us would, the way it was built to be used. It caught fire and exploded. She was badly burned, and she later died of those burns.

I keep coming back to the lap. Not a warehouse. Not a charging station. A lap, in a chair, at home. The most dangerous object in the room was the smallest one, and it was touching her.

I am not telling you to be afraid of your tools. I sell the tools. I use them. A good lithium pack, treated with sense, will give you years and never once raise its voice. I am telling you the energy is real, and the respect is cheap, and most people are spending neither.

So here is the sense. Charge these things where you can see them, on a hard surface, away from the bed, the sofa, the pile of rags in the garage. Do not charge them through the night while you sleep on the far side of a closed door. Use the charger built for the pack, not the cheapest one on the shelf, picked because it fits. If a battery gets too hot to hold, stop. And if a pack has gone fat, if the case has begun to swell the way the drill battery swelled, it is already telling you what it plans to do.

The swollen one does not go back in the drawer. It does not go in the kitchen trash, either, where it can finish the job in the truck or the landfill. It goes to the hazardous-waste drop, today, while you are still the one deciding when it comes apart.

The man took my advice and left the fat one on the counter. Go look at the one charging in your house tonight.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If there is a swollen battery in a drawer somewhere in your house, or a charger you have wondered about, the group is a good place to talk it through. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the Casely Power Pod recall and the death of the New Jersey woman referenced in this editorial are real.

The History in Your Change

 

Cedar Valley News
June 23, 2026
The History in Your Change
By George Khan

You learn a few things standing at a register for thirty years. One of them is the weight of a quarter. Another is the way almost nobody looks at one.

A coin comes across my counter a few hundred times a day. It goes from a hand to my hand to a drawer, or from the drawer to my hand to a hand, and in all the traveling, I am usually the only person in the exchange who actually looks at it. People look at the bills. Nobody looks at the change.

I was the one who noticed, back in the winter, when the quarters started to change.

I made a customer's change one morning and a coin came up I had not seen before. I turned it in my fingers, the way you do. On the back was a scene I had to hold up to the light to read. The signing of something. Men around a table. And along the edge, two dates instead of one: 1776, and 2026.

The Mint has been doing this all year, quietly, and most people have not noticed, because most people do not look at their change. For the country's 250th birthday, they redesigned the coins in your pocket. Five new quarters, each one a different piece of the story. The Mayflower Compact. The Revolutionary War. The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution. The Gettysburg Address. A new dime, the first in eighty years. All of it stamped with those two dates, the year the country started, and the year it turned around to look at itself.

For one year only. Next year the coins go back to normal. So whatever passes through your hands in the next few months is a thing you will not hold again.

I will tell you what I have watched happen across my counter since the winter.

Most people take their change without a glance. I hand them the Declaration of Independence, and they drop it in the cupholder. It is fine. People are busy. A man counting his lunch money is not thinking about Philadelphia.

But every so often, somebody stops. A girl, maybe nine, took her coins last week and went still, looking at one of them. She asked her mother what it was. Her mother did not know, so the girl asked me, and I told her she was holding the Gettysburg Address. She did not know what it was either. I told her, in the line, with people waiting: it was the place a man stood after a terrible battle and said the country was going to keep going. She looked at the quarter a while longer. Then she put it in her pocket instead of her mother's purse. She kept it.

Here is the thing I keep turning in my head, the way I turn the coins in my hand.

A coin is the one piece of this country every single person holds. It does not ask who you voted for. It does not care what you think about anything. It goes from the hand of a man who came here from somewhere else, like me, to the hand of a man whose people have been here three hundred years, and back again, all day, in every town, without anybody making a speech about it. We cannot agree on much right now. But we all still reach into the same drawer.

And for one year, what is in the drawer is the country's own story. Somebody put 250 years of us into the smallest thing we pass around, and trusted us to notice.

Most of us will not. But some of us will.

So here is what I am asking, and it costs you nothing. The next time you get change, before it goes in the cupholder, look at the back of it. See which one you got this time. The Mayflower. The war. The signing. And if there is a kid nearby, hand it to them, and tell them what it is.

A quarter is going to outlast every argument we are having this week. You might as well stop and look at it before you let it go.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us which of the five quarters you have found in your change, and whether you stopped to look. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the United States Mint’s redesign of the nation’s circulating coins for the 250th anniversary — five new quarters, a new dime, and the dual date 1776 and 2026 — is real.

I’m Very Glad I Wrote

 

Last Friday, at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, NPR’s Scott Simon sat across from Judy Blume and asked if she missed writing.

She is eighty-eight years old. Her last book was published more than a decade ago. She spends her days now reading children’s books behind the counter of her bookstore in Key West, Florida. She has been a writer for fifty years. She is not a writer anymore.

Scott Simon said he had the sense she didn’t miss it.

“I don’t miss writing,” she said, “but I’m very glad I wrote. Writing changed my life. But it was time to let it go. Could I have come up with more ideas and written more books? Yes. But I’m really happy I found something else I love to do.”

Judy Blume wrote Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Deenie and Tiger Eyes and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Blubber and dozens more. She fought censorship battles for decades, books challenged in school libraries across the country. She wrote for children who felt unseen — confused, embarrassed, growing up in a world where adults pretended certain things did not exist. She wrote them into the world and made them feel less alone.

She began as a reader. She began with stories bouncing around inside her head at age nine, stories she never told anyone because she feared they would think she was strange. She sold felt art pieces until she had $300, bought herself a small electric typewriter, and started. Fifty years of books followed.

When Simon asked about her characters — whether Margaret ever knocked on the door asking to be let out — Blume shook her head. “Margaret is always going to be twelve,” she said. “She’s not knocking, saying let me out, I’m in menopause. They are what they are. They stay in the book. They live for me in the book. And then I have to let them go.”

She let them go. She is glad she wrote them. She does not miss it.

Laura Ingalls Wilder did not begin writing until she was sixty-five years old.

She had lived the story first. She grew up on the American frontier — in Wisconsin, in Kansas, in Minnesota, in South Dakota — in the years when the land was still being settled, when families still traveled by covered wagon, when the winters came hard and the nearest town was a day’s ride away. By the time she sat down to write, the frontier was gone. The people she had grown up among were nearly gone too.

She wrote to preserve what she had seen before it disappeared entirely. She wrote nine novels in the Little House series. The last,

She wrote to preserve what she had seen before it disappeared entirely. She wrote nine novels in the Little House series. The last, These Happy Golden Years, was published in 1943. She was seventy-six years old.

She lived fourteen more years. She did not publish another novel. She had written what she needed to write. She died in 1957, three days after her ninetieth birthday, with her books still in print and still being read.

She had done the work while the work was there. When it was done, she let it go. She did not miss it, either.

Blume and Wilder lived in different centuries, wrote for different readers, led entirely different lives. The line between them is the same line.

Neither woman wrote to build a career. Neither wrote because writing was her identity. Both wrote because the stories were there and the readers needed them — Blume’s twelve-year-olds who needed someone to speak plainly about growing up, Wilder’s children who needed to know the world they came from before it was forgotten entirely.

Both finished when the work was done. Both were glad they wrote. Neither missed it.

The Power of Authors teaches: purpose is not a career. It is not an identity. It is not something to maintain. It is something you carry while it is alive and put down when it is complete. The author writing from genuine purpose does not have to write forever. They have to write faithfully while the stories are there.

Blume had stories at nine years old, bouncing a rubber ball against the side of her house. She wrote them for fifty years. She let the last one go.

What are you carrying right now? Not the story you might write someday. The one alive in you today. The one your reader is already waiting for.

Write it while it is there.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.