Vermont Goes Outside Together Every May. It Has Not Missed a First Saturday For 55 Years.

 

Cedar Valley News
April 30, 2026
Vermont Goes Outside Together Every May.
It Has Not Missed a First Saturday For 55 Years.
By Chloe Papadakis

This Saturday morning in Vermont, 22,000 people will walk out their front doors with green trash bags.

They will fan out across every town, city, and village in the state. They will walk the roadsides, the riverbanks, and the park paths. They will pick up what winter left behind. They will fill the bags, tie them off, and leave them for the truck. Then most of them will go home for lunch, or to a potluck, or to a hotdog roast at a coffee shop parking lot where someone salted the road with colored blocks for the children to find.

They have been doing this every first Saturday in May since 1970. They call it Green Up Day.

It started in 1969 when a Burlington newspaper reporter named Robert Babcock walked into Governor Deane Davis’s office with a simple idea: the state should sponsor a day for everyone to go outside and clean up the roads. The governor agreed. On April 18, 1970, four days before the first Earth Day, an estimated 70,000 Vermonters came out. They came with bags and gloves, their children, and their neighbors. They cleaned the state they lived in. Then they went home.

They never stopped.

I plan events for a living. I know what it takes to get people to show up for something. I know how hard it is to build a tradition from nothing, and how long it takes for a community to decide the tradition belongs to them. Vermont took one good idea from one determined reporter and turned it into something 22,000 people look forward to every spring. Fifty-six years of showing up.

This year, the town of Manchester reserved low-traffic routes specifically for families with young children. They hid colored blocks along the roads like a geocache. Kids who find them bring them to the noon hotdog roast and trade them for prizes. Jonah Spivak, who coordinates the cleanup for the town of Bennington, said people tell him every year they look forward to Green Up Day. An easy way to help, he said. A chance to get out and enjoy the place they call home.

Elena and I have been talking this week about what it means to take care of where you live. It started with the bird at the window in April. Then the allergy conversation. She has been more observant this spring than I expected — noticing things on our street, asking questions I do not always have answers to. On Sunday, she asked why nobody picks up the trash along the creek path.

I did not have a good answer. I told her Vermont might.

There is no Cedar Valley Green Up Day. I am not announcing one. But I am asking the question a newspaper reporter asked a governor in 1969: What if we did something about this together? What if the first Saturday in May meant something in our town? What if families came out — not because they were required to, not because someone organized a committee — but because it was just what Cedar Valley does in May?

Elena already knows which block she would start on. She told me this morning.

A community is not built in a meeting room. It is built on a Saturday morning when people walk out their front doors together, which is not a metaphor. It is literally what 22,000 Vermonters will do this Saturday.

Cedar Valley could do it, too. Saturday. Next Saturday. The first Saturday in May, every year, until it belongs to us.

If you walk out your door this weekend with a bag and a few minutes, or if you have thoughts about what Cedar Valley does together in spring, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation starts. Come tell us what you see on your block. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Vermont’s Green Up Day, Robert Babcock, Governor Deane Davis, and Jonah Spivak are real.

Barry Dickerson Walked the 5K Run

 

Cedar Valley News
April 29, 2026
Barry Dickerson Walked the 5K Run
By Lars Olson

Friday evening in Champaign, Illinois. The race starts, and the runners go. Barry Dickerson goes too, but not at a run. He walks. His legs move, his arms swing, his breath comes in the spring air smelling like cut grass and somebody’s backyard grill. The other runners pull ahead. He does not pick up the pace. He walks.

He crosses the finish line. Somebody is there — the kind of people who show up at finish lines for someone they love, hands in the air. He finishes. They cheer.

Then they all go to Aspen Tap. Beer. Burger. Plenty of laughs. A perfect night.

Back on December third, Barry Dickerson took what the Champaign News-Gazette called a knockout punch. I do not know exactly what happened to him. What I know is what followed: daily therapy, a slow climb, a high-water mark of seven point eight miles walked in a single day, and then Friday’s 5K. Five months from the punch to the finish line. He walked every step.

He said, “We all have two options. You can wallow in self-pity or pick yourself up and push forward. That’s what I decided to do.”

When I read those words, I did not think of Champaign. I thought of Cedar Valley.

I thought of the man whose marriage ended after thirty-one years. He did not see it coming. He came into the store the week after, bought a table saw he did not need, and spent three weekends building a workbench in a garage with no one to show it to. He came back for more wood. Then more. The projects are real now. He still eats alone, but his hands are busy, and his eyes are forward. He told me last week he has been sleeping better.

I thought of the couple whose last child left for college in August and who sat in a house full of quiet for two months before one of them said, “We need to do something with this.” They started delivering meals for the food bank on Thursdays. Then Saturdays. They told me they feel more useful now than they did when the house was full. They are not filling the empty. They are building something new in it.

I thought of the man who retired eighteen months ago and who is not fine. He will tell you he is fine. He is not fine. He has the time and the health and the means and he is wasting away in a comfortable chair doing nothing much, waiting for something to happen. I see him at the counter sometimes, buying small things he does not need, staying longer than the purchase requires. He is on the edge of his December third, and he has not yet chosen which way to fall. I pray for him. I wonder if anyone has told him about the two options.

None of them called what they were doing a comeback. None of them gave a speech. They just kept showing up — at the store, at the office, at the start line — one morning at a time, making the same decision Barry made. The wallow is real. I am not dismissing it. When December third hits, the wallow is what the body and the heart ask for. The choice is not whether to feel it. The choice is whether to get up after.

They got up.

Barry Dickerson is not famous. He walked a 5K in Champaign on a Friday evening, went for a burger afterward, and the Champaign paper thought it was worth reporting. I am glad they did. Because when I read about him, I saw every person in Cedar Valley who has been quietly choosing forward since their own December third.

Barry said one more thing. He said, “I hope to be running. One step at a time.”

Cedar Valley, you may be a Barry. You may know one. You may be the person at the finish line with your hands in the air for someone who walked the whole course.

All of it counts. Every step.

If you are somewhere in your own December third, or if you know someone who is, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where neighbors come when they need to not be alone with it. Come tell us where you are. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Barry Dickerson and his story are real, as reported by the Champaign News-Gazette on April 28, 2026.

What You Said May Not Be What They Heard

 

Cedar Valley News
April 28, 2026
What You Said May Not Be What They Heard
By George Khan

There are two people in Cedar Valley who have not spoken in two years. I know because I watch them navigate my deli to avoid each other. They used to come in together on Saturday mornings. Now they come separately, at different hours, and each one has given me a version of what the other said the day the friendship ended.

The two versions have almost nothing in common.

Neither one is lying. This is the part worth sitting with.

A researcher, Dr. Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago, has spent years studying what happens when people communicate with those they are close to. His finding runs counter to what most people assume. We expect the people nearest to us to understand us best — our partners, our siblings, our oldest friends. We believe closeness earns us a kind of shorthand, a way of being known without having to explain everything. What Keysar found is the opposite is often true. The closer we are to someone, the more we assume they understand us. And the more we assume, the less carefully we say what we mean.

He calls it the closeness-communication bias. We overestimate how clearly we have spoken to the people who matter most. We stop filling in the spaces because we believe the relationship already has. And so the message arrives incomplete, and the other person fills in what is missing with their own assumptions, which may have nothing to do with what we intended.

The numbers behind this are not small. Businesses in the United States lose more than one trillion dollars a year to miscommunication, according to research by Grammarly and the Harris Poll. Medical errors resulting from communication failures between caregivers cost one point seven billion dollars in malpractice claims and nearly two thousand preventable deaths in one study alone. These are the measurable losses. The unmeasured ones — the marriages, the partnerships, the families, the friendships — have no ledger.

I run a deli. I am not a therapist. But I have watched enough Cedar Valley relationships fracture over the counter to know something about where the break usually starts. It rarely starts with what was said. It starts with what was heard. And those are often not the same thing.

Someone says: I am fine. What they mean: I am not fine, but I do not know how to ask for what I need. What the other person hears: I am fine. And they move on. And the distance between them grows by exactly the width of what was not said.

Someone says: You always do this. What they mean: I am hurt, and I am reaching for the only language available when I feel this way. What the other person hears: you are a person who always does this. An accusation about character, not a cry from pain. They defend instead of listen. The conversation closes.

I have been misread my whole life. I know what it feels like to have someone decide what you are before you have finished speaking. I also know what it feels like to decide what someone else is before they have finished speaking. I have done it to people I love. Most of us have.

Keysar’s research suggests the remedy is not complicated: slow down long enough to check. Do not assume the message landed the way it was sent. Ask: Did you hear what I meant? Or: I do not think it came out right. Can I try again? These feel like unnecessary steps with people we are close to. They feel like doubt. They are not. They are care in its plainest form.

My two Saturday regulars have not figured this out yet. One told me last month he had thought about reaching out, but did not know how to start. I told him what I am telling Cedar Valley now. You start by saying: I think what I said came out wrong. I would like to try again.

It does not fix everything. But it opens the door. And most of the time, the other person has been standing on the other side of it, waiting for someone to knock.

If there is someone in Cedar Valley you have been meaning to reach back out to — someone the silence has gone on too long with — you are not the only one. The Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Dr. Boaz Keysar’s research on the closeness-communication bias is real.

Forty Percent of Local Newspapers Have Closed

 

Cedar Valley News
April 27, 2026
Forty Percent of Local Newspapers Have Closed
By Teresa Nikas

Glasgow, Montana, is in the northeastern part of the state. Population thirty-two hundred. The most remote town in the continental United States, by one measure. Sixty miles from the Canadian border, hundreds of miles from the nearest interstate. The high plains run in every direction as far as the eye can carry.

Glasgow has a newspaper. It is called the Glasgow Courier. And this spring it has a new editor named Skylar Baker-Jordan, who left a career in national opinion journalism to move there and run it.

Baker-Jordan wrote about the decision last week in the Daily Yonder, a publication covering rural America. He said, as a young journalist, local news was not what he aspired to. He wanted to make a name for himself on the national stage. He did. And then he looked at what the national press had become — the partisanship, the vitriol, the way opinion journalism had started to feel less like contributing to public discourse and more like eroding it — and he made a different calculation.

He said the numbers reflect what he felt. A recent Pew study found that while only 56% of Americans trust national news organizations, 70% trust their local newsrooms.

He moved to Glasgow. And within his first few hours there, people started telling him stories. Alleged crime. Alleged corruption. Things they wanted covered. He wrote: " The thirst for local news is not unique to Glasgow, but it is increasingly difficult to quench.

Nearly 40% of all local newspapers in the United States have closed since 2005. More than 130 closed in the past year alone. The business model built on advertising revenue collapsed when advertisers moved to social media. What is left is a growing expanse of news deserts — communities with no local paper, no one covering the school board, no one at the city council meeting, no one to call when the water rate goes up or the road crew skips your street for the third winter in a row.

Baker-Jordan named what a local paper actually is, and I want Cedar Valley to read this sentence carefully. He wrote: "Local newspapers are not just instruments of reporting on the dry proceedings of city hall or the local school board. They are civic institutions helping a community function by and for the people who call it home.”

I have been editing Cedar Valley News for a long time. I know what he means.

A local paper is not the stories it publishes. It is the fact someone is watching. Someone is asking questions. Someone is writing down what was decided in the room and making sure Cedar Valley knows what was decided. Without the paper, the room makes its decisions in the dark. The people affected by those decisions find out later, or not at all.

Glasgow, Montana, is the middle of nowhere. Cedar Valley is not. But the principle is the same. Where we live is somewhere. The decisions made here matter to the people who live here. What happens at the school board meeting, the council chamber, the hospital board, the zoning commission — it lands in Cedar Valley kitchens and Cedar Valley driveways and Cedar Valley families. Someone needs to be in the room. Someone needs to write it down.

Baker-Jordan chose Glasgow because it needed someone. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it advanced a career. Because the paper needed an editor, he had the skills, and he decided the work was worth doing.

Cedar Valley News was established in nineteen fifty-seven. It has been here since before most of the people reading this were born. I do not take for granted it will be here after I am gone. Every paper like ours survives on the same thing: the belief, shared by enough people in the community. The belief local news is worth having. The belief itself. Not a subscription model, a grant, or an algorithm. The belief.

Skylar Baker-Jordan moved to Glasgow to find out if the belief still held. In his first few hours, people lined up to tell him stories. It held.

If Cedar Valley News has covered something that mattered to you, or if there is a story you think Cedar Valley needs to hear, the Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Skylar Baker-Jordan, the Glasgow Courier, and the details described are real, as reported in the Daily Yonder on April 15, 2026.

What Can We Do?

 

On the evening of April 16, 2026, nearly 125 people gathered in a hall at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, Minnesota. Drums played in the background. They had come to hear Ojibwe author Marcie Rendon talk about her novel.

Rendon’s book, Where They Last Saw Her, had been chosen as the One Book Northland community read for 2026. The novel opens on a woman jogging on a reservation who hears another woman scream, then finds only a scuffle of footprints, tire tracks, and a lone beaded earring. From there it follows the search for a missing Indigenous woman — and the silence, institutional and otherwise, that surrounds her disappearance.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates approximately 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women remain unsolved in the United States. Rendon had been writing about this issue for more than a decade in poems, short stories, and plays before she wrote the novel.

When her editor first asked her to write a stand-alone book about the crisis, Rendon hesitated. “There’s no resolution,” she said. “If somebody’s missing or murdered, there’s no happy ending.” She wrote it anyway.

After the talk in Cloquet, an audience member raised her hand. “You presented this huge tragedy,” the woman said. “What can we do? I’d like to help make a difference.”

That question — asked in a community hall in northern Minnesota, by a reader who came for a book talk and left wanting to act — is the measure of what a book can do.

 

In 2012, Louise Erdrich published The Round House, a novel about a teenage Ojibwe boy whose mother is sexually assaulted near their North Dakota reservation. The crime takes place in a jurisdictional borderland — a zone where federal law strips tribal courts of authority over non-Native perpetrators. The family cannot get justice. The boy watches his father, a tribal judge, powerless to act within the system he serves.

The novel won the National Book Award. In accepting it, Erdrich said she had written the book because she wanted readers “to feel the frustration and agony that families experience when justice is out of reach.”

Erdrich is also Ojibwe — a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She had been writing about Native life in the upper Midwest for three decades before that night at the National Book Awards. She wrote when publishers told her there was no market for it. She wrote because she knew the truth of a community that rarely appeared in American literary fiction, and she understood that fiction was one of the few tools capable of making that truth felt rather than merely known.

The Round House changed legislation. It contributed to renewed debate over the Violence Against Women Act and tribal jurisdiction. A novel did that. Not a policy paper. Not a press release. A story.

Rendon and Erdrich are not the same writer. Their books are not the same book. But the line between them runs through the same conviction, and it runs through every page of The Power of Authors.

Purpose is not decoration. It is not the mission statement you attach to a book after it is finished. It is the reason you write the difficult book in the first place — the reason you write about the woman who screamed and was never found, even when there is no resolution, even when the ending is not happy.

Rendon hesitated. Then she wrote the book. An audience member in Cloquet stood up and asked what she could do. That is not a small thing. That is the entire point.

The power of authors is not measured in sales or awards or reviews. It is measured in the moment a reader crosses from feeling to action. Erdrich moved legislation. Rendon moved a woman in a community hall to want to help.

Both started the same way: with a story only they could tell, written with enough honesty that a reader who had never lived it could feel its weight.

You have a story only you can tell. You may be hesitating for the same reason Rendon hesitated — because there is no resolution, because the truth is hard, because you are not certain anyone will read it.

Write it. The woman in Cloquet is waiting.

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.

The Void Between You and Your Doctor Is Not Staying Empty

 

Cedar Valley News
April 26, 2026
The Void Between You and
Your Doctor Is Not Staying Empty
By Dr. Aisha Khalid

An oncologist at Stanford named Dr. Ilana Yurkiewicz published an essay earlier this month about a patient she calls Claire. Claire had curable cancer. She is dead.

Yurkiewicz asked her to follow up. But her first available appointment was months away. In the gap, Claire found other sources. Instagram told her to cut sugar to starve the tumor. A podcast recommended ivermectin. Politicians stirred regret over vaccines she had received decades earlier. By the time Claire got back to her physician, she had been in the misinformation ecosystem long enough to lose the window treatment required.

Yurkiewicz writes: I lost her to the void of poor access. Quickly, it was filled.

I want to talk about the void.

A typical primary care physician in this country has 2,500 patients. Studies suggest that adequately caring for them would require 27 hours per day. The math does not work. It has not worked for years. The result is a system where the first available appointment is often weeks or months away, where fifteen minutes is the standard visit length regardless of the complexity of the patient's case, and where the physician who would catch the issue early is simply not available when early matters.

What fills the void is not nothing. It is Instagram, podcasts, neighbors, politicians, and chatbots. Most of it is wrong. Some of it is dangerous. All of it is available at two in the morning when the patient is frightened and cannot reach anyone with the authority to tell them what is happening in their body.

Claire’s death was not solely the system’s failure. She made choices. She followed advice she should not have followed. But she made those choices inside a gap the system created. The void existed before the misinformation filled it. This is the honest accounting.

I have been a physician in Cedar Valley for twenty years. I have had patients come back after a long absence with something I wish I had caught sooner. I have had patients tell me, carefully, what they had been trying in the meantime. I have had patients I could not help because by the time they reached me, the window had closed. I am not Yurkiewicz’s oncologist. But I know the void she is describing. I have stood at its edge.

I want to give Cedar Valley something practical, because the system won't fix itself before Monday.

When you cannot get an appointment, and the symptom will not wait, say so. Do not accept the first available slot months away without telling the office what is happening. Call back. Speak to a nurse. Most practices have a nurse line for exactly this purpose. A nurse can triage. A nurse can determine whether you need to be seen sooner. The system has a pathway for urgency. You have to name the urgency to activate it.

If the symptom cannot wait for primary care, go to urgent care. Urgent care is not the emergency room. It is the gap between a symptom and an appointment, and it exists for the situation you are in right now.

When you do get in, tell your physician what you found while you were waiting. All of it. The podcast. The neighbor’s advice. The supplement you ordered. Your physician cannot help what she does not know. The conversation is not easier if you hide what you tried. It is harder because she is working with incomplete information, and so are you.

Yurkiewicz closes her essay with something worth repeating. Amid the noise Claire encountered, ChatGPT said something accurate, if impractical: you should see your doctor. The problem was not the advice. The problem was the door was not open when she needed it.

Cedar Valley cannot fix the national system. But Cedar Valley can do this: when something feels wrong, name it to someone with the authority to assess it. Do not wait for the void to fill itself.

If you have been putting off a call to your physician because you could not get an appointment, or if you have been sitting with a symptom and a question you have not asked out loud, you are not alone in Cedar Valley. The Facebook group is where the conversation continues. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Dr. Ilana Yurkiewicz and her essay in STAT News are real. Claire is a pseudonym used by Dr. Yurkiewicz to protect her patient’s identity.

What Your Reader Owes You

 

Authors give endlessly — time, vulnerability, truth. The relationship is not meant to be one-sided.

Authors talk about serving readers. Every writing guide, every conference, every workshop repeats the same message: give the reader value, respect the reader’s time, write for the reader first.

The advice is sound. It is also incomplete.

Nobody talks about what the reader owes the author.

I don’t mean money. The reader paid for the book — or borrowed it, or received it as a gift. The transaction is settled. What remains unsettled is the relationship, and relationships are never one-directional.

 

What the Author Gives

Consider what the author invested. Months or years of writing. Research, revision, doubt, and the daily discipline of sitting down when the words didn’t come easily. Vulnerability — placing honest thought on a page where strangers can judge it. Financial risk. Emotional risk. The willingness to say something true and stand behind it.

The reader receives all of this in a few hours of reading. The exchange is wildly unequal. The author traded years for the reader’s afternoon.

Most authors accept this imbalance without question. They are grateful for any reader at all. Gratitude is appropriate. But gratitude should not become silence about what readers can do — and should do — to honor the work they’ve received.

What the Reader Can Give Back

The first and most powerful thing a reader can give is honesty. Tell the author what the book meant to you. Not a formal review — just a sentence. An email. A message. “Your book reached me at the right time.” “I gave a copy to my daughter.” “I underlined a sentence on page forty-three and have read it every morning since.” Authors receive these messages so rarely most of them can recall every one they’ve ever gotten. Each one sustains the work for months.

The second thing a reader can give is a review. Not for the author’s ego. For the author’s reach. In today’s publishing landscape, reviews are currency. A book with five reviews is visible. A book with fifty is credible. A book with none is invisible, no matter how good it is. A single honest review — even two or three sentences — does more for an author than most readers realize. It costs the reader five minutes. It gives the author a lifeline.

The third thing a reader can give is a recommendation. Hand the book to someone. Say the words every author lives to hear: “You need to read this.” No algorithm, no advertising campaign, no social media post carries the weight of one person pressing a book into another person’s hands. Word of mouth built publishing before the internet existed, and it remains the most powerful force in publishing today.

I’ve published more than five hundred books. The titles with the longest lives are not the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They are the ones with readers who took action — who reviewed, recommended, and reached out. Readers who treated the relationship as a partnership, not a performance they watched from the audience.

A Partnership, Not a Performance

This is not about obligation in the heavy sense. No reader owes a debt they didn’t choose. But readers who love books — who depend on them, who build their inner lives around them — have a stake in the survival of the books they value. Authors cannot continue writing in silence. The ecosystem depends on response. A book without response is a conversation with no answer. Eventually, the author stops talking.

Every review is a vote for the book’s survival. Every recommendation extends its reach. Every honest message to the author renews the conviction to keep writing. Readers who understand this become something more than consumers. They become partners in the work.

If a book changed something in you — even slightly, even quietly — the author deserves to know. Not because they need praise. Because the relationship between author and reader is the oldest partnership in the written word, and partnerships require both sides to show up. The author showed up when they wrote the book. Now it’s the reader’s turn.

You finished the book. Now do the one thing the author cannot do alone.

Tell someone.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the author-reader relationship is a partnership worth honoring on both sides.

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.

“Coach, It Is Like You See Something in Me I Didn’t Even Know Was There.”

 

Cedar Valley News
April 24, 2026
“Coach, It Is Like You See Something in Me
I Didn’t Even Know Was There.”
By Dan Larson

There is a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina named Manzell Spencer Jr. He teaches social studies at Douglas Byrd Middle School. He is also the head football coach. Tonight, at a ceremony in Cary, he will stand among nine finalists for the 2026 North Carolina Teacher of the Year.

I want to tell Cedar Valley why I think this matters before we find out who wins.

Education was not Spencer’s first career. He felt torn, he said, between making an impact and earning a livable wage. He chose teaching. He chose purpose. When he was named the 2026 Cumberland County Teacher of the Year in September and then the Sandhills Regional Teacher of the Year in January, he said the recognition felt bigger than him. He called it a reflection of the daily work happening in classrooms not always receiving positive attention.

That sentence tells you who he is.

When Spencer took over the football program at Douglas Byrd, his goal was not wins. It was engagement. He recruited students who did not see themselves as athletes — students who were disconnected from school, who had not found a reason to stay. He instilled in them discipline and a focus on classroom work. When it worked, he and the other coaches and teachers built it into the school’s culture, so more students could be visible, more involved, more accountable.

His own words about his approach: “Whether it is a conversation after a game, a quick check-in at a store, or a message home to celebrate a small win, I make it clear: school is not just a place students go. It is a place where they are seen.”

And one student said this to him: “Coach, it is like you see something in me I didn’t even know was there.”

I have been a stake president for several years. Before, I served as bishop. Before, I built houses. The work changes, but the practice does not. You look at a person, and you decide, before they have given you any evidence, whether you believe something is in them worth calling out. Most of the time, they cannot see it themselves. They have been told, or shown, or have simply concluded, the limits of what they are. And then someone looks at them differently. And something moves.

Spencer does this at a middle school in Cumberland County, with students who had already begun to disappear. He finds them. He gives them a place to be. He sends a message home to celebrate a small win. He checks in at the store. He has a conversation after the game. None of this is grand. It is the accumulation of small acts of noticing, repeated until the student begins to believe someone sees them.

I have been sitting with the question of where repair begins since I came home from General Conference three weeks ago. Roy Harrington showed me one answer: repair begins on Saturday morning with a tape measure and a crew. Spencer is showing me another. Repair begins when an adult decides to see a young person before the young person can see themselves.

Cedar Valley has young people like Spencer’s students. Disconnected. Not sure they belong. Not sure anyone has noticed whether they show up or not. Some of them are in school. Some of them have left. Some of them are sitting in sacrament meeting wondering if anyone would call if they stopped coming.

The answer to all of it is the same thing Spencer does. You look at them. You see something. You say so.

If you know a young person in Cedar Valley who needs someone to see them, or if you are the adult who has been meaning to say something but hasn't yet, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Manzell Spencer Jr., Douglas Byrd Middle School, Cumberland County Schools, and the North Carolina Teacher of the Year program are real.

Someone in Pine Level, Alabama Is Alive Because a Town Meeting Happened

 

Cedar Valley News
April 23, 2026
Someone in Pine Level, Alabama
Is Alive Because a Town Meeting Happened
From the Mayor’s Desk
By Caleb Mercer, Mayor

On March third, George Khan wrote in this paper about Cedar Valley’s volunteer fire department. Eleven active members. Down from twenty-two three years ago. One truck where two used to roll. The oldest member is sixty-seven and has a bad knee he does not talk about. George services two of the department’s portable pumps himself. He rebuilt the pull-start on a rescue saw last fall.

Most of Cedar Valley read it. Some people sent messages. A few called the firehouse. Then the week moved on.

I did not let it move on. Because I am the mayor of this town, and what George described is a budget problem before it is anything else.

Two weeks after George’s editorial, I put a line item before the Cedar Valley town council: new medical response equipment for the volunteer department. An automated external defibrillator and a trauma kit with updated supplies. Total cost: four thousand two hundred dollars. The council voted. It passed.

The equipment is on order.

I want to tell you why I am writing about it this week. There is a town in Alabama called Pine Level, population just over one thousand. Volunteer fire department. This week, Mayor Bigley of Pine Level issued a proclamation for National Volunteer Firefighter Week. He issued it because something had just happened. Not long ago, Pine Level approved funding for new medical equipment for its department. Last month, a volunteer used it to save a life.

Mayor Bigley said what it meant plainly: a life was saved using equipment made possible by approved funding. Every dollar was worth it. You cannot put a price on a life.

I am a carpenter. I have built things with my hands and watched them hold or fail. The work tells you the truth. And the truth Pine Level is telling us is this: the vote in the room and the life in the field are connected by a chain shorter than it looks. The equipment we approved in Cedar Valley is not yet in the hands of our eleven volunteers. But it is coming. And when it arrives, it will be because this town made a decision in a meeting most of you did not attend.

I am not saying this to make anyone feel guilty. I am saying it because Cedar Valley deserves to know what its own decisions produce.

The eleven people standing between this town and whatever comes next in the middle of the night — they deserve to know it too. We have not said it loudly enough. National Volunteer Firefighter Week runs through Saturday. Cedar Valley’s volunteers do not hold press conferences. They do not post about the calls they run, the sleep they lose, or the training they complete on their own time with their own money. They just show up. Some of them have been showing up for twenty years. Some of them are watching the roster shrink and wondering how much longer the department can sustain itself.

I am watching too. There are more budget items coming. The department’s primary pump is twelve years old. The turnout gear worn by three of our volunteers is past its rated service life. These are not abstract concerns. They are the difference between a controlled response and a dangerous one. I will bring those items forward. I will ask Cedar Valley to vote on them. And I will tell you, every time, what the vote is for and what it means if it fails.

What I am asking today is simpler. Know who your eleven are. If you see them, say something. If you have ever thought about joining and kept putting it off, call the firehouse. If you have children old enough to volunteer, tell them what these people do.

Pine Level, Alabama knows what a vote is worth now. Cedar Valley should know it too, before we need a story like theirs to tell it.

If you know one of Cedar Valley’s volunteer firefighters or first responders, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where we can say so out loud. Come tell us who they are. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Mayor Bigley, Pine Level, Alabama, and the events described there are real. The Cedar Valley fire department details referenced are drawn from George Khan’s March 3, 2026 editorial in this series.

The Building Had Been Empty for Twenty-Five Years. They Reopened It with a Clock and a Pickle Jar.

 

Cedar Valley News
April 22, 2026
The Building Had Been Empty for Twenty-Five Years. They Reopened It with a Clock and a Pickle Jar.
By Lars Olson

There is a town in western North Carolina called Swannanoa. Most of the country has not heard of it. People in western North Carolina know it as the community Hurricane Helene nearly took apart in September of 2024.

Last week, a hardware store opened there.

I know how it sounds. But stay with me.

Peter and Beth Ballhaussen have owned Town Hardware in neighboring Black Mountain for thirteen years. When they decided to open a second location, they chose a building at 119 Alexander Place in the heart of Swannanoa’s old downtown district — a 4,200-square-foot brick structure on a short road between two streets, in a block people used to call the center of everything. The building had housed a pharmacy and a grocery store before sitting vacant for nearly twenty-five years.

The factory town it served, Beacon Manufacturing, closed in 2002. The mill burned in 2003. The block went quiet and stayed quiet.

Peter and Beth moved in anyway. They renovated the shell, installed the lighting, stocked the shelves. They soft-opened April eighth. They hired six people from the community, one of them a man named Will Hoilman.

Will grew up in Swannanoa when the factory was still running. He left after a while, raised his family in Old Fort twenty minutes away, and was gone for about thirty years. When the Ballhaussens needed someone for small engine repair, he came back. He said it feels like things have come full circle. He said he can almost see the building where he had his first physical from behind the store counter.

Soon after the Ballhaussens announced they were opening, a woman called. She turned out to be their neighbor. She was the granddaughter of the pharmacist who once ran the building. She grew up there. She gave them the clock from her grandfather’s wall.

The next Saturday, the granddaughter of the man who ran the grocery store drove in from Wilmington. She gave them a pickle jar.

Both of those things are now on the counter.

Beth Ballhaussen said she tears up thinking about it. She said it makes her heart feel good to know someone could walk in to buy a box of screws, look up, and maybe recognize their parents or grandparents in one of the old photographs on the wall.

I have run a hardware store in Cedar Valley for a long time. I know what it is to stand behind a counter and have someone come in for a part they need and leave having talked about something else entirely. I know what the store is to the people who use it as a reason to be somewhere. To stop and think. To ask a question they would not ask anywhere else.

Peter Ballhaussen said the block on Alexander Place was, for a lot of years, the central meeting place for the people of Swannanoa. He said it is encouraging to see a new generation of locals driving its revival.

He opened a hardware store in a building vacant for twenty-five years, in a town still recovering from a flood, because somebody had to.

Cedar Valley has its own block. It’s own building, someone has been driving past. It’s own Will Hoilman, maybe, who has been gone a while and has not yet found a reason to come back. I do not know where those things are for Cedar Valley. But I think most people here could find them without looking very hard.

If you know a gathering place in Cedar Valley worth saving, or a building worth reopening, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation can continue. Come tell us what you see. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Peter and Beth Ballhaussen, Will Hoilman, Town Hardware Swannanoa, and the details described are real, as reported by Fred McCormick in The Valley Echo on April 21, 2026.

Michigan Decided One Million People Had Carried It Long Enough

 

Cedar Valley News
April 21, 2026
Michigan Decided One Million
People Had Carried It Long Enough
By George Khan

There are people in their sixties and seventies in Michigan who have spent the majority of their lives with a felony conviction on their record. Not because they are still dangerous. Not because they have done anything wrong in decades. Because a word was stamped on them when they were young, and no one ever came to take it off.

Last week, Michigan announced it had automatically cleared nearly 1.6 million criminal convictions under the state’s Clean Slate Act. Misdemeanors after seven years. Felonies after ten. No petition required. No lawyer. No courthouse. The state found the records and cleared them.

Kamau Sandiford runs the clean slate program for Safe and Just Michigan. He described something worth sitting with. He said they sometimes encounter people in their sixties or seventies who have spent the majority of their lives with a conviction on their record. And he said it is not always because they want better housing or a better job. Sometimes they simply want the stigma removed. They want to die knowing they are no longer considered a convicted felon.

I went to prison at twenty. I came back to Cedar Valley in my forties. What I know about the sentence is not the twenty years — it is the walk back in. The way a word you were given follows you into every room before you do. The job application. The apartment. The handshake from someone who already knows the story and is deciding what to do with it. The record does not serve the time with you. It serves an indefinite sentence of its own, and no one announced when yours was finished.

My family never stopped believing I was worth more than what I had done. I spent years trying to understand why, and more years trying to earn something they had already given me. What Michigan did for one point six million people is not nothing. It is the state saying: You have served your time. The record has served its time, too.

Michigan’s Clean Slate Act was signed in 2020 and began automatically processing records three years ago. The law clears misdemeanor convictions after seven years and felonies after ten, provided the person has not reoffended. It is bipartisan legislation. More than thirty states have some version of this. Most require a petition. Michigan made it automatic.

The difference matters more than it sounds. The people most likely to miss a petition process are the people who need it most. They do not always know the law exists. They are working, raising families, surviving. The state of Michigan decided not to wait for them to find the door. It opened it.

One point six million records. Some of those belong to people who have been living quietly decent lives for thirty years while the word sat in a database, available to anyone who searched their name. They may not know yet. Some will find out when a barrier simply is no longer there.

I think about Owen. He is seventeen. He has his whole life in front of him, and I know better than most how fast one moment can change what follows. I also know how much it matters — when someone who was judged becomes someone who gets to walk through a door held open. Not because he earned it on someone else’s terms. Because someone decided the past had been carried long enough.

Cedar Valley is not Michigan. But Cedar Valley has people carrying old records. It is worth knowing what your state allows. It is worth telling someone who might not know to look.

If you know someone in Cedar Valley who has been carrying a record for years and has not looked into what might be possible, come tell us. The Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation can continue. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Michigan’s Clean Slate Act, Kamau Sandiford, Safe and Just Michigan, and the data described are real.

Before It Vanishes

 

On Wednesday evening, April 15, 2026, the Whiting Foundation gathered at the New York Historical Society and announced ten recipients of the Whiting Award for Emerging Writers. Each received fifty thousand dollars. The foundation has given the award since 1985 — a first opportunity, it says, for writers to devote themselves fully to their work.

One of the ten was Hajar Hussaini, an Afghan poet now teaching at Skidmore College in New York. The judges described her debut collection,

One of the ten was Hajar Hussaini, an Afghan poet now teaching at Skidmore College in New York. The judges described her debut collection, Disbound, as “a marvel of poetic architecture” and said her poems show how “mere fragments can contain the entirety of times, places, and people we thought lost.”

Hussaini grew up in Kabul. Her family returned there after the fall of the first Taliban regime. She lived in the city for ten years — came of age there, built friendships there, absorbed its streets and its losses. She left in 2014 to continue her studies. She has not been back since 2018.

She wrote her poems in English, her second language, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She turned her memories of Kabul into poems — her family, the mob killing of Farkhunda Malikzada in 2015, the sound of a city living alongside war. She wrote about a place she can no longer visit. She wrote because without the writing, those fragments would exist nowhere but inside her.

The award is not the point. The writing is the point. The award simply confirms what the writing already was.

In 1935, Anna Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilev was arrested by Stalin’s secret police in Leningrad. He would be arrested again, sent to the labor camps, held for years. Akhmatova spent seventeen months standing in prison lines outside the Kresty Prison, trying to learn whether he was alive, trying to deliver parcels.

She wrote poems about what she saw. But writing them down was too dangerous. The manuscript would mean arrest, perhaps death. So, she and a small circle of trusted friends memorized them. The poems existed only in human memory — held in the minds of a handful of people against the day they might be written down.

A woman in the prison line recognized Akhmatova one morning. She leaned close and whispered a question: “Can you describe this?”

Akhmatova said: “I can.”

She published Requiem — the cycle of poems born in those prison lines — in Munich in 1963, years after Stalin’s death, while still living in the Soviet Union. It could not appear in Russia until 1987. By then, Akhmatova had been dead for twenty-one years.

She wrote: “I was with my people then, there, where my people, unfortunately, were.”

The poems survived because she refused to let them vanish. Because she said yes when asked if she could describe it.

Hussaini and Akhmatova wrote in different languages, under different pressures, across a century of distance. The line between them is the same line.

The Power of Authors teaches that the writer’s deepest purpose is not performance but presence — standing where silence begins and writing what is real before it disappears. Not writing for an audience. Not writing for a market. Writing because some truths exist in only one place: in the person who lived them.

Kabul is changing. The city Hussaini knew — its intellectual circles, its street life, the faces of the people who shaped her — is not the city it was when she left. She cannot go back to verify it. She can only write from what she carried out.

That is what the fragments hold. Not nostalgia. Not performance. The irreplaceable record of a specific life in a specific place at a specific moment that will not come again.

Akhmatova stood in a prison line in a city under terror and said she could describe it. She kept her word for decades, across every danger, until the words could finally be printed.

You may not be standing in a prison line. But you are carrying something. A place. A person. A time in your life that is receding. A truth no one else was present to witness.

Write it before it vanishes. That is not a small thing. That is the whole work. That is what the power of authors means when it is real.

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

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

She Was Going to Lose Her Home to Taxes. Her Neighbors Had Other Plans.

 

Cedar Valley News
April 20, 2026
She Was Going to Lose Her Home to Taxes.
Her Neighbors Had Other Plans.
By Teresa Nikas

You pay sales tax on every board, every nail, every bag of concrete. The workers who build your home pay income tax and payroll tax on every hour they work. You pay income tax on every dollar you earn to afford it. Every truck delivering materials pays fuel tax on every gallon. By the time you move in, your home has been taxed a dozen ways before you ever turn the key.

Then the government taxes you again. Every single year. Not on income. Not on a transaction. On the fact you own it. And if you do not pay, they take it.

Barbara Bailey found out.

Barbara is seventy-five years old. She has lived in the same house on Jarboe Street in Kansas City since the nineteen-eighties. She paid for it. She kept it up. She is not a developer. She did not profit when money started moving into her neighborhood. She just owned a house in a place where others had decided to live.

Between 2018 and 2020, assessed values in her West Side neighborhood rose by one hundred twenty-eight percent. The county average was eighteen percent. Barbara’s property tax bill climbed more than fifty percent. When a reporter asked whether the rising taxes would force her out of her home, she said one word.

Yes.

A retired attorney named Michael Duffy volunteers for a community organization called Westside Housing. When the reassessment hit, he and his colleagues started looking for tools. They found one in Missouri’s Chapter 353 — a developer tax incentive law written to attract investment to blighted areas. Developers have used it for decades. Westside Housing asked a different question: what if we turned it on the people already here?

The Kansas City Council approved the plan in September of two thousand twenty-two. Homeowners making less than seventy-five thousand dollars a year now pay property taxes based on their income, not the assessed value of their home — two point six five percent of income, frozen for twenty-five years.

There was a catch. To trigger the break, homeowners had to temporarily transfer their deed to a corporation. Families whose homes had been in their names for generations were being asked to sign the title over to an organization and trust they would get it back. Volunteers went door to door. Some people said no. Some people said yes.

Barbara Bailey’s hand was shaking so badly she could barely sign her name.

She signed. Two hundred seventy-two families enrolled. At least 30% make less than $25,000 a year.

Barbara Bailey is still on Jarboe Street. She told a reporter exactly where she plans to be carried out from, and she did not say it gently.

What Michael Duffy and Westside Housing did was find a workaround. A workaround is not justice. Barbara Bailey should not have needed a retired attorney and a clever statute to stay in a home she already owned. But the claim was on her house, and the workaround let her keep it.

Cedar Valley has people like Barbara Bailey. People who built a life inside four walls, paid what they were asked to pay, and now watch the annual bill arrive for the right to keep what they built. The question Westside Housing answered is one Cedar Valley can ask too: what tools exist, what neighbors are willing, and who is close to losing what they should never have to lose.

If you have been sitting with this — your own bill, your own numbers, your own worry — you are not alone in Cedar Valley. The Facebook group is where the conversation can continue honestly. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Barbara Bailey, Michael Duffy, Westside Housing Organization, and the Westside Chapter 353 Redevelopment Plan are real.

He Visits the Old Woman Because Her Husband Is Buried There

 

Cedar Valley News
April 18, 2026
He Visits the Old Woman Because
Her Husband Is Buried There
By Dr. Aisha Khalid

There is a nurse in South Africa I have been thinking about since Thursday.

His name is Bukhosi Mdletshe. He runs the Ensingweni Clinic in KwaZulu-Natal — a small building with fittings from the nineteen-eighties, serving 12,000 people in one of the highest-HIV-burden regions on earth. Ninety-six percent of his patients on HIV treatment have the virus suppressed in their bodies. I want to tell Cedar Valley how he does it.

Mdletshe grew up in this community, the son of a single mother, raised by the people he now serves. He trained as a nurse, worked in hospitals in Durban, and came back. He says he is paying his dues. The story was published two days ago in Spotlight, a South African public health journal. I do not expect Cedar Valley to have read it.

This is what stopped me. Mdletshe stood on a rise above his clinic and pointed across the hills. He pointed to a circular house made of concrete bricks. An old woman lives there, he said. She will not leave because her husband and forefathers are buried on the land. She lives too far from the clinic and has no way to get there.

So, he visits her.

He pointed to another home. A child-headed household. He checks on them. He pointed to a house down in a valley where an elderly woman has been missing her medication. He said, “We need to check on her.”

A major problem in his region, he told the journalist, is patients defaulting on treatment. Not from indifference. Because they cannot afford the bus fare.

His clinic serves one of the highest HIV-burden regions on earth. Ninety-six percent of his patients on HIV treatment have the virus suppressed in their bodies. In a rural clinic. In an old building. With one nurse running it and a doctor who comes twice a week.

Ninety-six percent.

I have practiced medicine in this country for twenty years. I know what it costs to achieve a number like that. It costs the same as what Mdletshe is doing every day: going to the patient who has stopped coming in. Not waiting. Going.

I think about the patients I have seen over the past 20 years who did not come back. Those who meant to schedule a follow-up but did not. The ones who fell off a medication and did not tell me. The ones I watched walk out of an appointment knowing something was not right, but not knowing how to say it. I think about what I did for them and what I did not do.

Mdletshe does not practice in Cedar Valley. He practices in rural KwaZulu-Natal, where the distances are measured in hours of walking, and the stakes of missing an appointment can be measured in years of life. The circumstances are not the same.

But the question is the same. Who has stopped coming in? And have we gone to find out why?

It does not require a clinic manager. It requires the willingness to notice when someone is absent and ask after them. A neighbor. A family member. Anyone who knows someone who has stopped showing up for their own health and has not asked why.

Mdletshe said, “These are all our people.” He made a sweeping gesture across the hills. All of them. The old woman at the circular house. The children in the child-headed household. The woman defaulting on her medication down in the valley.

All of them his people. All of them worth the walk.

If you know someone in Cedar Valley who has stopped going to their doctor and you do not know why, you are not the only one sitting with this. The Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Bukhosi Mdletshe, the Ensingweni Clinic, and the details described are real, as reported by Sue Segar in Spotlight on April 16, 2026.

The Revision You’re Afraid Of

 

Every author reaches a moment when the manuscript is finished, but the book is not.

The sentences are clean. The chapters are in order. The spelling has been checked, the grammar corrected, the commas debated and placed. The surface of the manuscript shines. And something underneath it doesn’t work.

You feel it before you can name it. A chapter runs too long. A section repeats what an earlier section already said. The middle sags. The opening promises something the ending doesn’t deliver. The structure holds the words in place, but the words aren’t doing what you need them to do.

This is not a line-editing problem. This is a structural problem. And structural revision is the work most authors avoid.

Why Authors Resist

The resistance is understandable. You spent months — sometimes years — building the manuscript. Every chapter represents hours of effort. Every paragraph carries memory. Cutting a chapter feels like cutting a piece of yourself. Rearranging the structure feels like admitting the original vision was wrong.

It wasn’t wrong. It was a draft. Drafts are supposed to be rebuilt. The first version of a manuscript is the author’s conversation with themselves — working out what the book is, what it wants to say, where the truth lives. The revision is the conversation with the reader — reshaping the material so someone who wasn’t inside your head can follow the path you’ve walked.

These are two different tasks. Most authors treat them as one. They polish the draft instead of rebuilding it, and the book arrives to readers still shaped by the author’s process rather than the reader’s need.

I’ve published more than five hundred books. The manuscripts needing the most structural work are rarely the weakest. They are often the most ambitious. The author tried to do something large — cover a wide span of time, weave multiple themes, tell a story from several angles — and the ambition outgrew the original structure. The material is strong. The architecture isn’t holding it.

What Structural Revision Looks Like

Structural revision asks questions line editing never touches. Does the book open where the story begins, or three chapters before it? Does every chapter earn its place, or do some exist because the author needed to write them rather than because the reader needs to read them? Does the ending arrive where the purpose of the book has been fulfilled, or does it keep going because the author wasn’t ready to stop?

These are hard questions. They require the author to step outside the manuscript and look at it from the reader’s position. What does the reader know at this point? What are they waiting for? What have they been promised, and has the promise been kept?

Sometimes the answer means cutting a chapter you love. Sometimes it means moving the strongest material to the front instead of burying it in the middle. Sometimes it means combining three thin chapters into one with real weight. Sometimes it means admitting an entire section belongs to a different book.

None of this is failure. All of it is craft in service of purpose.

The Book on the Other Side

I have watched authors go through structural revision with the same look on their faces — dread at the beginning, exhaustion in the middle, and quiet astonishment at the end. The book on the other side of the revision is not a different book. It is the same book, finally standing upright. The material they struggled with for months suddenly works because the structure now supports it instead of fighting it.

The willingness to rebuild is what separates a manuscript from a book. A manuscript is what the author wrote. A book is what the reader receives. The distance between the two is measured in revision — not the comfortable kind, but the kind requiring courage.

If your manuscript is finished but something feels unresolved, trust the feeling. The surface may be polished. The structure may need rebuilding. The revision you’re avoiding is almost certainly the revision your book needs most.

The book you imagined is still in there. It’s waiting for you to be brave enough to find it.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the courage to rebuild is as essential as the courage to begin.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Building Ramps on Saturday Mornings

 

Cedar Valley News
April 17, 2026
Building Ramps on Saturday Mornings
By Dan Larson

Roy Harrington used to be an industrial engineer. He is retired and living in Bryan, Texas. On Saturday mornings, he builds wheelchair ramps.

He has been doing this for fifteen years. He coordinates the volunteers, measures the sites, designs the ramps, and makes sure the materials are there when the crew arrives. Four or five people. A few hours. Less than a thousand dollars in lumber and hardware. And when they leave, someone who has not been able to leave their home can do so.

Harrington is the regional director for the Brazos Valley chapter of the Texas Ramp Project, a nonprofit building free wheelchair ramps for low-income elderly and disabled Texans. The organization has been doing this work since 1985. More than thirty-two thousand ramps. Not thirty-two thousand people helped — thirty-two thousand ramps built by crews of volunteers across the state, each one a morning when a team showed up, cut the wood, drove the screws, and handed someone back a life.

He tells the story of a ramp they built for a woman in his area. Routine job. A few hours, same as the others. Not long after, there was a house fire on her street. Her house. She got out.

Harrington said it plainly: “Many of our clients are essentially trapped in their homes. Being able to get in and out easily can completely change their lives.”

I have spent most of my working life in construction. I know what a set of front steps looks like when they have been neglected long enough to become dangerous. I know what a seven-inch drop off a porch means for a person with a walker. I know what it costs to fix it and what it costs not to. The person who cannot afford the fix does not stop needing to leave their house. They just stop leaving.

This week I came home from a site and drove past a house I pass most days. The woman who lives there uses a wheelchair. Her front steps are broken. There is no ramp. I have driven past many times and registered the fact the way you register most things you see every day — present, noted, filed away under things you mean to do something about.

I stopped this time.

I don’t yet know what will come of it. But the stopping matters. Harrington stopped. Thirty-two thousand times, give or take, someone in the Texas Ramp Project stopped, showed up, and built something. No ceremony. The client comes out and uses the ramp. The crew loads up and goes home. Done.

I have been thinking since General Conference about where repair begins. I came home carrying the question. Two weeks of sitting with it and I think part of the answer is this: repair begins when someone stops driving past.

The Texas Ramp Project operates in Texas. Every state has something like it. Rebuilding Together. Local Habitat for Humanity affiliates. Church service organizations. If you have skills with lumber and an open Saturday morning, there is almost certainly someone in or near Cedar Valley who needs what you know how to do. If you are not sure where to look, start with the neighbors you already pass.

Most of the people who needed thirty-two thousand ramps were not strangers to someone. They were someone's neighbor. Someone drove past them every day.

If you know someone in Cedar Valley who is trapped in their home by a set of steps, or if you have a Saturday morning and a willingness to help, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us what you know. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Roy Harrington and the Texas Ramp Project are real.

Your Windows Are Killing Migratory Birds

Cedar Valley News

April 16, 2026

Your Windows Are Killing Migratory Birds
By Chloe Papadakis

There was a small bird on our back step this morning.

I almost stepped on it before I saw it. Brown, about the size of my fist, lying on its side near the door. I have found birds at our windows before and always assumed it was bad luck. I went looking for what it actually was.

Up to one billion birds die every year in the United States from striking windows. It is the second-leading cause of bird deaths in the country, behind only habitat loss. And the part nobody in Cedar Valley is likely to know: it is not primarily a skyscraper problem. It is not Chicago or New York. It is us. Fifty-six percent of collision deaths happen at low-rise buildings. Forty-four percent happen at residences. Homes like mine. Homes like yours. Every resident in America is estimated to kill an average of two birds per year.

Think about Cedar Valley. Count the houses on your street.

Dr. Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College conducted the first serious scientific study of bird window collisions in the United States and has studied this issue since the 1970s. He believes, to this day, it is an underappreciated problem causing irreparable damage to bird populations.

The mechanics are simple and terrible. Birds cannot see glass as a barrier. They see what the glass reflects — trees, sky, the yard behind them — and they fly toward it. Spring migration is happening right now. The birds moving through Cedar Valley today are the same ones people here have put feeders out for, kept a yard for. Billions are in the air. Our windows are in the way.

I looked up at the window above where the bird lay. The glass was reflecting the yard behind me — the maple, the patch of sky, the neighbor's fence. A perfect picture of somewhere to fly.

I am not writing this to make anyone feel guilty. What is useful is this: the fix is simple, inexpensive, and available today.

You can break up the reflection. Tape, paint pens, window film with small dots or patterns placed two to four inches apart across the glass surface. There are products made specifically for this — window tape, Feather Friendly film, even painter’s tape — and they cost a few dollars. The pattern breaks the mirror effect, so birds see the glass instead of flying through it.

You can move a feeder. If a bird feeder sits more than three feet from a window, a bird in flight has enough speed to be killed on impact. Move it to within three feet and a collision becomes a tap, not a fatal strike.

You can turn off lights at night during migration. Birds navigate by stars. Artificial light pulls them off course and leaves them circling until dawn, exhausted and vulnerable.

None of this requires money most people don’t have. None of it requires a permit or a contractor. It requires knowing the problem exists. Until this week, I did not know. Now I do.

I buried the bird from my step this morning under the maple tree. Elena asked what I was doing. I told her a bird had flown into our window and died, and I was putting it back in the ground.

She asked if we could stop it from happening again.

We went inside and put tape on the windows.

If you found a bird at your window this week, you are not alone — and you are not out of options. The Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us what you found, what you tried, or what you still have questions about. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Dr. Daniel Klem Jr. and the research described are real.

Read What You Sign

 

Cedar Valley News
April 15, 2026
Read What You Sign
By Lars Olson

When you took your last job, you signed papers on your first day. Probably a stack of them. You signed the tax forms, the direct deposit form, and the handbook acknowledgment. You signed pages you did not have time to read because your new supervisor was waiting, and you did not want to start off on the wrong foot.

Something else may have been in the stack. Something called a Training Repayment Agreement Provision. The people who study these call them TRAPs, and the name fits.

Here is how it works. Your employer tells you the training is free. You go through it. You work the job. Then one day you decide to leave — for a better offer, for family reasons, because the conditions are not what you were told they would be. A few weeks later, a letter arrives. You owe your former employer thousands of dollars for the training they said was free.

This is not hypothetical.

BreAnn Scally took a grooming job at PetSmart in Salinas, California, because the company advertised free paid training. She quit after seven months because she could not make ends meet on fifteen dollars an hour. PetSmart sent her to a debt collector for $5,500 — $5,000 for the Grooming Academy and $500 for the kit. The debt hit her credit report. Her credit score, which she had worked to build, dropped. She has said it brought her back to square one.

She sued. Colorado's attorney general sued PetSmart separately in July 2025. Pennsylvania's attorney general settled with PetSmart, requiring them to stop the practice entirely in the state. California banned TRAPs outright starting January 1, 2026. New York banned them in December 2025.

PetSmart is not alone. HCA Healthcare and its staffing affiliate used TRAPs on new graduate nurses. Nurses who wanted to leave before two years were told they owed as much as eighteen thousand dollars for their orientation. Nevada banned the practice and ordered HCA to pay back the nurses who had already paid. The penalty across three states came to $2.9 million.

Major employers use these agreements in industries employing more than one in three private-sector workers. Trucking. Healthcare. Retail. Service industries. The training is called free. The exit fee is buried in the onboarding packet.

I have run a hardware store for thirty years. I have hired people and let people go and watched people leave for better work. I understand there are real costs when someone walks out the door two weeks into the job. I understand an employer wanting some protection when they have put genuine money into someone’s training.

But I know the difference between a fair deal and a trap.

A fair deal tells you what it costs before you sign. A fair deal does not bury the exit fee in page twelve of an onboarding packet you are handed on your first morning. A fair deal does not send a debt collector after a groomer making fifteen dollars an hour for leaving an unsafe work environment. A fair deal does not call something free and then hand you a bill for leaving.

Former Senator Sherrod Brown heard workers testify about these agreements. He said: “Last I checked, indentured servitude was illegal in the United States of America, but it looks like some enterprising companies are rebranding it.”

Most states have not banned TRAPs. If you live somewhere other than California or New York, there may be nothing standing between you and one of these agreements except whether you read the papers before you signed them.

So here is what I want Cedar Valley to do with this.

If you are starting a new job, ask before you sign anything whether the onboarding packet includes a training repayment provision. Read every page before your first day if you can. If you find a clause requiring you to repay training costs when you leave, ask what the amount is, what the timeline is, and whether it applies if you are laid off. A fair employer will answer those questions plainly.

If you signed something in the last few years and you are not sure what it said, find your copy and read it. Know what you agreed to.

And if you run a business in Cedar Valley and you are considering one of these agreements — think hard about it. The long-term cost of trapping people is always higher than you think. Workers talk. Cedar Valley is not a big town.

Someone in Cedar Valley has already opened a letter like this. Someone else signed a stack of papers without reading them and is only now wondering what was in the stack. If either of those is you, the Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. You are not the only one. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, BreAnn Scally, PetSmart, HCA Healthcare, and the legal actions described are real.

 

The Man Who Purchased a Prison

 

Cedar Valley News
April 14, 2026
The Man Who Purchased a Prison
By George Khan

Kerwin Pittman bought a prison last November.

Not as a developer. Not as an investor. He bought it because he knew what it was and what it could become.

At 18, he was sent to prison, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. He served eleven and a half years. Nearly a thousand of those days were spent in solitary confinement. He was released in January 2018 with his family waiting, and the world moved on without him.

He started a nonprofit when he got home. He launched an anti-recidivism hotline. He built a mobile reentry center, a bus driving to people who need housing help, job placement, mental health resources—because sometimes the people who need help most cannot get to it. He worked alongside the Governor of North Carolina on a task force examining racial equity in the criminal justice system.

Then last November, he saw a real estate listing.

The former Wayne County Correctional Center in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Nineteen acres. Eighty thousand square feet. Closed since 2013. Sitting vacant for more than a decade.

He purchased it for $275,000. He is, by every account, the first formerly incarcerated person in United States history to purchase a prison.

The barbed wire is coming down. The bars are coming down. The signs reading “No inmates allowed past this point” are coming down. He is building private rooms instead of open dormitories. He is covering the windows designed so correctional officers could see into the bathrooms. He plans job training in trades. A six-month stabilization program for men coming home from prison with nowhere solid to land. Room for 300 at a time.

He calls it a Recidivism Reduction Campus. The blueprint, he says, is “from incarceration to ownership, from punishment to purpose.”

I want to say something plainly here. Pittman was convicted of a serious crime. He served his sentence. Whatever the circumstances of the night, he was eighteen, the court decided, and he lived inside the decision for more than a decade. No one should pretend otherwise, and Pittman does not.

But here is what I think about when I stand behind this counter.

April is Second Chance Month. Prison Fellowship, the country's largest Christian nonprofit serving incarcerated people and their families, has been marking it since 2017, and this year marks 50 years of its ministry. Nearly one in three American adults has a criminal record. Of the people released from North Carolina state prisons in 2021, 44 percent were re-arrested within two years.

Kerwin Pittman looked at those numbers and decided not to accept them. He decided the place once holding him could be turned into the place that holds people up instead.

The question I keep returning to is not about Goldsboro. It is about here.

Every town has someone who made a mistake, served the time, and came back home. Sometimes their family was waiting. Sometimes, Cedar Valley gave them the chance to prove themselves. Sometimes it did not. Sometimes a door stayed closed, a job, a conversation, a seat at the table, and the person on the other side eventually stopped knocking.

Kerwin Pittman had family. He said so himself. He had a place to go and people who believed he was worth the trouble. Many of his friends did not.

I do not know who in Cedar Valley needs someone to believe in them right now. But I suspect you do.

A man purchased a prison and turned it into a second chance. Cedar Valley does not need to buy anything. It just needs to open a door.

Someone in Cedar Valley knows this story. A door opened when it did not have to. A second chance given or received. A person who came back and was allowed to prove themselves. The Cedar Valley News Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town are fictional, Kerwin Pittman is a real person, and the national events described are real.