The Town Stopped Delivering Babies This Spring

 

Cedar Valley News
May 30, 2026
The Town Stopped Delivering Babies This Spring
By Aisha Khalid

She is twenty-six and seven months along, and the first thing she asks me is how far it is to Millerton in the snow.

I tell her I do not know offhand. I am thinking about her blood pressure, which has crept up two visits running, and she is thinking about a county road in January. We are in the same room, looking at two different maps.

The hospital where she expected to deliver stopped delivering babies this spring. There was a notice, and then there was not a unit. The nearest one is fifty minutes away on a clear day. She has timed it in the rain. She has a plan for who watches the older child, and a plan for if the plan falls through.

I have been her doctor since before she was pregnant. The planning is not anxiety. It is competence. She has looked at a problem nobody asked her to solve and solved it as far as it can be solved, which is not all the way.

For a long time, I read patients like her by their numbers. The pressure is up. The visits are sometimes late. A chart records this and does not record why. It would have been easy, a few years ago, to write the word a chart writes for a woman who arrives flushed and behind schedule. The word would have been wrong, and I would not have known it.

Here is what I have learned to ask instead. How far did you come today? Who is in the car when you cannot drive? The answers are not in the blood work. They are in the fifty minutes, and the fifty minutes are not her doing.

The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform put numbers to it this year. Fewer than half of rural hospitals in this country still deliver babies. In most rural places, the nearest one is more than thirty minutes off, and in many it is fifty or more. Women did not stop having children in these towns. Delivering a baby costs the hospital more than it is paid, and a service which loses money is a service a board eventually closes.

I am not on the board. I will not pretend to know what it takes to keep a rural hospital from going under. I will tell you what the closure looks like from my side of the desk. My side is the side nobody counts.

It looks like a healthy young woman planning a delivery the way you would plan a long haul through bad weather. It looks like a pressure reading I cannot separate from the road behind it. It looks like prenatal visits I now schedule with the drive in mind, because the drive is part of the medicine.

She asks me, near the end of the visit, whether she is overreacting. She has done everything the books and I have told her to do, and she is still asking a doctor for permission to be worried.

I tell her she is not overreacting. The worry is the correct response to the facts, and the facts are not hers to fix. Then I do the only thing the room allows. I write down the labor and delivery floor fifty minutes away, and the direct number, not the main line. I tell her to call ahead, to leave earlier than seems reasonable, and to trust the plan she has made, because it is a good one.

It is not enough. We both know it. A body in labor does not consult a map, and fifty minutes is fifty minutes whether the planning was careful or careless.

I have been a doctor in this town for twenty years. I used to believe the hardest part of the work was telling people the truth about their bodies. The harder part is sitting with a person whose body is fine, and whose town has quietly removed the thing she needed, and having nothing to offer but the direct number and the early start.

She folds the paper once and puts it in her coat. She has a long way to go, and she knows the road.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If a hospital near you has stopped delivering babies, tell us how far the drive is now, and what you have done to plan for it. 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 Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform and its 2026 findings on rural maternity care referenced in this editorial are real.

The Trip He Kept Saving For

 

Cedar Valley News
May 29, 2026
The Trip He Kept Saving For
By Dan Larson

A man in my ward came to see me this week with a number written on the back of an envelope.

He is retired now. He drove a delivery route most of his working life, and on the weekends, he flew to the places the route did not reach, and he kept the miles. For years, he kept them. He set the envelope on my desk the way another man might set down a photograph. It was soft at the corners from handling. The number on the back had been penciled in, erased, and penciled again, the way a man updates a figure he checks often. He had been saving toward a trip.

I asked him where he meant to go. His wife had always wanted to see the town where they were married, a small place two states away, neither of them had seen again in forty years. He had been saving toward it since their fortieth anniversary. Their fiftieth is in September.

Then he told me why he had come. He had read the news about the airline.

You read it too, most likely. A low-cost carrier, the one with the bright yellow planes, stopped flying before dawn on the second of May. It had carried people for thirty-three years. The flights ended in a single night, and the people holding its miles woke to learn the miles were no longer flights. They were a claim in a courtroom.

Here is the part the man could not get past, and neither can I. The same airline had borrowed money against its loyalty program. It had pledged the program itself to its lenders as security, counted, valued, and placed first in line. The lenders stand first. The members stand last, behind everyone else the airline owed. To the lender, the program was collateral. To the member, the miles were, in the words of the program’s own rules, of no cash value, worth whatever the airline decided from one day to the next.

The man did not want comfort. I started to tell him his miles were a small thing against fifty years, and he stopped me. He raised one hand, the way he might once have stopped traffic on his route. He had not come about the miles, he said. He had come because the news made him do a different sum.

He had been saving toward the trip for ten years. Saving had quietly become the thing he did instead of going. Every year brought a reason to wait, a roof, a grandchild, a hip to mend, a better season to travel. The balance grew. The trip did not happen. And reading about a company counting on people to save and wait and never quite spend, he recognized the arithmetic. He had been running it on his own marriage.

A loyalty program earns its surest profit not from the customer who spends but from the one who saves and waits and trusts and never redeems. The patient is the product. The industry has a flat little word for it. I will not repeat the word, because the people it names are not a category. They are a man with an envelope.

A promise is only ever worth as much as the one who holds it. We hand our patience to companies whose word turns out to be a line they may rewrite, and we call it loyalty, and we are wounded when loyalty is not returned. But the older danger is the one the man named himself. We do it to each other. We save toward the people we love, and we let the saving stand in for the going.

He and his wife are flying in September. He booked it before he left my office, in cash, on a plane still in the air. He did not wait for me to tell him it was not too late. He told me. He had counseled himself better than I.

The miles a company issues can be marked to nothing in a night. The promise between two people to go somewhere together cannot. No one holds the lien on it but you.

If you have been saving toward someone, go.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If there is a trip you keep saving toward and deferring, or one you finally took, we would like to hear where you meant to go. 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, Spirit Airlines and the events described are real.

The Reader You’ll Never Meet

 

You will never know most of the people your book reaches. Writing for them is an act of faith — and the faith is justified.

I wrote a book I never planned to write.

For years, I hosted a radio show in Alaska called Alaska Outdoors. Each show ended with a 90-second short vignette about fishing, hunting, the land, the weather, the animals, and the people who lived close to both. When the show went off the air, I gathered a hundred and twenty of those vignettes into a book called One Last Cast.

It was an afterthought. A way to preserve the material. I expected the audience would be the same people who listened to the show — sportsmen, outdoor enthusiasts, Alaskans who recognized the rivers and the ridgelines.

The book sold well among them. No surprise there.

The surprise came from the parents.

The Audience I Never Imagined

I started hearing the same story, over and over, from people I never expected. Parents were reading the book to their children at bedtime. Not toddlers. Tweens — ten, eleven, twelve years old. Kids growing up in Anchorage and Fairbanks and the Mat-Su Valley, lying in bed listening to ninety-second stories about a moose standing in fog on a riverbank, about the sound a reel makes when the line runs out, about the way winter light turns the mountains purple at three in the afternoon.

I did not write those vignettes for children. I did not imagine a parent’s voice reading them in a dark bedroom. I did not picture a twelve-year-old falling asleep to the rhythm of sentences I’d written for adult listeners driving to work.

The book found them anyway.

This is what books do when they are written with honesty. They travel beyond the author’s intention. They reach people the author never pictured, in rooms the author never entered, at moments the author could not have predicted. The author writes for one reader, and the book finds another. The author writes for one purpose and the book serves a second one the author never knew existed.

 

The Invisible Audience

Authors measure reach by what they can see. Sales numbers. Reviews. Emails. Social media mentions. These are the visible signs, and they matter. But they represent a fraction of the book’s true life.

For every reader who tells the author what the book meant, dozens read it and say nothing. For every parent who mentioned the bedtime ritual to me, how many others did the same thing and never thought to say so? The visible audience is the tip. The invisible audience is the body of the iceberg, silent and vast.

Books travel in ways no marketing plan can predict. A copy donated to a library enters a circulation system reaching readers for years. A book left behind in a cabin finds someone who needed it at exactly the right moment. A title passed from mother to daughter carries a meaning neither of them discusses with the author.

The work is happening. The author just can’t see it.

The Faith the Work Requires

Every author faces a moment when the numbers feel small, and the silence feels large. The temptation is to measure the book’s value by what can be counted. But counting captures only what is visible, and the most important work a book does is almost always invisible.

A book written with purpose does not stop working when the author stops promoting it. Purpose gives the book its own momentum. The honesty on the page continues to meet readers wherever they are, whenever they arrive. A book written to chase a trend expires when the trend passes. A book written from conviction remains available to anyone who needs it, for as long as copies exist.

Somewhere right now, a person you will never meet is reading something you wrote. They are underlining a sentence. They are pausing at the end of a chapter. They are lying in a dark bedroom listening to someone they love read your words aloud. They are not going to tell you about it. They are simply going to carry it forward into a life you will never see.

You will never meet most of your readers. You don’t need to. The book is your handshake. The book is your introduction. The book is the conversation you’ll never hear but started anyway, because you believed it was worth starting.

Write for the reader you’ll never meet. They are already out there.

Yours might be the voice they fall asleep to.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the books worth writing are the ones written for readers the author will never know.

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.

Helen Left Her Binder By The Side Door

 

Cedar Valley News
May 28, 2026
Helen Left Her Binder By The Side Door
By Chloe Papadakis

The summer festival planning meeting opens at seven on a Thursday evening, in the room behind the community hall where the heating system makes its small noises. Twelve of us are at the long table. A pitcher of water and a stack of paper agendas sit between us. Helen kept the vendor binder for fourteen years. Helen wore reading glasses on a chain and kept her notes in pencil. Helen finally stepped down in October. The agenda calls for nominations for chair.

The room is quiet.

Someone says, “We’ll just figure it out later.” The meeting moves to the next item.

I have sat in this room for several years now, in the back, taking notes on the gatherings the town has and the ones it has stopped having. The summer festival will happen this July because last year’s volunteer team is willing to do it one more time without a chair. Next year, I am not certain.

Helen’s binder is in a cardboard box by the side door, waiting for whoever will pick it up. The binder has tabs for vendors, parking, permits, the contact at the fire department, the contact at the school for the loaner risers, and a single sheet of paper at the back, which says, in Helen’s careful handwriting, the pie lady arrives at six. It is a fourteen-year-old object. Helen will not be back to explain it.

This is not a Cedar Valley problem. The U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps published their 2023 Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement in November of last year. The headline number is 28.3 percent — the share of Americans who formally volunteered through an organization in the survey year. The rate had recovered from the pandemic floor. It had not recovered to where it was before. It sits 1.7 points below pre-pandemic.

In Williamsville, New York, the Glen Park Art Festival, in its sixteenth year, will not happen in 2026. The council president named the reasons honestly. In British Columbia, the Buccaneer Days parade and the Oak Bay Tea Party parade canceled this spring. The boards used the same plain words: a shortage of volunteers, a shortage of someone willing to chair.

Back at our meeting, a young mother on the committee, with her daughter asleep in a stroller beside her, asks the question I have been waiting for. “Can’t we just hire someone to chair?”

I want to say yes. I want to say there is a way to pay for what Helen did. The answer is no, and the reason is the part of the work no one wants to name. The chair is not a job description. The chair is the person who calls the pie lady in March, remembers her name, knows her husband had heart surgery last fall, and notices when she does not show up at the meeting and calls to ask if she is all right. The chair is the person who is in relationship with the people who make the event happen.

A paid chair is a contractor. A real chair is a neighbor. The two are not the same job.

The events the town counts on are not held up by buildings or budgets or traditions. They are held up, year after year, by the one person who has been in the chair. When the person leaves, the event continues for a year or two on the residue of her relationships. Then it stops.

The Buccaneer Days parade in Esquimalt is not coming back this year. The Glen Park Art Festival is not coming back this year. In some towns the parade comes back after a pause. In some towns it does not. There is no rule. There is only who is willing.

I think about Helen’s binder by the side door. I think about my daughter, who will be old enough to come to the summer festival in two more years, and the festival she will come to depends on someone in this room tonight.

The agenda has moved on. There is still time. The chair seat at the back of the room is empty. Someone in Cedar Valley already knows whose seat it is.

Sit down.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Have you been the one in your town who took a seat on a committee — or stepped back from one? Tell us what you would want the next person in the chair to know. 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 U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps’ 2023 Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement, the cancellation of the Glen Park Art Festival in Williamsville, New York, and the cancellations of the Buccaneer Days and Oak Bay Tea Party parades referenced in this editorial are real.

The Same Truck

 Cedar Valley News

May 27, 2026
The Same Truck
By Lars Olson

Saturday morning, the Methodist pastor’s boy came in. He is fifteen. He set a broken pull cord and a fouled spark plug on the counter between us and waited. Then he asked whether my ward needed help with the food drive next Thursday.

I did not answer right away. I asked him whether his father had sent him. He said his father had not, exactly. He had heard at supper two of our men were down with the flu, and he wanted to come ask himself.

I told him yes. He left with the new cord, the spark plug, and a receipt for $14.30.

I am the bishop of the Cedar Valley Ward. Many of the same people walk through both doors.

Sunday evening, in the bishop’s office, I told my second counselor about the boy. My counselor is a quiet man. He ran a carpentry crew for thirty years before he was called. He listened, and then said the boy had been listening at his supper table long before Saturday morning, and the rest of us could probably do less of the talking and more of the same.

The same week, in Dallas, a truck pulled up to Joe’s Food Pantry, run by Catholic Charities. It was the hundredth of two hundred and fifty truckloads The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is delivering this year to food banks in all fifty states, by Independence Day and beyond. The food came from our storehouses. The pantry will feed nearly thirty-four thousand meals worth of Dallas residents from a single truck. Some of it would also go to Soldiers’ Angels for a new pantry for veterans and military families.

David Woodyard, who runs Catholic Charities Dallas, said the partnership with our church sits at the top of his list of collaborators. His chief development officer, Kelly Noonan, called the relationship more than they could have imagined when they started.

I read these things at the back of my store on Wednesday morning, between a customer asking about deck stain and another asking about a frozen exterior faucet. Then I went home and ate supper. I thought about the boy.

There are towns where the bishop and the Catholic priest never speak. There are towns where the Methodist youth and the LDS youth do not know each other’s names. In such towns, a truck arriving is news because it would not have happened otherwise.

In Cedar Valley, the truck would have happened anyway. The priest from St. Anne’s is in here every six or eight weeks for a fitting or a flapper or a sash chain. He has been coming in for nineteen years. The Methodist parsonage roof had a leak two springs back, and I sold them the metal flashing at cost, because the trustee who came in for it had voted on every school bond Cedar Valley has issued since 1994. The Baptist youth pastor and my second counselor have built three wheelchair ramps together in the last twelve months. The last was for a woman in the Baptist congregation whose son works for me Saturdays and had asked his pastor for help.

None of this is a project. None of it earns a press release. The phone numbers were exchanged years ago, at funerals mostly, and at a chamber breakfast in 2011 nobody remembers but everyone showed up for.

Faith does not have to agree on the second person of the Trinity to agree on what a hungry child needs.

The Methodist pastor’s boy is bringing four of his friends to help unload the truck on Thursday. Two of them are not Methodist. None of them are LDS. One is the son of an electrician who came in last week for box staples and stayed twenty minutes because we were both trying to remember the man who taught both of us how to wire a junction box.

The boy did not wait for his father. The part I keep coming back to is the listening he was already doing.

Tomorrow morning, call the pastor of a church you do not attend. Ask what is on their list this month. The answer will be shorter than you think.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. We would be glad to hear which churches in your town have learned to work together, and what they have built. 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, David Woodyard, Kelly Noonan, Joe’s Food Pantry, Catholic Charities Dallas, Soldiers’ Angels, and the America250 food donation initiative of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are real.

The Third Stool From the Door

 

Cedar Valley News
May 26, 2026
The Third Stool From the Door
By George Khan

A woman came in this morning at seven and ordered a half sandwich. She has been ordering the half for about a year. She used to order the whole. She paid in singles and a small handful of change and put the change in the jar by the register. She did not count it. I wrapped the sandwich and said the same thing I say every Tuesday and she said the same thing back. She works two part-time jobs now. She used to work one.

I read the news before I opened. I read it standing at the slicer with the lights still off in the front of the deli. Matt Frantzen, the president of UAW Local 1268 in Belvidere, Illinois, has been writing the same update to his members for three years and three months. The Stellantis plant has been silent since February 2023. About a thousand workers were laid off in the final round. In October the company told the union the plant would reopen in 2027. In January Frantzen told his members the date had slipped to mid-2028.

On Thursday in Auburn Hills, Michigan, three hundred miles from Belvidere, the CEO of Stellantis unveiled a strategic plan. Sixty billion euros. Sixty new vehicles. The Belvidere slide said retooling could begin this year.

I started the soup.

The man would have been sitting on the third stool from the door. He would have come in at six forty-five for the breakfast plate, eggs over easy, before his shift started at seven. I have served men like him for thirty-one years. Three of them, in Illinois, have been gone since February 2023. They were never my customers. The stool is the seat in my deli where they would have been if their plant had been mine.

The lunch rush started at eleven thirty. I sliced pastrami. I made change. I wiped down the counter where a man had spilled something. I thought about Frantzen writing the next update tonight or tomorrow or Sunday. He has written it standing at his kitchen counter and sitting at the table and once, I imagine, in the parking lot of the union hall with the truck running. He writes the part where he tells them something has moved. He writes the part where he tells them he does not have an answer. He writes the part where he tells them he is still asking.

A regular came in at twelve fifteen and asked about my grandson, and I told him. The radio was on low. The radio said something about Auburn Hills. The regular did not look up from his plate, and I did not turn the radio up.

After he left, I wrapped a pastrami sandwich for a teenager. I gave him his change. I did not look at the third stool from the door. I knew where it was.

By two o’clock, the room was empty. I sat down on the stool behind the counter, which I do not usually do, and looked across at the third stool from the door. The stool was where I had left it. I have not moved it in three years.

Tonight, tomorrow, or Sunday, Matt Frantzen will write the next update. A man in Belvidere will read it on his phone, standing in his kitchen, with the bills next to him. The chair across from him has been empty for three years, too.

I do not know him. I have never been to Belvidere. What I have is a stool in my deli, I have not moved in three years, a woman who used to order the whole sandwich, and a regular who asked about my grandson today and did not look up when the radio said Auburn Hills.

The deli closed at three. I locked the front. I came back behind the counter and stood there for a while. I walked over to the third stool from the door. I straightened it, though it did not need straightening. Tomorrow morning at six forty-five, the stool will be there. I will be at the slicer. The eggs will be where I keep them. The radio will be off until I turn it on.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a seat you have kept open for someone you have never met. 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, Matt Frantzen, UAW Local 1268, Stellantis, the city of Belvidere, Illinois, and the events described in this editorial are real.

Written for Two

 

The name on the cover is not a name. It is a promise.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a pen name. In Mandarin, it means “twins.” The Taiwanese author who writes under it was born Yang Jo-tzu. She had a twin sister, Yang Jo-hui, who shared her passion for literature, history, and storytelling. They worked alongside each other — writing, researching, translating. In 2015, Yang Jo-hui died of cancer. She was thirty-one years old.

After her sister’s death, Yang Jo-tzu took the name Shuang-zi — twins — and kept writing. Every book she has published since carries both of them. The name on the cover is not a name. It is a promise to a sister she could not keep writing beside.

On May 19, 2026, at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London, a book written under both their names won the International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue — set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, a novel about a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese interpreter, about food and travel and love and the weight of empire — became the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prize. The first win for a Taiwanese author.

Publishers had rejected the book as untranslatable. Mandarin Chinese carries meaning in ways English cannot mirror — characters layered with centuries of history, tones altering sense, the weight of a single word impossible to carry across. Translator Lin King, born in New York, raised in Taipei, carrying both languages in her own life, translated it anyway.

In her acceptance speech, Yáng said: “Literature cannot be kept separate from the soil in which it has grown.” She dedicated her closing words to her homeland. The prize money — £50,000 — was split equally between author and translator. Two women. One book. Both names on the award.

In 1967, a translator named Gregory Rabassa opened a manuscript written in Spanish by a Colombian author named Gabriel García Márquez. His task was to carry it into English without losing what made it alive.

The novel opened with a sentence Rabassa had to translate perfectly or not at all.

In his English: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One sentence. A man facing death. A memory of ice. A lifetime compressed into thirty-two words. Rabassa found every one of them.

García Márquez, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, said Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the original. The highest praise one author has ever given another.

Rabassa said: “The translator is an artist who subordinates himself to another artist.” He spent his career giving English-speaking readers voices they would otherwise never have heard — García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa. He found the word. He found it again. He found it a thousand times, until the sentence in English held what the sentence in Spanish had carried.

Publishers had once said those voices were untranslatable too.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ writes under a name meaning twins. She writes every book for two people. Lin King carried the words across a language publishers said could not be crossed. At Tate Modern, they stood together and accepted the prize.

Yáng said: “I believe in literature’s power because in the life of the mind, literature has never ceded ground or given up on the dialogue between people.”

The Power of Authors teaches: purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing. Not talent. Not strategy. Not the approval of publishers who say a thing cannot be done. Purpose. The author who writes from genuine purpose — from the soil of a real life, a real loss, a real conviction about what literature is for — writes the book no algorithm can predict and no rejection letter can stop.

Yáng had a purpose large enough to carry her sister’s name. Lin King had a purpose large enough to carry a language across itself. Together they produced a book publishers said was impossible.

You have a purpose. You may not have named it yet. You may have set it aside because someone told you the book could not be written, the story could not be told, the language could not be crossed.

Write it for the person you are carrying. Write from the soil your life has grown in. Write because literature has never ceded ground and never given up on the dialogue between people.

The name on the cover is not the only name in the room.

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.

Three O’Clock

 

Cedar Valley News
May 25, 2026
Three O’Clock
By Teresa Nikas

At three o’clock this afternoon, almost nobody in this country will pause. The country has forgotten the minute is there.

Cedar Valley News, as best I can tell, may be the only paper in America reminding its readers today. We are doing it on purpose. A small paper in a small valley cannot do much about the wars the country fights or about the funerals other towns are holding. But we can remind a town of what the country has agreed to remember. A paper unwilling to do the small thing within its reach has stopped earning its name.

This is the National Moment of Remembrance. Congress established it in two thousand. It asks every American to pause one minute, at three p.m. local time, on the last Monday in May, to honor those who died in service to this country. Twenty-six years on, almost no paper will print a word about it. The minute went on the books, and the books have not made it into most lives.

So here is the reminder, in plain language, on Memorial Day morning, while you have time to act on it.

At three o’clock this afternoon, stop. Sixty seconds. Wherever you are. If you are at a barbecue, set down the tongs. If you are driving, pull over if you can. If you are at the lake, stop the boat and let it drift. If you are on the porch with your family, like I will be, do not make a speech of it. Just say it is three o’clock, and ask the people you love to be quiet with you for one minute.

I am going to make a big deal of it on my own porch. I am going to tell my sister and her husband at breakfast. I am going to tell my nephew, who is eight years old, the same age I was when I first noticed my grandfather walking out at quarter to three. My grandfather was a veteran of a war I will not name, because the war is not the point. He came home in 1946 and lived 43 more years and did not, in all I knew of him, give a single speech about what he had seen. Every Memorial Day until the year he died, he stepped onto his back porch at quarter to three, sat in a wooden chair he had built himself, and waited. At three, he took his hat off and held it on his knee. At one minute past, he put it back on and went inside.

I asked my mother once what he was doing out there. She said he was visiting some friends. I said where are they. She said they could not come to the house.

I understood eventually. The chair is on my porch now, the wood darker than it was, the cushions newer than the rest. I am going to tell my nephew today what my mother told me. He is old enough now to understand a part of it. At quarter to three, I will walk out to the back porch and sit in my grandfather’s chair. My family will follow me. We will be quiet together at three. At one minute past, we will go back to the lemonade and the grill. We will have done the thing the country asked us to do.

One other thing, because Memorial Day and Veterans Day are not the same, and the country keeps confusing them. Today is for the ones who did not come home. November is for the ones who did. If you have a living veteran at the table today, thank him if you want to, but he is not the subject. The subject is the friends he carried home in his head, the empty chairs at the company reunion every year, the men and women whose graves the volunteers marked with flags last weekend.

Set your phone for two fifty-nine. Whatever you are doing, stop at three. Make a small thing of it with the people you are with. Tell them where the minute came from. Tell them why we have it.

Let Cedar Valley be the town which did.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what you did at three o’clock. 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, Memorial Day, the National Moment of Remembrance, and the Act of Congress establishing it in 2000 are real.

The Field Is Plowed Before the Harvest

 

Cedar Valley News
May 23, 2026
Six Hours and Forty-Eight Minutes
By Aisha Khalid

She is the third name on the list. I have known her for nine years. She teaches eighth-grade history. Her intake form is in her handwriting, with the letters falling away at the ends of words.

She sits carefully, the way a person sits whose back has been telling her something. I ask how she is.

She says, I sleep, technically. I just never wake up rested. I do not know what the difference is.

I let her sit with the sentence. I have learned, in twenty years, the answer arrives faster if the question is allowed to arrive first.

Three years, she says. She has tried melatonin and the rings. She knows her deep sleep percentage, her REM, and her resting heart rate. She wants to know what is wrong with her.

There is probably nothing wrong with her, I say. Her body is doing what bodies do on six hours and forty-eight minutes a night for a long time. Six hours and forty-eight minutes is the average for an American adult, according to Gallup. More than an hour less than the country slept in 1942. She is not the exception. She is the average.

She is quiet a moment. Then she says, almost to herself, she did not know it was so bad.

The cause is not personal failing, I tell her. The experts name stress first; nearly half of Americans report frequent daily stress, the highest in Gallup’s seventy-year trend. Long hours, second. Phones in the bedroom, third. The people sleeping least are young mothers, carrying what nobody else sees.

She laughs at the last one. The first real laugh of the visit. For a moment, the room is different. Two women who both know what carrying-what-nobody-sees feels like, neither of us pretending.

I tell her what closes it. Consistent hours. Morning light soon after waking. A darker, cooler room. Less screen before bed. Less alcohol in the evening.

She stops me at the last one. She does not drink, she says. Well, one glass of wine before bed. To relax. Just the one.

I let the wine sit on the counter between us. I have learned to take this conversation slowly.

This is not a moral question, I tell her. It is a sleep question. The science is firm. Wine helps you fall asleep faster, which is why it feels like it is helping. But it degrades the second half of the night, when deep sleep does the body’s repair work. The wine she has been drinking to sleep has been taking from her exactly the sleep she came in asking for.

She does not speak. I can see her doing the math.

There is something larger, I tell her. Even if she sets the wine down tonight, the standard list is not the whole answer. Her cause is one of the harder ones. The stress. The hours. The cognitive load nobody but her is keeping count of. Something she has been treating as non-negotiable has to come off her list before the body will give back the hour.

She is quiet again. Longer this time.

Then I tell her something I do not always give the woman in this chair. In 2018, a Harvard study followed nurses and other health professionals for 34 years and identified five behaviors. Do not smoke. Keep alcohol low. Maintain a healthy weight. Exercise thirty minutes daily. Eat a healthy diet. People who followed all five lived 12 to 14 years longer, 10 of those years free of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Look at the longevity list, I tell her. Look at the sleep list. They are one list. The wine she drinks tonight is the wine her seventies will charge her for. One ledger. The country has been buying twice.

I do not tell her what to put down. The prescription I write most cautiously is the one for someone else’s habits.

She thanks me and stands. At the door, she turns and asks, quietly, whether anyone ever really does it. I tell her the truth. Some do. The ones who do are the ones who decided the cost was finally too high.

The door closes. I sit for a minute before I call the next name.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the night you slept eight hours and how the next day felt. 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 Gallup sleep data, the CDC findings, the cited sleep science on alcohol, and the 2018 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study on five lifestyle behaviors and longevity referenced in this editorial are real.

Writing Through Doubt

 

Every author hits a stretch where the book feels pointless. Doubt is not a signal to stop. It is a stage every honest writer passes through.

It arrives without warning.

One morning, the sentences come easily. The next morning, they don’t come at all. You sit at the desk, open the file, read what you wrote yesterday, and feel nothing. The words look flat. The chapter feels aimless. The purpose you started with has gone quiet, and you can’t remember why you thought this book mattered.

Every author knows this moment. Most believe it means something is wrong — with the manuscript, with their ability, with the idea itself. They take the doubt as evidence. They stop writing to figure out the problem. Some never start again.

The doubt is not the problem. The doubt is the process.

Why Doubt Arrives

Doubt arrives because honest writing requires the author to stay open. You cannot write with conviction and remain defended at the same time. The act of putting truth on the page means lowering your guard, and the moment you do, uncertainty walks in.

This is not weakness. It is the cost of doing the work honestly.

The authors who never experience doubt are the ones who never risk anything on the page. They write safely, staying inside boundaries they already know, repeating ideas they’ve already tested. Their manuscripts are comfortable. Their manuscripts are also forgettable. Doubt is the price of ambition. It is what happens when a writer reaches beyond what they’ve already mastered and tries to say something they haven’t said before.

I’ve published more than five hundred books. The manuscripts written through doubt are almost always stronger than the ones written without it. Doubt forced the author to question every assumption, reexamine every chapter, and defend every sentence. The book emerged leaner, truer, and more honest because the author refused to let the doubt win, but also refused to ignore it.

What Doubt Sounds Like

Doubt speaks in reasonable voices. It does not announce itself as fear. It disguises itself as judgment.

“This has already been said before.”

“No one is going to care about this.”

“You’re not the right person to write this book.”

“The first draft was better. You’re making it worse.”

Each statement sounds rational. Each one invites the author to stop. And each one is the voice of a writer who is closer to the truth than they realize. Doubt intensifies near the center of what matters most. The closer you get to the honest core of your book, the louder the resistance becomes. The voice telling you to quit is not a warning. It is a compass pointing directly at the work you need to do.

How to Write Through It

The answer is not to silence the doubt. You cannot. The answer is to write alongside it.

Sit down. Open the file. Write the next sentence. It does not need to be good. It needs to exist. The sentence after it does not need to be good either. What matters is the act — the decision to keep moving when every instinct says stop.

Doubt loses power the moment the author keeps working. It feeds on stillness. It grows in the gap between sessions. An author who writes every day, even badly, gives doubt less room to operate. An author who waits for the doubt to pass before writing again has handed doubt the keys.

The other essential practice is returning to purpose. When the writing feels pointless, the problem is rarely the writing. The problem is the author has drifted from the reason they started. Go back. Reread the dedication page. Remember who the book is for. Remember what it is meant to do. Purpose is the antidote to doubt — not because it eliminates uncertainty, but because it gives the author a reason to keep going despite it.

Every finished book was once an unfinished manuscript surrounded by doubt. The authors who completed them did not feel any less doubt than those who quit. They simply decided the book mattered more than the feeling.

Your doubt does not prove the book is failing. It is proof you are doing the hardest, most honest work a writer can do.

Keep writing.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the courage to keep writing through doubt is the skill no craft book teaches.

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 Field Is Plowed Before the Harvest

 

Cedar Valley News
May 22, 2026
The Field Is Plowed Before the Harvest
By Dan Larson

A Nobel economist died last week. His name was Edmund Phelps. He was ninety-two, taught at Columbia for sixty years, and won the prize in two thousand and six.

I did not know his name before. But the obituaries described his work in a way which stopped me. They said Phelps put the human being back into the dismal science. He refused to treat the economy as a machine. He insisted, against the consensus of his time, an economy is a theater of human expectations. People hire, invest, build, and plant on the strength of what they believe will arrive. The expectation is the engine. By the time the harvest comes, the field is plowed.

I sat with the sentence about the plowed field for a while.

It was an economist describing what every farmer in this valley has always known. The seed goes in the ground before the rain comes. The work happens in the cold months, on faith in months not yet come. By July, when anyone can see the corn, the labor of February is months past. The harvest looks like a gift. It is. But the gift only arrives because someone, in the cold, committed to a summer he had not yet seen.

I have been a stake president for some time. I have watched a lot of weddings. I have signed papers for young couples buying houses on the strength of jobs they had not yet proved at. I have watched men and women begin missions whose ending they could not see. I have watched parents bring a first child home and commit, in advance, to twenty years of a life they did not yet know how they would afford. I have watched congregations build chapels for membership rolls they hoped to have a decade out.

Every one of those acts was a field plowed for a harvest the person could not yet see.

The economist would have called it expectation. The Bible calls it faith. Hebrews puts it this way: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. A young couple buying a house is not, in their own minds, demonstrating Hebrews. They are buying a house. But the act underneath is the same. They are committing on the strength of a future they have decided to trust.

Phelps spent his career proving economies do this constantly, and the committing is what makes the future arrive. The boom does not begin when the productivity gain shows up in the data. It begins earlier, when people start expecting it and acting on the expectation. The investments are made, the hires happen, the chapels are built, and by the time the gain itself arrives, the world is already adjusted to it.

I want to be careful, because I do not want to make Phelps into a preacher he was not. He was an economist. He did not invoke God. He may not have shared my faith.

But what he proved, with mathematics and forty years of careful work, is this: the deepest engine of any economy is the same engine which has run my congregation since before any of us were born. People commit to a future they cannot see, and the committing is what causes it to arrive.

He died on May 15th. The obituaries say he saw, to the end, what he had always seen: the human being, with his hopes and his risks and his willingness to act on what he expected, was the most underrated force in any economy.

I would add only this: the same human being is also the most underrated force in any town, any marriage, any congregation, and any household.

The field is plowed before the harvest. Every harvest you have ever brought home was committed to in advance. By faith, by expectation, by hope, by trust, by whatever name you keep for the act. The names are different. The act is one act, and a Nobel economist spent a lifetime telling us so.

May he rest in peace. And may the rest of us, in the cold months, keep plowing.

Tell us on the Facebook page about a field you plowed before the harvest came.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a field you plowed before the harvest came. 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, Edmund Phelps, his death on May 15, 2026, his 2006 Nobel Prize, his career at Columbia University, and the lines of his work described in this editorial are real.

What the Phone Did Not Kill

 Cedar Valley News

May 21, 2026
What the Phone Did Not Kill
By Chloe Papadakis

I plan rooms for a living.

When the barbecue is in Maryam Park, or the dance is at the Olsons’, or the cultural exchange is in the church basement, my job is to fill the room and watch what it does. I am the woman in the back, counting heads and how long people stay. Long enough to notice things.

The thing I have been noticing for the past few years is attention.

There are statistics about attention you may have read. The average human attention span on a screen is now forty-seven seconds. Americans check their phones 205 times a day. Deep reading has declined by 39% over the last 10 years. The numbers are real. I see them in my own hand. I am twenty-eight, and I am of the generation everyone is writing about.

But I want to tell you what I have also been seeing, because it is in the same room as the first set of numbers, and almost never gets named in the same breath.

The young people of Cedar Valley are coming to my events.

They are coming to the dances, cultural exchanges, award nights, and lectures. They are coming to the things their parents come to. Not all of them. Not every time. But more of them than the year before, and more of them than the year before. I keep track.

It is not just my events. Library visits among my generation are up seventy-one percent. Two-thirds of young readers say a book app called BookTok inspired them to read a book they would not have picked up otherwise. Independent bookstores are growing for the first time in years. The print novel, declared dead more times than I can count, has been quietly resurrected by people younger than thirty.

Two true things. The phone is taking our attention in 47-second chunks. The young people the phone was supposed to capture forever are walking into libraries, picking up novels, and sitting through two-hour cultural exchanges.

I have come to believe both at once. The phone is doing what the headlines say. And it is not. Attention has not died. It has become earned.

Here is what I mean by earned. When I plan a room badly, the phone wins. The lecture goes long, the speaker reads slides, the chairs are wrong, the room is cold, and the phones come out. Not because the people are weak. Because the room failed them. I have planned rooms like it. I know the feeling of watching them check out, one by one. I know it is on me.

When I plan a room well, the phone loses. The barn dance last fall, the hall full, the music right, nobody on a phone for two hours. The cultural exchange in March, the conversation honest, the food made by the women who came up to it, the children settled. Phones in pockets. The Saturday market when the weather holds. The Christmas service when the choir is on.

The phone is patient. It will always be there. The job of the people who make rooms — the planners, the teachers, the pastors, the parents who put dinner on a table — is to put something in it worth the phone going dark for. When we do, even now, the phone goes dark.

The data the headlines do not lead with is telling us something. The young person who walks into the library, picks up the novel, and sits with it for an hour has not lost the capacity. She has been waiting for something worth using it on. The capacity for sustained attention is not a thing my generation was born without. It is a thing we have been waiting to spend.

This is what I want to say to the older people of Cedar Valley who worry about us, and you know who you are, and we love you for worrying. We are not gone. We are choosing more carefully. The room has to be worth it.

Make the room worth it. We will be there.

Tell us on the Facebook page about a room worth the phone going dark for.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a room where the phones went dark, and the people stayed. 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 attention-span data, the library visit and BookTok findings, and the independent bookstore growth referenced in this editorial are real.

The Deal a Publisher Made With His Plumber

 

Cedar Valley News
May 20, 2026
The Deal a Publisher Made With His Plumber
By Lars Olson

A customer told me something last week, and I have been turning it over ever since.

He is a publisher. He told me about a deal he has with his plumber. The way he tells it: he does not publish books, and I do not fix leaks. The plumber comes when called. The bill is what the bill is. Nobody has talked the other out of a dollar.

I laughed, because I have been watching some version of the deal walk past my counter for forty-one years, and I have never heard it said so cleanly.

I want to be careful. I run a hardware store. My best customer is the man or woman going to try the job themselves. I want them in the aisles, coming back next Saturday for the next thing. Nothing I am about to say is meant to chase one of them out the door.

But forty-one years teach a man to see something. A survey of 1,700 homeowners last year found that 58% spent more on a do-it-yourself job than they had planned. More than a third of the damaged jobs cost $500 or more to fix the fix. It is the part the YouTube video does not mention.

Here is what I have learned to see when a customer comes in with a part on the counter. I am not looking at the part. I am looking at two things about the job, and one about the customer.

The first is whether the mistake will be visible. Trim cut wrong. A faucet washer set wrong. A porch board in the wrong joist. You see it the same day, fix it the same afternoon. The cost is the part and an hour of your time. I cheer these on. Most of what I sell is for jobs like these, and most of what gets fixed in Cedar Valley is fixed by the person who lives there.

The second is whether the mistake will be hidden. Hidden mistakes do not announce themselves the day you make them. They wait. Electrical inside a wall. Plumbing inside a wall. Gas anything. Anything structural. The cost is not the part. The cost is what you find three months later, behind the wall, when the water has been running where it should not have been running.

The one thing about the customer is simpler. I am asking whether they have done one like it before. Not the same job. One like it. The difference between the man who fixes the leak in twenty minutes and the man who turns it into a four-hundred-dollar bill is rarely smarts. It is reps. The tenth time you sweat a pipe joint, you do it right. Nobody is good at the first one. The honest question is not can you do this. It is have you done one like it.

When the job is a visible-mistake job, and the customer has done one like it, I send them home with the part and a smile. When the job is a hidden-mistake job, and the customer has not, I find a way to say so without saying so. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I see them in two weeks with a sheepish look and the parts for the second attempt.

The publisher has done his own math. His time is worth more on a page than under a sink. He may be right. He may also be a man who tried it once and learned. I did not ask. The deal he made is the same deal a good carpenter makes with his accountant, and a farmer makes with his veterinarian. He does not do the other man’s work. The other man does not do his. The bill, when it comes, is what the bill is.

I am not telling you to call the plumber. I am telling you what I look at when you come to my counter. The fact of my watching does not mean I am judging. It means I want you to win.

Tell us on the Facebook page about a job which went well, or one which did not.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the repair you fixed yourself, or the one you wish you had called for. 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 survey findings on do-it-yourself project costs and damage referenced in this editorial are real.

The Flowers and the Thorns

 

Cedar Valley News
May 19, 2026
The Flowers and the Thorns
By George Khan

A woman counted out her change on my counter this morning.

She is a regular. She buys the same sandwich on the same day. This morning she set down a five and went into her coin purse for the rest, counting it in dimes and nickels while the line waited behind her. She was not embarrassed. She was being careful in a way she did not used to have to be.

I see this every day now. The order made smaller. The extra thing put back. The young father who used to buy Saturday lunch for himself and his boy now buys one sandwich and cuts it in half.

I am not going to tell you the squeeze is not real. It is real. It is on my counter every morning. It is in my own wholesale invoices, which have not stopped climbing in five years. The nightly news says the country is in its worst mood in seventy-four years, and it is not lying. The number is the number.

But I want to tell you something I have noticed about the nightly news.

The nightly news watches thorns for a living. A fire, a closure, a falling number, a fight. It is very good at finding the thorn in any garden, and holds it to the camera every night at six. What it almost never does is turn the camera ten degrees and show you the rest of the garden. It has rose blinders. It sees only the thing with a point on it.

I read further than the news at six. Not because I am clever. Because a man who runs a small business learns to read more than one report.

Here is what is in the other reports. The people who study the economy for a living are not as unified as the man at six o’clock makes them sound. Many look at the same country and use words you will not hear on the broadcast. Words like steady. Words like sound. Small business confidence went up last month, not down. The job market, the people who measure it say, is holding. Growth is slow, but growth is not a fire. None of it makes the squeeze a lie. Both things are in the same garden. The thorn is real. So is the part the camera does not turn to find.

I have run this deli for thirty-one years. I have watched two kinds of people walk through the door.

One kind comes in and sees the thorns. The prices, the line, the thing gone wrong, the reason today will be hard. They are not wrong. The thorns are there. Every word they say is true.

The other kind sees the flowers. The same prices, the same line, the same hard day. But they notice the boy did get his half a sandwich. They notice the woman behind them quietly covered the dimes. They notice it is spring outside the window. They are not wrong either. The flowers are there too.

It is the same garden. The same town, the same week, the same economy. The two kinds of people are not seeing different worlds. They are seeing two true halves of one world, and choosing which half to carry out the door.

I want to be careful, because this is not a trick. I am not telling you the thorns are imaginary. I have been cut. My invoices have cut me. I am telling you something smaller and truer. A person gets a say. A small one. You get to aim your eyes. And what a man looks at first, morning after morning, is in the end what he becomes.

The woman finished counting her change. She got her sandwich. She said thank you, the same as always, and will be back next week. In a hard year, it is not nothing.

Tomorrow you will get up and look at the garden. It will have thorns in it. It always does. It will have flowers in it. It always does. Which one you reach for first is, more than the news will admit, up to you.

Tell us on the Facebook page what you reached for.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what you reached for this week — the thorn you could not help seeing, or the flower you found beside it. 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 record-low consumer sentiment readings, the rise in small business confidence, and the labor market and growth assessments referenced are real.

The More You Read

 

Two reports landed in April 2026. Neither made the front page. Together, they tell a story every author needs to understand.

The first came from the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom. The organization had surveyed more than 114,000 children and young people aged five to eighteen. Its finding was stark: children's reading enjoyment has reached a twenty-year low. Only one in three children aged eight to eighteen say they enjoy reading in their free time. Thirty-six percent fewer children enjoy reading now than in 2005. A report released alongside the data warned: the “relentless” focus on measuring literacy progress in schools has “pushed reading for pleasure to the margins.”

The second came from the Pew Research Center in the United States. In a survey of more than 8,000 American adults, researchers found 75% of Americans had read at least one book in the past 12 months. Sixty-four percent had read a print book. The physical book, declared dead by technology forecasters for twenty years, remains the most common way Americans choose to read.

Read both reports together and a question forms. If children are losing the love of reading — and adults are still reaching for books by the millions — something is happening in the years between childhood and adulthood. Something is either being lost along the way or found.

What turns a child who endures reading into an adult who chooses it? Not a test score. Not a standardized measure of phonemic awareness. A book someone handed them at the right moment — one they could not put down.

In 1955, a researcher named Rudolf Flesch published a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read. It argued American children were not learning to read because the primers used in schools — the Dick and Jane readers, with their flat sentences and careful vocabulary controls — were too dull to make a child want to read. The report caused a national debate.

William Spaulding, educational director at Houghton Mifflin, approached a cartoonist and writer named Theodor Seuss Geisel with a challenge. Spaulding gave him a list of roughly 225 words — words a first grader should know. He asked Geisel to write a book using no more than those words. A book a child would actually want to read.

Geisel spent a year and a half on it. He later said he found two words on the list rhyming with each other and built everything from there. Those two words were “cat” and “hat.”

The Cat in the Hat was published in 1957. It used 223 words. It sold nearly a million copies in its first year. It has never gone out of print. It changed how children learned to read in America.

Dr. Seuss understood what the researchers had missed. The problem was not an inability to read. The problem: the books children were given didn’t make them want to. He wrote: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

He did not write a curriculum. He wrote a story. The story did what the curriculum could not.

Seventy years later, the reports are different. The problem is the same.

Schools are measuring literacy. They are not measuring love of reading. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where authors live.

The Power of Authors teaches: purpose begins with a reader. Not a demographic. Not a market. A reader — a specific person, at a specific moment, who needs what only this book can give them. The author, writing with genuine purpose, writes for the child sitting in a classroom who has been taught to decode words but has not yet been given a reason to love them.

The child becomes the adult, accounting for 75% of the Pew survey. Something changed between the ages of ten and forty. A book changed it. A story someone wrote because they understood the purpose of reading is not decoding — it is presence, connection, the feeling of being inside a life other than your own.

The reports from April 2026 are not a crisis for educators alone. They are a challenge to every author.

Write the book a child will not be able to put down. Write the story making a reluctant reader forget the time. Write with enough honesty and enough joy and enough truth — so a ten-year-old somewhere picks it up and thinks: I didn’t know reading felt like this.

Not a small purpose. The largest purpose there is.

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 Nephew Was the Reason

Cedar Valley News
May 18, 2026
The Nephew Was the Reason
By Teresa Nikas

There was a barbershop one town over from where I grew up.

It had been there sixty years. When I was a girl, my father drove twenty minutes to it rather than five to the shop nearby, because the barber knew how my father wanted it cut before he was in the chair.

By the time I was grown, the old barber had handed the shop to a nephew. The nephew was not unkind. He was just somewhere else. He cut hair competently, asked no questions, and remembered nothing. The shop still cut hair. It no longer sold what it had always sold: the feeling of being known.

It closed fifteen years ago. The nephew blamed the chain salon by the highway. The salon was real. It was also twenty-five miles away, and had been there nine years before the shop went under. The salon was the weather. The nephew was the reason. If I am honest, the shop had died some years before it closed. The chair stayed full a while longer. But what made it his shop was already gone.

I have been thinking about the shop because I am thinking about newspapers.

Newspapers have been closing for twenty years. Hundreds of them. At nearly every funeral, the cause of death has been given as the internet. The reader went online. The advertising went online. The classified page, which paid for everything, went online and did not come back.

All of it is true. I will not tell you the internet was a ghost story. The loss of the classified page was a real wound, and some good papers, run by people who never forgot their readers, bled out from it anyway. I will not insult those papers by pretending otherwise.

But here is what I cannot get past.

The internet did not arrive at one newspaper. It arrived at all of them on the same morning, the way weather arrives at every farm in a valley at once. If the internet alone were the killer, it would have killed evenly. It did not. Some papers are still here, and they are the ones who never forgot they had customers.

A newspaper is a business like any other. Its customer is the reader. It can forget the reader the way the nephew forgot the men in his chair.

It looks like this. The paper covers the distant outrage instead of the school board, because the outrage is cheaper and comes pre-written. It talks down to the reader. It treats the reader not as a neighbor but as an audience to be counted and sold to advertisers. It becomes, a little at a time, less useful, less surprising, less honest. Then it watches its readers leave, and says the word internet, the way the nephew said chain salon.

The reader did not leave because a screen was shiny. The reader left because the paper had stopped being worth the trip. A reader forgives a paper anything except the sense it has stopped seeing him.

Cedar Valley News is sixty-eight years old. It was founded in 1957, when this valley had more farms than streetlights. It has outlived a great many papers, and the fact buys it nothing. The cemetery is full of old businesses who thought age was a wall around them.

A year ago, on June fifth, we started sending these editorials to you a new way, and reading them aloud a little after, because a paper unwilling to walk to where its readers are is composing its own last sentence. June fifth marks one year of the effort. One year is not a birthday. It is a progress report, and only the people holding it can grade it.

I will end with a test. It is not about newspapers.

Every business you depend on is, this week, either remembering you or forgetting you. The bank. The grocer. The garage. You already know which ones still see you and which ones have started looking past you. The ones who still see you are worth your loyalty while they are here to receive it.

Tell us on the Facebook group about a business who never forgot you.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The stories are welcome too — the shop, the counter, the person who knew your name and remembered it. 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, the long decline of American newspapers and the loss of classified advertising revenue are real.

The Patients Moved First

 

Cedar Valley News
May 16, 2026
The Patients Moved First
By Aisha Khalid

He set the bottle on my desk Tuesday, next to a lab report folded into quarters.

He was sixty-four. His previous doctor had moved out of town. He had been taking two capsules a day of a red yeast rice supplement, on his own, for six months. He turned the lab report so I could read it. His total cholesterol had dropped forty points. His LDL was inside the range his previous doctor had spent three years trying to reach.

He asked whether he should keep taking the supplement.

I told him red yeast rice is a statin.

He looked at me for a moment. He had not been told this. The bottle did not say it. The internet had told him red yeast rice was the natural alternative to the drug.

So I explained it to him, and I will explain it to you.

Red yeast rice has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. Its active ingredient, monacolin K, is chemically identical to lovastatin, the first FDA-approved statin. The drug is a supplement, isolated and put into a tablet. Studies show red yeast rice lowers LDL cholesterol fifteen to thirty-four percent, comparable to a prescription statin. His cholesterol came down because he had been taking a statin for six months. He had not known what to call it.

He asked me how he was supposed to know.

I told him the truth. He was not supposed to have known. He figured it out anyway, the way patients have been figuring things out for twenty years.

When I started practicing, patients waited for me to tell them what to do. They handed me their symptoms and trusted me to hand back a prescription. The patients who walk in now bring lab reports they ordered themselves and questions about studies they have read. The man on Tuesday was the ordinary patient of 2026.

I told him what I have watched. In 2002, twelve percent of American adults practiced yoga for pain. By 2022, it was almost twenty-nine. The complementary and alternative medicine market is projected to reach $229 billion by 2033. Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins have integrative medicine departments. The National Institutes of Health funds supplement research. The country has been moving for two decades. The patients moved first. The hospitals and doctors are catching up.

Not all of them. I told him he had probably met both kinds who have not. The doctor who will not discuss a supplement because the agency has not approved it. The doctor who tells you everything natural is safe, and everything from a pharmacy is poison. Both have stopped doing the work.

The work is not hard to describe. You ask what is in the bottle. You look at the lab report. You watch the numbers. You do it again in three months. The supplement is not the enemy. The prescription is not the enemy. The categories are the enemy. They let a doctor stop looking at the person in front of him.

I told him his statin was working. I told him the trouble with his bottle is the label cannot promise next month’s capsules will match this month’s, because supplements are not tested the way drugs are. I told him to keep what was working, switch to a brand an independent laboratory had checked, and come back in three months.

He said something as he folded the lab report back up. He said he had not led anything. He had just been watching his own cholesterol.

Then I told him the thing I want to tell you.

He was right. He had not set out to lead anything. Neither had the woman who took up yoga in 2003 to help her back, nor the millions of patients who walked into exam rooms over twenty years and asked one more question than their parents would have asked. Not one of them set out to move American medicine. Together, they moved it more in twenty years than the medical schools moved it in fifty.

You have been the ones moving this. Keep moving it. Read what you can find. Watch what works. Trust what your own numbers tell you.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. What you have read, tried, and learned about your own health is welcome too. 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, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the yoga participation figures, the complementary and alternative medicine market projection, the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins integrative medicine departments, and the chemistry of red yeast rice and lovastatin are real.

The Conversation After the Signing

 

The real work of a book signing doesn’t happen at the table. It happens in the conversation afterward.

The line has ended. The last book has been signed. The store employee is stacking the remaining copies. Most authors start packing up.

Then someone lingers.

They stand a few feet from the table, waiting for the crowd to thin. They hold the book close — not like a purchase, but like something personal. When the space clears, they step forward and say something the author will remember for years.

“This is my story too.”

What the Table Cannot Do

Book signings are performances. The author sits — or stands, if they’ve learned better — behind a table, greets strangers, signs copies, and smiles. The interaction is pleasant but shallow. A name spelled correctly, a brief thank-you, a handshake. The reader moves on. The author greets the next person in line.

This is the public work. It matters. It puts books in hands and faces behind names. But it is not where the real connection happens.

The real connection happens after. In the conversation no one else hears. The reader who stayed behind because the book touched something they weren’t expecting. The stranger who recognized their own experience on a page and needed the author to know.

I’ve published more than five hundred books. I’ve coached authors through hundreds of signings. The authors who understand the value of the conversation after the signing are the ones whose books find lasting audiences. Not because the conversation sells more copies. Because the conversation teaches the author something no sales report ever will.

 

What the Author Learns

The conversation after the signing tells the author why their book matters. Not in the abstract. Not as a concept. In a specific human life, standing in front of them, telling them what the words did.

A veteran who says the chapter about coming home put language around something he’d been carrying for decades. A daughter who bought the book for her mother and came back to say it opened a conversation they’d never been able to have. A retired teacher who read one passage aloud to her husband at the kitchen table and watched him cry for the first time in forty years. These are not book reviews. These are lives intersecting with words. No author can anticipate them. Every author needs to hear them.

These moments do not appear in royalty statements. They do not show up in Amazon rankings. They are the reason the book exists, and the author would never know it without the conversation.

Every one of these exchanges teaches the author something about their own work they could not have learned alone. The book is doing things the author never intended, reaching places the author never imagined, answering questions the author didn’t know they’d asked. The reader becomes a mirror, showing the author the book’s true shape.

 

Standing, Not Sitting

This is why I teach authors to stand at their signings. Look the reader in the eye. Only sit to sign the book. Standing changes the dynamic. It says: I am here to meet you, not to receive you. It removes the barrier of the table and puts the author and the reader on equal ground.

A standing author invites conversation. A seated author behind a stack of books invites a transaction. The difference is everything.

When you stand, the reader who lingers doesn’t have to approach a desk. They step toward a person. The conversation starts more naturally. The wall comes down. What follows is honest, human, and unrepeatable.

Authors who dismiss signings as sales events are missing the point. The signing is a stage. The conversation after is the work. It is where the author discovers what the book became once it left their hands — and it is almost always more than they expected.

The next time you do a signing, don’t rush the ending. Stay. Watch for the reader who lingers. They have something to tell you, and what they say may change how you understand your own book. Give them the space to say it. Stand where they can reach you.

The best thing a signing can give you is not a sale. It is a conversation you didn’t see coming.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the most important moments in an author’s life happen not on the page, but in the conversations the page creates.

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 Rooms We Stopped Building

 

Cedar Valley News
May 15, 2026
The Rooms We Stopped Building
By Dan Larson

A man in our ward stopped coming to church two years ago.

I will not name him. He is sixty-eight, retired, widowed, and lives alone in the house he bought with his wife in 1982. His wife died in early 2024. He came to her funeral. He came to a few Sunday meetings after. Then he stopped.

I have visited him three times since. He answers the door. We sit in the kitchen and talk about his garden. He is not angry. He is not in crisis. He has not lost his faith. He has lost something harder to name.

He has lost the rooms.

The chapel was one of his rooms. The Saturday breakfast at the Lions Club was another. The bowling league out on Highway 14 closed in 2019. The neighbors he used to talk to over the fence have moved or died. The barber he saw every six weeks retired. His wife was the room he came home to. She is gone.

What he has left is his house, his garden, his phone, and me, once every five months, sitting at his kitchen table for forty minutes.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic in 2023. The report cites Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses showing social isolation carries mortality risk equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The Survey Center on American Life reports the number of American men with no close friends has roughly quadrupled since 1990. One in six adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation last year they feel lonely always or often.

The major outlets report the facts. They have mostly not reported why.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in a 1989 book called The Great Good Place, gave us a term we should have been using all along. The third place. Not home. Not work. The third room a person walks into in a normal week, where they are known by name, where they are nobody’s customer, and nobody’s family member, and nobody’s project. The cafe. The bar. The library. The barbershop. The Knights of Columbus. The Legion. The hardware store on a Saturday. The church potluck where the food was an excuse to stay.

The third place is the room where the casual friendship happens. It is the room where an older man takes a younger man aside and says one sentence the younger man will remember for thirty years. It is the room where a woman in the middle of a hard week sits next to a friend and does not have to explain herself. It is the room where the country talks to itself.

The third places have been closing for forty years. The bowling alleys closed first. The fraternal lodges aged out. The mainline churches shrank. The diners thinned. The hardware stores were absorbed by box stores. The pandemic took another round and closed them for good.

Nobody decided to close the third places. They closed because we stopped showing up.

I have spent thirty years watching what happens when a man like the one in my ward loses his rooms one at a time. He does not become a different person. He becomes a smaller version of the same person. His world contracts to the radius of his front door. He stops calling. He stops being called. The loneliness data is what happens when this story happens to enough men at once.

The country treats the loneliness epidemic as a mystery. It is not a mystery. We let the rooms close. The rooms are where friendships live.

The chapel is one third place among many. I am going to tell you what I see from inside it. We held a potluck on Wednesday. Two men I had not seen in a year came. They did not stay long. They came because somebody walked over and asked them. Maybe next month they will come again.

This is the work. This is the only work. Walk over. Ask.

There is a man on your street who has lost his rooms. You know who he is. Walk over. Ask him. Then tell us on the Facebook page.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The third-place stories are welcome too — the room you remember, the room you miss, the room you walked back into. 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, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research, the Survey Center on American Life findings, the Kaiser Family Foundation data, and Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place are real.