The Cancer Test She No Longer Has to Dread

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go find the door.

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

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

The Media Kit

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What a Media Kit Contains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Author Who Sets the Standard

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

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

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

Build It Now

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

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

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

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

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

The Revolution Ended a World of Bowing and Rank

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Flag a Fourteen-Year-Old Orphan Drew

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alaska sent a copy of Benny Benson's flag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battery on Her Lap

 Cedar Valley News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History in Your Change

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Very Glad I Wrote

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write it while it is there.

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

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

 

The Sentence They Waited a Lifetime to Hear

 

Cedar Valley News
June 22, 2026
The Sentence They Waited a Lifetime to Hear
By Teresa Nikas

A man came into the office a few years ago with a cardboard box under his arm. Inside it was his life. Not a metaphor. Forty years of letters, a war he had not talked about, the recipes in his late wife's hand, a story he had been writing in pencil since he retired. He set the box on my desk the way you set down something heavy you have carried a long way. He wanted to know if Cedar Valley News might print a piece of it. What he wanted, under the question, was to know whether any of it had been worth keeping.

I have done this work long enough to know the look. It is not vanity. It is the oldest wish there is. A person reaches a certain age, understands they are going to be forgotten, and reaches for a way to leave a mark before they go. They write it down. They bring the box.

I thought about him this week, reading about the people who got the phone calls.

For six years, a company called PageTurner told authors their work had been chosen. A real publisher wanted it. A studio was interested in the film. All they had to do was cover some fees, some taxes, a few costs up front, and the dream they had carried their whole lives would finally come true. The calls came from a building in another country, from people reading a script. More than eight hundred Americans believed them. Most of them were old. Together, they lost tens of millions of dollars, and last month, the man who ran it pleaded guilty. He will be sentenced in July.

I want to be careful about where the cruelty actually lives in this story.

It is not mainly about the money, though the money was real, and some lost everything. It is in the sentence they were told. "Your work has been chosen." It is not a clumsy lie. It is the exact sentence each of them had been waiting an entire life to hear. The scammers did not pick a random hope to exploit. They found the tenderest one a human being carries, the wish to have mattered, and they used it as a handle.

And here is the part the court filings do not measure. A person who falls for this does not tell anyone. They are ashamed. They believed the kind voice on the phone, and now they cannot bear to say so out loud, so they carry it alone. Some of them carried it to the end of their lives. The loss in this story is not only the savings. It is the silence afterward, the good, trusting person sitting alone, certain they had been made a fool.

They were not fools. The wish was not foolish. Wanting your one life to leave a trace is the most human thing I know. The fools, if we must find some, are the ones who looked at the wish and saw a way to make a withdrawal.

Someone in Cedar Valley has a box like his in a closet. Someone here finished a manuscript last winter and is afraid to show it to anyone. And it is possible someone here got a call last week, from a warm and professional voice, saying the most wonderful thing, asking only for a little money to begin.

Two things, and then I will let you go.

If a stranger calls to tell you your work has been chosen and then asks you to pay, hang up the phone and call someone who loves you before you do anything else. It is not a publisher. A publisher pays you.

And the other thing is the better one. If someone in your life has a book in them, or a box, or a story they keep almost telling, do not make them wait for a stranger to call. Sit down at their kitchen table. Ask them to read you a page aloud. The thing those people were selling was a counterfeit of something real, and the real one costs nothing.

Go and give it to someone before the phone does.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the box of writing in your own family, and whose hand filled 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 PageTurner Press and Media scam described here — more than eight hundred authors, most of them seniors, defrauded before the man who ran the scheme pleaded guilty in May 2026 — is real, reported by the United States Department of Justice.

Fewer Twins, and the Risk They Carried

 

Cedar Valley News
June 20, 2026
Fewer Twins, and the Risk They Carried
By Aisha Khalid

She was eight weeks along, and she had waited a long time. We watched the screen together, the two of us, while the small flicker found its rhythm. One heartbeat, quick and certain, filling the dark little room with its sound.

She smiled. Then she said, almost to herself, "I'd half hoped for two."

I have heard the wish before. She had come to it the hard way, through years and needles and more disappointment than she would tell most people. When the clinic called with good news, part of her had pictured a matched set. Two cribs. The whole thing done at once. A fullness to make up for the long wait. There is a particular hope in a person who has waited too long for one of something. It does not ask for moderation.

"I asked them for two," she said. "They would only put one back."

I did not rush to answer. The wish is a real one, and it deserves a moment before the medicine arrives to explain itself.

A report crossed my desk last week, the kind most people never see. In 2014, thirty-four of every thousand babies born in this country were twins. Last year, thirty. The twin birth rate had climbed for more than three decades, and then, quietly, it turned and began to fall. Headlines, if they bother, will call it a decline.

I am old enough in this work to remember what the climb looked like from inside an exam room. I remember the twin pregnancies of fifteen years ago. The early bed rest. The blood pressures I did not like. The deliveries which came weeks too soon. I remember a mother in a hospital gown moving between two incubators down the hall, allowed to lay one hand on each, not yet allowed to hold either. Twins are a joy. They are also, in plain medical terms, a harder and riskier road for everyone on it.

What changed is not the babies. What changed is us. For years, the clinics placed two or three embryos, hoping one would take, and accepting the gamble when more than one did. Then the science of selecting a single strong embryo improved, and the gamble stopped being worth taking. Doctors began putting back one. The number on my desk is the result. Fewer twins is not a sadness in the data. It is a danger fewer families now have to walk through.

I told her some of this. Not as a lecture. As an answer to the question under her question, which was whether she had been given less than she asked for.

She had not. She had been given the safer road by people who had learned, across many years and not a few hard outcomes, which one it was. The one embryo was not a smaller hope. It was the wiser one.

This is the part of medicine almost no one claps for. A cancer caught early gets a story. A life saved on a table gets a story. But the danger which never arrives makes no sound at all. The preterm birth which did not happen, the tiny baby who did not spend a month under lights, the mother who held her child on the first day instead of the fortieth, leave no trace in anyone's memory. They are the best work we do, and they are invisible, because their whole nature is to be the thing which did not occur. We have no ceremony for it. No one writes a card to thank a doctor for the emergency they never had. The mother does not lie awake grateful for the month in intensive care she was spared, because she never knew the month had been waiting for her.

A number going down is not always a loss. Sometimes it is a multitude of quiet dangers, each one not run. Safety, written as subtraction.

We looked at the screen again before she left. One heartbeat, still going, strong and unhurried. I have delivered enough babies and sat with enough grief to have stopped ranking miracles by size.

I told her it was the safest sound I know.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a quiet good outcome in your own family — the trouble which, looking back, never 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, the decline in the United States twin birth rate described here — from about thirty-four twins per thousand births in 2014 to thirty in 2024 — is real, reported by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The Five-Sentence Pitch

 

Someone will ask what your book is about. The answer you give in the next ten seconds will determine whether they ever read it.

It happens at the grocery store. At church. At a family gathering, a cousin you haven’t seen in years says, “I heard you wrote a book — what’s it about?”

The author opens their mouth. And nothing clear comes out.

They start at the beginning. They explain the backstory. They describe the characters, the research, the years of revision. They watch the cousin’s eyes glaze over. By the time they finish, the cousin nods politely and changes the subject.

The book just lost a reader. Not because the book failed. Because the author couldn’t say what it was in the time it takes to pour a glass of water.

Belief Is Not Enough

I remember when Ruthann Crosby brought me Miracle in the Glass. There were no illustrations. No artist attached. No immediate pull saying, “This one’s going to be a winner.” Truth be told, it wasn’t a book yet.

But Ruthann had something better than a strong pitch — she had belief. She believed in the story’s message. She believed it needed to be in the world. And more importantly, she believed she could make something of it.

She did. She found an illustrator. She built the book. And then she did something most authors will not do. She took it to her community — personally, directly, one conversation at a time. She sold hundreds of copies within the Jewish community through direct connection and personal effort. The book never became a bestseller for us. But it became a success for Ruthann because it fulfilled its purpose.

Here is what Ruthann understood. Belief gets you out of the chair. The pitch gets the book into someone’s hands. You need both. Belief without words to carry it dies in the room. The pitch is how the author's conviction travels to the reader.

What a Pitch Is and What It Is Not

A pitch is not a summary. It is not the table of contents recited from memory. It is not the story of how you came to write the book, however moving. It is the answer to a simple question — why should I read this? — delivered in the time a person is willing to listen.

Five sentences. No more. Who you are. What the book is about. Who is it for? What it does for the reader. Where to get it.

Each sentence earns the next. The first identifies you. The second names the book and its subject. The third tells the listener whether this book is for them. The fourth gives them a reason to care. The fifth tells them what to do next.

This is not a sales script. It is a conversation compressed to its essentials. The same conviction driving the writing now drives the introduction. The voice is the same. The purpose is the same. The only difference is the length.

Why Most Authors Resist

Authors resist the pitch for the same reason they resist the practical work in general. It feels like selling. It feels reductive — how can three years of writing be captured in ten seconds? The temptation is to explain everything, to do justice to the complexity, to make sure the listener understands the depth of the work.

The listener does not want depth. The listener wants a door. The pitch is the door. Once they walk through it — once they pick up the book — the depth is waiting for them inside. The pitch does not replace the book. It invites the reader in.

I wrote in The Power of Authors what I have learned across six decades of publishing: books don’t sell books. People sell books. A good book doesn’t find readers on its own. It’s the author who has to step up, introduce it, talk about it, believe in it enough to share it — one reader, one event, one bookstore at a time.

The pitch is how you step up. Five sentences. Practiced until they feel natural. Delivered with the same conviction you brought to the writing.

Try yours on someone today. Not tomorrow. Today. The first version will not be the one you keep. But the one you keep will not arrive until you speak the first one out loud.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the author who can say what their book is for in five sentences reaches further than the one who needs five minutes.

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 Father Nobody Thinks to Ask

 

Cedar Valley News
June 19, 2026
The Father Nobody Thinks to Ask
By Dan Larson

A man came to see me a while ago. A good man. The kind everyone in town leans on without thinking twice. He coaches the boys, he shows up early, he is the first to lift the heavy end of anything. He sat down across from me, and for a long while he did not say much. Then he told me he had not been all right for a long time, and this was the first time he had said it out loud to anyone.

I have sat in this chair across from a great many people. I want to tell you about the fathers.

A father learns early what he is supposed to be. Steady. Strong. The one who carries things, not the one who needs carrying. He is the roof, not the person under it. We hand him the role with love, and he takes it up with love, and somewhere in the taking up of it he learns a quiet lesson nobody meant to teach him: a father does not get to fall apart.

So, he doesn't. He holds the job he hates because the family needs it. He lies awake with the bills and says nothing at breakfast. He carries a grief, or a fear, or a low gray weight he cannot name, and he carries it the way he was taught to carry everything, which is alone.

I have known a hundred of these men. The one who lost his job and dressed for work for three weeks so his children would not worry. The one who wept in the hospital parking lot where no one could see, then came inside steady. The one who carried his own father's silence into his fatherhood, never shown another way. None of them would have called it depression. Most would have called it nothing at all. They got up each morning and did the next thing, and the next, and told everyone they were fine.

Here is something the cards in the store this week will not tell you. About one in ten new fathers falls into depression in the first year of his child's life. One in ten. And while we have learned, rightly, to look after new mothers, almost no one thinks to ask the father. No one screens him. No one sits him down and says, “How are you, really?” The question is simply never put to him, and so he never finds out he was allowed to answer it.

I am not a doctor. I cannot tell you what is happening inside any particular man. But I have learned, across years in this chair, the one who looks the most solid is very often the one carrying the most, and the distance between "fine" and the truth can be a long and lonely country a man crosses entirely by himself.

It need not be so. There is no shame in it. A strong man who admits he is struggling has not stopped being strong. He has done the bravest thing a strong man can do.

I think of the Garden, on the hardest night there ever was. Even He, who could have borne it alone, asked His friends to stay awake and watch with Him. He did not want to be alone in it. If the Lord Himself wanted company in His worst hour, no father in Cedar Valley needs to face his own in silence.

This is my Father's Day word, and it runs two ways.

If there is a father in your life, do not only thank him this Sunday. Sit down with him. Ask him how he is really doing. And when he says "fine," as he will, stay a moment longer and ask again, gently, the way you would want to be asked.

And if you are the father reading this, and you have not been all right: it is not a failure to say so. It is not weakness, and it is not a burden you place on anyone who loves you. Say it to someone. Your wife. A friend. Your doctor. The Lord, who is already awake.

You were never meant to keep the watch alone.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a father who carried more than he let on, or the question you are going to ask this Sunday. 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 medical finding cited here — roughly one in ten new fathers experiences depression in the first year of a child’s life — is real, drawn from published research.

The Recipe Bound for 2276

 

Cedar Valley News
June 18, 2026
The Recipe Bound for 2276
By Chloe Papadakis

Somewhere inside a nine-hundred-pound steel cylinder, sealed this week and bound for the ground in Philadelphia, there is a recipe for a cookie.

The cylinder is America's Time Capsule. It was sealed this week, and the country published the full list of its contents. It will be buried on the Fourth of July, and it is not meant to be opened until the year twenty-two seventy-six, when the people who lift the lid will be as far from us as we are from the Revolution.

Every state was asked to send something forward. You can read the list. Most of the news reported it as a curiosity: look at the strange things Americans buried. There is an iPhone, the newest one. There is a bottle of Coca-Cola. There is a thread of synthetic DNA with the Declaration of Independence encoded inside it.

Those are the items the headlines chose. They are not the ones I keep thinking about.

New Mexico sent a recipe for biscochito, the little anise cookie it calls its state cookie. Maine sent a bone from a right whale. Oregon sent a single pin, made by hand by a Native artist. When a whole country was asked what to hand to people it will never meet, a good part of the answer turned out to be small, and particular, and made by somebody's hands.

I have spent my working life deciding what a town should gather around, and I will tell you what I learned from reading the list. The newest phone will not tell the people of twenty-two seventy-six who we were. They will have their own phones, better ones, and ours will look to them the way a butter churn looks to us. But a recipe in a person's handwriting, for a cookie a family made every December, it will still mean something. It carries a hand. It could not be downloaded. It had to be written.

I have been asking myself a question, and I will hand it to you. If Cedar Valley filled a box for the year twenty-two seventy-six, what would we put in it?

Not the new things. The new things date the fastest. I think we would end up at someone's kitchen drawer, the one with the recipe cards gone soft and brown at the edges, a name written at the top in a hand nobody uses anymore. I think we would put in the spoon a man carved, the quilt a woman pieced from worn-out shirts, the photograph with the names penciled on the back so they would not be lost.

We would not send the grandest thing we own. We would send the truest small one. The thing a person made, or kept, or loved enough to write down.

I know what this town keeps, because I have spent years watching it. It is never the newest thing. It is the dog-eared program from a school play long gone, the lure a father tied, the hymnal with a grandmother's notes still in the margins.

There is a reason the country reached for the cookie recipe and the handmade pin even while it sealed in the newest phone. Some part of us already knows what lasts. We know the machine-made thing will be replaced by a better machine-made thing, and another after it. And we know the thing a person makes by hand says what a factory cannot: someone was here, and they cared enough to make this, and they were thinking of you, whoever you are, opening this box so long from now.

The capsule goes in the ground on the Fourth. Most of us will never think of it again. But the question it asks is a good one to carry for a while, here in the summer of our two hundred and fiftieth year.

Look at what is in your own house. Find the one thing you would send forward to a stranger in twenty-two seventy-six, the thing to tell them you were real, and you were here.

I think you already know it is not the newest thing on the shelf. I think it is the one with a person's hand still on it.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us what you would put in a box for the people of twenty-two seventy-six, and why. 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, America’s Time Capsule, sealed in June 2026 and set to be buried in Philadelphia on July 4 and reopened in 2276, is real.

The Neighbor with the Chainsaw

 

Cedar Valley News
June 17, 2026
The Neighbor with the Chainsaw
By Lars Olson

The morning after the storm, my lot was full before I unlocked the door. By the time I flipped the sign, a dozen men were waiting on the walk, and I knew what nearly every one of them had come for.

Chainsaw chains. Bar oil. Gas cans, the red plastic kind, two gallons and five. Tarps, blue, by the dozen. Work gloves. Extension cords, the heavy outdoor kind, fifty feet and a hundred. Ratchet straps. Batteries. A man needs no list for a morning like this. The storm writes the list, and the whole town comes in carrying the same one.

The weather service called it a derecho. I had to look up how to say it. The wind came across the country near ninety miles an hour last week and knocked the power out for more than half a million homes, ours among them. By the time the rain stopped, there were trees down on roofs and lines down across roads, and a quiet in the dark, you do not forget.

You saw the storm on the news. You saw the satellite picture, the red and purple blob sliding across the map. You saw the number of homes without power and the airport delays in the city. The news is good at the night of the storm.

The news is not there for the morning after. It does not keep a camera at my counter, where the real story gets told, one customer at a time, for the next three weeks.

Here is what the news missed. The first man through my door did not buy a chainsaw chain for his own tree. He bought it for the widow two houses down, whose maple came through her porch roof in the night. The second man bought a second gas can, because his generator was already running a line across the fence to the house next door, where a fellow keeps his insulin in the refrigerator. A woman bought every tarp I could put in her cart and would not say whose roofs they were for.

This is the part you only see from behind a counter. A storm does not only knock things down. It shows you, in one morning, who in a town knows how to do a thing, and who will do it for somebody else.

I have run this store for forty years. I have opened the morning after more storms than I can count, and it is always the same, and it always surprises me. I should be used to it by now. I am not. The town I serve, the one I worry has forgotten how to fix anything, turns out to be full of people who own a chainsaw and know how to use it and will spend a whole Saturday on a tree which is not theirs.

It is the emergency system nobody puts on a map. Not the one with the sirens. The one with the neighbor with the chainsaw, the neighbor with the generator, and the willingness to walk it down the block.

Half the men in my line had never run a chainsaw for anything but firewood. By noon, they had the hang of it, because somebody had to, and the man next to them already knew how. A skill spreads fast in a town the morning it is finally needed.

The county will send crews. The power company will send crews. They will get to the big lines first, as they should, and the small streets will wait. In the waiting is where a town finds out what it is made of. We are made, it turns out, of one another.

So here is the practical part, because I am a practical man. Buy the chainsaw before the storm, not the morning after, when I am out of chains. Keep a gas can full in the garage. Learn to start the generator on a calm day, not by flashlight in the rain. Know which neighbor keeps medicine cold, and which one lives alone.

The wind will come again. It always does. Be the kind of house your street can count on when it does.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us who showed up for you after the storm, or whose tree you cut yourself. 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 June 2026 derecho described in this editorial, and the power outages it caused across the Midwest, are real.

The Kind Lie

 

Cedar Valley News
June 16, 2026
The Kind Lie
By George Khan

A man has come into the deli on Tuesday mornings for the better part of twenty years. He orders the same thing every week. The pastrami on rye, hot, with a pickle. I start it when his truck pulls in.

Last month, he started ordering the egg sandwich instead. He told me he was watching his cholesterol. I made it and said nothing, because the egg sandwich is two dollars cheaper than the pastrami, and a man is allowed to keep his reasons to himself.

I have stood behind this counter long enough to know the difference between a man watching his cholesterol and a man watching his wallet. They order the same way. They tell you the same thing. You learn to hear the second one underneath the first.

It is not only him. In the last few months, I have watched a dozen small changes like it. The family who used to get four sandwiches gets three and splits the fourth. The fellow who always added a side gets it plain. The woman who came in every Friday now comes in every other Friday. None of them says a word about money. People do not.

The newspaper has been explaining why. The country's cattle herd is the smallest it has been in seventy-five years. Not since 1951 have there been so few. Years of drought thinned it out; the ranchers have not rebuilt it, and so the price of beef has climbed, with more expected before the year is done.

I read all of it in the slow hour between the breakfast rush and the lunch crowd. It is good to know why. But the why is not what I think about when I am making the egg sandwich.

I have cut meat for a living since I was twelve years old. I know the price of a brisket the way some men know the price of gasoline—in my bones. When it climbs, I feel it in my hands before I ever see it on an invoice. The newspaper and I noticed the same thing this year. We just noticed it from different sides of the counter.

The newspaper counts the herd. It counts the price per pound. It counts what the restaurants in the city pay and charge to make it back. Those are real numbers, and somebody should count them.

But there is a number nobody counts. Nobody counts the man who orders the egg sandwich and calls it cholesterol. Nobody counts the fourth sandwich split into halves. Nobody counts the small, quiet arithmetic a working family does in the doorway before deciding what they can have today. It does not show up in any report. It shows up at my counter, one order at a time.

What gets me is its dignity. Nobody complains. Nobody asks me to feel sorry for them. A man who has traded his Tuesday pastrami for a cheaper breakfast does not want a conversation about it. He wants his egg sandwich, his change, and his morning. The least I can do is give him all three without making him explain.

Last week, a young father ordered a single sandwich and told me he had already eaten at home. I have known him since he was a boy. I did not believe him. I wrapped his one sandwich, wished him a good day, and let it stand, because it was a kind lie, and it was his.

This is the part the price reports miss. The squeeze is real, but the people inside it are not asking to be counted. They are quietly getting on with less. And a town is held together, more than people know, by how gently we let each other do it.

Here is what I do, and you can do it too, wherever your counter is. When somebody orders smaller than they used to, and gives you a reason which is not quite the reason, take the reason. Make the sandwich. Give them their morning.

You cannot see all of a person's arithmetic. But you can see the person doing it, right in front of you. Be kind to them.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the small swap you have made lately, or the one you have watched somebody else make with dignity. 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. cattle herd figures and rising beef prices described in this editorial are real.

Because History Was in the Making

 

In 2024, Marjane Satrapi was asked why she had returned to graphic novels after years away from the form. She had thought she was finished with them. Then in September 2022, Iran’s morality police arrested a twenty-two-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Amini died in police custody. Young women across Iran poured into the streets.

Satrapi picked up her pen. “I felt compelled to draw again,” she said, “because history was in the making.”

She had been drawing history since she was a child. Born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969, into a politically active family, she was ten years old when the Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah and changed everything — the veil became compulsory, her male classmates were separated from her, the adults in her life were abruptly transformed by the new order. She absorbed it all. Decades later, she drew it in stark black and white as Persepolis — a graphic memoir translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a film winning the Jury Prize at Cannes, banned in Iran, taught in universities across the world.

After her husband, filmmaker and translator Mattias Ripa, died on April 8, 2025, Satrapi’s Instagram page changed. She began posting one word at a time — one word per post, one after another, until the words formed a sentence: “I lost the love of my life.” She did not post much else after.

On June 4, 2026, Marjane Satrapi died. She was 56. A friend told AFP she had “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.”

The Élysée Palace announced her passing. “Her passing marks the loss of a leading figure in French culture and an artist deeply committed to freedom, whose work carried a universal message and earned her immense international acclaim,” the statement said.

She spent her life drawing what she had seen. Not what she had researched. Not what she had been told. What she had lived, in the place she had lived it, with the people around her.

Between 1810 and 1820, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya produced a series of 82 prints he called The Disasters of War. He had witnessed the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the guerrilla war of resistance. He had seen what armies did to civilians. He drew what he saw.

Beneath one of the prints, he wrote three words: “Yo lo vi” — I saw this. Not “I imagined this.” Not “I was told this.” He had been there. He wrote his presence into the work as a moral claim: this is the record of a witness.

The prints were never published in his lifetime. Too dangerous, too unsparing, too direct in their accusation of everyone who had participated in the slaughter. The Disasters of War was not published until 1863, thirty-five years after Goya’s death.

He drew them anyway. He drew them because he had been there and someone who had been there had to make a record. He did not know whether the prints would ever be seen. He made them from the obligation of a witness who could not leave the record unmade.

Satrapi drew in black and white deliberately. Not because color was beyond her — she was a painter, a filmmaker, an illustrator in many registers. She chose it because black and white holds the reader in the image. It does not let history become picturesque.

When she was asked in 2024 why she returned to draw again, she did not say she wanted to make a statement. She said she was compelled. History was in the making and she had been there before and she knew what it looked like.

She picked up her pen.

Goya drew what he saw and died before it could be published. Satrapi drew what she saw and was banned in her own country. Neither waited to be safe. Neither asked whether the record was convenient. Both understood: the obligation of the witness is not to publish. It is to make the record honestly and trust the rest to time.

The Power of Authors is about exactly this. Not craft. Not platform. The obligation of the writer who was present, who saw something from where they stood, who understands the record needs to be made.

You have been somewhere. You have seen something no one else saw from exactly where you were standing.

Someone will need the record someday.

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.

We Were Told to Keep the Peanuts Away

 

Cedar Valley News
June 15, 2026
We Were Told to Keep the Peanuts Away
By Teresa Nikas

Katie stopped me outside the paper last week with her baby on her hip and a question she had clearly been carrying a while.

She did everything right the first time. When her son was born, the pediatrician told her to keep peanuts away from him. No peanut butter. Nothing with peanuts in it. Not until he was older. She was careful. She read the labels. Her son has a peanut allergy now, the kind you carry an injector for.

Her daughter is eight months old. At the last visit, a different pediatrician told her the opposite. Start peanuts early. Give them often. It is the surest way to keep the allergy from forming.

She looked at me and asked the question I did not have an answer for. "Which one of you," she said, "am I supposed to believe?"

I did not have a good answer for her. I am not a doctor. But I have spent my life reading the public record of what people are told, and then told to forget, and I knew the shape of what she was describing before she finished saying it. It was not really a question about peanuts. It was a question about trust.

I have sat at the editor's desk a long time, and I have watched this happen more times than I can count. A study lands. The headline is certain. Parents reorganize their kitchens around it. And then, a few years on, the certainty turns out to have been pointed the wrong way. I have printed the headline and, a few years later, printed its opposite, under my own masthead, in the same plain type. Eggs were bad for you, then fine. Salt was a quiet killer, then the picture muddied. Every time, somebody in town had already rebuilt a habit around the first answer.

The peanut advice is the cleanest example I know. For years, the official guidance was avoidance. Keep peanuts away from the babies most at risk. Then, in 2015, a trial followed more than six hundred high-risk infants and found the opposite was true. Feeding them peanuts early cut their chance of the allergy by more than eighty percent. By 2017, the national guidelines had reversed completely.

The hard part is not the reversal. The hard part is what the reversal means for Katie. The careful mother who followed the old advice to the letter may have been doing the very thing the advice was trying to prevent. The people hurt worst were the ones who trusted the instruction most.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a column against doctors or against studies. The reversal came from science, not in spite of it. The same slow process which gave the wrong answer is the process which found the right one. This is how knowledge works. It is slow. It corrects itself. It is honest about having been wrong, eventually.

The trouble is not the science. The trouble is the certainty we wrap around it before it has earned the wrapping. A study is one voice in a long argument, not the verdict at the end of it. We keep mistaking the newest voice for the final word.

A good newspaper knows the difference. My job is not to hand you the loudest finding of the week dressed up as settled truth. My job is to tell you what is known and to be honest about the wide territory of what is not. When the evidence has not yet earned a verdict, the honest headline is the plain one. We are still finding out.

So here is the small thing. The next time a study crosses your morning with a confident headline. The food to embrace, the food to fear, the answer finally in. You are allowed to wait. You are allowed to say, "We will see.” It is not ignorance. It is the same patience the science itself is going to need.

Katie is feeding her daughter peanuts now. Carefully. Trusting an answer which reversed once already. It is the bravest kind of ordinary thing. To act on the best we know, and stay humble enough to change our minds.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a time you followed the best advice you had and then watched it change. 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 2015 peanut-allergy trial and the reversal in national guidance described in this editorial are real.

He Asked If It Was His Eyes

 

Cedar Valley News
June 13, 2026
He Asked If It Was His Eyes
By Aisha Khalid

He came in for the usual things. Blood pressure, the refill on his cholesterol pill, the knee aching before rain. He has been my patient for most of the twenty years I have practiced here, and he does not waste my time. So, when he hesitated at the door on his way out, I sat back down.

He wanted to ask me something, and he was embarrassed by it. His grandchildren had come to visit the week before. He had taken them into the backyard at dusk, the way his own father once took him, to catch fireflies in a jar. He remembered the yard of his boyhood full of them, a whole field blinking, more than any boy could catch. He stood out there with his grandchildren, and they waited, and in an hour, the children saw three. The children were not disappointed. They had nothing to compare it to; three was a fine number to them. He was the only one in the yard who knew to grieve, because he was the only one who remembered the field.

He asked me if it was his eyes.

He is seventy-four. His eyes are not what they were, and he knows it. He wondered if he was misremembering, the way the old are accused of doing, painting a childhood brighter than it was. He wondered if the fireflies were still out there, and he simply could not see them. Part of him wanted me to say so. It is easier to lose a little of your eyesight than to lose the thing you carried a child outside to show.

I told him the truth. His eyes are fine. He is not misremembering. The fireflies really are fewer. The people who study them estimate as many as one in three firefly species in North America may be at risk of disappearing, crowded out by lost meadows and the lights we leave burning all night long. He had read none of it. He did not need to. He had counted three where there once was a field, and he was right.

I have spent twenty years learning to notice the things a body does quietly, before it ever announces them. A number drifting a little each year. A weight coming off without anyone trying. The hard things rarely arrive with a knock. They arrive as a small difference from last year, the kind nobody charts until it is already far along. I have sat with patients who came in certain they were well, while a number on a page had been climbing for years in a direction no one was watching. The body keeps a record we forget to read. We call it a diagnosis once it is loud enough to frighten us.

A yard of fireflies going dark is the same kind of loss. It has no single night. No one moment the lights go out for good. It is only ever fewer than last year, and fewer than the year before, until one summer an old man stands in his grass with two grandchildren and counts on one hand what used to fill the whole dark.

The trouble with a slow loss is it never feels like an emergency, so no one is ever called for it. There is no siren the night the fireflies thin. There is only a good man, embarrassed in my doorway, asking whether the failing thing is himself.

It is not him. I want to be careful to say it, to him and to you. When the world dims a little each year, the people who notice first are not imagining things, and they are not too old to be trusted. They are the ones still looking.

I told him to do one thing for me, the next time the grandchildren come. Turn off the porch light. Leave the far corner of the yard unmowed and a little wild. Take the children out at dusk, and wait longer than feels reasonable. The fireflies still left in Cedar Valley are out there, in the dark we have not yet filled in.

His eyes are fine. It is the rest of us who stopped looking up.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the fireflies you remember, and whether you still see them where you live. 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 decline of North American fireflies described in this editorial is real.

Start Planning the Day You Sign the Contract

 

The production window is not downtime. It is the difference between a launch and a letdown.

There’s an old story about a young man who wanted to become the world’s best fox hunter. He apprenticed under a master. He learned every trick of the trade — how to run the hounds, blow the horn, ride the horse. Then the master left him on his own.

He caught nothing.

When the master returned and asked if he had done as taught, the young man said, “No. I found a better way.”

But no fox.

I have watched authors make the same mistake. They sign the contract, receive the production timeline, and then sit back and wait. Or they decide the guidance doesn’t apply to them. They skip the invitation list because it feels like selling. They never write the pitch because they assume the book will speak for itself. They postpone the release party until the books are already in hand, then scramble to organize something in two weeks.

No fox.

The Author Who Did the Work

Then there was Betty Arnett. Betty wrote 22 and the Mother of 11. She followed the guidance to the letter. She planned her private release party down to the details. She built her invitation list during production — not after the books arrived, but while the cover was being designed and the interior was being laid out. She invited her community. She embraced the responsibility of sharing her own words.

The result was a packed room. Smiling guests. Books moving off the table and into hands. A successful beginning to her writing journey.

Not because of luck. Because of preparation.

Betty did not reinvent the process. She did not decide the guidance was beneath her. She did not wait for the perfect moment. She used the production window the way it is meant to be used — as the most valuable planning period an author will ever have.

What the Production Window Is For

The contract is signed. The manuscript is in production. The cover is being designed. Most authors treat this as the quiet period. The publisher works. The author waits.

Betty didn’t wait. Neither should you.

Three tasks belong in this window, and all three determine whether launch day feels like a beginning or a scramble.

First, the invitation list. Write down every person you know. Family. Friends. Colleagues. Former classmates. Church members. Neighbors past and present. The list will be longer than you expect. Every name is someone who will hear about your book, and many will buy it — not because they are avid readers, but because they know you. The people who cannot attend the release party still receive the invitation. The invitation is an announcement disguised as a gesture. Send it to everyone.

Second, the two-sentence pitch. Someone will ask what your book is about. It will happen at the grocery store, at church, in an elevator. Two sentences capturing the book’s purpose and why it matters. Practice them until they feel natural. Say them to your spouse, your neighbor, the person behind you in line. The author who delivers two clear sentences earns the follow-up: “Where can I get a copy?”

Try yours on someone before the day is out. The first attempt will not be the version you keep, but the version you keep will not arrive until you try the first one.

Third, the venue. Choose a date with margin. Choose a setting matching the book’s subject and spirit. A historical novel at a historical attraction. A memoir at the community center where the story took place. Betty chose a private party. The match between book and setting is marketing the author does not have to explain. Readers feel it when they walk in.

The Difference Between Talk and Action

There is a difference between someone who talks about reaching readers and someone who does the work. The first tells you what they’re willing to do — when the timing is right, when the kids are older, when they figure out social media. The second builds the invitation list during production, practices the pitch in the kitchen, and books the venue before the cover proof arrives.

The production window is a gift. Betty Arnett used it. Her room was full. Her books moved. Her journey began the way every author’s journey should begin — with preparation, not panic.

The master taught the young man everything he needed. The young man decided he knew better.

Betty decided to do the work. The difference is everything.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the authors who do the work reach further than the ones who find a better way.

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 Reason to Make Peace Is Not Peace

 

Cedar Valley News
June 12, 2026
The Reason to Make Peace Is Not Peace
By Dan Larson

I sat with two people this week who could not make peace.

I will not tell you who they are, or what the quarrel was about. It does not matter, and it is not mine to tell. I will tell you only this. They are good people. They both knew they ought to put the thing down. If you had asked either of them how, each could have told you, chapter and verse. They knew the what. They knew the how. They sat in my office, and they would not move.

I drove home thinking about the gap. Most of us are not short on the what. The news these days is full of the hope for peace. Far away, in cities we will never see, men sit at long tables and try to end a war, and the whole world watches and prays they succeed. Closer in, President Nelson, near the end of his life, said it plainly: “I urge you to choose to be a peacemaker, now and always.” And the Savior, on a hillside, blessed the peacemakers outright.

There are answers to the how, and President Nelson gave good ones. Do not return contention for contention. Choose reconciliation when you would rather be right. Let the last hard word in a room belong to the other person, not to you. I have given counsel like it a hundred times across this calling. I gave it again this week, to two people who already knew it. It did not move them an inch.

The how is powerless without the why. And the why is the thing we almost never say out loud.

We love the first half of the Savior’s sentence. Blessed are the peacemakers. We carve it on plaques and read it at funerals, and we stop there, as if the blessing were the peace itself. But read the whole line. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

He did not promise the peacemaker peace. He did not say the quarrel would end. He did not say you would get your way, or the other person would finally come around. He promised something else. He promised you would be called a child of God. You do not lay the quarrel down to win the quarrel. You lay it down to become a child of your Father. There is no other way in. I have read those words for forty years. I did not understand them until this week, watching two good people refuse the one thing waiting to make them more than they were.

President Nelson told a story once, from his years as a surgeon. A doctor beside him lost his temper and flung a scalpel, and it struck him in the arm. He carried the scar for life. And he wondered, decades on, whether the germs on the blade were any more poisonous than the contention we carry in our hearts and call righteousness.

The story tells me this. The venom of a quarrel lands first in the one who keeps it. The grudge you will not set down does its quiet damage to you, not to them. When you make peace, the first person you heal is yourself.

The world’s peace is a different thing. It is a treaty, a ceasefire, a quarrel run out of fuel. It is worth praying for, and I pray for it. But the Savior marked the difference Himself. My peace I give unto you, He said — not as the world giveth. The world’s peace is the absence of a fight. His peace is the presence of something the fight cannot reach.

You do not make peace because it works. Half the time it will not. You make peace because of who it makes you.

So if there is a quarrel you are carrying this morning — a grudge, a coldness, a name you have stopped saying — do not wait for the other person to move first. Do not wait until it works. Set it down for the sake of who you are becoming. The world is waiting on its treaty. You do not have to wait on yours.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about a peace someone made in your life, or one you are trying to make now. 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, President Russell M. Nelson and his call to be peacemakers are real.