You can do something for me today. For every author you know. For even the authors you don’t. An act of literary citizenship that takes 7-10 minutes. Sure, you can spend time and/or money to be a literary citizen—hosting events, blogging, editing or reading for a journal—or contribute gently to your community by giving thoughtful feedback in your own writing group. But to actually help authors sell books, for free, right now:

Write a review.

Not “pitch a review to a literary publication,” although that’s great, too. Not “write a 900-word blog post balancing serious critique with just enough praise.” Not “read the book twice for fairness and highlight quotes and eventually put something up in a couple of months.” Just write and post a short review, right away.

• Write a review of 3-10 sentences. Maybe quote one line you really liked.
• Post to Amazon, where you can usually review…

By Charles G. Thompson

I have written and published a number of nonfiction pieces. A personal essay about seeing my dead father shopping at Trader Joes. Another essay about my love life as a gay man in Los Angeles. An article about how my perpetual depression lessened during COVID. But, until recently, I had not tried my hand at an op-ed. Yes, similar to writing more personal nonfiction, but different.

The idea for the editorial was spawned by a headline in the Los Angeles Times, “Growing Fears of ‘Dead Pool’ on Colorado River as Drought Threatens Hoover Dam Water,” which reported that Lake Mead could be at “dead pool” levels by 2025. I’m a constant water worrier, having lived in California most of my life, and Lake Mead is an essential source of water for Southern California. Seeing the words “dead pool” frightened me. Did that mean one of our…

By Amanda Le Rougetel

To write is one thing, to be read — deeply read, seen on the page for the writer we can be — is another.

Words on a page amount to something or nothing, until someone other than the writer reads them, and then those words amount to a whole new world. A world of response. A world in which the words give shape to life beyond the writer’s hopes and dreams and take hold as the reader’s.

The ultimate reader is one who, like you, reads the piece in published form. But before then, the wise and the brave writer asks for feedback on the early, pre-published drafts. If it takes courage to write, it surely takes courage to ask for feedback and then more courage to receive it: Courage and calm and confidence. Not always present in good measure, but even a scrap of each…

By Iris Graville

1. Sit. Place a folded sign with your name and title on the table where you usually work. A table under sepia photographs of Coast Salish peoples rocking a baby in a cradleboard, carving wood, and hunting whales. Some of their faces carry deep creases; many fold chapped and worn hands in their laps. They lived, worked on, and cared for this sea long before you did, years before this sixty-year-old vessel plied these waters at 13 knots, coursing between islands that now carry names of European explorers who claimed them as their own.
2. Scrawl. With a pen in a leather, handbound journal, numbering each page and dating each entry. Record conversations overheard; observations of rocky cliffs, cedars and coppery Madrones, and jewel-like water carrying the 310-foot Tillikum on its route through Washington’s San Juan Islands.
3. Type. On a shiny, 13-inch, three-pound laptop Coast Salish tribes never…