In a bit of serendipity — or whatever we’re calling it nowadays — an editorial about impeachment I’d composed several days ago ran in our town paper today. The text is below.
Any citizen, including you, can start the resolution process in your city or town: here is a guide.
Today, www.impeachdonaldtrump.org added obstruction of justice to its resolution text. Read about it here, then please sign the petition (currently at over 900K signatures. We’d like to get a million).
Today, Saturday, started off rainy, but then the sun broke through and I decided to go to the nursery and buy a tree I’ve been wanting — an Eastern redbud. I drove home extremely carefully, trying not to let all the leaves blow off. (The only way I could fit it in the car was to have it hanging out the window.) Continue reading
HUGE NEWS.
Today, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution calling for an impeachment investigation of Donald Trump.
The resolution asks Congress “to investigate whether Trump violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause or committed any other high crimes and misdemeanors that could lead to impeachment,” according to the L.A. Times. Continue reading
I’m here only to be here. That’s the discipline. Discipline is showing up. Continue reading
Today is my birthday. I’m fifty-one years old. That’s the kind of age that sounds really, really old when you’re young.
Of course I don’t feel old, and especially not lately, when I’m on such a steep learning curve. I’m a baby organizer, an infant activist. Recently, I discovered Marshall Ganz, an iconic longtime organizer (first through this excellent interview and then this one and then Resistance School). He makes extraordinarily exciting (to me) connections between narrative, faith, and politics–basically, my sweet spot. Continue reading
This piece originally appeared on Medium.
One of the most difficult tasks I face as a novelist is one that seems the simplest: explaining what my books are about. It’s almost always the first question I get in a casual conversation. Quickly outlining the plot feels reductive, but it’s hard sometimes to see my own larger themes and motivations, especially when I’ve just finished a book: the world I’ve created still seems too large and the people too complex to pull out one-sentence, much less one-word, explanations.
But distance helps. I’ve had a little time now (my first book came out in 2010, the second in 2015), and with it more insight — which, believe it or not, has come at least partly by way of Bernie Sanders. I was trying to figure out why my feelings about his campaign are so strong, why they resonate with me, as they do with so many others, so deeply, and I realized that the driving ideas — necessities — of both my fiction and my activism are the same: truth and courage. Or, to state them negatively (but in a way that lends itself much more to plot-making, as well as politics): lies and fear.