I wrote a novel about political activism–Hot Season–and I’m launching it just a week before election day. So from now through November 8th, I’m going to be approaching activism as art and art as activism, to bring attention both to my novel and the causes closest to my heart, nearly all of which are at stake this election season.

One of the ways I’m doing this is through something I call protest poems–which are really no more than publicized versions the comments and additions I make to the petitions that I sign every day. Why? Because petitions hold more weight with public officials, apparently, when they aren’t just “cut and paste.”

So why not approach them as art?

If you find yourself inspired by this practice, consider joining me in signing this petition to save the monarch butterfly: http://petitions.moveon.org/s/xRpefS

And consider preordering the ebook of my novel, Hot Season: http://amzn.to/2dmM5ok

Protest Poem, 10.3.16

Sent on Behalf of the Monarch Butterfly

When the butterfly most abundant in the memory of anyone born in the 1970s is going extinct in 2016, something is wrong.
When a species can recall a certain tree, in a certain field, on a certain mountainside, though no single individual of that species has ever seen it–we owe it to that species, to the web of life itself, to protect it.
Human beings are notoriously shortsighted. Pesticides like Monsanto’s toxic Roundup and Roundup Ready crops benefit us in the short term.
But in the long term, they are robbing our children of a heritage millions of years in the making, the beauty of their birthright–a childhood with butterflies.