Get Involved

Last weekend, before an event for my book ONE GOAL at the amazing Savoy Bookshop in Westerly, RI, I did an interview with a writer from the Westerly Sun about it. In the middle of the Q & A, she said "I see you have a 'Get Involved' section on your website -- can you explain?"

The idea to add a Get Involved section to the website came from my friend Lisa Genova, whose novels about neurological disorders have created so much awareness and raised so much money. Click on "Readers in Action" on her website, which focuses on Alzheimer's with Still Alice, Huntington's Disease with Inside the O'Briens, and now ALS with her just

-released book Every Note Played.

While Lisa is a veteran at these things, my friend Rhiannon Navin (I have mad-crazy-talented friends, eh?) has positioned her debut novel, Only Child, to advocate for gun safety/control in the United States, with Moms Demand Action and Everytown USA taking center stage.

For ONE GOAL, I focused on the local. So much about this story is about the community leaders and organizers who work to support Lewiston, Maine, including its rock star high school soccer team. From youth soccer leagues to Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services, from the food pantry at the Trinity Jubilee Center to Maine Community Integration, these are the groups that do the hard work, every day. Helping readers to make connections between this kind of almost impossibly local work and our national discourse on immigration and refugees is important. I wanted to make sure that readers had access to supporting these endeavors.

I hope ONE GOAL instills a sense of how important community volunteers and community organizers are to the health of a town and its people. These are the unsung heroes of daily life. And I hope that Lisa helps find a cure for ALS, and Rhiannon makes our schools safer. Because writers always have something to say.