This is my keynote speech from the League of Utah Writers’ Pre-Quill Conference on Saturday, April 18, 2026, at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City, Utah.

“Until humans give up on being human, the connection between human writer and human reader will only grow more important as the Age of the Algorithm becomes the Age of the Counterfeit Soul.”

Thank you for coming to this final session, even if your mind already overflows with fresh insights from today’s sessions and your heart just wants to go home and write—even if some other parts of you would rather get a head start on dinner at Siragusa’s or Tacos Lopez.

Thanks also to Candace for that kind introduction.

If you ever want an acute, vigorous bout of imposter syndrome, get someone to call you Writer of the Year, preferably by surprise. I wallowed in it for part of that August weekend, and then I did what we all have to do. I got back to work. There were good people who were eager to help me with that, here in the League of Utah Writers.

Since then, I’ve enjoyed the role. I like teaching and I like hanging out with writers. I’ve been doing more of those things than before, from Logan to St. George to Denver. (I realize Denver is outside Utah.) If you read my Introduction to the anthology we just released, you may conclude that I enjoyed my work on that too.

Decades ago, I met a man from Egypt on the campus of a large, urban university in the Northeast. He was a graduate student there. I was an undergraduate student elsewhere. We had never met before and hadn’t planned to meet on that sunny and humid afternoon, but we talked for most of an hour, and part of what we discussed was the books we were reading.

I said he should read my book, which was one of the great American books. He said he’d read mine if I’d read his, which was one of the great books in his part of the world. So we read each other’s book, and a few weeks later we met again to talk about them. Then life happened, and we never saw or heard from each other again.

I’ll come back to that.

I want to talk about connections today—human-to-human connections, human soul to human soul, however you define the human soul. To my fellow introverts, who are most of you, I hasten to say, don’t be too alarmed. This is connecting even we can do.

First, let’s consider the connections between us as readers and the writers we read.

Second, I have a couple of thoughts for you about connecting as writers with our own readers.

Third, I want to talk about our connections with each other, as writers.

In the end—and along the way—I’ll try to tell you how important I think our writing is, yours and mine.

Connecting as Readers to Writers

First, connecting with the writers we read can teach us, among other things, gratitude—gratitude for the beauty and power of the experience they created for us, which they created always with some labor and difficulty, and in many cases despite great personal challenges. If they hadn’t overcome those obstacles, at least for a while, the connections between us and them could never have happened.

After his father went to debtor’s prison, Charles Dickens was forced to work in a factory from age 12, in a place and time where labor, including child labor, was long and brutal and often deadly.

Maya Angelou endured profound trauma as a child, including poverty, sexual abuse, and racism.

Agatha Christie suffered severe dysgraphia. That’s extreme difficulty with the physical, mechanical act of writing, of all things.

As a slave in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was forbidden to learn to read and write, but he learned anyway, and he read and he wrote.

Nawal El Saadawi was mutilated, imprisoned, and finally exiled. She wrote her famous memoir in her prison cell, using smuggled eyebrow pencils and toilet paper.

Franz Kafka battled anxiety and deep depression and suffered a badly dysfunctional family life. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in his thirties, he kept writing.

According to Robert Pirsig’s obituary, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers in five years.

Kate Chopin was widowed at age 32, with six children and enormous debt. Soon her mother also died, and the family business failed. Her doctor suggested she begin writing, both to support her large family—no pressure there—and as a means of coping with depression.

The list could go on, and it could include writers and poets in this room. You’re probably thinking their life experiences helped make them the writers they became, gave them something to say, helped them connect with readers. You’re probably thinking that about yourself too. I’m sure it’s all true. But it’s also true that many other people in the world have faced similar challenges and have not written anything. So I propose gratitude, perhaps even awe, when we encounter those who have written—who have done their part to connect with us.

My favorite 19th century author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, suffered epilepsy. His death sentence for revolutionary activity against the tsar was suspended almost literally at the last second, when he was already blindfolded and tied to a stake in front of a firing squad. His sentence was commuted to hard labor; he endured the next four years in a Siberian prison camp. He came out of that experience—though it never came out of him—to create some of the most compelling fiction and the most memorable characters world literature has ever seen.

I mention him because I want us to spend a minute looking at the other side of the coin. Many of the writers whose creations and connections we might treasure could also be cautionary tales for us, to put it mildly. We might be tempted to dismiss them, even cancel them, for something they did or said or were. For my part, I would usually rather learn from their mistakes and then judge them by what they did best, and by who they were at their best, which is how we all want to be remembered, I think.

Dostoevsky was sometimes anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, two attitudes of which I heartily disapprove. He left his wife in Russia, dying of tuberculosis, and took his mistress to Europe, where he gambled away their money. I think all of that is despicable—and he thought so too. I want to say he was better at writing than he was at life, but life is different from writing. Each day in life may give us a new chance to live better, and Dostoevsky gradually learned to do that, but every bad day still happened and, in its way, will live forever unchanged. A bad day isn’t a first draft of a story we can revise and polish before the world ever sees it. In that sense, writing well is far easier than living well—and writing well is hard enough.

Then there’s my favorite 20th century author, Vasily Grossman, a major Soviet writer and war correspondent. In October 1952 his epic novel of World War II, Stalingrad[1], was nominated for a Stalin Prize, the highest literary award under Josef Stalin’s regime (of course). Reviewers compared it to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and called it “an encyclopedia of Soviet life.” A prominent colleague called its publication “a great and joyful event.” One writer wrote to Grossman, “You opened the forbidden door. You wrote the truth.” The reading public loved it too; it quickly sold out. Then people flocked to libraries for it.[2]

Two months later, in December, Stalin publicly declared that “every Jew is a nationalist”—nationalist was as bad a word among the Left then as it is now—a nationalist and “an agent of American intelligence,” he said. Every Jew. Did I mention Grossman was a Jew?

The next month, in January, Pravda, one of the Soviet Union’s two biggest daily newspapers, announced in a front-page story that nine Soviet doctors had been arrested and jailed for plotting to undermine the health of Soviet leaders. Six of the doctors were Jewish; they were supposedly the guiltiest. Every day for months, the newspapers ran a new article about the so-called “Doctors’ Plot.” They were “killer doctors,” “monsters,” “vile traitors to the motherland.” All of this was widely recognized as a fabrication and as the prelude to yet another large-scale purge of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Also in January 1953, Grossman’s own publishers and many fellow writers and reviewers began to denounce the novel they had praised so highly before. A handful of his peers still courageously defended it, but the new party line was that he portrayed Jews too favorably and simply too much. He made them look too normal. Critics said he got recent history wrong, though he actually got it right. They also said his novel was politically unacceptable.

Late that same January, these two story lines, Grossman and the Doctors’ Plot, intersected. Under Stalin’s direction, Pravda drafted an open letter condemning the six Jewish doctors who were accused. They summoned 57 prominent Soviet Jews to their office, including Grossman, and directed them to sign the letter.

Grossman knew what was going on. He knew the plot was fabricated. For decades  he’d watched these things lead to the death of his friends and colleagues. Under Lenin and then Stalin, so many of his fellow writers and poets, and tens of millions of his fellow Soviets, were executed, intentionally starved to death, or sent to the camps. At times he had expected a similar fate for himself.

He knew better, and he’d never done such a thing before, but he signed that letter that day.

The public attacks continued. His novel was called “a spit in the face of the Russian people.” His publisher’s editorial board announced that publishing it had been “a grave mistake.”

Stalin died a few weeks later, and the Doctors’ Plot letter was never actually published. The doctors were quickly exonerated, and the seven who hadn’t died while being tortured were released. Stalin’s death also averted that imminent purge, saving many people, probably including Grossman himself. But for the rest of his life he could not forgive himself that moment of weakness, when he signed the letter and betrayed both truth and conscience.

His greatest novel, Life and Fate, the sequel to Stalingrad, came later. It couldn’t be published in Russia until 1988, long after Grossman’s death in 1964, when Gorbachev’s glasnost was well advanced and the Soviet Union was about to disintegrate. I’ve never been tempted—should I have been tempted?—to reject it or his other writings, because he had a moment of moral weakness in a newspaper office, or because those who held political and cultural power in his country denounced him.

Like your life and my life, like every person’s life, the lives of the writers we read are filled with flaws and mistakes, small and large, which probably got in the way of their art in some ways, but didn’t prevent them from connecting with us, if we will connect with them, across space and time.

I’m not saying we should excuse or admire writers’ bad behavior because they’re writers, or that we must always read the writers we learn to despise. I am suggesting that, as readers, we owe our writers some grace. Like ourselves, like our current works-in-progress, those writers were still unfinished, as writers but especially as humans, when they wrote that thing we read and lived that life we somehow feel entitled to judge and condemn.

To come full circle, if we receive past and present writers’ gifts to us, their connections, with humility and grant them grace, one of the things reading them can do is fill us with gratitude and even with awe.

Connecting as Writers to Readers

Second, I had some buttons made last fall. I’ve been wearing one here and there and giving them away at writer events. They say “STEAM not STEM. Be human.”

STEM, of course, is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. I love all four of those, especially math. I was a hardcore math geek in junior high and high school. I started college as a Math and Computer Science major, loved it, did well, and changed my majors after one semester to Political Science and Russian. That’s an odd tale for another day.

By now I’ve forgotten most of the math I knew, but if anyone wants to talk about non-Euclidean geometry or the sizes of infinity, or even the conflict of cubic space and spherical space in some great works of literature, see me afterward.

So STEM matters to me. It matters a lot. It matters immensely to this nation and our world. But if we are so committed to teaching science and math that we neglect to teach the arts and humanities; if we are so focused on funding technology and engineering that we divert funds from the arts and humanities, especially in education; we are at extreme risk of turning a mostly civilized society into a fragmented horde of high-tech barbarians.

Put another way, the triumph of technology tends toward tyranny, unless it is moderated by the humanities and the arts—things which teach us deeply how to be human, connect us with other human souls, teach us beauty and empathy—and then school our empathy, so it’s less likely to be abused and exploited by people with ugly, non-empathetic goals.

So we add an A to STEM, for the arts and humanities, and we get STEAM. That’s why my buttons say “STEAM not STEM.” I shared a table with a writer friend at an event in Provo last fall. She looked at my buttons and said something like, “You realize ‘steam’ means something else when you’re sitting next to a romance writer.”

A writer and teacher in St. George asked me several weeks ago why I was opposed to STEM, because the button says, in part, “not STEM.” I had to explain that I’m not opposed to STEM; I just don’t want it to be all there is.

A writer and teacher I met in Colorado last fall has mostly convinced me to add the H after all, if I ever remake the buttons, H for humanities, to give the arts and humanities a greater fraction of the acronym. So SHTEAM.

Someone else has nearly persuaded me that the study of religion, not necessarily in a devotional or sectarian sense, but at least in a frank, clear-eyed historical and philosophical sense, needs to be part of that too, because religion has had so much to say about what it means to be human. So maybe I should add an “R”? From STEM to STEAM to SHTEAM to SHTREAM, S-H-T-R-E-A M. I’ll need a bigger button.

Those of you with a certain sort of playful mind may have anticipated my next thought: if we’re using all those letters anyway, why not rearrange them and make our acronym HAMSTER?

Let me try that on you. If we make room in our lives, our schools, and our homes for STEM but not HAMSTER, we sow the wind, and we will surely reap the whirlwind.

Or maybe this: we should fund the whole HAMSTER, not just the STEM.

Yeah, I don’t know. If you see me wearing a different button at Quills this fall, come say hi and see what it says.

Believe it or not, all of that leads to the connections I want to talk about between us as writers and our readers, and indirectly to connections among readers, such as me and my friend from Egypt, who connected with the help of our books and their authors.

Ours is not the first age to place its faith in science and technology at the expense of our humanity and community. But it fits uniquely the words Austin Tindle recently used to describe it: “infinite content” and “infinite isolation.”[3]

In some ways the machines enable that isolation. In August, in the New York Times, Ezra Klein boasted that artificial intelligence can now be—as in replace—our advisers, friends, therapists, coaches, doctors, personal trainers, tutors, and even lovers.”[4]

Not too long ago, an NPR headline asked, “If a bot relationship FEELS real, should we care that it’s not?”[5]

Recently in my social media feed, Laura London described relationships with artificial romantic partners this way: “No sacrifice, no otherness, no possibility of transformation—just endless validation of whoever you are. The demons don’t even have to work anymore,”[6] she said.

So it’s really no surprise that we humans are in some ways as starved as we have ever been for human connections. That makes writers and other makers of those connections as necessary now to human life and civilization as we have ever been.

We hear that writers are endangered, because AI can allegedly write better, not just faster—or if it can’t yet, it soon will. Not all human writing is art or needs to be, but ours at least attempts to be. The very foundation of art is a human connection between the artist and, in our case, the reader. That’s why I say artificial intelligence, including its large language models, produces content, not art. It’s getting better at pretending to be human, but no matter how much venture capital and electricity and how many computer chips it sucks out of the economy, AI simply has no human soul for making human-to-human connections.[7]

When we try to use machines as a substitute for human connection, they’re like a drug that suppresses our hunger pangs but leaves us malnourished. When we humans let machines do our writing for us, as opposed to using them as tools as we do our own writing, we leave our readers and ourselves malnourished.

Our machines, their algorithms, and the relative handful of people who build and control them will lead us, if we let them, to a social, moral, and spiritual sort of Rabbit Starvation. You can eat all the rabbit you want—I like it; it tastes like chicken—but if you don’t eat anything else, you will die of malnutrition. We’ve also learned that, when deer are snowbound and can’t get to their food, we can fill their stomachs with hay and they still starve.

Until humans give up on being human, the connection between human writer and human reader will only grow more important as the Age of the Algorithm becomes the Age of the Counterfeit Soul.

Toni Morrison said, “Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.” That was right after she said, “No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all.”[8]

We don’t always feel consciously connected with our readers as we write, but sometimes we do. They may be so caught up in our story, when they read it, that they don’t detect their connection with the author. Even if they do, they may not stop to analyze it. But we have to believe in something; let’s have faith in our art, at least in the sense of believing in that human connection between writer and reader—believing in its necessity, its possibility, and its power.

In late December I finally uploaded to Amazon and IngramSpark my first novel. It’s so thick that if you saw it in the conference bookstore, you immediately knew it’s self-published. A few readers have already told me that, when they read it, they felt seen. I treasure those successful connections.

The human connection between writer and reader can enrich our readers’ connections with others too. A retired woman in North Carolina reported reading my books aloud to her husband, who has gone mostly blind. A couple from central Utah read my books to each other on a cross-country trip. That was before my novel, which could probably get them from home to somewhere in Alaska.

Another reader told me The Dad Who Stayed, the novella in one of my collections, helped her see her own childhood and the people in it in new ways.

One short story in my Christmas collection is about an old man who lives alone, except for the one remaining hen in his chicken coop. He visits her with gifts on Christmas Eve and Christmas, and they have some one-sided conversations. I’ve had readers tell me it was their favorite story in the book, because it brought back memories of life with their parents and grandparents. Not coincidentally, that story was born of the human connection I still feel with numerous members of my parents’ generation.

You don’t have to be a great writer to make these connections. I’m not. You just have to write and then put your writing in front of at least one willing reader.

None of my stories will ever change the whole world or any major part of it. That’s probably true of your writing too. But those small, poignant, apparently passing human connections really do change the world, one or two humans at a time. You know they can change the world, because they’ve changed your world. Mine too.

At any given moment, we may write for a lot of reasons. I suggest that the highest reason to be writers, the grandest and best and maybe even the most practical reason to write, is to connect human writer to human reader, to enrich and expand the humanity of both.

There are other ways to make those connections, including other arts. But you and I, as writers, have a crucial role to play in answering the social, intellectual, spiritual, humane starvation that rages, in old ways and new ways, in our time.

Writers Connecting with Writers

Third, let’s consider the connections among us, as writers. You aspiring writers who aren’t sure you deserve to call yourselves writers yet—I’m calling you writers too.

We writers compete for limited resources: traditional publication opportunities, shelf space in bookstores and libraries, Amazon rankings, reader attention, book-buying dollars, prizes. That’s grounds enough for hostility or at least ignoring others and focusing on ourselves. Yet somehow, when I’m with writers, a few or a crowd, I don’t see hostility or indifference. Instead I see writers helping, supporting, teaching, encouraging each other, including so many who have done and still do those things for me. I thank and salute you for that.

At the League website, you’ll see we have a vision: “The League of Utah Writers aims to be the most sought after, accessible, and inclusive writing organization in Utah.” On the same page you’ll see our collective values, including this one: “Creating a community of hopefulness, support, and empowerment where everyone is welcome.”[9]

I see our leaders in the League and our members labor diligently to be exactly as inclusive as our vision declares, to create exactly the sort of community our value statement describes. I applaud them for that. I applaud you for that.

I also thank you and them, because those words on our website align with my own experience in the League—in our chapters and conferences, including Pre-Quill, the first writing conference I ever attended. This is a hopeful, supportive, empowering community, both for and because of the writers who are here. The League does so many good things for writers. We writers do so many good things for each other.

I don’t wish to overshadow any of that when I say this: Any good vision is aspirational. It’s not something we’ve already perfected or can easily or quickly achieve. Likewise, any values worth the name challenge us to improve what is already good or even excellent. In other words, no matter how well we are doing, we can probably do a little better.

It’s not unusual, these past few years, for me to urge Utah writers to join the League of Utah Writers. Sometimes they tell me they were members of the League in the past but decided they didn’t want to be anymore. They loved their local chapters but felt unwelcome in the League as a whole.

I know people are different. Nothing in life suits or pleases everyone. And some people simply choose not to belong in certain settings. But what these writers tell me when I ask them why they felt unwelcome makes me think that, at some point in the past, we could have done just a little better than we did.

Maybe we’re doing better now; those reported experiences happened years ago, some number of years. Maybe the writers who reported them are doing better too. Maybe, if they reached out and came back to us now, most of them would feel welcome.

By their accounts, and I’ve heard several, what happened back then, however many years ago, was that they kept hearing things from writers in the League, in both formal and informal settings, the cumulative effect of which was to convince them that their particular social, political, or religious backgrounds or beliefs made them unwelcome in the League. In no case that I’ve heard was it a matter of someone attacking them personally because of their beliefs. It some cases it was others attacking their beliefs, without necessarily knowing that some of the people listening actually held those beliefs. Sometimes it was writers with opposite beliefs simply assuming out loud, I suppose, that no sane, decent, or intelligent person could disagree. Or perhaps someone mistook a complex issue for a simple one.

It really might be different now for the writers who felt unwelcome here in the past. I hope so. But in case there’s still even the narrowest gap between us and our ideals, I want to dig a little deeper here.

We are still talking about connections.

So many purveyors of words in our world have narrowed their motives and their minds to the point that they want only to connect with our rage or our credit cards, or both. The League of Utah Writers is an oasis of civilization in that desert, a place where we, in all our diversity and individuality, can connect on other terms. Each of us can celebrate, or on our bad days at least earnestly respect, not just our differences from others, but others’ differences from us.

Those differences can seem insurmountable. Our backgrounds, associations, and experiences, our thoughts and our hopes, even the books we’ve read, have led us on widely varied political, social, ethical, and religious journeys, to different waypoints and destinations, to say nothing of different hairstyles and fashion sense. I say that as one with scarcely any fashion sense and very little hair to style.

If we dress or do our hair differently, you and I; if we write in ways, or about things, that make each other squirm or boil; if we find that we believe each other to be deeply wrong about the most important things, whatever those may be; if the only things we have in common are that we are humans who write, and we want to be better at it, and we want to help other writers too, that can be enough. We can genuinely, earnestly welcome each other in the League of Utah Writers.

Those divisive things I listed, those political, social, ethical, and religious things, among others, matter immensely. Of course they do. But they don’t have to matter here in ways that interfere with our connections. We will be a better and larger writing community and better serve our individual circles of humanity if we’re better at connecting with our fellow writers.

I’m not saying we should stand for nothing. I absolutely am not saying that. I’m not sure what life is even worth if we don’t stand for something. I’m certainly not saying we should all agree. I’m not saying we should avoid exploring difficult questions or advancing controversial positions in our writing and our lives.

I’m saying that when we gather at a little restaurant where the tables are packed as close together as they can reasonably be, or even closer, we should eat—and talk and laugh and connect. But we should probably save our dancing for somewhere else. Also our pickle ball and our martial arts. It’s just not the place for those.

Even if the things we do here necessarily include sharpening our verbal weapons and honing our tactics, we can leave our battles at the door. We can get back to them after we’ve connected with our fellow writers.

We can prove over and over again, to ourselves and everyone else, that people matter more than positions and labels—no matter how wrong we think those people are, no matter how misguided they think we are—no matter how our fellow writers look, believe, live, or, dare I say, vote.

We can spend the time, effort, and patience necessary to understand individual humans—before we presume to judge them, if we must judge them at all. We can discuss rather than accuse. We can reach for truth instead of “lazy tropes and easy answers.”[10] We writers have a uniquely powerful tool set for such things.

I acknowledge that a safe space for learning to be writers may not always be a perfectly safe space for everyone’s feelings, no matter how hard everyone tries. We live and write and connect with each other in a world of competing and even incompatible values and ideas. It can be difficult not to feel personally attacked when we encounter ideas that contradict our own, and the people who hold them. It’s a little easier when we’re as eager to accept others’ humanity as we are for them to accept ours.

We writers will always need thick skins to protect the big, thumping hearts we wear on our pages. But we can make all those writer hearts feel safe and welcome here, even if we’re convinced that the heads attached to some of those hearts are deeply wrong about something important. We can be eager to connect with our fellow writers, and for them to connect with us.

We already try very hard. We help each other in all sorts of ways. That says volumes about the quality of people in this room and the people who built this organization over nearly a century. As I said, I don’t want to overshadow any of that success, any of that goodness, when I suggest that, in the League of Utah Writers, our vision and our values are aspirational.

Our Writing Is Important

Those connections I’ve mentioned are precious and fruitful. They’re worth making and maintaining and protecting—partly because each person is important, yes, but also because our writing is so important. It’s part of my faith that this time in which we live and write and connect is for us, and we are for it.

I’ll say it again: this time is for us, and we are for it.

More than forty years ago, as I said in the beginning, I met a man from Egypt at the University of Pittsburgh. I love Pittsburgh. We talked about books. We read each other’s book. We talked again—and never saw or heard from each other after that.

I still remember that brief connection. I remember it vividly. We made that connection with the help of writers and their books. That connection changed me, maybe only a little, maybe only gradually, but in a way which lives on in what’s left of my memory. So maybe the connection itself wasn’t so brief after all.

What if two complete strangers had not stopped to discuss their books and in some measure their lives that afternoon, then had not read each other’s book and had not talked one more time?

What if the writers who wrote those books hadn’t written them? What if they had looked out upon a world already full of stories and decided that the stories only they could tell, or the poems only they could write, didn’t matter at all? Were not worth telling? Were not worthy of telling? Or reading?

What if they had yielded to their respective cases of imposter syndrome, or quailed before the mountain of things we gradually learn and master as we write and rewrite and rewrite and help each other and come to conferences? What if they had never finished their first drafts? What if they had never invited others to critique their drafts, never listened when that happened? Those are difficult things to do. What if they had never revised or never finally published at least some of what they wrote?

What if no one, especially other writers, had reached out to support and encourage them when being or becoming a writer—or just being alive—became too difficult, when they were down to the last crumbs of hope in their artistic and emotional cupboards? What if they had summoned all their introverted courage and joined the local writing community, only to be pushed away, however gently, and shown, even if no one said it to their faces, that they were unwelcome among writers?

I spoke of granting grace to the writers we read. We can grant that same grace abundantly to each other.

When I say this time is for us, and we are for it, one of the things I mean is that no one can make our human connections for us, individually or collectively. Certainly no machine or algorithm can. A counterfeit soul simply cannot do what a real human soul can do.

The only ways our stories, our poems, our essays, our scripts will fail to make those human connections is if we fail to write them, or let machines write them for us, or fail to send them out into at least a tiny corner of the world.

Someone will probably encounter even our finished stories and think they suck, and on some days we’ll agree. But someone else, perhaps someone whose need for human connection has grown desperate, or someone who loves such a person and worries—someone will see our words and read them, experience them, connect with us, and judge, if they judge at all, that our stories don’t really suck that much.

It’s also possible that no one else can help the other writers you meet in some of the ways you can. It’s possible that some of the connections that will make your writing even better, or help it to exist in the first place, await you here in the League of Utah Writers. I think the odds of that are excellent—and perhaps we might still improve the odds just a tiny bit, if I’m right about our vision and values being aspirational.

In any case, I’m a writer. You are writers. Thank you for letting me be a writer with you. Thank you for stepping out of the safe and comfortable shadows, or wherever you were, to be a writer with us. From the back row to the front row to the Zoom audience, you are welcome here. You are welcome here. You are welcome here.

And this time is for us, and we are for it.

Thank you.

[1] Sometimes published as For the Right Cause.

[2] Many of the details in this section are drawn, in a few cases paraphrased, from Alexandra Popoff’s superb volume, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (New Haven: Yale U P, 2020), especially Chapters 10 and 11. Another excellent source in English is John and Carol Garrard’s The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York: Free Press, 1996).

[3] Elle Griffin, “The Internet Is Dead—Long Live Print Media!” Elysian Press, 3 Nov. 2025, https://www.elysian.press/p/the-internet-is-deadlong-live-print

[4] Ezra Klein, “How ChatGPT Surprised Me.” The New York Times, 24 August 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/opinion/chat-gpt5-open-ai-future.html.

[5] Manoush Zomorodi, “If a Bot Relationship FEELS Real, Should We Care That It’s Not?” Body Electric, NPR, 2 July 2024, www.npr.org/2024/07/01/1247296788/the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-chatbot-relationships. 

[6] London, Laura (@LauraLondon). X, 14 Nov. 2025, www.twitter.com.

[7] I asked Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude if any of the three has a soul. Gemini and ChatGPT said none of them has a soul of any kind—no “soul, consciousness, or any internal ‘spark’ of life,” as ChatGPT put it. Claude hedged a little, but when I pinned it down, it said, “At best I’m a medium, not an artist.” That was a few weeks ago; heaven only knows what it will say about itself tomorrow or next year.

[8] Toni Morrison, “The War on Error.” The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019, p. 29.

[9] https://www.leagueofutahwriters.com/luw-policies          

[10] David Josef Volodzko, “I met a CNN senior reporter. It did not go well.” The Radicalist, 28 Mar. 2026, https://www.theradicalist.com/p/i-met-a-cnn-senior-reporter-it-did. [Later removed.]