If you don’t have something unique, you have nothing.

Evan Swensen
January 26, 2026

If you don’t have something unique, you have nothing. — Steve Levi

Steve Levi doesn’t write to fill shelves. He writes to challenge assumptions.

A longtime Alaskan and former bush schoolteacher, Levi learned early what happens when stories go unrecorded. In remote communities, history doesn’t wait. It disappears. The people who lived it grow old. Details blur. What remains is silence—or worse, someone else’s version.

Levi refused to let the silence win.

The Classroom at the Edge of the World

Teaching in the Alaskan bush isn’t like teaching anywhere else. Communities are small. Winters are long. Students carry stories most educators will never hear—survival, adaptation, lives shaped by forces urban America has forgotten.

For Levi, the bush wasn’t a posting. It was an education.

He learned to listen. He learned to notice what others overlooked. And he began to understand something essential: the best stories aren’t hiding in publishing houses or MFA programs. They’re hiding in places no one thinks to look.

This insight shaped everything he would write. His nonfiction captures the grit of human experience—gold-rush camps, remote villages, the rough edges of frontier Alaska. He doesn’t romanticize. He documents. He preserves what would otherwise vanish.

But documentation wasn’t enough.

Fiction as a Vehicle for Truth

Levi recognized fiction could reach readers in ways journalism couldn’t. A well-crafted mystery invites people in. It entertains. And while readers are entertained, it slips truth past their defenses.

His novel The Matter of Gift Mortgages does exactly this.

On the surface, it’s an impossible-crime mystery—a man who dies twice, ghost employees, gold-for-crypto laundering, a hydroelectric project gone bad. The plot twists. The logic holds. Readers turn pages.

Underneath the story is something far more serious.

Trillions of tax-free dollars have changed hands through gift mortgages—most flowing to the well-connected while ordinary citizens subsidize the transfer and stay silent. It’s one of America’s most overlooked financial scandals. Levi opened the book with a foreword laying out the facts plainly. The characters are fictional. The scandal is real.

This wasn’t a rant dressed as a story. It was a story built to reveal rot hiding in plain sight.

Why It Matters

Most writing books teach the how. Structure your scenes. Hook your reader. Master dialogue. Others focus on the what. Write thrillers. Write memoir. Write what sells.

The Power of Authors asks a different question: Why does your writing need to exist?

Levi embodies the answer. He doesn’t chase trends. He chases questions. He asks what others haven’t considered. He looks where others don’t bother. He trusts readers to handle the truth—if it’s delivered with craft.

The gift mortgage scandal didn’t need another policy paper. It needed a story compelling enough to make people care. Levi provided one. Not because he mastered a formula, but because he understood his purpose.

The Responsibility of Uniqueness

“If you don’t have something unique, you have nothing.”

This isn’t marketing advice. It’s a challenge.

Every writer has access to the same words, the same genres, the same tools. What separates work worth reading from work quickly forgotten is whether the writer brought something only they could bring.

For Levi, uniqueness comes from decades of listening in places others ignored. It comes from willingness to wrap hard truths in entertaining packages. It comes from refusing to write what’s already been said.

The world doesn’t need more books. It needs more books worth reading.

Your Turn

You’ve seen something others haven’t. You know something worth sharing.

The question isn’t whether your story matters. The question is whether you know why it must be told.

Steve Levi spent decades in classrooms, gold-rush archives, and remote communities gathering what others left behind. Then he shaped it into something lasting.

What are you waiting for?

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a writer refuses to settle for ordinary, The Power of Authors explores what it means to write with moral conviction—even when the truth hides beneath trillions of dollars no one wants to discuss. Find it on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. For an autographed copy: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM