What Can We Do?

On the evening of April 16, 2026, nearly 125 people gathered in a hall at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, Minnesota. Drums played in the background. They had come to hear Ojibwe author Marcie Rendon talk about her novel.

Rendon’s book, Where They Last Saw Her, had been chosen as the One Book Northland community read for 2026. The novel opens on a woman jogging on a reservation who hears another woman scream, then finds only a scuffle of footprints, tire tracks, and a lone beaded earring. From there it follows the search for a missing Indigenous woman — and the silence, institutional and otherwise, that surrounds her disappearance.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates approximately 4,200 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women remain unsolved in the United States. Rendon had been writing about this issue for more than a decade in poems, short stories, and plays before she wrote the novel.

When her editor first asked her to write a stand-alone book about the crisis, Rendon hesitated. “There’s no resolution,” she said. “If somebody’s missing or murdered, there’s no happy ending.” She wrote it anyway.

After the talk in Cloquet, an audience member raised her hand. “You presented this huge tragedy,” the woman said. “What can we do? I’d like to help make a difference.”

That question — asked in a community hall in northern Minnesota, by a reader who came for a book talk and left wanting to act — is the measure of what a book can do.

 

In 2012, Louise Erdrich published The Round House, a novel about a teenage Ojibwe boy whose mother is sexually assaulted near their North Dakota reservation. The crime takes place in a jurisdictional borderland — a zone where federal law strips tribal courts of authority over non-Native perpetrators. The family cannot get justice. The boy watches his father, a tribal judge, powerless to act within the system he serves.

The novel won the National Book Award. In accepting it, Erdrich said she had written the book because she wanted readers “to feel the frustration and agony that families experience when justice is out of reach.”

Erdrich is also Ojibwe — a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She had been writing about Native life in the upper Midwest for three decades before that night at the National Book Awards. She wrote when publishers told her there was no market for it. She wrote because she knew the truth of a community that rarely appeared in American literary fiction, and she understood that fiction was one of the few tools capable of making that truth felt rather than merely known.

The Round House changed legislation. It contributed to renewed debate over the Violence Against Women Act and tribal jurisdiction. A novel did that. Not a policy paper. Not a press release. A story.

Rendon and Erdrich are not the same writer. Their books are not the same book. But the line between them runs through the same conviction, and it runs through every page of The Power of Authors.

Purpose is not decoration. It is not the mission statement you attach to a book after it is finished. It is the reason you write the difficult book in the first place — the reason you write about the woman who screamed and was never found, even when there is no resolution, even when the ending is not happy.

Rendon hesitated. Then she wrote the book. An audience member in Cloquet stood up and asked what she could do. That is not a small thing. That is the entire point.

The power of authors is not measured in sales or awards or reviews. It is measured in the moment a reader crosses from feeling to action. Erdrich moved legislation. Rendon moved a woman in a community hall to want to help.

Both started the same way: with a story only they could tell, written with enough honesty that a reader who had never lived it could feel its weight.

You have a story only you can tell. You may be hesitating for the same reason Rendon hesitated — because there is no resolution, because the truth is hard, because you are not certain anyone will read it.

Write it. The woman in Cloquet is waiting.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.