The joy! Karen with Lolly, a pug belonging to dear friends. Photo by the late Ken Bleyer.

Hello, friends,

I’ve been saving up all the news. In June I signed with literary agent Lisa Amstutz at Storm Literary, after which we made a couple of editing passes through the manuscript, and now, True Doubt, a Deep State Journey, is out on submission to publishers! I’m thrilled at having Lisa as my agent, and look forward to a long literary relationship with her and Storm.

Every time I tell someone about the book, their eyes widen with *wow!* and they ask, “When is it coming out?” Answer: we don’t know yet, and won’t until we sign with a publisher, after which it will go through final edits, and then they will set a date. Most likely it’ll take at least a year after signing. But I’m planning other True Doubt-adjacent things to let people know about it.

If you’re newly subscribed or don’t know about True Doubt, here’s a quick summary: A federal biologist in Alaska (me) is under extreme pressure to lie to the public, deny the existence of climate change, and advocate for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be drilled for oil as proxy for the fate of public lands everywhere. As a result, she whistleblows anonymously to The New York Times for three years. This disrupts the alliance between the George W. Bush Department of the Interior and Big Oil. The biologist is eventually targeted for intimidation and publicly named on a U.S. Congressman’s “hit list.” True Doubt traces the history and impacts of climate policy capture and intimidation of public servants.

If you are in or around Port Townsend this month, I will be reading a half-hour of excerpts from True Doubt on Thursday, October 15 at 7:00 pm Pacific time at the Friends Meeting House and sharing the evening with the wonderful poet Sheila Bender. That’s at 1841 Sheridan in Port Townsend. This event kicks off the fourth season of readings and is sponsored by The North Press and the Port Townsend Friends (also known as Quakers). My reading will not be recorded or put online because the book is still out on submission and we can’t do that, so you’d have to attend this one in person to hear it. More details are here.

On Wednesday November 18 at 4:00 pm Pacific, 7:00 Eastern, I will be reading via Zoom a longform essay published last June in the literary magazine Multiplicity, which is part of Bay Path University in Massachusetts. This braided essay is about a wildly joyful encounter with a mega-pod of dolphins in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, juxtaposed with my media interviews and congressional meetings trying to lower the number of killings of whales and dolphins by the Navy’s super-powerful and lethal sonar with its 300-mile range. That story ends with one of the dolphins and me having a wild “meeting of the minds.” I’m honored to have been asked to read. If you’d like to attend via Zoom, I’ll post a link ahead of time on my Facebook, Instagram, X, and Threads pages. I’m listed under KarenLSullivanWriter or just my name. I haven’t been super-active on social media recently, because *WRITING*. But authors need to be accessible, and I’ll be online more. And I’d love to see you at both readings!

One more bit of news: As a coping mechanism for these trying times, I’ve gone back to writing humor, and our local paper noticed. Its Editor asked me to write a nautical humor column for their quarterly insert called Working Waterfront, and so far, three have been published. One reader wrote me to say she laughed so hard she couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. For a humor writer, that’s the pinnacle of praise. Anyway, you can find them under “Satire & Humor” on my publications page.

And that’s it for now. I’d love to hear from you, so scroll down and drop me a comment.

All the best,

Karen