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The Denver Post

For Author, It's Publish Or Watch World Perish

By Colleen O'Connor Denver Post Staff Writer

Monday, August 30, 2004

Tell Susan Skog that peace doesn't sell, and she won't buy it.

For two years she pitched her latest book, "Peace in Our Lifetime," to countless publishing companies. Her previous books had been well-received, including "Radical Acts of Love," which included 80 examples of compassion in action - from medicine to business - and became a OneSpirit Book Club selection for 2001. But peace, apparently, isn't as lucrative as compassion.

Editors loved her idea of interviewing premier peacemakers from the world's hottest war zones, she says. But their sales teams invariably objected that peace wasn't commercial, and spiked the deal.

Earlier this year Skog received her final rejection. "It galvanized me," says the Fort Collins author. "I thought, I'm a midlife woman with rising testosterone and deepening convictions. So don't tell me there's no one who is interested in my message. That was the moment when I knew I just had to go for it."

Convinced that a critical mass of people now believe that peace is the ultimate homeland security, she decided to self-publish the book. More than 12 million people in more than 700 cities in 60 countries marched for peace in 2003. Around the world, peace-centered gatherings are cropping up from India to Illinois, from inner-city neighborhoods to Internet communities.

Indeed, the attitude that peace isn't marketable perplexes some Americans. "For heaven's sake, I don't know how anyone could believe that peace is not important," says veteran journalist Walter Cronkite, who recently wrote a column advocating the creation of a "Department of Peace," an idea that U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced last year as a House bill that would create the Cabinet post.

"The whole future - not only of our American democracy but of civilization itself and the human race - depends on our achieving peace," he says.

"If we continue to fail to establish a peaceful order that is enforceable, humanity is doomed, especially with so many nations, particularly small nations, acquiring atomic power. Unless we get the United Nations to work the way it should, which means the United States doing a lot more in cooperation with the United Nations or finding other organizations to assure a peace, we're all doomed. That's how important peace is."

Skog and her family feel the same way. After she got that last rejection, her husband, Jim, urged her to self-publish. Putting their values into action, they took money from savings and created a company to do the book themselves.

"When you decide to self-publish, you have to commit with your whole heart and soul that you believe in this project," she says. "So it had to be a family decision. Our (teenage) boys had to support our schedule and to know that maybe we wouldn't have as much time to do the things we'd been doing, but that we felt passionate about this message as a family."

The boys gave their support, and over the past six months, Skog and her husband often worked 12-hour days. She interviewed 50 peacemakers like Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and Amber Amundson, who wrote in an open letter that she refused to hate the terrorists who killed her husband in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11.

Jim, who left a 25-year career at Hewlett Packard, focused full time on creating their publishing company: registering with the Library of Congress, calling book distributors, designing the ad campaigns.

On Wednesday, Skog will do a reading at the Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek. Over the next few months, she'll speak at bookstores and universities in Boulder, Fort Collins, Boston and Chicago.

Her book interweaves stories of successful peacemaking in some of the world's hottest conflicts with practical instructions on how to resolve conflicts in our lives.

There's the story of an African peacemaker named Dekha from the Kenyan village of Wajir. A long drought had triggered tension in this territory of shepherds: People began stealing land and livestock.

One day women from the warring tribes formed Women for Peace. They began sharing meals together. They got their men involved. Tribal leaders formed committees to solve conflicts. They called a cease- fire and held workshops to study the roots of conflict. People hosted peace festivals and created the Wajir Peace and Development Committee, mobilizing leaders of government, business and religion, and clan elders and nongovernmental-organization workers.

"Women for Peace was born out of necessity," Dekha told Skog. "We started with small initiatives that quickly launched into a highly organized movement. We knew that, though this was not simply a women's problem, we women could inspire positive change through nonviolence."

Then there's Elissa Tivona, a Jewish woman from Colorado who believed there must be Jews and Arabs willing to become partners for peace. Living in Denver in the 1970s and advocating for Middle East peace, she received death threats because of her beliefs, and so muzzled her desire to be a peacemaker. A decade ago, she decided to try again.

"I finally rebelled against the dissonance created by Israeli government policies," she told Skog. "Fed up with mainstream propaganda claiming, 'There are no partners for peace,' I decided to find out for myself."

So Tivona sat at her computer and simply surfed for peace. She discovered "hundreds of thousands" of partners seeking Middle East peace. "These partners are worldwide, energetic and very much present," she said. "If you go one level below Arafat and Sharon, you will find people who have been talking and reaching out to each other forever."

Validation of these kindred spirits inspired Tivona to help organize the Perspectives on Peace conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The 2002 conference featured speakers such as Elizabeth Rabia Roberts, international coordinator of the Global Nonviolent Peaceforce.

"Gandhi and (Vietnamese monk) Thich Nhat Hahn talk about peace being personal," Skog says. "It's not delivered by someone wiser or more powerful - it resides in us. As (former Washington Post columnist) Colman McCarthy says, 'Peace isn't as much about getting bombs out of the Pentagon as out of our own hearts.' "

Staff writer Colleen O'Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com .