Intended as a “beachy” summer entertainment, Laura Pritchett’s hot newest novel THREE KEYS brings readers along on a mischievous midlife adventure that starts right off with the protagonist’s theft of an abused dog and the card-playing celebration of a mustang-advocate’s sobriety anniversary. This story demonstrates the effectiveness of offering our lives to the planet via “entertainment.” Some people look down on fiction as a path toward a thriving future. Others discourage mainstream novelists from including serious questions in stories we turn to when present circumstances overwhelm us. Laura Pritchett, currently Director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, is an author who boldly bucks both attitudes. She knows story is, in fact, the way people have always explored possibilities, and that human imagination is necessary to finding the future the planet deserves.

She also knows people can be more open to serious topics when they are in the safe space of someone else’s adventure. Ammalie—while taking three illicitly-obtained keys on a trip—encounters other people embracing our current challenges. In desert Arizona, she occupies a rundown trailer in the classic “middle of nowhere” and finds it also already housing an unkempt monkey-wrencher of deep earthly convictions. Hiking into the distances improves the strength not just of her lungs and legs but also her backbone. She finds anonymous water-drops, and commits to the challenge of ambiguity around what is legal and what is ethical. She decides she too can offer something from what she has to unknown people with urgent needs.

My first “author event” in the company of this writer who refuses to let the mainstream limit her artistic choices was an exhilarating evening. Laura offered more of herself—and precious time—over an early dinner and then a wind-down brewpub drink, than cultural values of efficiency would dictate. She calls, in word and in her actions, for literary citizenship and mutual support. Read Three Keys yourself to join Ammalie’s final adventure in New Zealand and see how literary citizenship tangles into planetary citizenship and a future that can work for all.