Writer Kathleen Stocking wants to change the world. The acclaimed author of Letters from the Leelanau and Lake Country has just published her third book of essays, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale. In it, she takes readers along on her incredible journeys from her home in seemingly peaceful, picturesque northern Michigan to some of the world’s most unstable and terrifying places. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, she brings her skill with words, language and storytelling to protect herself, as well as teach an incredible range of students: from hardened criminals in maximum security prison to the offspring of Central American despots; from poor African-American children traumatized by gang warfare in their urban neighborhood to Third World children in Thailand and Romania.