At the Tucson Festival of Books, community organizations of all kinds shared the white tents populating the University of Arizona's central greenspace with authors and booksellers to celebrate togetherness and the value of our different choices in reading, writing, eating, music, science or fantasy. Ben's Bells is a global nonprofit organization based in Tucson that began hanging strings of hand-painted ceramic beads with a small brass bell, spreading a message to Be Kind among the random finders of the colorful artworks. Since its beginning in 2003, the organization has blossomed and borne many fruits that feed the world's hunger for joy, beauty, and yes, kindness. People of all ages pulled up a chair at the art table to become part of the movement, and from my seat at the University of Nebraska Press booth, i watched kindness as it became embodied, then ready to share.

My own small effort to spread kindness through art has been in the literary realm, by dedicating author proceeds from The Scent of Distant Family to animal welfare efforts. Because so many animals populate the pages of the novel, this cause seemed a great fit, and as i described my desire for humans to grow our sense of kindness and kin-ness with other-than-human animals, the proximity of our two booths also seemed to meld together a joyful participation in the world's ongoing ecologies. As Forest Melton encourages us to Stand up for Kindness (on the Ben's Bells website): Community building is about wrestling with injustice. It is about struggling with inequity and exclusion and then doing something to create change. It requires delving deeply into what kindness is and how it manifests in all levels of our society.

The next big book festival my publisher will be at is the AWP in Los Angeles, also home to one of the Best Friends Lifesaving Centers and a No-Kill coalition of kindness-focused animal welfare organizations that numbers up to 100. The NKLA movement works in its region to move our society toward increasing compassion and broad-based community action to ensure a brighter future for companion animals and all of us who care about them. Decentering humans in our fiction is one way among many that people are reminding ourselves of a greater kinship across our planet, and that we succeed most fully when we solve our problems together.