Former News editor Diane Chiddister recently published her newest novel, “Peace Corner,” which reads as a love song to Yellow Springs and its Quaker residents. (Submitted photo)
New novel a paean to Quakers, Yellow Springs
- Published: September 10, 2026
Every weekend for more than 20 years, you’ve seen them there, on the corner of Limestone Street and Xenia Avenue — the Peace Corner. A small band of local residents, many of them Quakers, holding signs with messages peaceful and political, bearing public witness to injustice.
What does bearing that witness mean, in a time when the injustices seem to keep on coming? It’s a question that animates “Peace Corner,” a novel by former Yellow Springs News editor and villager-at-large Diane Chiddister. The author is headed back to the village — the same one brought to life in the novel — in September following the book’s release this month for a book launch and reading.
“Peace Corner” — which follows Chiddister’s debut novel, “One More Day,” published in 2021 — explores the lives of four central characters who move through Yellow Springs carrying different ideas about what it means to be useful, be active and belong.
Readers first meet Olympia, an 80-year-old retired doctor and Quaker, who’s contending with the limits of what one person can do in an unjust world. Next is Cary, an elderly widower, who’s seeking purpose after his wife’s death and wants to make new connections, including with Olympia. Avery, a teenager newly arrived in Yellow Springs, is struggling to find her place while taking a stand against state policies targeting transgender people. Howie, an Amazon delivery driver, first enters their orbit in the novel’s opening pages in a truck flying a Trump flag and displaying a noose labeled “For Traitors.”
The Yellow Springs of the novel will feel familiar to local readers, as Chiddister lets her characters move through a recognizable map: Avery attends Yellow Springs High School; Tom’s Market becomes a locus of concern; activists organize a food drive in the nursery of First Presbyterian Church; and, of course, the Peace Corner is where it all begins.
Speaking with the News this week, Chiddister who now lives in Olympia, Washington, said she started writing the novel Nov. 1, 2024, at the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. She said she had only a rough shape in mind at the outset: The book would be set in Yellow Springs, it would follow an older Quaker woman and it would begin and end at Peace Corner.
“I missed Yellow Springs so much, you know,” Chiddister said. “And certainly an advantage of being a fiction writer is you get to pretend.”
And just a few days after setting pen to paper, Donald Trump was elected president.
“At first, I tried to avoid that real world turmoil,” Chiddister said, adding that she worried connecting the novel too closely to current events might hem it in.
“But then I just threw up my hands and gave up,” she said. “I decided to lean into what was actually happening, because the people on the Peace Corner, they’d be leaning into it.”
And so the world outside the novel was invited in — Quaker resistance to federal immigration enforcement, threats to temporary protected status for immigrants and state and federal policies aimed at transgender youth. In at least one case, Chiddister said, life unexpectedly imitated art: a character mounts an effort to preserve Tom’s Market, and the grocery store later adopts a cooperative model — a plot point Chiddister wrote before that effort was publicly announced in real life. Likewise, a plot involving a Haitian family and the loss of TPS echoed the mounting uncertainty in nearby Springfield; by the time the novel was published, TPS protections had ended and immigration enforcement had begun in the neighboring city.
Though these issues loom large in the novel — as they do in the Yellow Springs that lives outside its pages — Chiddister said the book wasn’t intended as a catalogue of political emergencies.
“It was a love song to Yellow Springs — to the activism and progressive thinking of the town, the caring of the town,” she said. “And it’s a love song to Quakers, to that legacy of political activism and courage that Quakers, speaking truth to power, have shown through centuries.”
In addition to familiar places and concerns, readers will note some familiar presences in the background figures who populate the village of the page. Chiddister described them as affectionate pastiches — lightly disguised villagers recognizable, perhaps, by mannerism or role in community life, but under a different name. The only such tribute who retains his name is the owner of the local grocery store, Tom — with the real Tom’s permission, Chiddister said.
Further from whole-cloth are the novel’s central characters, through whom Chiddister explored different facets of the community. Olympia’s activism, for example, is intertwined with musings on both grief and aging. Chiddister said she’s drawn to older women as fictional subjects because age demands repeated acts of reinvention — “They’ve been through so much and transform themselves so much,” she said.
Chiddister added that both Olympia and Cary had professions that determined the shape of their days and identities, but retirement has left their time and selves amorphous.
“As older people, they have to become somebody else,” Chiddister said.
Teenage Avery’s struggle emerges in a much different stage of life, but carries its own exploration of purpose and belonging — hard enough when one is an adolescent among friends and familiar peers, and harder when one is new, afraid of speaking in class and the tallest girl in school.
“That struggle is one that, even though it’s been 50 years, doesn’t feel that far away,” Chiddister said.
Writing Howie — a hard-edged character who, for a good portion of the book, looks on the Peace Corner folk and their ilk with both bewilderment and a measure of contempt — took a different depth of imagination, Chiddister said.
“I had to really find his humanity,” she said.
Without erasing the menace of Howie’s first appearance, “Peace Corner” aims to find the humanity underneath his antagonism, and find what fuels it. What she found, Chiddister said, was isolation, and a deep longing for connection. At one point, Howie wonders: “Whatever happened to neighbors?”
“He wants that community,” she said. “And that’s certainly something missing from his life.”
Community, in “Peace Corner,” is a concept, but it’s also a practice — people standing beside one another and taking responsibility for what they can do. As Olympia muses during silent Quaker Meeting after friends — and Friends, as Quakers are officially known — work to help an immigrant to safety: “If the world needs saving, don’t expect others to save it. No. Do it yourself.”
Then again, though Olympia is resolved to do the work even if she has to do it alone, “Peace Corner” also ruminates on what sustains those who keep acting — what keeps outrage from hardening into contempt, exhaustion from withering into withdrawal.
A kind of gentle response emerges in a poem excerpt recited aloud during Friends Meeting by Olympia’s friend Maisie:
The longer I live and the more I see
Of the struggle of souls towards the heights above,
The stronger this truth comes home to me—
That the Universe rests on the shoulders of love,
A love so limitless, deep, and broad,
That men have re-named it, and called it God.
Chiddister is a practicing Quaker, though she describes herself as “kind of an agnostic” when it comes to naming what happens in silent worship, in which Friends sit together in silence, sometimes moved to stand and speak.
“There’s a sense of some force, something bigger than us,” she said, which sometimes brings “a feeling of being connected to everyone.” Olympia experiences something like that connection in the novel; in one passage, she’s suddenly flooded by a feeling of love, first for all those in the room with her, and then “for humanity.”
But Chiddister acknowledges that the feeling can be fragile, writing: “Sometimes, in the big world, [Olympia] loses this love” — but she sometimes manages to hold onto it for a few minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes the whole day. The world remains unjust, time is finite and love is hard. “Peace Corner” suggests we must still show up and try again.
“It feels like we better do it right now,” Chiddister said. “Oh, this is the time.”
A “Peace Corner” book launch event will be held Friday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. in the YS Senior Center great room. The event will feature a conversation between Chiddister and Desiree Nickell about the novel, followed by audience discussion. Chiddister will also read from “Peace Corner” alongside writer Ed Davis — whose village-inspired collection “Here We Stand: The Shawnee Springs Stories,” was released this spring — on Sunday, Sept. 13, 3–5 p.m., at the Emporium.
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