A Novelist and an Essayist Walk Into a Podcast and Reach the Same Conclusion
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SEATTLE - Washingtoner -- A fiction author and a nonfiction writer arrive at the same conclusions by completely different roads. That's the conversation at the heart of Episode 40 of the podcast Breadcrumbs, where Diana Colleen, author of the 4-time award-winning eco-thriller They Could Be Saviors, interviews host Kevin Howard, author of Onward At Last — using her own book's discussion guide as the framework. The episode was released today.

Howard's Onward At Last, winner of the 2025 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for adult non-fiction e-book, argues, through 101 commentaries rooted in philosophy, economics, and lived experience, that the virtues Americans hold most sacred — independence, competition, and self-interest — may be the very forces driving inequality, climate destruction, and collective unhappiness.

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Colleen's They Could Be Saviors makes the same argument through the lens of speculative fiction, placing a psychedelic-assisted therapist at the center of a plot to kidnap billionaires and force climate accountability.

"We are a part of nature. We are a result of nature. The idea that we are separate from it, that nature is just a resource to be exhausted — that's the crisis underneath the crisis," says Howard. For Colleen, the idea of separateness is a foundation of her argument that billionaire-ism is pathology — and the central theme of They Could Be Saviors.

Howard argues that the stories billionaires tell themselves to justify their wealth are the root of the problem. "Most everything they believe that justifies them being a billionaire is untrue," he says — and until those narratives collapse, the system they prop up won't change.

It's exactly the kind of conversation the discussion guide for They Could Be Saviors was designed to spark. The guide is available as a free download to newsletter subscribers on Colleen's website, and is also available for purchase on Amazon.

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The full podcast episode can be watched here: Breadcrumbs - Episode 40: Interview with Diana Colleen - They Could Be Saviors [YouTube Cut] - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDxo3wiNXmk)



They Could Be Saviors and Onward At Last are available at booksellers everywhere. For more information, visit They Could Be Saviors | Diana Colleen | Award-Winning Speculative Fiction (https://www.dianacolleenauthor.com/)  and  Age of Balance — Kevin Howard (https://ageofbalance.com/)