that are reflected in her works. Arnason moved back to Minneapolis–Saint Paul in 1974 and continued to work in offices, warehouses, a large art museum, and more recently, a series of small nonprofits devoted to history, peace, justice, and art. Since 1994, she has shifted her literary focus from novels to short fiction. She retired in 2009 and now writes full-time. Politics The issues that transpire most in Arnason's life and writings encompass feminism, peace, social justice, support for the union movement and a deep belief that racism and all forms of prejudice should be opposed. City Pages labelled Arnason as a political radical. Having come of age during Second-wave feminism, Arnason included gender and sexuality as central themes in her work, notably in her collection of stories, in which she "wanted to create a society in which homosexual love was normal and heterosexual love was abnormal, sort of as a thought experiment. And because contemporary Americans have very rigid ideas of what is normal." The stories also addressed issues of gender roles and reproductive rights. She was profoundly affected by the McCarthy period, particularly because of the ways that children were taught to securitize against nuclear annihilation. She became involved in the Student Peace Union and attended demonstrations during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ring of Swords, Arnason's novel, illustrates peacebuilding after a long war; an endeavor both representative of Arnason's peace beliefs and of the make love, not war politics of the 1960s. In 1963, Arnason went to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with her mother. This had a profound impact that would be reflected in her story "Big Brown Mama and Brer Rabbit" in which Brer Rabbit transforms into an African-American man in the early 20th century. Arnason has often opted for racially diverse characters, including, but not limited to, a heroine of Chinese descent in A Woman of the Iron People and a Hispanic heroine in Ring of Swords. In addition, her Lydia Duluth stories present a future in which an overwhelming majority of humans have dark brown and black toned skins as the best protection against the radiation of many stars. Arnason had intermittent activist politics outside of her work as an author, working in a campaign office in New York, collecting and transporting supplies for striking coal miners in Kentucky, becoming a local and national official in the National Writers Union and