The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. You've almost certainly never heard this cryptic phrase before, but after reading Kevin Wilson's Now Is Not the Time to Panic, you won't forget it. The story follows two teenagers who make a poster featuring that line accompanied by drawings, and post copies all over their small town of Coalfield, Ohio. As soon as I read that description, I knew I had to read this book. I also came of age as an artsy, counterculture girl in a small town, and the novel brought back the transcendence I found in creative expression. I thought back to the things that my few friends and I did—the puppet show parodies of Lord of the Flies, the alter egos we created to email rock stars and the time we formed a performance art troupe that never did anything. (We still put it on our college ...