Committed, and not just acting

If YOU get annoyed when actors engage in activism, Mia Kirshner is right there with you. The 33-year-old actress -- who played a stripper in the revered 1994 movie "Exotica" and has worked steadily since, most often in roles as sexualized smarty-pants, like her character Jenny Schecter on "The L Word" -- said recently, "I think some actors have exploited their philanthropic efforts to promote a film."

Kirshner was saying such things because her book, "I Live Here," released last week, is unmistakably philanthropic. Over the last six years, she traveled to four messy and malignant parts of the world -- the Russian republic of Ingushetia; Burma; Juarez, Mexico; and Malawi -- that have large disenfranchised populations. "I Live Here," is the product of those trips: Its four separate volumes, one for each region, tell stories about the women and children in these places through journal entries, collages, photographs, paintings, graphic novellas and images of found objects. Kirshner wrangled many collaborators; J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons are the co-authors, and there is a boatload of other contributors, including some of the subjects themselves.

Elaborately designed in its look, knottily layered in its content and far afield from the entertainment world in its subject matter, the Pantheon-published "I Live Here" is no vanity project. Kirshner had the idea for it after the attacks of Sept. 11, while she was working on a television series she wouldn't name, but made her feel, she said, "pretty dead inside," and that she was "just working to work." (International Movie Database evidence points toward "Wolf Lake," a short-lived CBS series about werewolves in a Pacific Northwest town. But it could also be "24," in which Kirshner has had a recurring role as Mandy, a diabolical lesbian terrorist.)

After Sept. 11, she organized a benefit for Afghan women, and realized she wanted to do more, focusing, she said, on "people who are in war or displaced or living, basically, in an extremity." She then began doing research, her own mock-ups of what a book might look like and arm-twisting to get other people involved. Since then, Kirshner paid for the trips, her co-authors' salaries and the Vancouver office space for the project. "I did this in the most foolish way," she said over drinks in a Los Feliz cafe. "I met with my business managers this morning, and it's very clear that I sac-." She cut herself off before completing the word "sacrificed."