After the Wreck: Naomi J. Williams on Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories

Naomi J. WIlliams's story "Lamanon At Sea" appeared in APS 8.

Everyone likes a shipwreck story. I’m certainly not the first writer to be drawn to the La Pérouse expedition, an ill-fated voyage of exploration that left France in 1785 with two frigates under the command of Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, and disappeared three years later in the South Pacific. Part of the early mystique of the La Pérouse story, of course, was that for almost forty years no one knew what had become of the expedition. It’s always a boon to fictionalizers when people disappear into thin air.

Posted on October 8, 2009 | Etc. / Fiction / Issue 8 | Permalink

Source Material:
Sara Majka Considers Booking a Room

Sara Majka's story "Saint Andrews Hotel" appeared in A Public Space 8.

Years ago, I became fascinated with a hotel in Portland, Maine, though I’m not sure why. The Inn at St. John is a basic hotel near the bus station, not gritty enough to explain my fascination. I’ve never been in, but pictures on the website show velvet curtains and furniture that’s meant to look Victorian. Quotes promise that it’s "comfortable and a good value" and “CLEAN!” It offers three room tiers: pet-friendly rooms, economically priced rooms for extended visits, or romantic luxury accommodations for weekend getaways. If you want any of these things, it says, the hotel is exactly what you’re looking for.

There’s something touching in this accommodation. I like how the hotel wants to be everything for everyone, and can’t hide this. How eagerness and sincerity linger a millimeter beneath its reach for class, and lurking beneath that is what I imagine is the truth—it won’t be as shabby as I had hoped, and it will cost more than I thought to find this out. Maybe I like how it misses every sort of mark. But what I like best is that it rents rooms by the week, offering a home to people, however temporary.

Posted on August 17, 2009 | Etc. / Fiction / Issue 8 | Permalink

Powers of Recuperation

1.

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward

her body   the chair she sits in
to be abandoned  repossessed

The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
     second world, third world, cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,

gangrenous, maiming, class
war lives on

a done matter she might have thought
ever undone though   plucked

from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after

She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman

endless beginner

whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass   plundered

Posted on July 20, 2009 | Issue 8 / Poetry | Permalink

Trans-Neptunian Object

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.

Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.

Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.

My grandmother's house stands on the hill above the sea where she left it.

When I come back to visit I discover a crater in its place.

This room is full of facts.

All day I let the cat out, let it in, then let it back out again.

I mean this metaphorically.

Some facts never exist.

It is winter. It is summer.

All night the branches tap at the glass.

Posted on July 1, 2009 | Issue 8 / Poetry | Permalink

The Blackberries

On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.

Black, rose, and khaki together on the bunch, they are more like the sight of a rogue family at its different ages than a strong temptation to picking.

In view of the disproportion of seeds to pulp, birds don't think much of them, so little remains once from beak to anus they’ve been traversed.

But the poet in the course of his professional promenade takes the seed to task: “So,” he tells himself, “the patient efforts of a fragile flower on a rebarbative tangle of brambles are by and large successful. Without much else to recommend them—ripe, indeed they are ripe—done, like my poem.”

Posted on July 1, 2009 | Issue 8 / Poetry | Permalink

The Mupandawana Dancing Champion

When the prices of everything went up ninety-seven times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead. In a space of only six months, he became famous twice over, as the best coffin maker in the district and as the Mupandawana Dancing Champion.

Fame is an elastic concept, especially in a place like this, where we all know the smells of one another’s armpits. Mupandawana, full name Gutu-Mupandawana Growth Point, is bigger than a village but it is not yet a town. I have become convinced that the government calls Mupandawana a growth point merely to divert us from the reality of our present squalor with optimistic predictions about our booming future. As it is not even a townlet, a townling, or half a fraction of a town, there was much rejoicing at a recent ground-breaking ceremony for a new row of Blair toilets when the district commissioner shared with us his vision for town status for Mupandawana by the year 2065. Ours is one of the biggest growth points in the country, but the only real growth is in the number of people waiting to buy coffins and the lengthening line of youngsters waiting to board the Wabuda Wanatsa buses blasting Chimbetu songs all the way to Harare.

You will not find me joining that queue out of Mupandawana.

Posted on June 18, 2009 | Fiction / Issue 8 | Permalink

Li Ling

The five-thousand-strong Han army that had set out for the north in the ninth month had been reduced to a defeated group of fewer than four hundred soldiers—weary, wounded, and without their general—when in the eleventh month they reached a fort on the frontier. News of their defeat quickly reached the capital of Chang'an via post-horse.

Emperor Wu was not as angry as might have been expected. Given that the main Han army, a large force commanded by Li Guangli, had been soundly defeated earlier, it was unreasonable to expect much from Li Ling's small force, amounting to a single detachment. Moreover, the emperor was convinced that Li Ling had died in battle. Nonetheless, Chen Bule, who had earlier come from the northern deserts bearing a message from Li Ling to the effect that all was quiet on the battlefront and the troops' spirits were high, and who had been rewarded with an official post for having brought such good tidings, and remained even now in the capital—this Chen Bule had of necessity to commit suicide. Everyone felt sorry for him, but there was no help for it.

Posted on June 10, 2009 | Fiction / Issue 8 | Permalink