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

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

Double Happiness

The outer office was much the same as she remembered it. The thick neat oak desk of Mrs. Lanahan, a manageable stack of buff folders in the far right corner. A small boy in a blazer likely to be his older brother’s knocked unhappy heels against the chair leg. He’d been waiting for a while, a tear path nearly dry on his freckled cheek. Wide gray eyes skimmed Ann McCleary then let her go, no help. Someone’s grandmother dispatched to pick up a sick child, nothing positive. Nothing that could distract or cajole Sister Mary Arthur to leniency.

Ann McCleary had boys of her own, long grown, boys she’d left to stew in that very chair. Her line: If you got yourself there, you’d done something to deserve it. She’d made a single exception with Terry, age seven, when a polished oxford lace-up went skidding under the desks to catch the attention of a girl he favored. Even younger, even in nursery school, Terry had some tiny thing stilled to contemplation, to watching him. She smiled to think of him, not the handsomest of her boys, but the one, the one who lit up the room.

Posted on January 13, 2009 | Fiction / Issue 7 | Permalink

Are You Ready?

Los Angeles has been called the City of Dreams; also the City of Angels; Jim Morrison called it the City of Lights, but to me it was just a city. I often say that I’m originally from New York, but that’s not true. Although I did live in New York for a number of years, I was born in California, near San Diego, and for that reason Los Angeles has never been a dream for me, just a city, a city to live in. Nathanael West called it the City of Death, and maybe it was for him, but for me, at the moment, it was something else. At the moment I was walking along Vermont Avenue, alive in a way I’d never been before, alive to my senses and the world streaming in through my senses. I’d detached who I was from the web that had organized my world, and although a sense of self is a wonderful thing, as I walked along the sidewalk that morning, listening to the sounds of the cars, and the birds, and the occasional voices, I didn’t need any mediation between me and the world.

Posted on January 9, 2009 | Fiction / Issue 7 | Permalink

Debt

Lev has worried all afternoon that his niece and her husband won’t find his house. It is easy to miss the turnoff for Todd Road and get lost in a maze of half-paved, wooded roads that are part of the town’s semirural fantasy about itself. He is relieved now to see the step-van pulling into his driveway, the late sun bouncing in a streak off the vehicle’s metal siding.

“Yes, okay, I have the address,” Sonya’s husband had told him earlier today, when Lev was giving him directions.

“The address won’t help. Just listen to me…”

“I am listening.”

It had been one of those exchanges where the other person’s sentences seemed always to begin in the middle of your own.

Three years ago, Sonya had sent him and Dina a photo of herself and Meho in a wedding chapel with vinyl records and photos of old movie stars on the walls. A year and a half later, a second picture had arrived in the mail: a professional snapshot of a dark-eyed infant girl posing on a cushion, a studio backdrop of painted clouds behind her. “Our angel has arrived,” it said beneath. When Lev attached the card to their refrigerator, Dina had wondered out loud why someone would burden their child with a name like Andjela Bliss.

Posted on October 1, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 6 | Permalink

Politics Is a Craft

VISIONS OF BERNIE EPTON (1983)

You could slate Attila the Hun or Yuri Andropov as a Democrat and he’d win this election… —Marty Oberman, Alderman, 43rd Ward (February, 1983)

Epton Before It’s Too Late —Epton Campaign Slogan

I say to you Mr. Epton: Do you want this job so badly? Are you so singularly minded that you would try to destroy a character? —Harold Washington (March, 1983)

This town is beset by a wretched plague. —Leanita McClain, Chicago Tribune (March, 1983)

He comes to me sometimes in my awake dreams, shouting, Shut up, shut up, shut up…

Election night, 1983. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe the campaign had, finally, driven him as bonkers as some Washington partisans accused him of having been all along. On paper, the man was a living miracle. He won 48.6 percent of the vote as a Republican running in Chicago. Of course it wouldn’t have happened if the Democratic nominee hadn’t been you know who. A vote for Bernie Epton was a vote for survival, plain and simple.

Posted on September 2, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 6 | Permalink

Politics Is a Craft: Part Two

Harold Washington was reelected to a second term on April 7, 1987, defeating Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary and Edward Vrdolyak in the general election. He died unexpectedly on November 25, 1987, at City Hall. You can read more about Harold Washington’s place in Chicago’s political history in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

HAROLD WASHINGTON WALKS AT MIDNIGHT (1998) OUT AT MIDWAY AIRPORT

No one in this city, no matter where they live or how they live is free from the fairness of my administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are.
—Harold Washington

Politics is a craft that has many practitioners and few craftsmen. —Ralph Berkowitz

Of Harold Washington, they used to say that as long as he had politics he’d never be lonely. And that was all well and good while he was alive, but caused some problems for the mayor in heaven. First he didn’t appreciate that the gates were pearly. Is this some sort of subliminal message? Then he challenged Gabriel for Arch Angel on a reform ticket and nearly pulled it off with forty-seven percent of the vote. Disgruntled and sub-angels supported him in droves. Over the years he caused so much trouble that finally, God, just to get rid of him for a while, let him come home for a small, unannounced visit.

Posted on August 28, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 6 | Permalink

Testimony

I'd been sitting there in the courtroom all day, looking at the back of people's heads, mostly Andy Munson's. In that situation you couldn't help but sit and wonder what went on inside there, in Andy's head. I'd known him as long as I could remember. There were a lot of people in town I'd known as long as I could remember, and some of them I knew better than Andy but I suppose I knew Andy better than most. But there was always something about Andy you couldn't know. Maybe it was hard to figure out Andy because Andy didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out himself.

Posted on August 14, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 3 | Permalink