• The concepts in “Justice” are very personal to me. Having lost several loved ones over the years, I, like William, am unable to accept platitudes as comfort for the day-to-day heartbreak that comes with loss. The story was driven by my desire to let William find his way back, even while giving full expression to his bitterness and grief.
Jerry M. Burger is professor emeritus of psychology at Santa Clara University. His short stories have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Harpur Palate, the Briar Cliff Review, and the Potomac Review, among other publications. His novel, The Shadows of 1915, examines the generational effects of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
• The seed for “Home Movie” came from a newspaper article I stumbled upon several years ago about the discovery of some pre-WWII movies. The films were of Jewish citizens taken in either Germany or Poland just before the rise of the Nazis. What I recall most from the article is the descriptions of how happy everyone seemed and how they had no idea that their world was about to change for the worse. This observation got me thinking about how photographs and home movies necessarily capture people and events in the middle of their stories and how differently we react to old pictures based on what those stories turn out to be.
James Lee Burke has published thirty-nine novels and two collections of short stories. He is the recipient of two Edgar Awards, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Three of his novels have been adapted for the screen, and a fourth is in production. He and his wife, Pearl, have lived for many years in western Montana.
• The first scene in my story is one I remember from the days after Pearl Harbor, when my mother and I pulled up to my grandfather’s house. I remember the coldness, the dust, the broken windmill rattling in the wind, the bareness of the land, as though it had been stricken by an angry hand, the light that had been drained forever from the sky. Psychologists call this a world-destruction fantasy. However, this was no fantasy.
And neither were the deportees. In bad times, frightened people seek scapegoats. The desperate and the poor on our borders have no voice. A man in our White House demonizes them. I hope this story says something about the precipitous times in which we live. I also hope it says something about the goodness of Latino people and the holiness that I believe is characteristic of the many I have known and lived among.
Michael Cebula’s fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, ThugLit, Midwestern Gothic, Mystery Weekly Magazine, and the anthology Murder Mayhem Short Stories. His story “The Gunfighters” was selected as an honorable mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019. He lives in the Midwest with his wife, Sheryl, and his sons, Silas and Samuel.
• I can’t write a short story until I know exactly what the first lines are, and once I put them down, they don’t change. The opening lines of “Second Cousins” bounced around in my head for several months, but other projects got in the way before I could sit down and write them. Once I did, the rest of the story came fast. One of the things I find most fascinating about fiction — or real life, for that matter — are people who generally think of themselves as fundamentally good or normal discovering, to the contrary, exactly what they are capable of when life demands it. Hopefully “Second Cousins” explores a shade of that in an interesting and entertaining way.
The managing editor of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine under the editorship of Cathleen Jordan during the late 1980s, Brian Cox is now a newspaper editor in Detroit. He has received a handful of state and national press awards for his reporting and opinion writing. In 2017 his dramatic play Clutter made its world premiere at Theatre Nova in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went on to earn two Wilde Awards, for best new script and best performance — original production. As the artistic director of PencilPoint TheatreWorks in southeast Michigan, Cox produces “Snapshots: Stories of Life,” a live storytelling event in which people share true stories from their lives based on a personal photograph. He made his crossword puzzle debut when his puzzle “Knock-Knock” was published in the July 26, 2017, edition of the New York Times. He and his wife, Dana, have two children, Elijah and Annie.
• “The Surrogate Initiative” started out as a concept story after a particularly well-targeted advertisement came across my phone, prompting me to think, Wow, they are getting disturbingly precise at figuring out my tastes and interests, which led me to consider the idea that technology — AI in particular — cannot be far from being able to simulate an individual’s decisionmaking process and accurately predict that person’s judgments, and I started speculating what that might eventually look like. Jury duty struck me as a suitable environment to explore the question, and I became intrigued by the challenge of writing a science fiction legal thriller.
I ran the concept by a few lawyer friends of mine, and they seemed intrigued enough by the idea to buy me a beer and offer some insights, and I became involved in building the story out. I particularly enjoyed imagining Detroit in the not-too-distant future.
As the plot developed and the character of Cassandra Howard emerged, I sensed loneliness in her that I didn’t understand, and it was through considering her loneliness that the special relationship with her father formed, which led me to this larger idea that the technological pursuit of digitally capturing our identities — our personhood — could result in an approximation of immortality, which, I realized with a forehead slap, I had read about years and years ago in a book by Frank J. Tipler called The Physics of Immortality, large swaths of which I hadn’t understood but had nonetheless found fascinating.
Having lost my mother a few years ago, I know Cassandra’s ache to have her father back, and I wonder how many of us who have felt that loss, if presented with the opportunity she has to resurrect her parent, would make the same choice at the end. The temptation and emotional reward would be too great for me, I fear.
Doug Crandell has received awards from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kellogg Writers Series, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, and the Jentel Artist Residency. One of his stories appears in Pushcart Prize 2017. NPR’s Glynn Washington chose Doug’s story for the 2017 Page to Screen Award. A short story was awarded the 2017 Glimmer Train Family Matters Fiction Award, and stories are forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, The Sun, and the Saturday Evening Post. Doug has been appointed as public service faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four novels, two memoirs, and a true crime book about Santa Claus, Georgia.
• I grew up on farms in Indiana, places that were owned by landlords. My folks were called cash renters, a configuration that’s similar to sharecropping. On one of those properties, nestled among corn and soybean fields, is a real water feature named Shanty Falls. As a kid I played there, and when we left the place for another, the falls stayed with me. Those types of geographies can follow a writer for a long time, and I was somewhat dismayed that I’d never used it as a backdrop for fiction before. That explains the inspiration for the setting.