Although Urbantasm is inspired by Flint, Michigan the story takes place in the fictitious city of Akawe.
Over the years, I’ve been asked a few times why not simply set the story in Flint. After all, the choice to go with a fictional setting automatically imposes an additional barrier. When I tell a reader that Urbantasm was inspired by my experiences “growing up in and around Flint,” it is awkward to segue into an explanation that the novel is set in a made-up place. There are risks that even readers familiar with Flint will misidentify intended analogues. And this may even factor in the choice of 178 literary agents not to represent Urbantasm. From a marketing perspective, having to explain that this novel about a “not Flint” is really a novel about Flint risks making the book harder to sell.
Given all these liabilities, why not simply set the story in Flint?
The answer, in brief, is that it isn’t possible.
A non-fictive setting doesn’t work for a variety of aesthetic and practical reasons. There are myriad justifications for fictionalizing the real-world setting of a novel, as evidenced by Yoknapatawpha County, Middlemarch, Besźel/Ul Qoma, and many others. Here are a few of my reasons:
First of all, the main plot of Urbantasm takes place over the course of 1993-1996 as John Bridge and his friends find themselves enmeshed in the conflicts of feuding gangs and families; however the story invokes events ranging from the auto factory closures of the 1980s and 1990s, to the UAW strike of 1998, to the Flint Serial Stabber of 2010, to the Flint Water Crisis from 2014 to the present, and more. A fictional setting is an elegant way to reconcile these disparate timelines: it provides a means to collapse events spread across 40 years of Flint history into a three year frame.
There is also the potential to explore alternate histories without using this as a narrative sledgehammer that pushes the whole story. So, for example, how would the auto industry have evolved if there were two major unions, not one, or four major automakers instead of the three? How would Flint have responded if its collapse happened in a few years instead of over the course of a generation? For that matter, how would Flint coexist in a world with an alternate Flint? These questions can be explored in Urbantasm through the presence of XAWU alongside the UAW, of X Auto alongside the Big Three, and when characters take a road-trip from Akawe to… Flint! It is even possible to deconstruct and examine the legacies of historic figures by reimaginging them as composite characters in which specific features are altered, enhanced, or elided.
Finally, and most profoundly, is the opportunity to fully metaphorize the universe. In a more literal Flint, metaphors exist where one finds them, but in Akawe is it possible to saturate the city in metaphor, from the names of each street, to the founding myths of specific neighborhoods, to the interplay of culture and commerce. This freedom to metaphorize without restraint is a propos to a story inspired by 19th century literature. It was Novalis who said that “to romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”
As communities like Flint wrestle with the implications of their past and the exigencies of their future, a literature that is rich in “magic, mystery and wonder” — that injects these elements into commonplace encounters — is a necessity, and one that can be well-served through the invocation of fictive and creative liberties.