In 1995, I was seventeen and an 11th grader at Flushing High School in a suburb of Flint, Michigan. Most of my friends went to the Flint public schools and Powers Catholic high school, and I was always startled by the gap between those of us who benefited from basically stable homes and those who had to fend for themselves. This was at a time when General Motors was cutting thousands of local jobs each year, when the crack epidemic had segued into a heroin epidemic, and Flint posted the most dire crime and poverty stats in the nation. As a result, while some of my friends were applying to colleges and laying the groundwork for their careers, others were just looking for an escape from houses where they were abused, or working on the sly to help cover food and the mortgage, or praying that they wouldn’t be outed to their families. As a young witness to these things, I often felt helpless and overwhelmed by the immensity of the struggles my friends faced.
That December, I happened to pick up an abridged translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in which the virtuous fugitive Jean Valjean struggles with his conscience for justice amid the turmoil of 19th century France. This book transformed me. Not only did suspense and drama fill its pages, but Hugo’s masterwork also portrayed the world as a place infused with a kind of personal supernatural energy. Figurative ghosts that were more powerful than literal ghosts, because of the strength of the human minds from which they sprang.
I quickly concluded that the things I was witnessing in my own life were every bit as worthy of a sprawling epic, infused with its own illuminatory power. So I sat down and started to write that epic. I called it Urbantasm.
Twenty-seven years later, Urbantasm is finally finished.
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