Cobalt: A Mystery

January 25, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

A mystery story from my new collection Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction… especially for those who would like to see more historical Lutheran pastors featured in detective stories.

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Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was old, sick, stiff, and hungry. For all that, he was the most able-bodied of his household. His wife Anna, terrified by reports of the battle in Long Island and little comforted by news of the Continental Army’s timely retreat, hid in the bedroom, alternately sleeping and indulging in fits of hysterics. Henry’s daughters and daughters-in-law had their hands full minding her and their little ones, not to mention the heavy burden of fear concerning the fate of their husbands. One daughter-in-law’s parents, their house in New Jersey having been quartered by the British, had fled and taken refuge at the Muhlenberg home, but they were still weak and in shock at losing all their worldly possessions. Not to mention the narrow escape en route from bandits, who enforced their own version of the law when the armies were engaged elsewhere.

All Henry wanted, then, was a nice dish of sauerkraut and dumplings, followed by a good night’s sleep. What he got instead was a pounding at the door and a summons from Lieutenant Colonel Brodhead’s men. “It concerns a prisoner. You are needed to translate” was all the flunkeys would say…

All about "Protons and Fleurons"

January 11, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This story collection, Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction, gestated over a long period of time. “Iron” and “Gold” were the first two stories I drafted, well over a decade ago. At the time I didn’t have any sense that they would be linked by a common theme of an element of the periodic table to each other, much less to another eighteen stories.

I can’t remember anymore exactly how the idea for a whole book of stories based on the periodic table came together, though “Molybdenum,” as an exercise in metafiction, tells some of what I’ve been able to reconstruct from my memory.

After I settled on the idea, though, I read John Emsley’s comprehensive book Nature’s Building Blocks: An A–Z Guide to the Elements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I took notes about aspects of the elements that I thought might give rise to a good story. The resulting stories are the ones that coalesced into a good yarn…

Mystagogical Realism

May 25, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

I can remember the first time someone told me about Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “It’s magical realism,” he told me. “What’s that mean?” I asked. The answer: “There’s a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate.”

That was enough for me. I was hooked. You can guesstimate when this conversation took place based on the fact that I ended up reading the book in my private berth on an Amtrak traversing halfway across the country because all the flights were shut down due to a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.

Marquez’s fiction has a distinct flavor all its own (of hot chocolate?), but it wasn’t so far off from other books I’d known and loved but had no collective term for. Top of the list was C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

I did not start out loving this book, probably because I was too young the first time I read it. But more importantly because the trilogy structure inadvertently misled me. Out of the Silent Planet takes place on Mars! Perelandra takes place on Venus! That Hideous Strength takes place on… Earth?! I was bitterly disappointed, that first time through.

But subsequent rereadings shifted its status from my least favorite of the trilogy to my very favorite of all of Lewis’s works. It spoke to the intuition that there is much of a wondrous nature even on this Earth. The problem is not wonder’s absence but my (and our) perception thereof…