Jane Sadusky

In the war years of 1917-1918, loyalty tests and suspicion of the “daft and odd” converge to upend and reshape the lives of Pete and Sophie Witala and those closest to them. In this excerpt, Pete has been sentenced to prison for violating the Espionage Act.

Joe Witala casts back across memory to unravel the interplay of luck, circumstance, and secrets in his life.

 

His mother has been stepping in and out of his days lately. Passing the garden, he smells the lotion she smoothed on her hands each night. Funny, how you could be a grown old man and still be missing your mother.

"Evokes that time in childhood when the rituals of holiday and travel can be both mysterious and comforting ... this story is about those special circumstances when a child suddenly catches a glimpse of one of the darker secrets of the adult world." (Larry Watson, Lead Judge, Wisconsin Fiction Contest, 2005)

 

Ten is the perfect year. At least it was before Helter Skelter at 7:00 p.m. Eastern and soft porn teen idols and eating disorders. You could still be Nancy Drew or Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc. But that was my cosseted post-war world, not the ten of the breaker boys or Dust Bowl kids or Birmingham church girls.

"Family Photos" conveys the unraveling of one woman’s hope and family under the realities of hardscrabble farming and women's lives in the early 1900s. "This world and its deprivations are skillfully depicted, with spare descriptions that have both a documentarian's dry touch and a sure-handed fiction writer's perspective" (Dwight Allen, Lead Judge, Wisconsin People & Ideas/Wisconsin Book Festival 2010 Short Story Contest).

 

They are long forgotten by anyone living. "I remember," we say. But we are so often wrong. We know something from the archive of photographs and script and type. We get fragments of the stories from largely unreliable narrators, narrators drawn to the comforting, the comical, the heart-wrenching, or the scandalous, according to their own needs.