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I’ve never had much luck writing for original theme anthologies. I’ve been invited several times and I always say I’d be willing to try, but for reasons I don’t fully understand I rarely deliver the goods. In fact, here’s my one and only success. Anne Jordan asked if I’d write a story for her FIRES OF THE PAST, a collection of stories about home towns. I said sure, thinking probably not. But she kept nagging me and, as the deadline approached, a story did suggest itself. It sprang from an idea that I had introduced in an earlier piece called “Home Front,” but had not fully developed.
It has occurred to me that those of us whom demographers count in the baby boom generation have left a decidedly mixed historical record. For all the good we may have done, we have also at times been selfish, wasteful and dismissive of generations before and after our own. Go figure how the idealism of the sixties became the greed of the eighties, how hippies morphed into yuppies. Might there not be a backlash as we pass into our dotage, payback for all the problems we ignored, resources we squandered? If there is, we might experience something like the future of “Pogrom.”
God help us.
My home town in March of 1991, when FIRES OF THE FUTURE came out, was Durham, home of the University of New Hampshire. I have since moved twice and now live in the sleepy little town of Nottingham, only about fifteen miles from Durham. So I still get back occasionally, and the last time I was in town, all the places mentioned in “Pogrom” were still there.
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