History as Mythology: A Guest Post by Senaa Ahmad

A sharp and smart debut collection of stories from a singular voice in fiction. Read on for an exclusive essay from Senaa Ahmad on writing The Age of Calamities.

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I’ve always been drawn to stories that reimagine the past or reframe familiar mythologies. And I’ve always loved stories that are a little slippery and strange, where the characters bend the shape of the narrative they’re in. This was one of the many winding paths that led me to The Age of Calamities.

Another winding path: growing up in a small city in Ontario, I knew the life my family lived was a step out of time from everyone else’s. We didn’t own a television set and the first time I visited a movie theater, I was a teenager. We grew our own fruits and vegetables in the backyard. When our laundry machine broke down, which I remember happening often, we’d hand-wash our clothes and hang them to dry on the clothesline. On occasion we’d sew new clothes. I’d read books about girls from the nineteenth century and recognize in their lives an echo of my own.

Even the encyclopedia set we owned was decades out-of-date, salvaged from a garage sale, some covers missing. In the encyclopedia’s recollection of history, the USSR was still intact and the moon landing was a fresh occurrence. Its omissions were many, what it deemed worthy of commemoration was likewise lopsided; I understood this vaguely at the time, and I’d fill in more of its gaps over the years.

These encyclopedias were how I first encountered many of the figures who populate The Age of Calamities. When you meet people via their encyclopedia entry, they’ve been flattened by the weight of history. Many of their contradictions and oddities get rubbed away. To meet Florence Nightingale is to meet an archetype of Florence Nightingale. To talk about Genghis Khan or Marilyn Monroe is to invoke a cultural shorthand for an idea they might represent.

This, then, was a third winding path: I wanted to take those familiar archetypes and amplify their larger-than-life qualities, or undermine them, and see what happened. I was curious how historical figures might fare outside of their usual settings, trapped in unconventional stories.

When I started the collection, it was 2018 and I was surrounded by horrors both personal and global, thinking about history and survival. I knew all of this would feed into the stories. But I wanted to temper the bleakness of what I was writing with some lightness, some peculiarity. I was interested in how horror and humor could amplify each other’s effects when laid side-by-side. And I wanted to use structural strangeness to investigate who was directing the narrative and how they were doing it. The first story I wrote was “Let’s Play Dead,” a story where Henry VIII keeps killing Anne Boleyn, except he never seems to get it right.

I hope you’ll follow these familiar figures down their own winding paths, to see how they might shape or be shaped by their new environments. To discover what impulses guide their stories. To see what calamities befall them and if they find their way through.