The high speed train pulled out of the station with the smooth acceleration that still amazed Joel, even after years of riding the Republic’s rail network. Through the window, Chicago’s skyline stood sharp against the early January sky, the kind of crisp clarity that only came with single digit temperatures and clean winter air.

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The thing about Christmas trees is that they’re supposed to bring joy, which is why it’s deeply unfair that they also bring a very specific kind of anxiety that makes your right eye twitch while you smile through gritted teeth and tell your children, “Yes, sweetie, that’s a wonderful place for the ornament,” while simultaneously calculating how long you…

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Alastor’s fingers found the switch on the electric menorah, and the sixth light flickered to life, joining the shamash and the five previous nights already glowing on his windowsill.

Outside, the December darkness had settled over the small town of Makochi, which had once been two towns, Malta and McConnelsville, with a population of just over six thous…

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The line stretched down Cermak like a patient serpent, fifty people at least, a chain of bodies pressed close but never close enough to share real warmth. Grady stamped his feet against the pavement for the hundredth time just to remind himself that his toes still existed.

The sound was sharp against concrete and rang like iron in the negative twelve de…

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The kitchen smelled of freshly baked poppy seed bread their mother only made during the winter holidays and the five Novak Roberts siblings sat around the same table where they’d eaten countless meals as children. Through the window, snow fell steadily on their parents’ backyard, clinging to the windows, heavy and …

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The puck skittered across the ice like a nervous animal, and Anthony Korbin Riendeau chased it with the single minded determination that had made him a decent center, if not a spectacular one. His breath came in white plumes that the wind snatched away immediately, and somewhere behind him he could hear Jamal shouting something that was probably strateg…

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She didn’t understand what had come over her when see had volunteered to work on the student’s winter play. Whatever had possessed her at the end of September was quickly forgotten and it was not until the end of October when her department chair reminded her that practices would start in November that she truly started to think about what she had gotte…

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Father Frost was a fraud.

Miriam knew that now. Because today in class her teacher had taught them about snow and how it was like rain but frozen into tiny ice crystals that fall from the sky when it’s cold enough, but not too cold. Her teacher had said that when air climbs higher and higher it gets colder, which didn’t really make sense to Miriam becaus…

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When I first mentally devised this Prologue, it was meant to do a couple of things, obviously since that is their purpose after all; I wanted to set the general time period and I wanted to lay some history of the world, people and places.

I think originally what I envisioned was a sort of performative monologue by the character called Rimah Sari in this draft. Verik here is meant to be this young newly minted soldier who is of a low rank and eager to make the most of where he is and to see a show that people have been talking about. He is eager to see this play by Rimah Sari, and I called it a play in this draft and I called Rimah Sari a playwright.

I liked my description of Rimah and how she began her performance. Mentally again I was envisioning a sort of historical monologue performed from her cultural and historical background which would run counter to the prevailing beliefs of the audience.

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Prologue

“Good evening,” the clerk said, eyeing Verik’s shoulder patch and likely noting the plain green patch. “How can I help you?” Verik quickly pulled his gloves finger by finger, the leather, not yet worn smooth by years of wear and tear, tight against his hands. He placed them carefully on the stone counter of the theater’s ticket box and pulled out his pouch of coins and setting them beside his gloves, knocking one of them off in the process.

Behind the brass latticed grille, the clerk, a thin man whose spectacles caught the gaslight and threw it back in geometric fragments, looked up at Verik with the particular expression of someone accustomed to being patient with people.

“A ticket,” he said, and then, bent down to retrieve his fallen glove, “for the evening’s performance. The new work by...” He consulted a small card he’d kept in his breast pocket for three weeks, its edges soft from handling. “By Rimah Sari.”

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Inspector James Chen Morowitz had always maintained that the most peculiar occurrences happen on holidays, when the world thinks itself safe in the comfort of tradition. This Christmas morning would prove him right in the most unsettling way. Chen’s bare feet touched the cold floor of his apartment as he rose, still groggy from what felt like an unusual…

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As the ships' horns blare in the distance, signaling the official handover of sovereignty, I can't help but think about how we got here, to this moment where the Stars and Stripes finally lowers for the last time over the Great Lakes. As I watch the crowd surge with excitement, I'm struck by how quickly the impossible became reality. Less than two years ago, the very idea of an independent Great Lakes nation was dismissed as the pipe dream of union agitators and radical intellectuals. Yet here we stand, our flag flying proudly over the waters that have always been our true home.

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There's a group of diplomats and their delegations gathering near the park's eastern edge, you can tell by their formal dress and the variety of flags they carry. My teacher, Miss Addams, says they represent all the nations that helped us become free. I recognize the Mexican flag immediately; Pa made sure we all knew it, saying "Remember who stood with us first."

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The sound of a train whistle momentarily pulled my attention from the revery of Grand Park and pulled me back to a memory of my older brother Jacob telling me about his return from France. He came home to a different country than the one he'd left to fight for, we joke now that he went to war an American and came home a Lakes citizen, though he says it never really was that simple.

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The crowd in Grand Park keeps growing, and I overhear someone say it reminds them of Constitution Day last September. I remember how the news spread across the Lakes like ripples from a stone dropped in still water. The constitution, written in secret on that great ship, was finally real.

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Micah crouches and tugs at my sleeve again, pointing toward the growing flotilla in Lake Michigan. "You see that big one with the white hull? That's the Republic’s sister ship," he says, his voice carrying that know-it-all tone he gets when talking about boats. But today I don't mind; he knows like most boys my age I love boats and trains, I don’t mind when he's going to tell the story of the Floating Assembly, as everyone calls it now.

His father, my Uncle Jonah, was one of the delegates at the assembly. He served as a wheelman on the Great Lakes for twenty years before the Declaration, and he says there was never any question about where they'd meet. "The Lakes themselves had to birth the document," he likes to say at family dinners, "just as they'd birthed our people."

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Mama had told me she knew something was different one morning because Pa didn't go to work at the steel mill. Instead, he put on his suit but on a Thursday, the same one he's wearing today as we stand in Grand Park. She told me how the streetcars and trains were packed with people, all heading to Haymarket Square, even though everyone knew what US President Wilson had signed into law the day before, or maybe because of it.

"Your father said to me," Mama had told me while she was pressing my suit, "'Miriam, today we choose whether to be citizens or subjects.' That's how he put it, simple as discussing the weather." She didn't understand then, she says, but she does now. We all do.

I wasn't there when Eugene Debs climbed onto that wagon, that same wagon they say the anarchists used in '86, though Pa says that's just a story people like to tell. But I've heard it described so many times I sometimes think I remember it. The spring air thick with coal smoke and wet lake wind. The way the crowd, already thousands strong by mid-morning, kept growing like a lake after the winter thaw. Workers from the stockyards standing shoulder to shoulder with university professors, their differences washed away by something bigger than themselves.

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Published by the Great Lakes Democratic Republic Cultural Institute In cooperation with the National Library of the GLDR 2024 Edition

Introduction

In 1943, as the Great Lakes Democratic Republic prepared to celebrate its 25th anniversary of independence, the Department of Cultural Memory at Great Lakes Polytechnical University launched an ambitious project. Students, armed with notebooks and early recording devices, spread throughout our nation's communities to capture the memories of citizens who witnessed the historic events of April 11, 1919 – the day our independence was formally recognized by the United States of America.

The resulting collection, first published in 1944 as "Voices of Independence," became a cornerstone of our national archives. Now, eighty years after its initial compilation and 105 years after independence, the GLDR Cultural Institute is proud to make these vital historical documents available to readers outside our borders for the first time.

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