Wonderful Town - New Short Story from Sonja Srinivasan

"While not a native, I have known and loved Ann Arbor since I was three years old. I strongly associate the town with classical music (especially UMS) and the University of Michigan. As a fiction writer, I prefer to draw on real life, classical literature, and/or my imagination, and had been resistant to writing anything personal. As a classical musician, I am a huge fan of Leonard Bernstein, having studied Candide for a project in college, and writing a paper on Bernstein for a graduate class on creativity. However, after the death of my father, I began to reflect on his life as a chemistry graduate student in the early 1960s in the South, and his love of music. So an idea came to me about an immigrant discovering the joys of Western classical music while a student at the U of M, culminating in Bernstein’s first performance at Hill Auditorium. 

Sampath bears a number of elements of my father as well as his cousin (a doctor who married a doctor of Lithuanian origin, and a serious Western classical music aficionado). Many characters bear names of people who were important to my father, but this story is ultimately fiction. I really wanted to do justice to Ann Arbor, my father, UMS, and the University of Michigan. Readers can decide whether or not I was successful!" - Author Sonja Srinivasan