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Anthology of Chicago, which Hyman started up earlier this year, collects essays, poems, and stories that evoke the spirits of different neighborhoods. (So far, it’s chronicled Pilsen, Logan Square, and Hyde Park.) In the spring, it attracted the attention of Paul Dailing, who lives in Noble Square and writes 1001 Chicago Afternoons, a website that, in the spirit of Ben Hecht’s 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago column that ran in the Chicago Daily News from 1920 to 1922, will attempt to post 1,001 stories from around our fair city. (Hecht only got to 425 stories before he was fired.)
The readers are a mix of male and female, black and white, experienced and unpublished, and they’ll be covering a wide swath of Chicago, from Rogers Park to Beverly, in short stories, poems, and personal essays. Hyman and Dailing recruited them from people they already knew, from random connections (like the woman in Dailing’s community garden who happened to know Shannon Cason, of NPR’s Snap Judgment, who will be telling stories about Bronzeville), and from cold calls (like Bill Savage, a Northwestern prof and Rogers Park bartender who happens to have written the introduction to the University of Chicago Press edition of Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and, more recently, coedited, with Pilsen resident Paul Durica, who will also be reading in Chi Lit, an annotated edition of Chicago by Day and Night, a guidebook to the 1893 World’s Fair).
“You can point to different things,” says Hyman. “There’s culture and collective memory. I look at the map a lot to figure out where I am. But where you are, the perception of the thing is more important than the thing itself.”
