Daniel Mason on the Weight of History

Editor’s Note: Read Daniel Mason’s new short story, “For the Union Dead.”

“For the Union Dead,” a new story by Daniel Mason, will appear in his upcoming story collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (available on May 5). To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Daniel and Oliver Munday, a senior art director at the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Oliver Munday: You’ve primarily written historical fiction. However, “For the Union Dead” is set in contemporary San Francisco and uses a historical event—the American Civil War—thematically rather than as a backdrop. Can you describe how using history in this way informed the writing process?

While I’m very much drawn to history, my interest is less in reproducing a historical event and more in employing a different time and place to explore something that feels quite pressing. This story is part of a collection () that comes out in May; all the other stories from the collection are