In my new novel, The Insurrectionist, Chicago Bullet reporter Ian Landquart learns that he is no longer heading to the Paris bureau, as planned. He must make way for a more diverse correspondent. Instead, he is assigned to one of the paper’s suburban satellite offices.
When he balks, the editor says, “Take it or leave it, Ian. If you don’t want it, I got a stack of résumés that high from reporters who’d give their left arm to write for the Chicago Bullet.”
A harmless metaphor? No way. Ian—who lost a leg several years ago in a hiking accident—resolves to turn tables on the newspaper, using his disability as a pretext to file a civil rights complaint against the paper. The following scene is from his first day at his new work station.
The DuPage bureau, where Ian showed up on Monday, was located in Oak Brook, a suburb full of office parks with grassy berms and ponds with spritzing fountains where Canada geese paddled about, too lazy to migrate further north for the summer. Bureau chief Krystal Brufke, she/her, was a pudgy White woman with frizzy gray hair, dressed in a mauve suit, flowered blouse, and mom sneakers. Her rainbow-colored mask asserted, undeniably, LOVE IS LOVE.
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The Elephant Box 