Church called me a pussy six weeks before tryouts. That’s what I tell his granddaughter, Raquel, who’s sitting across from me in the apartment above my supermarket in northeast Denver on a Saturday morning. She is young, had not…
When Davyon faces off with Raquel on the first page of 1989, he considers the gap in age between himself and his interviewer, a young woman making a documentary about her grandfather, Davyon’s old basketball coach. “I don’t expect her to know about South Africa, Tiananmen Square, or Reaganomics,” he narrates. “September 11, social media, and Beyoncé. These are the touchstones of her generation. It’s all about context. Hers. Mine. Whatever lies in between.” What lies between is Church, a black man who hid his queer identity while playing twelve seasons in the NBA. What had lain between the conceit of this story and the pages that now make it a book was an opportunity to explore retrospective narration.
Most of this story takes place in the past. I wrote these pages first, and they were fun to write because they sparked nostalgia for the titular year. It was a time when I, and most of the brothers I knew, dreamed of playing college or pro sports, mostly basketball. Davyon, then, processes the world—including the domestic abuse he suffers at the hands of his father—through the lens of hoop. I worried there would be too much basketball on the page, but beta readers responded favorably to the bond Davyon and Church form through their shared passion for the game. What irked them was an underdeveloped narrative frame. On what occasion, and for whom, is Davyon recounting this story?
I put off answering this question, but it would not turn me loose. I’d already written a version of the story with Davyon, now an adult, reflecting on his time with Church when he learns of his death via social media, but that frame was thin. Yes, he would certainly think about his old mentor in the wake of such news, but how would that reminiscence lead to a full recounting of the events from 1989? An interview might prove useful, but who would conduct it and what purpose would it serve? I ruminated on legacy and memory for a time before an idea began to grow. What if Church’s granddaughter—a known, but still unborn, entity in 1989—is now an aspiring documentary filmmaker? What if her first subject is Church? What if she contacts Davyon, whom she knows about from Church’s archival basketball footage, for an interview? A structure snapped into place, a narrative frame that justified Davyon’s extended trip down memory lane.
This retrospective tool also made it possible for me to revisit character and setting some twenty-five years after the main story unfolds. Davyon, for example, inherits Uncle Junior’s grocery store, marries then divorces, and nurses a grudge toward his father, now sober and a Christian and determined to make amends. Church, before his death, doted on Raquel, teaching her to play basketball, coaching her high school team, then paying for film school. Park Hill, then a mostly Black enclave in northeast Denver, is now in the grip of gentrification. Junior’s Grocery Store now features a small coffee shop and a deli stocked with kombucha. The Martin Luther King Center, once a refuge for Black youth, now caters to middle-aged white constituents who play pickleball on the basketball court. While gentrification is not the subject of 1989, the elasticity of its narrative structure accommodates observations about rampant capitalism and racism that have displaced many Black Denverites.
Two historical notes before closing. Most of this story is set at the King Center, Junior’s Grocery Store, or Jackson High School. The King Center is the only site that is historically accurate. Situated in the Dahlia Square, Junior’s Grocery is a composite of two stores in northeast Park Hill—Junior’s in the Holly Square and a supermarket once run by a Korean family in the Dahlia Square. I worked in that supermarket one summer, so from a craft perspective, collapsing both stores into the Dahlia location felt right. Jackson High is a fiction named for Oliver Toussaint Jackson, the Black man who in 1910, inspired by Booker T. Washington, founded Dearfield, a Black settlement in Weld County. The agrarian community, a beacon of hope for African Americans who envisioned a self-sustaining town where they might live free from racism, eventually folded in the wake of agricultural slow downs that followed World War I and the Dust Bowl.
VINCE OMNI is author of 1989, winner of the CRAFT 2025 Novelette Print Prize. Other awards include a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize, the Jesmyn Ward Prize in Fiction, and the Margaret Walker Memorial Prize in Creative Writing. His writing has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Best Debut Short Stories 2025, and is forthcoming in Virgin Islands Noir. Vince holds an MFA from the University of Kansas and a PhD from Florida State University, where he was a McKnight Doctoral Fellow. He teaches African American literature and creative writing at Lake Forest College and is cofounder of SoulClap: A Black Joy Journal.
