Civility Certified: A Dossier Novella

For Civility Certified, I worked with three sources.

The first is Martin Luther's 95 Theses from 1517. Luther posted his propositions to the church door at Wittenberg, demanding that the institution admit what it was doing - selling salvation, monetizing grace, creating a credential system for the afterlife. The structure of numbered propositions, posted to the institutional door, demanding accountability - that form echoes throughout this novella. There is a character who writes theses. The institution does not welcome them.

The second source is Jefferson Davis's address to the Confederate Congress in 1861. This gave me the rhetorical DNA of exclusion dressed as protection. Davis spoke of voluntary participation, states' rights, procedural legitimacy - all while encoding slavery into the constitutional fabric of the Confederacy. The Civic Trust & Access Authority in my novella speaks in that register. It promises safety. It delivers sorting.

The third source is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from 1925 - specifically, his theoretical writings on dialectical montage. Eisenstein believed that meaning emerges from the collision of images, that the audience assembles truth from fragments. This novella works the same way. You receive documents out of sequence. You reconstruct causation. You become complicit in the interpretation.

Three sources. Three different centuries. Three different forms of institutional power confronting individual resistance. And from their collision, a new story emerges - one that feels disturbingly contemporary.