Aubanel | Will Power Edward

By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.

That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.

One Tuesday, a water-damaged box arrived from a condemned estate. Inside: a 19th-century journal bound in cracked leather. The owner had been a minor poet named Sabine Durand, erased from history because her patron had been a political dissident. As Will carefully separated the pulp-molded pages, he found something strange—a pressed fern, and beneath it, a single line of verse:

By thirty-five, Will had become a man of quiet, stubborn decency—not because of his name, but in spite of it. He worked as a restoration archivist at a failing municipal library, repairing books no one else wanted to read. His coworkers called him Ed. Will Power Edward Aubanel

He went home, brewed tea, and started on the next box—a shoemaker’s diary from 1888, filled with pressed flowers and the names of lost children.

He had power. And he knew exactly what to do with it.

Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?” By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore

Will Power Edward Aubanel had always hated his name. It was a cruel joke his late father, a classics professor with a flair for the absurd, had left him. “Will Power” as a first name, “Edward” as a fig leaf of normalcy, and “Aubanel” as the surname that guaranteed no one would forget the punchline.

Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop.

The breakthrough came when he found a letter Sabine had hidden in a false spine: a plea to her sister to burn the poems. “They are too fragile for a world that sharpens its teeth on soft things.” That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library

He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker.

Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.”