Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so happy to bring your story “Blue” to our readers. Can you tell us what inspired this story and how it came about?
So I actually created the world that “Blue” takes place in well before I sat down and wrote August into being. 2020 was a hideous year for wildfires across the board—California, Greece, Oregon, Australia—and it felt like every other news story was full of bloody skies and destroyed communities. Wreckage everywhere. My climate anxiety was at an all-time high. I couldn’t bear to write about reality, but I also couldn’t bear to leave it completely behind, so I built this world where disasters bruise themselves into the people who survive them, leaving wild magic behind.
I wrote a lot in that world. Mostly scraps of novels that I got frustrated with and abandoned. Mostly as a coping mechanism. I’d been especially struck by the visceral horror of the pictures taken during the Australian bushfires—people who had to evacuate to the beach as a last resort. What happens to those people, when the fire is fought back and they have to leave the safety of the beach? “Blue” finally came out of that.
This story is thick with emotions: the trauma of living through disaster, the terrifying knowledge of how close disaster is, and the sheer panic of life after what you expected to be the end. What flavor of emotion was foremost in your mind when you were writing this?
The feeling of being absolutely underwater was probably the frontrunner—that blind terror of launching headfirst into uncharted territory. What do you do with that, when you realize that the end of the world isn’t a hard stop and you kind-of just have to keep going? August is really, really afraid, because when I wrote “Blue” I was really, really afraid.
I found a lot that was familiar in August’s fear of creation. There’s something terrifying about the prospect of unleashing something raw in art that might let other people understand a deep part of you. Have you ever run into this as a creator?
“But what if people see it?” is probably my default setting as a creator, honestly. I’m not really the kind of person who can easily crack open my chest and share how I feel, so everything I write ends up feeling horribly exposing. Writing August was a relief, a vessel for me to pour these intense anxieties into. Sharing August feels like unpeeling all of my skin and inviting people to stare at my bones. The fear of being known and being seen is absolutely unmatched.
That being said—“Blue” is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever written. I was trying to spin something sparkling and hopeful out of a time when the sky overhead was black and orange and my family and I were trying to figure out how we’d fit four animals and four people into one car if we had to evacuate. It’s incredible that I get to share her.
Contrasts fill this story: Santa Monica and Albuquerque, fire and water, the desire for connection and the fear of it. What about these contrasts spoke to you when you were putting this story together, and are there others you hoped to express that I didn’t see?
It just sort of happened, very instinctively, very much built around animal fear. When you’re afraid, convinced you’re going to die in a fire, what’s the one thing you want more than anything in the world? Water. When you’ve survived a city built on a hill, where do you run to feel safe? Somewhere flat and wide-open. When you’re starving for community, and struggling with a dramatically changed identity, what is your instinct? Shy away. Protect yourself first.
I think contrasts force us to find the complexities in between. “Blue” is a story of opposites, but it’s also rooted in the uncomfortable, complicated feelings that come with trying to reconcile those opposites. It’s something I’ve been tangling with since I developed this world, that wildling magic is born out of these awful traumas—and yet there’s wonder to be found in it. The world can be at its absolute rock bottom—and yet there’s still living that has to be done.
Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
There’s so much I want to explore in this wildling world of August’s, the bonebreakers especially, and the people who are caught between the ordinary and the uncanny. It all started as a raging love letter to Southern California, though, so right now I’m agonizing over the zero draft of that novel. All wildfire, all smoke and destruction, a community shaped by a twenty-year-old tragedy. It’s got sharper teeth than “Blue,” but more than anything it’s about loving a place so much that it grows into your bones.