Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so happy to be able to bring your story, “Bozpo Witch-Bane” to our readers. First things first: Is Bozpo inspired by a real person or a real cat? And what are the stakes of revealing that truth? What inspired you to give life to Bozpo?
Thank you, I’m so excited for readers to meet Boz!
This story owes its existence to a night-vision camera recording of two frogs peeking through a cat flap that someone posted online. I think the caption was something along the lines of “Hm . . . these aren’t my cats.” After I stopped laughing, I started thinking, “What if they were your cats, though?!” We have a lot of stories about humans being transformed into animals (or vice versa) or a series of animals (Tam Lin comes to mind), but perhaps not so many stories about animals being transformed into other animals. I imagined that a cat would find it incredibly upsetting to be turned into a frog. The story developed from there.
Bozpo is indeed inspired by a real cat—my cat Steve, a rescue from the mean streets of Chicago. He’s old and toothless now and lives a pampered indoor life, but I get the sense that he thinks of himself as a ruthless assassin. You should see how fiercely he gums his cat-grass. (Boz was also inspired by the titular hussar from Jean Giono’s Le hussard sur le toit, Angelo Pardi. They’re both extremely confident in their physical abilities and always ready to throw down—and “Pardi” derives from pardus, or leopard. Plus, I get a kick out of describing this story as Homeward Bound meets The Horseman on the Roof.)
In general, I love cats and stories about cats, but I haven’t read many stories that acknowledge the strangeness and murderousness of cats. (Side note: Karel Čapek’s “From the Point of View of a Cat” is my favorite “cat perspective” story of all time.) Cats are born to kill! They can jump up to six times their height and have knives on their feet! They decimate bird and lizard populations! The character of Bozpo, besides being based on the bottomless rage contained in the body of little Steve-o, was also a reaction to various calls for animal stories that requested no animal death or “vegan” animal stories (i.e., you can have horses but you can’t ride the horses). I understand the reasons behind these requests, but nature is, well, wild. I suddenly needed a story about a cat who was so murderous he wanted and expected to be able to kill things ten times his size.
I am so intrigued by the point of view of this story and am so curious to ask you what inspired you to take that decision, and what was the biggest challenge of having this particular narrative voice?
I knew I wanted a cat to narrate. It couldn’t be Bozpo (I’m pretty sure his internal monologue is just “Kill—kill—kill!”) It had to be someone who was older, who could speak confidently about the norms of the story universe and show the reader that Bozpo’s outlook was rather unusual. The biggest challenge was trying to explain the narrator’s motivations in a way that was compelling but not too revealing. Why does she decide to follow Bozpo? What’s in it for her? I knew the answers, but I had a horrendous time trying to give her agency in her own story without spoiling the twist at the end. I went through so many drafts!
I obviously, like a plebian, cannot help but ask about your take on witches and cats. Granted, it is an association we have gathered through media representation; however, is there any particular reason about the relationship that drew you into writing this story?
Here again I wanted to write something that was the opposite of what we usually see (a symbiotic relationship between witches and cats), and I wanted to write about a scary witch. As much as I love the cottagecore interpretation of witches as benign or helpful beings, I also enjoy stories where witches are frightening, cruel, jagged, unpredictable, elemental. But I don’t think of the witch in this story as a villain—more as a force of nature. She culls the population of Kinghawk to keep its people from encroaching on the borders of the marsh that she protects. In this universe, cats are aligned with people: They live in human settlements and sail with humans on their ships. A witch who guards a delicate ecosystem of small species is the natural enemy of a cat who—in partnership with humans—would only bring destruction to her realm.
I guess I was thinking a lot about the push-pull of human progress and how it’s all so gray. It seems that our wellbeing has an inverse relationship to the wellbeing of non-humans. Not necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily a good thing. And everyone’s pure motives have become less pure over time. The aging witch can’t let go of her feud with a long-dead king and persecutes his successors; the cat is simply too bloodthirsty. And the humans claim they won’t shed any blood during their exploration of the frozen north, but who knows?
The best thing about your piece was the way language was used to build the rest of the world. On a personal note, what kind of writing style were you trying to employ, or were you thinking about it while writing this? Do you think that it enabled a certain effect in the way the story is read and interpreted?
Thank you! I did want the story to sound like a fairytale from an alternate universe or alternate history, to have archaic formulations and repetitions similar to our “Once upon a time.” At the same time, this is a world where oral tradition is strong, and—ironically—I wanted this story to feel like a legend that someone was reciting or singing to the reader rather than a story one might encounter in a written medium.
My word choices and sentence structure for short stories tend to be simple and clear, because I want to get the concept of the story across and not trip people up or bore them with long descriptions. (That is against my nature. I belong to the Umberto Eco school of lists.) It was fun to be able to be more lyrical here, to go on pseudo-historical tangents, etc.
What are you working on now, and are there any other projects we can look forward to seeing from you in the future?
Right now, I’m desperately trying to ignore all the amazing short story and flash submission calls I’ve been seeing. I’m trying to train my way into longer-form narratives, with the goal of writing a novel in 2024. I have two novelettes that I’m hoping to finish by the end of the year. One is a space western inspired by the reintroduction of elk to Estes Park in the American Rockies. The other is a wuxia heist that I’ve had banging around my head for almost a decade. I’m also planning a novella that’s part ghost story, part Qing dynasty police procedural. (My spouse is a historian of China and East Asia, and I definitely benefit from their hard work in the archives!)
Lastly, I have a few new short stories coming out this year! I don’t think I can say where yet, but they’ll be linked on my website eventually. Funnily enough, two of them also involve cats.