Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “The Body Fate” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
I took a class on medieval literature, and I was intrigued by the clash of pagan magic against very Christian narratives. The magic in many medieval stories is weird and never explained—supernatural entities act upon the hapless protagonists and then vanish from the narrative. There’s no system or set of rules for how the world works. It’s frustrating from a modern perspective, where we’re used to fantastical elements being coherent, but it does make the magic feel truly mystical. I was also fascinated by Le Morte D’Arthur and Malory’s exploration of chivalry, feudalism, and gender. I ended up leaning more on stock archetypes than specific class notes, but the influence is there.
After letting the story marinate in my head for a few months, I wrote the draft in two days and was pretty pleased with the result. Then I sent it off, and here we are!
What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?
I knew I wanted to write something centering unicorns, but as I dug into the research, none of the traditional medieval mythos gelled with the story seed I had in my head. I grappled for a while with trying to twist the story to fit the myth, or vice versa. In the end, though, I decided to lean into the incompatibility and make the myth mismatch a central part of the story. Never quite fitting into a preconceived narrative is a very trans/non-binary feeling.
The easiest part was the castle segment, which popped into my head before I’d written the beginning of the story—specifically, the image of the uncanny unicorn in an ancient, abandoned bedroom. I really love atmospheric settings. I want to write a novel that’s just extravagant descriptions of unsettling rooms.
What authors or stories have most influenced your work? Are there themes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?
Tamsyn Muir, Catherynne M. Valente, Douglas Adams, and weirdly enough, Sophocles. (You can tell I like stories that are wacky and irreverent and deeply sad.)
I write a lot about homelands—longing for them, feeling out of place within them, the mythologized ideal of them, etc. I like cathartic vengeance stories and reimagined myths. And, obviously, queerness, but that one is almost never intentional (except when it is). It’s just the lens through which I see the world, so obviously my stories will be biased towards it.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?
Nope!
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
By the time this comes out, I will have hopefully completed the rough draft of a novel for Camp NaNoWriMo. It’s a contemporary fantasy story about a cartographer chasing down his homeland—a mythical, moving island that lives in the space between worlds. Think Piranesi meets Annihilation meets The Odyssey. Ish. I want to traditionally publish it one day, but given the capricious whims of the industry, I’m happy just to have written it.
I have a flash fiction story that will be published in Nightmare magazine in July, and two stories that will appear in Kaleidotrope at a later date.