Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “Eat” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
This story was the result of a personal writing challenge. Every once in a while I challenge myself to write something that is really out of my comfort zone or that I just plain don’t know how to do yet. In this case, I challenged myself to write fairy tale retellings and mashups for a period of time, I think about six months. At the end of the challenge, I had five stories. Two of them have been published—this one and another, “Knotty Girl,” which is in the May/June 2023 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The other three are *terrible* and will probably never see the light of day. Actually, maybe not—there’s a Three Bears one that might have potential.
For “Eat,” specifically, I wanted to take two stories that I didn’t think had any natural thematic connection and sort of squish them together and see what happened. So, as you can see, this is “Jack and the Beanstalk” meets “Hansel and Gretel.” It came out far darker than I initially intended.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?
Because this story came out of a challenge, a lot of the writing difficulty was mechanical, not emotional or thematic (which is where I usually struggle). The easiest part of writing this story was the beginning, where the children are lost and wandering and discovering weirdness in their world. I find it easier to work with strong sensory images so the initial bits with the tower just flowed. Everything that happened once the giant witch appears was tricky for me, though. I had a really hard time writing her—how she looked and how she moved and what she did. She wasn’t a very well-formed character in my mind at first, so when I tried to describe her and her actions I would just go on and on and not really accomplish much. Her initial description was almost a page long and at the end of it even I had no idea what she really looked like. It took a while for me to conceptualize her and even now, I think I kind of copped out and made her a set piece in a way—her descriptions and actions are still very sensory.
What authors or stories have most influenced your work?
Ooh, I love and hate this question because I *know* I’m going to leave people and stories out but quickly, right off the top of my head; Ursula K LeGuin, Robin Hobb, Sheree Renee Thomas, Charles De Lint, Deena Mohammed and lots, lots more of course. For this piece, specifically, there’s a short story by John Crowley called “Lost and Abandoned” that I took a lot of inspiration from. It’s also a retelling of Hansel and Gretel, and while it plays out very differently, wondering about what that story would be like from a different perspective was part of the emotional genesis of “Eat.”
Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?
Yes and no. I think that’s something that changes for me every few years. I do often write about young people facing adultifying trauma, specifically young women, because it’s a very common experience in reality that needs the distance of fantasy to think about properly sometimes (which is, I guess, where most fairy tales come from anyway?). I also tend not to give POV characters names unless I absolutely need to, but this story is an exception to that. Nobody really thinks of themselves by name, do they?
Actually, this story is a departure for me in a lot of ways because I always try to find a redemptive angle for the ending and plant a few little seeds of joy for the reader to take with them, but that doesn’t happen here at all.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?
Horror isn’t something that I do, or at least not something I set out to do, so I really didn’t like how I felt after writing this at first. I’m a yellow-bellied chicken and I don’t personally like scary things at all. I had to side-eye myself a bit after writing that last line, like “Wait, who am I? Am I okay? Where did this even come from?”
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
I just set myself a new challenge to try and write some science fiction about brains. No idea how that’s going to go, or if anything decent will come out of it, but so far I’m enjoying learning about the brain and thinking about how neurological science may change in the near future, and what the social, human implications of those changes may be, especially in this age of impending AI. I’m also editing and polishing a fantasy novel I’ve written about a young deaf man who goes on a quest into the hearing world to find his father—but again, who knows where that will go?