Thank you, I’m very happy to be here!

“Set Yourself on Fire” actually started out as a realistic fiction short story. I wrote it in second-person, originally, but I was drawn to the idea of the narrator being an actual ghostly presence in the story, so I decided to do a complete rewrite using first-person direct address instead. I wanted it to look like it was written in second-person, right up until the moment the narrator makes themself known to the reader as an actual character present in the story who is quietly observing everything. I ended up being a lot happier with this version. Since every word of narration is in the voice of a ghost, the story itself becomes haunted.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?

The subject matter was definitely the hardest part. Domestic violence and abuse are already very emotionally raw and heavy topics, but there’s also an element of anxiety over writing about it “the wrong way.” (One of my closest friends works as a trauma therapist, and her encouragement played a big part in me being able to finish this story.) Changing the story from realistic fiction to be more fantastical and supernaturally oriented also helped. I’ve found writing about ghosts (and other speculative fiction things) can make it a little easier to explore difficult things like trauma and grief. What came easiest though was writing about the connection between the narrator and the protagonist. Having the narrator speaking directly to the protagonist gave this story a different kind of emotional gravity, and I really enjoyed exploring it.

How long did it take you to write this story, and was it typical of your process? Are you generally a slow writer, or a fast one? What factors contribute to your work style?

It’s always hard for me to know how long it takes for me to finish something, especially when it’s a story like this one where the earlier version of it was both an entirely different story but also still technically the rough draft and a vital part of the process. It’s a common occurrence for me to write something and then completely change my mind about it and open a blank word document to start over from a different angle. As a result, I can be a very slow writer. (Or maybe you could say I’m a sometimes fast but extremely inefficient writer.) Even now I still haven’t really gotten the hang of having a brain with ADHD, so my writing pace is very sporadic. Overall, I do lot of the initial creative work for any story in a state of generalized chaos, and sometimes it can take a little while before it comes together.

Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?

Ghosts, sad robots, East Asian folklore. Nonbinary characters and queer relationships. Neurodiversity. Lonely strays and found families.
In general, I think speculative fiction is a vital space for exploring and processing difficult things in ways that don’t have to hurt as much as realistic fiction. Because you can have a story about a very real and familiar misery, but also in this story world, magic is real, and sometimes the helpless bystander does have the power to stop a tragedy from happening through sheer force of will. Sometimes the murder victim can seek justice for themself.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

“Set Yourself on Fire” has actually received the most rejections of any of my stories—sometimes it reached the final round of considerations, but ultimately it would still be rejected. It got to a point where I honestly thought the story just wasn’t publishable. That’s why I’m so grateful to Fantasy Magazine for giving it a home. So let this be a tangible bit of encouragement to any other writers to never give up.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m working on the final revisions for my debut book, Small Gods of Calamity which will be published by Interstellar Flight Press in Spring 2024! It’s an occult detective story set in South Korea starring Han-gil—a protagonist who is kind of a disaster but he’s trying his best—as he chases down a parasitic spirit that leaves a trail of dead bodies in its wake. He’s joined by his adopted sister, Azuna (the onmyouji), and Yoonhae (the spirit medium who shares a tragic backstory with Han-gil).

The whole story is an amalgamation of my love of detective fiction, ghosts, East Asian folklore, and nature documentaries, and I’m really looking forward to being able to share it with people.

Thank you for having me! I’m honored to be a part of this issue.

This story had two distinct points of inspiration. The first was that I wanted to write about a sort of Faustian deal but from a new perspective. It doesn’t make sense to me that a malevolent entity would separate humans from animals; at some point, if you’re so far above the mortal world, wouldn’t humans and animals look the same to you? What would a deal like this look like if it were offered to a wolf, and why would a wolf take it?

The second stems from my experiences with natural history specimen collecting (this is a fancy way to say that I collect animal bones). I’m in a few online communities with other collectors, and sometimes they will find bones from an animal who had clearly faced a devastating injury, like a broken bone or a gunshot, which healed over well before they ultimately passed. These bones have always been so fascinating to me because you can literally see how the bone has completely reshaped itself to heal (often in a strange, warped way because it was never properly set), but also because there’s a story there: about the animal that was horrifically wounded and continued on regardless.

You workshopped this piece at the Clarion West writers workshop this summer. How did that experience shape this piece, and what did you take away from the workshop experience?

This piece likely wouldn’t exist without Clarion West. My cohort liked to assign themes to each week (it was a bit of an inside joke), and one week happened to be “animal week.” This story idea had been sitting in my story idea list (read: graveyard) for a while now, so I figured I might as well pull it out if we were going to be writing about animals.

I ended up writing this story in about four days (not quite a week, I had critiques to catch up on). The only way for me to write that fast is to just let go of realism and logic, and to heavily lean into surrealist imagery. For a lot of stories, that strategy isn’t really effective, but it was invaluable for this piece. I think I would have struggled to capture the same dream-like style if I wrote this piece like I normally would: meticulously over months and months.

Feedback from my cohort has made the editing process, both for this piece and my other drafts, so much easier. Something I’ve always struggled with is identifying points of confusion in my drafts, identifying which particular lines caused those moments of confusion, and deciding whether or not the narrative truly needs to be clarified at those points.

I can safely say that I learned the most during Arley Sorg’s week, not just from his feedback on my writing, but also from the critiques he gave to the rest of my cohort. He was able to articulate aspects of craft and storytelling that I never had words for until now.

There are strong themes of decay, consumption, and birth in this story, and visceral detail throughout that emphasizes them. Did those themes emerge from the world-building, or was the world built around the themes?

 It’s definitely a bit of both. I knew from the get-go that I wanted to portray Risha in various states of decay. In fact, most of the original outline were descriptions of how Risha’s body would fail in a new way, with the rest of the story taking shape as I decided the consequences of that moment.

Decay, consumption, and birth are motifs that felt natural to include in a story about wild animals, especially since one of my goals was to avoid anthropomorphizing Risha. I really wanted to sell that this is a story being told by a wolf, albeit in a heavily stylized way, which means the horrific aspects of the story need to be horrific to a wolf, not just to a human audience. I achieved this through the perversion of the natural world: rotting that never ends, death that never comes, the birth of creatures that have inherited your curse.

The wolf, dog, and stag appear in storytelling traditions around the world. Do they have specific symbolic meaning to you?

Wolves and deer are the quintessential predator-prey pairing to me, which is the main reason why I focused on these two animals for the story. If anything, I think I defaulted to a wolf and a stag without a lot of thought, but as I was discovering the story, it became clear that they were incredibly useful for the narrative: a wolf is a type of animal that someone would shoot, not to eat, but to kill, which is an important distinction to make for the beginning of the story. In “Dread of the White Dog,” hunting and eating, because they are so closely related to survival, also invoke feelings of love and intimacy. I wanted the relationship between Risha and the stag to be the opposite of that between Risha and the hunter.

The dog was an easy choice for me. The creature appearing to the wolf needed to be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, which is a dissonance that lends itself to a feeling of unease.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

 I’m in editing mode right now. I have a bunch of workshop drafts that I’m super excited about, including one about eldritch horror unicorns, which ended up being my favorite Clarion West story. In addition to that, I’m also editing a larger novella project that I’ve been meaning to fix up for years now. These edits are going to be a labor of love between me and my partner (she edits a lot of my work!) It’s a draft that I love dearly, which features traumatized necromancers, robot wolf gods, and surreal gender-bending shapeshifting. I’d love to finish working on that in the next few months!

As a diaspora Korean fantasy author, I’ve recently become curious about traditional Korean folk tales, especially stories about shamanism. Last year, I came across the tale of “Barigongju,” or Princess Bari. There are different versions of this story told across Korea, but the basic story goes like this:

Bari is the seventh daughter of a king and queen, and her disappointed parents—who hoped for a boy—abandon her after she’s born. Her name, 버리, comes from the Korean word beori, “to throw away.” Many years later, when her parents are dying, Bari is tasked with saving their lives. Dressed as a man, she goes on a fantastical journey to find a cure for her parents, traveling to the underworld and facing a divine guardian who tests her mettle.

The ending isn’t always the same. In some versions, Bari becomes a goddess of the underworld and patron goddess of shamans. In other versions, she has to bear twelve sons for the divine guardian before she’s allowed to return to her parents with the cure. In all versions, she’s depicted as the paragon of a good daughter who upholds filial piety at great personal cost. I became fascinated with this story because, like most of the diaspora Asians I know, I have a lot of hangups with this concept of filial piety, the fundamental value, rooted in Confucianism, that you must care for and obey your parents no matter what. I was also struck by the crossdressing detail present in most versions of the myth. It’s hard to find original sources that shed light on why this was included, especially since I’m not fluent in Korean. But I started to imagine Bari as a nonbinary witch who secretly resents all the things her family asks of her, which gave me the inspiration to write a diasporic, genderqueer retelling of the folk tale.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?

“Bari and the Resurrection Flower” is the first short story I’ve ever written that wasn’t a college assignment. I’m a novel writer at heart, and I’m used to having room for ideas to grow and expand into 80,000+ words of material. Fortunately, I had the existing structure of the folk tale to build around, which made things easier. Still, I struggled to keep the story contained and still include a meaningful character arc for the protagonist.

What came easiest was portraying Bari’s complicated, tangled emotions of love and resentment for her family. I think children of immigrants, particularly eldest children, will experience my story differently from everyone else. It’s a feeling that’s hard to put into words, but I tried. I also greatly enjoyed writing Mujangseung, the imperious, alluring antlered god of the underworld who finds unexpected kinship with Bari. He’s quite different from the version of the divine guardian in the original folk tale who demands that Bari become his wife and bear him twelve children. I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing about that guy.

What authors or stories have most influenced your work?

A handful of my strongest literary influences, in rough chronological order from childhood to the current day: Warrior Cats, The Chronicles of Narnia, Year of Impossible Goodbyes by Choi Sook Nyul, Anne of Green Gables, all the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Animorphs series, anything by Cornelia Funke or Suzanne Collins, His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing series, A Song of Ice and Fire, Catherine Jinks’s Pagan Chronicles, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Margaret Rogerson’s Vespertine, This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone.

Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?

Oh, absolutely. I find myself drawn over and over to three character archetypes that I call the outcast, the demon, and the paladin. The outcast is a character who’s been rejected by society and rejects society in turn; Bari is one example. The demon is an otherworldly being who often tempts, torments, or corrupts the outcast, but is sometimes a force that influences them to be more human. And the paladin is the selfless, morally good character who exists in constant conflict with an inherently flawed, brutal world. “Bari and the Resurrection Flower” doesn’t really have a paladin character, but a lot of my other stories do.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

I’m not the first person to write a take on “Barigongju” that dissects filial piety and Bari’s traditional role as the dutiful, happily-suffering daughter. Since writing the story, I’ve discovered that the South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-yong wrote a book called Princess Bari, translated into English in 2019, that retells the myth in a modern setting. I’ve also learned about a Korean webtoon of the same name by Kim Na-im that depicts Bari as a shaman’s apprentice in the modern world.

It excites me that this little story I wrote gets to join an existing canon of “Barigongju” retellings, in the same way that many different authors get to retell the tale of Hades and Persephone, or Odin and the rest of the Norse pantheon. I’m here for all the nonwestern myth and fairy tale retellings, and I’m thrilled that Fantasy Magazine took a chance on my work.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Since writing “Bari and the Resurrection Flower,” I’ve had an exciting personal development; my debut novel sold to Simon & Schuster / Saga Press and will be published in summer 2024. Pitched as “sapphic Mad Max: Fury Road with magic,” it’s a science fantasy about a motorcycle courier in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who helps a princess she’s in love with flee her unwanted betrothal. It’s called Road to Ruin, and it’s not quite available for preorder yet, but it will be soon. You can add it on Goodreads, subscribe to my newsletter for updates, or follow me on Twitter to get the latest news. I’m currently working on the sequel, featuring the same characters.

Most of my writing is fictionalized autobiography, and as I’m getting older I cull through my life experiences looking for my more interesting dramas. I was thinking of my first marriage and how my husband left me high and dry, but he was still able to get U.S. citizenship. I moved to New York as we were going through our divorce and everything I touched turned to gold. He came to Manhattan and asked if he could see me. I agreed and took him to the theatre where I was working, and then we went out to eat. He told me how a string of bad occurrences had struck him after he left me, including how a dog that had been friendly toward him bit him, and how he’d had an accident driving the bus in his new job. So I got the idea of a man marrying a woman not out of love but because she was his ticket to a big payoff. Instead of her depending on her father to fix her husband, she would do it herself. And of course she would have a best friend who would help her by picking up any straggling pieces—in this story it was Liene helping out with the children while Ma’ Dear was recuperating from “fixing” Jason. The other characters just fell into place.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?

The most difficult part was having Ma’ Dear purposely kill Jason. At first I was just going to have her give him a “spanking” but she said, no, she was going to go all the way, live with it, and kill Jason off. It scared me at first, but then I was grateful that I have writing as a weapon because if I had Ma’ Dear’s power I could think of a couple of folks I would “fix.” The easiest part was writing about the love between Ma’ Dear and Liene because I always write about women’s friendships.

What authors or stories have most influenced your work?

Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower), Marlon James (The Book of Night Women), Nnedi Okorafor (BINTI), Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Virtue and Vengeance) and Tananarive Due (any of her short stories).

Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?

I am new at writing fantasy, and with “My Dear, My Love” I’ve written two stories and now have had both of them published. Until I gave fantasy a try, I wrote literary fiction. But there are archetypes that I commonly use in my writing: the heroine and her ride-or-die girlfriend, a villainy-type and the secondary villain (my secondary villain is also usually a victim of the villain as well), and a Goddess who plays the role of the magical aide. I’m sure, as I write more fantasies, I’ll be using all of these characters.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

“My Dear, My Love” proved to me that I can use literary devices in writing fantasy and have the two blend together seamlessly. I also liked writing about Hellacious and how he loved his granddaughter, would do anything for her, and how that love, and trust, spilled over to her best friend; I loved how Hellacious was strong enough of a man to let Ma’ Dear be strong enough to take care of her own business.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I have just finished the final (I hope my agent likes it this time) revision of my novel, The Myth Makers, that I have been working on off-and-on since 1991. It’s a fictionalized account of the two years I spent living in Paris. And I have a poetry chapbook, A Litany of SHE Poems, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024.

I’m thrilled to have the story in Fantasy Magazine! This story was written for a Halloween contest, a friendly contest among crit partners, not directly for any kind of publication. It doesn’t really have a Halloween vibe—I quickly abandoned any attempt to make it feel very Halloween-ish—but it came from the prompts another writer suggested to me. A snippet of an Emily Dickinson poem, a creepy image, and a question.

What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?

The story has a dream-like sequence, back and forth between two slightly different points of view. One of those is essentially bodiless, a roving consciousness that doesn’t interact with people or the setting, only observes. That’s often a hard sell for a story, to make an observer still engaging. But then creating a fabulist world within the funeral home—that side of the story had its own challenges at times, but was a lot of fun to create. Really the story came together, in a very similar form to its final draft, quite smoothly and well within the contest deadlines—something about it seemed to flow.

What authors or stories have most influenced your work?

I think the influence of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi probably stands out here. In general, Italo Calvino has had a huge influence, as has Ursula LeGuin. Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris novels. Catherynne Valente’s Orphan Tales. And anything and everything by Patricia McKillip.

Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?

Immigrants and exiles. Transformations, especially caused by environmental factors. Magic as something strange and poorly understood. Stories, words, and music as magic.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

“Across six caskets and over seven coffins . . . ” as a storytelling device makes me smile. I like to discover (or invent!) allusive alternatives to “Once upon a time,” and there are some great ones from other languages that sound so cool when translated into English. This invented one plays with an English one, though—from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, of all things.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

My third and final book in The Arcist Chronicles should be coming out sometime—it’s with my publisher and just waiting for the right publication slot. I think it’s a powerful conclusion to the series. I’m self-publishing this month a chapbook of micro-fictions that are very Calvino-esque, about a magical, open-air market and the goods that one might find there. Otherwise I’ll soon be diving back into editing a (McKillip-esque?) novel about magical plants and wildfires and fungal transformations. Hopefully a final revision pass before I start looking to find it a good agent and/or publisher.

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?

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.

“Broodmare” is a story I have been mulling over for a few years. Back in 2019, I read an article in Mother Jones about the lack of abortion access in the south. The article focused not only on those who had to travel several hundred miles to obtain safe abortions, but also on the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund and specifically a woman named Laurie Bertram Roberts. Roberts, her daughters, and her partner physically pick up people in need of an abortion and transport them across state lines to get them the medical care they need.

This was the fall of 2019. It would be another three years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe. I think everyone with a uterus was understandably terrified after the 2016 election, and I couldn’t get this image out of my head, of a woman and her family traveling in a van across the country to help maintain reproductive justice.

In October 2021, I took a short story workshop and committed myself to writing and finishing this story to present to the class. I knew I had to get it out now, because history was moving faster than my pen. The class lit a fire under me to finally tell the story.

What was the most difficult part of writing “Broodmare,” and what came easiest?

To be completely frank, the most difficult part of writing “Broodmare” was writing it. My writing practice has been spotty at best, completely absent at worst. When the pandemic hit, I lost a lot of the freelance work I was doing, and suddenly had more time. So I started writing again. Over the last two decades, I’ve done little bits of writing, but nothing longer than flash fiction. So I felt rusty, figuring out how to organize my thoughts and ideas, and work out story details and structure. The workshop was the best thing for it, because it forced me to finish it within a tight timeframe. If I wanted to get the most out of the workshop and if I wanted the critiques—which I needed, shout out to my fellow workshoppers, whose insight and input proved invaluable—I had to finish this story.

I think people might hate me for this answer, but the easiest part of writing “Broodmare” was also writing it. I had been getting into a van with Marge for almost three years. In the beginning I didn’t know her very well, but I spent many nights falling asleep imagining myself in the van with her, looking out the window at the countryside, picturing the towns she stopped in and the people she visited. I found the story in all those imaginings; it felt like it presented itself to me. The horse stuff was also easy. I am incredibly allergic to horses, but I’ve always loved them—I’m the saddest Horse Girl in the world. When I was little, I was obsessed with the book “Black Beauty.” I think I was about 10 when I had to write a book report on it, and instead I handed in an epilogue describing Black Beauty’s experience with his new, kind owner. That was my first real experience writing fiction. The teacher gave me a passing grade because she said the writing was good, but admonished me for not fulfilling the assignment. It wasn’t intentional, but now it feels like there’s a reason I put horses into a story that brought me back to writing.

The poor roan’s story encapsulated the risks so many pregnant people face, now and certainly even more so in the future. It’s a moment of real visceral despair that I found absolutely haunting. Short of magic like Marge’s, where can we find hope?

I think we find hope in people like Laurie Bertram Roberts and her family, who perform magic without any supernatural abilities whatsoever. Marge couldn’t exist in a vacuum. She needs her community to keep doing what she’s doing. It was important to me that the people around Marge, supporting Marge, be normal, everyday people. That includes Trace and Dolores, and the little old lady at the grocery store. Their real power comes from working together, and that’s where our power comes from too. We find hope in the people who don’t stop fighting for reproductive justice and refuse to accept the barbarism imposed by the opposition.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?

This story haunted me for two years before I finally got it out. It taught me that if I can’t stop thinking about something, I should probably start writing it down. Pay attention to your ghosts.

We were thrilled to learn that this is your first short story sale—congratulations! It’s an honor to be part of this milestone for you. What has your writing journey been like up to this point?

As I mentioned, my writing journey has been fairly rocky up to this point. I wrote more when I was younger, and studied creative writing in college, but my practice fell off once I graduated. I feel like I’m still finding my footing with a daily writing practice. My parents run an online air cargo magazine and I’ve flexed my writing muscles on short nonfiction pieces there and elsewhere, but I’m still figuring out fiction. I discovered Cat Rambo’s writing community and that has been an incredible resource. The classes and teachers have helped me tremendously, and the community itself has been so supportive and welcoming. I never thought I’d find a writing community in the middle of a pandemic!

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m currently being haunted by a short story around identity and assimilation. My mother is from Pakistan, but that’s a part of my identity I’ve felt a little disconnected from for most of my life, and I’ve wanted to reclaim it. I’m also excited because I’m participating in a 2023 Story a Week Challenge to push myself more. My hope is to get at least a handful of good first drafts that haunt me this year.

I actually started it during a session of my writers workshop! If I remember correctly, the initial prompt was “receiving mail” and it just unspooled from there. I was probably thinking about friendships and how a close friendship is its own microcosm, and so hard to understand from the outside. The setting is pretty specifically the town where I went to college, including the rocks up behind campus; one particular landmark is, specifically, called Table Rock. The friendship is referential of one that I’ve had since college, with the added layers of magical power, and a tumultuous friend breakup.

This story is such an intimate portrait of regret and paths not taken, it reads almost like a journal entry. The past three years pushed many of us to consider the possibility that we might not see our loved ones again. What can Jessie’s story teach us about that terrible what-if?

In some ways, I think the classic lesson of “The Monkey’s Paw” can be applied to Jessie’s story. Just because you can wish for something doesn’t mean you should. This is kind of a throughline of my “witchy” short stories like this one, which include “Sugar and Spice” (Sockdolager, 2016) and “The Pearls That Were His Eyes” (Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, 2019). It is innocuous and normal to think, “I miss my friend, I hope that I see her again, maybe we’ll patch things up,” but when it turns out the friend has passed away . . . well it’s still normal to miss them, anyway. Less so, when their posthumous letter says “trust me,” to actually trust them. I think it’s also unfortunately normal to still have regrets and what ifs. What if I had reached out sooner, or at all? Did they know how much I cared?

When Jessie makes the decision to banish Angie both metaphorically and literally, it got me thinking about how ritual can be used in our daily lives –  sometimes to help us start something (like a story, maybe?) or end something, like Jessie’s period of refusing to grieve. Is ritual something that inspires you, either in your life or in your writing?

Given that I am not a planner in pretty much anything, including writing, my first reaction is to say that I don’t really have anything like that. But that’s not entirely true; first off, I was raised Catholic, and while I haven’t been to church in many years, I think there are still elements of that practice and tradition that I reach for more often than I realize, in addition to little childish rituals that I never really gave up, like wishing on the first star I see, or when I blow the fluff off of a dandelion. My writing rituals are actually very deeply entwined with listening to music. While I don’t make a playlist for every single thing that I write, I have a playlist that I fall back on from my very first NaNoWriMo (2007!) or even, sometimes, I just end up with a song on repeat. In the case of this story, it was two songs: Death Cab for Cutie’s “Follow You Into the Dark” (which was also clearly the title inspiration) and Silversun Pickups “Circadian Rhythm” (the acoustic version specifically). I’ll also often have a tab open with a solitaire game, for when I’m allowing a thought to coalesce and don’t want to continue staring at my cursor, but don’t want to get involved with a game that requires more thought than that. Prior games that filled that niche have also been the original shareware version of Snood, and Space Cadet Pinball.

Some of your details are so vivid and specific –  my first deck was a Crowley, and you’re not kidding about the vibes! –  I have to ask: Do you have a favorite tarot deck today, and if so, what makes it your favorite?

I have yet to speak with somebody who doesn’t feel that way about the Crowley deck, it’s very interesting!

Like Jessie, my very first deck was a Rider-Waite that came from a garage sale, except I neither bought it nor rubber-banded it; my best friend at the time got it for me. We also haven’t spoken since senior year, so maybe (definitely) I was pulling on that further-back relationship than just my best college friendship. During college, I got a Buckland Romani deck that was my number one for several years, and I did buy a Dali deck and again, like Jessie, I liked it but it didn’t resonate with me as I’d hoped. My current favorite is the fairly new Somnia Tarot, which has photographed imagery that in many ways sticks very close to the traditional cards (Death, the Hanged Man) and has very interesting departures with others (The Tower, Page of Cups). As the name suggests, it is very dreamlike, and I think that gentle unmooring from reality makes it all the more evocative.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Right this second I am writing the sequel, in novel form, to my fantasy short story “Mistempered Weapons” (Kaleidotrope, 2022). My cyberpunk novella series, Run With the Hunted, always releases in October, which makes Run With the Hunted 5: Insert Coin to Play still fairly new, and Run With the Hunted 6: [to be determined] not really-truly in progress yet.

Sometime in 2023, I will be self-publishing the novel that I’ve been referring to as “modern witchy girl Hamlet” (not the title, don’t worry!) That novel continues to explore the throughline I mentioned earlier: that just because you can wish for something, or even make it happen magically, doesn’t mean you should. It also deals with grief and grieving, in the way that much of my short fiction does (including “Into the Dark” here) and contains a very good dog who will of course be safe.

The earliest scenes came to my mind one evening as I sat with a friend whose experiences parallel my main character’s. She was asking her son Parebul; and I thought, “What if she needs to do this to find herself a home? To play the games from our childhood to get something so profound . . . ” I had a skeletal vision of the landlady that demanded a game of balans-bɔl. The piece grew from there, a merge of imagination and reality. I am forever grateful to that friend for giving me this story.

Themes of contrast run through your work: desperation and pride, need and generosity, violence and love. Are those calculated choices that you make during the creative process, or do they emerge from the subject matter?

The themes were inherent to the story’s real-life inspiration, so they emerged naturally as I wrote. They weren’t merely themes—but the day to day hurts and hopes of a mother in search of safety.

We had the pleasure of publishing your piece “rat/god” in the June issue. One thing that strikes me about your work is that the line between prose and poetry is very fluid. Where is that line, in your mind? Or is there one?

There is no line, in my mind. I started my writing journey with poems. I think mostly in poetry when creating, though I believe different stories crave different styles and structures. My favourite things to read, or be inspired by, use a perfect blend of prose and poetic techniques. And I try my best to listen to the story I am working on, its different parts, and do whatever they demand of me.

In the end the landlord says, “I believe our stories should give us homes.” Your home of Freetown in Sierra Leone feels like a character itself in this story. How would you describe the relationship between your stories and your home?

I have noticed over the years that the relationship between my stories and my home is cyclical. My experience of home, the good, the bad, inspires my stories, and my stories, in turn, have inspired my experience of home.

Sierra Leone is a magical country. Freetown, a magical city, trauma aside, broken-dreams aside, on and on. Passers-by have rich stories if you know where and how to look. Streets and markets, hills and beaches, music, art, clubs, every sunset, every full moon, rain, harmattan. My stories are teaching me how to see, and how to listen.

What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I am working on short stories, mostly flash fiction. A friend and I are doing our second year of a flash a day challenge the entire month of November. BTW “rat/god” was written during last year’s challenge. I am working on these pieces, sharpening them to send into the world.

Works readers can look forward to: I have flash fiction forthcoming in issues of both Lightspeed Magazine and Tales to Terrify, as well as a poem coming in Strange Horizons, all written in last year’s flash challenge. I also have a short story out soon on PodCastle. I hope readers enjoy them as much as I did imagining and writing them.