Anyone familiar with my past publications will know “time” is something I often play with in my stories, whether it’s splitting a person into their various selves at different ages (“Splits”), making my main character age in reverse (“A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass”), or writing a protagonist addicted to nostalgia in pill form (“In the Grip of Yesterday”), to name a few. But I’d always wanted to write a story that simultaneously incorporated several time periods. I have an interest in history, be it major world events or simply pop culture history, and I wanted to include things like my love of ’40s music, pop art, vintage food, the moon landing, and yes, even Star Wars, in a single story, but I didn’t know how to pull it off. This story finally came about in an almost accidental way. I’m a life-long insomniac, and I woke up in the middle of the night, so as I sometimes do, I got up to write. The opening line just came to me, and I started free-writing from there, the first draft flowing out of my exhausted mind.

What led you to place the Oakmont in Manhattan?

I realise this may seem an odd choice for a Canadian writer, especially one who spent years living in Toronto, which would make you think that an obvious choice for a setting, but I went with New York for a few reasons. For one, the first line, “On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time,” was the first thing that popped into my head, and I went with it. Of course, I could’ve changed that in editing, but it made sense as a setting for a lot of the historical references I later included in the story. For instance, the silent film, Safety Last, which was filmed in and takes place in New York and sees Harold Lloyd dangling over the city from the hands of a huge clock. As a kid, I’d watched these old silent films with my dad and had always wanted to include Harold Lloyd’s work in one of my stories, since he never gets as much credit for his contribution to film as Keaton and Chaplin do. Safety Last is not just my favorite of his films, but it also came with built-in, time-related symbolism. There’s also the reference to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph, V-J Day in Times Square. I’m a former professional photographer and have long been a fan of Eisenstaedt’s work—in fact, I focused an entire final project on him in college—so I knew this photograph had been taken at the end of World War II, in the midst of the celebration in the streets of New York. So, because of details like this, and the fact that it fit the “big city” aesthetic I was going for, New York just felt right for the setting.

I was struck by how, even with an apartment building that spans the decades, living in The Oakmont means living under threat of eviction. How much did the current housing crisis and general modern precarity factor into this?

I don’t know that I consciously included that in my story as a mirror to what the housing crisis is like now, but it’s something that’s definitely been on my mind. I look at how much rent has risen in Toronto, for instance, and I honestly have no idea how we could afford to live there now. We’ve also experienced it first-hand in our own desire to move to a more spacious house, only to find nothing that would suit our needs within our budget, despite already owning a home we could sell. In the end, we had no choice but to give up our search for a new home and opted to renovate our current home instead. I consider my family privileged for owning property at all. I honestly have no idea how anyone who didn’t buy when things were still reasonable can be expected to do so now, and rent isn’t really any better. As far as my story’s concerned, I feel like the people called to The Oakmont are a special kind of people in the first place, and so they accept that this is a magical place, and that this magic isn’t meant to last forever, and they’re okay with just getting to experience it for a limited time. Of course, the ending leaves that in doubt too. Time’s a funny thing. In some ways, maybe residency at The Oakmont is forever.

Given the way you built the setting, the theme of lost love feels natural for these characters. Was the love story between Sarah and Roger always at the core of the story, or did it emerge in the telling?

Though I often write about human connections of other stripes, I rarely write love stories, so this ultimate May-December relationship is a departure for me. The romantic thread was there from the start, though, and I think it had to do with the fact that I’ve always been struck by the sacrifice soldiers make going off to serve their country, knowing they’ll be away from their families for so long, if they return at all, as well as the courage of the loved ones left behind. My dad’s always been interested in war history, and I grew up watching war movies and documentaries, so I knew war was going to play a part in this story. World War II became the conflict Sarah and Roger have to contend with, but there’s also a mirror in the Vietnam War that Don’s against taking part in. At the core of both conflicts is Sarah, who bridges the different attitudes of the generations. On the one hand, she understands and even respects Roger’s desire to enlist, given that at the time it was a point of honor and men in the ’40s felt called to a higher duty in defense of their ideals. But Sarah also understands why her friend Don is protesting the Vietnam War, and even why he opts to go to Canada rather than face the possibility of getting drafted. Her position in history gives her a unique view of both situations, and being the person she is, she doesn’t interfere with their decisions, but it’s still difficult for her because she cares for them, and she knows how both wars unfold. But Sarah doesn’t know how things turn out for them as individuals, so it’s also extremely hard on her, especially where Roger’s concerned, since she’s in love with him. She represents the loved ones left to continue living life, never knowing if bad news will one day come from the front.

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?

I have a few short stories I’ve written that are still in a rough state, but I hope to get those out in the world soon. One of them also involves a time anomaly because I couldn’t keep from playing with time for very long. I’m also working on a novel that expands on my short story “Splits.” I can’t say when it’ll be done, but stay tuned for that. And I’m also putting together a short story collection, which is nearly ready, so I’m hoping to put that out in the not-too-distant future as well. I’m really good about updating my website, so readers can stay abreast of all my publications and any forthcoming stories through that, or by subscribing to my free monthly newsletter, the link for which is also on my website.

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.

A few years ago, to celebrate his 80th birthday, my uncle decided to write his memoir, not for general publication but to create a family-history record that he could pass down to younger generations. He dictated the book to my aunt, then friends and family edited it, and I typeset it into a book for print just in time for his family-only book-signing event for his birthday. “God of the River” is partly inspired by his recollections and the increased number of otter stories in Singapore. There’s been a rash of otter attacks recently in the area where my parents live—my mom’s friend’s koi fish ended up beheaded, but with most of the bodies left intact. I found that to be a curious thing.

I felt a deep chill halfway through the story, when the references to Spitfires and Zeroes made it clear precisely when it was taking place. What led you to set this piece during the Second World War?

The WWII section was a vivid section in my uncle’s memoirs. It was a defining, traumatic part of history for Singapore and Southeast Asia that doesn’t appear as visible outside it as do other theatres of war. As a consequence, when writing historical fiction, I’ve often chosen to set short stories within the time period or refer to it.

For me, this story goes deep into the subjugation of women to men’s aims and goals, from Popo being forced to settle for the lowest of expectations to the world-girdling war and the roving bandits that put them all in danger. Is this a theme you were aiming for, and how did it influence the way the story came together, if at all?

My maternal grandmother’s (my Popo’s) marriage was an arranged marriage. While she never said much about it to me, I’ve often thought about how things could have been different had she been much less of a calm and gentle person. That was a key influence in the creation of the story Popo’s character, and it helped bring together the elements of the narrative itself.

There are a lot of themes of resistance in the story and bound up in A-Ling’s attempts to summon the River God, whether it be fighting against nature or other people. Nevertheless, a story about a god could just as easily be about the characters observing the god’s problem-solving power. How did A-Ling end up being an active participant in her story, rather than an equally-valid observer?

I prefer to write stories where the main character has direct agency, so as the narrative progressed, there had to be a climactic moment where the story became more about her and her struggles than about the titular character, yet it also had to work out in a meaningful and believable way.

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?

I’ve been reading more historical Chinese novels recently, wuxia, xianxia, and otherwise, so many of the story ideas I have now are thematically related, even if they might not be set in a historical fantasy setting. I’m working on my next novel along those lines. Hopefully, people interested in my work will watch this space.

I’m so glad to be in Fantasy Magazine, with fiction this time! I’d had the idea of a bread golem, and of intertwining a modern story and a pre-Holocaust story for many years, but every time I’d try to write it, I couldn’t figure out the theme the story was about. But after a few months of pandemic, I was feeling helpless—I wasn’t a healthcare professional, I wasn’t going to be able to develop or test a vaccine, etc.—I realized that’s what the story was about: what you do when you feel helpless and all seems lost. Because the thing that helped me was doing something, frankly anything. I bought a used sewing machine and learned to sew masks. It didn’t help the main problem, which is that there was a pandemic. It didn’t help my second problem, which is that I was high-risk for major complications in a pandemic that people didn’t seem to care enough about. But it did help me feel better. And it eventually led to new options that hadn’t been open to me before, like activism via op-eds in the San Francisco Chronicle. So, into the story that went, and suddenly the narrative gears clicked together.

Your choice to contrast the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic with the Second World War and the Holocaust, to me, felt simultaneously ultra-bold and extremely sensible. What led you to tie those particular times together in this story?

My whole family had to deal with the Holocaust in different ways. Most were able to flee from Eastern Europe. But my grandmother was only eight when she went into hiding with a Christian family in Poland, and the rest of her family was murdered by the Nazis. For as long as I can remember, my family has had the attitude of, “if she can survive that, you can survive this smaller thing that’s happening to you now.” So when I was feeling a lot of despair about the pandemic situation, especially as a person whose disability will very likely be made permanently worse (with very poor quality of life) if I get COVID and especially feeling scared when hospitals were talking about rationing care for disabled folks, I would always remember my grandmother’s story. I was in good shape in comparison—nobody was actively hunting me down to try to give me COVID, and I had the privilege of being able to stay home. I could figure out how to do this. So eventually, in my head, the two events became very intertwined. This story is loosely about my grandmother, who gave me great perspective (by phone, from Israel, just like in the story) early in the pandemic, and who had a family pharmacy (not a bakery) in Poland back in the day.

While this isn’t the first golem story I’ve read since 2020, it is the first that made me tear up. Do you think that there’s a particularly strong resonance among readers and writers for golem stories these days, considering everything?

I think that, for me, there’s been a huge uptick in antisemitism lately, which has made me lean into my culture and religion a bit more. I hadn’t seen a ton of Jewish speculative media prior to 2020, when I started writing this story, and I wanted to put something out there. A golem is both very Jewish, and also a thing you can directly create and act upon. I think a lot of us have been feeling helpless and gravitating towards the things that are empowering, and perhaps the combo of these two things has made a sudden golem renaissance in SFF? But also, golems are cool, so it might just be that!

This story doesn’t shy away from modern realities; contrast that to the wake of the 1918 flu, where creators were eager to never mention it. How do you think writers today should tackle the pandemic in their stories, and how has it influenced the course of your writing in particular?

SFF is a wonderful tool for escapism, but I wish more stories that could reasonably include the pandemic would do so. I worry that such a high percentage of our media (both SFF and otherwise) is pandemic-free, that it makes it harder for society to remember that we’re actually still in a pandemic. We haven’t fixed this (for example US COVID deaths in 2022 were higher than in 2021) and we still need to take mitigation steps. But folks in many countries are too eager to say that it’s over and we can throw all those mitigation steps out the window. I’d love for more media to remind folks of the reality we still live in.

For my writing in particular, I couldn’t write very much in 2020. Too much pandemic anxiety. But as I found better coping mechanisms, the writing came back and came with a greater focus on mental health and disability than before. I’ve also learned how nice it is to be able to write lying down on a couch in pajamas instead of sitting upright and wearing actual jeans at a café.

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?

Just a week ago I finished a middle-grade novel that has five kids with super-senses (super-taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch) meet in detention and realize something hinky’s going on, so they must unravel the conspiracy that made them that way. And, as I wrote in my previous Fantasy Magazine essay, I’m a sucker for a good heist story, so of course the characters need to break into a secret lab to solve the mystery! Here’s hoping it finds a good home.

The idea of “The Black and White” has been kicking around in my head for a really long time and was spurred by a terrible thought. I used to have this great fear that I would lose contact with my sister and the only thing that would reunite us would be our father’s death. Over time, that fear or anxiety started to change shape into something more fantastical, like many of my fears. It became a story idea about two estranged sisters who were reunited by their father’s death, except these women weren’t human, and neither was their father.

Originally, the idea was going to be this novel following these two sisters as they carved their way across America, hunting monsters and mending their relationship. But the idea was so strong that I didn’t want to wait to turn it into a longer story and instead wrote it out in a day during one of my August write-a-story-a-day challenges. It took maybe a few hours the first time I wrote it, but then I put it away for about a year to develop my skills and practice writing a bit more. I returned to it this year, a few months back, with a whole new outlook for the story and sharper skills to make it happen. I put it through two rounds of edits with my critique group, who helped me clarify and heighten what I was going for within the story. They were especially helpful at getting me to up the emotions of the piece. I first sent it out to The Dark, then Apex, next Nightmare, and finally it found a home at Fantasy!

The strongest theme I got from this story was that taking revenge for what happened in the past can be essential to moving forward, surrounded by feelings of exhaustion and abandonment. Were you hoping to generate those reactions in your readers, or were you looking for something else?

It’s funny that you mention that theme because, while it is definitely the sisters’ driving theme or motivation, it’s not so much the story’s. The story’s theme was based around the destructive effect of an “us vs them” or a Manichean way of being and how it can distract from everything else surrounding you. The feelings or reactions I wanted the reader to feel aren’t related to the theme but to the sisters’ relationship. I wanted readers to feel the fractured relationship of the sisters and how they slowly tried to mend themselves when faced with each other. I wanted the readers to feel that pull to run away, but the need to stay. That feeling of missing someone even if you don’t really know them anymore. If I could cast the readers into reacting, it would be to want the sisters to mend their relationship and stay together, whether or not that meant following their nature or choosing their own path.

I was intrigued by the way you set up Maria and Mal as vampire-esque hunters, and how there were times it struck me as metaphorical as much as literal. What led you to add that layer to the story, and are the hand-tentacles your own creation or something from the wider world?

Vampires hunting vampires is something I’ve always found interesting. I’m a fan of Buffy, Supernatural, and the other paranormal hunter shows where monsters hunt monsters on the regular. It always brings up so many themes around self-hate and wrestling with aspects of ourselves by destroying those who remind us of who we are.

I don’t think there’s anything new under the tentacle sun. For me, the imagery of hand-tentacles was introduced by The Faculty when I was young. There’s this very specific scene where hand, or rather, finger tentacles, appear that has lived rent-free in my mind ever since I was like 13. The addition of being able to see the sisters’ second-skins as tentacles was a later one I added because I thought it would help lock this story and the characters in the reader’s mind more.

The title you chose, “The Black and White,” simultaneously carries simple and complex meanings. In what ways did this title speak to you?

So many ways! But the main ones were visual and thematic. The visual meaning leans into the road tripping or driving setting of the story and the black and white stripes on the road. The thematic meaning plays into the black-and-white thinking at play in the story that drives the sisters to do what they do and behave the way they do.

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?

I am one of those writers constantly working on projects. I’m currently querying a horror fantasy book, also with vampire-esque creatures, about Alzheimer’s, caregiving, and monsters. I’m also working on revisions and rewrites for a dark fantasy about home, death, and growing up. I publish weekly on my websites, Byline or By Crook and At Home Pro Writers. Byline is my author site where readers can find updates about stories I’m working on and find links to my published work. At Home Pro Writers is my site for helping writers become better at their craft.

In the coming months, readers can find my stories in tons of places! I have a nonfiction piece out in the October horror issue of The Writer on writing thematic horror (like “The Black and White”). I also have a dark fantasy novelette, “To Carve Home in Your Bones,” coming out from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in their Nov/Dec 2022 issue. The novelette is about a shipwrecked swim team trying to make a home in a world where trauma monsters burst from your skin—it’s a doozy! I also have a short story coming out in Interzone Issue #295 called “Building Blocks” about home, self-identity, and what we do for things we want. I also write a monthly horror short fiction and poetry review series for Tor Nightfire called “Into the Night” and review books monthly for Lightspeed Magazine.

I wrote this story over a late-winter weekend spent in a tiny cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was warm enough to rain the whole time but cold enough that there was still ice and snow along the shore. I really wanted to encapsulate part of that weekend—the juxtaposition of sand and snow, the awe of a lake that’s trying its best to be an ocean—Lake Michigan is a magical place for me.

Early in the story I realized I would be weaving between the past and the present, and that’s when I started to get curious about the structure. In retrospect, deciding to label each section as a step helped keep me organized in a way that I might not have been able to otherwise. I wrote by going back and forth between two documents, one with the steps listed in a chronological order so I could see what parts might be missing, and the other document with the story in the order it felt more natural to tell it—much the way you see it now.

The most stressful part of writing this story was when I’d discover a step that made sense chronologically, and then have to figure out where in the non-chronological telling it might make most sense for the reader.

The strongest emotions I pulled from this were desperation and yearning to see the world in a new way—I figure those are the “other ways of knowing” from the title, and natural companions of the sea. Were you trying to focus on these emotions in particular, or did I completely miss what you were going for?

I was hoping to leave the reader with hope and yearning, and perhaps a grief that hasn’t gone away, but has changed, and left the narrator changed.

Mami Wata’s presence in this story felt to me like the sea as seen from the shore, vast and cool and mysterious. What led you to make her such a strong presence in it?

This is an interesting question! I’ve had a Mami Wata story lurking in my bones for a minute. When I started writing I didn’t know this would be the one. though. The first working title was ‘something, something, sea-witch’ actually, and at first I was thinking it would be an Ursula-type figure that the main character beseeched. But as the tone of the story solidified, I realized it needed to be a benevolent figure, and Mami Wata fell into place naturally.

There’s a strong current here that no matter how much we long to escape the world we’re in or find a better one, we can’t wait for it to come to us; that, like water, we have to shape the world to us. Did you have this consciously in mind when you were writing, and is there anything else you were hoping to get across with the story?

Current. I see what you did there.

Ah, but seriously you flatter me! I love that this is what you pulled from the story. I’d be lying if I said that was consciously in my head as I was writing. I was very focused on balancing grief and hope in this story, and I think you need both, in a way, to begin to enact change on the world around you. A dissatisfaction with the way things are and a strong belief that there can be something different. So I think that connection makes sense.

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?

I am shin deep in drafting a novella right now, and there’s a first draft of a dark fantasy weird western that’s been giving me the side eye for a few months (I’m coming back to you, I promise). But really my heart is in short fiction. I have a feverish flash story coming out later this year at The Deadlands as well as a story featuring a different sort of grief and heartbreak forthcoming at Baffling Magazine.

This story was first written as a story-within-a-story in an unpublished novel, entitled One & Zero; Zero & One, which is set in an entirely digitized “post-singularity” society and is exploring what it means to have a society in which, in some sense, every person is also a number. Although the primary characters of the book are probably not Jewish, there is an undercurrent of Judaism in the book (and a Jewish subculture within the society), and I wrote this story to show some of the ways that Jewish lore (in this case, the Talmud) had been adapted to this very different society.

To me, this reads like a story AIs might tell, especially given the way that Lemmas Zero and One echo binary code. How did this structure speak to you in the writing?

It is exactly that! This story is “hidden lore” inside the aforementioned novel’s text—the society of algorithms hides its historical connections to Judaism, in much the same way that Christian society obfuscates and oppresses Jewish narratives. So this is a Jewish story, but at the same time, the algorithms have retold it in a way that makes sense to them.

(For the curious, the two lemmas of the story are drawn directly from the Talmud, with minor alterations. So my assumption is that the Talmud must still be around in this future society, but of course the dominant culture is adapting it in their own ways.)

The story’s recursive frame struck me as an awesome choice for the telling, and it left me with the sense that it ties the whole thing around the concept of singularity, especially when you consider the way singularities work in black holes. What led you to unfold the story like this?

Since the core premise of the framing novel is “what does it mean if a person is an algorithm or an algorithm is a person?” it’s playing with that. To an algorithmic consciousness, maybe the basic unit of meaning is inherently a recursive loop, in the way that we as concrete beings start our reason with concrete “objects,” “ideas,” and “rules.” So when algorithms tell stories, perhaps instead of starting with introducing the characters or the setting (the “objects”) they would start with the cycles and the loops.

I found the algorithm’s character comforting in the way it was depicted—so often synthetic life is depicted as emotionless—and almost angelic in its faintly weird, detached manner. Was there anything in particular that led you to include the algorithm in this way?

Since in its original context the story is something that is told by algorithms, to algorithms, I thought it was important to retell the story in such a way that it centers the algorithm and its experience. To them, “foxes” and “fishes” are mythical creatures, like dragons or fairies, and to them, of course what these benighted creatures from the dark ages need is for a right-thinking algorithm to come and explain to them how math works.

To someone who isn’t in the privileged class of algorithms, this might come off as grating or frustrating, of course. But they’re not really the intended audience.

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?

I have a bunch of novel-length and longer projects that I can’t talk too much about because they haven’t sold yet! (Although I did cheat a bit and talk about one of them above.) I also have a short story “How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Destroyed the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly” coming out with Tor.com at some point, and two flash stories coming out with Lightspeed at some probably-slightly-sooner point.

Meche, the protagonist in “The Memory of Chemistry,” first appeared in my novel, Ink—an immigration dystopia originally issued in 2012 and reissued by Rosarium Publishing in 2018. Her character is, in fact, a reader favorite, and over the years a number of them have expressed interest in finding out what happened to her after the events of the book. I’ve always resisted writing a sequel, to be honest, because what follows dystopia is the unbelievably hard work of living.

But at a friend’s urging, I decided to write a prequel story focused on what made Meche who she was in the novel—a ferociously smart and self-possessed chemist who used her science as a form of resistance. Still (as she did while I was writing Ink) Meche wanted to take her story somewhere other than what I had first imagined. So I followed.

It turns out both Meche and I wanted to explore the emotional landscape of aging. How you cross a threshold after which, no matter how innovative or brilliant you are at your craft, no matter how deep your activism, no matter how rich the well of your experience—you will be defined, and invisibilized, by your age. So I set out to do the unpardonable to a favorite character: to let her get old and see her.

Chemistry is a very strong theme throughout this story, with sharp looks at how it can be a mechanism of art, freedom, and destruction. What led you to look at chemistry through this lens?

There’s always magic in my stories, and chemistry is magic. At one level, its processes demand as much ceremony and discipline, as much arcane knowledge, and the same kind of will and curiosity as the most complex imaginary magical system. At another level, it is a very ordinary form of magic—without barriers, and accessible to anyone who bakes, cooks, cleans. It is a science that appeals to me for this very reason—everyone can perform acts of chemical magic.

This story doesn’t shy away from politics, considering the emphasis it puts on revolution and change, and especially not the dark political clouds over the United States these days—and at the same time, the story deals with it in terms of anticipation or as memory. Was that your first choice during writing, or was it something that developed, or something else entirely?

In the process of writing, the story turned into both prequel and sequel, undoubtedly because I am—like Meche—an aging Latina in this country at this precise moment in history. We grapple with trauma. We fight in what ways we can for what we love. We grieve for what we’ve lost and for what cannot be reclaimed. We have long memories, in a society that insists on short ones.

And we live with our ghosts.

You tied the story tightly around insects. Beyond the clearer relations of luciferase and belief, where did the relationship between insects, chemistry, and this story manifest for you?

It started with bees, their uniquely transformative work and the astonishingly preservative nature of what results from that work. The other insects followed.

It’s always intrigued me that insects—creatures we rarely think about except when we are hellbent on exterminating them—are the repository of so much folk belief. They’re divine messengers, symbols of soul or scourge, portends of death and new beginnings. It’s no coincidence that, in our day and age, immigrants are represented by the monarch butterfly, which flies as far as 3,000 miles across the continental Americas to reach home.

Sadly, we have been less attentive to insects and the integral part they play in the wellbeing of our world than we should have been. According to reports, a third of all insect species are endangered. The total mass of insects has declined so precipitously that the data suggests they will vanish within a century, impacting the ecosystems in which they are essential—which is every ecosystem.

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?

One of my stories is upcoming in the anthology Dreams for a Broken World, edited by Julie C. Day and Ellen Meeropol. The anthology benefits the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which aids children in the U.S. whose parents are targeted progressive activists or who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities.

Thank you! I’m so happy to be published in Fantasy Magazine!

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, is a natural harbinger of fresh starts. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wistful for holidays that embodied that kind of connection to the earth and her rhythms, particularly around the 1st of January, which can be incredibly cold, dark and uninspiring to me (especially in the UK), while Nowruz, which I look forward to, takes place on the Spring Equinox with all the warmth and promise that should welcome a new beginning. It makes complete sense to me that the ancient Persian world would position itself around it, and also that the cultures historically influenced by Iran should even today have incredible stories and rituals marking the day. Growing up we commemorated Nowruz, as many Shia Muslims in Pakistan do. I think about Nowruz at the end of winter every year and I often marvel at how, even in countries closer to the culture celebrating it, it’s not always marked. Pakistan, where I’m from, is a neighbor of Iran, and historically Nowruz has been celebrated by Muslims in the Indian subcontinent harking back to Mughal times. But I feel like for various reasons even the people around me who marked it have to struggle to keep it alive now, as our lives contort to accommodate increasingly frenzied urban function. Happily, it is still alive and flourishing in Iran, Azerbaijan, and other Central Asian countries. I imagine festivals similar to Nowruz anywhere in the world contribute significantly to mental wellness. We could use a lot more community, wholesome ritual, and connection to intergenerational traditions that go back centuries. These are things I think about more and more.

As far as the story’s premise goes, I was inspired by my family. My child is three, and I found myself discussing a folktale with her. I had just finished reading it as it was in the book, and I asked her what she would have done had she been in the character’s shoes. And she gave a very different answer than both the one I was thinking of and the one in the book. I recall my own mother discussing fairy tales with me that were problematic. It is key to traditions of oral storytellers that the story responds to the audience, and each generation is a little different, leading to a different encounter between the storyteller and the audience.

I was warmed by what the protagonist’s mother said early on about the kinds of rules in stories, and the worlds they aspire to. So many stories exist to reinforce only one particular truth. What kind of stories do you think are especially necessary now to tell other truths and aspirations?

Thank you! I very much concur with the mother in that there are ideas built into the story that don’t necessarily do much to challenge a flawed narrative. You can have stories about how hatred and othering is bad, and have them demonstrate it in action to make a point, but it doesn’t necessarily shift things if the starting point is always hateful by default.

I feel stories with blueprints that don’t rely on the othering of anyone are sorely needed. I also personally feel I’d love to see more climate change stories. I would also say stories where there is less emphasis on a single Chosen One figure who changes things could open the way to stories exploring community in action and the ways real change can occur.

I don’t know what kind of stories, exactly, are especially necessary, but I would say all authors and storytellers are essential to this craft, and that we must work to remove obstacles that prevent us from hearing as many of them as possible. There are as many of these essential stories existing as there are people, so I wouldn’t be able to say which ones out of them are more necessary without marginalising someone.

Not long ago there was discourse about whether stories have to have conflict. Nane’s belief that they need “the betrayal, the enemy, the danger” strongly reminded me of that. Is that a theme you were aiming for in this story, or did you have other things in mind here?

Yes, that is what I was drawing on! I’ve never been to any big writerly workshop, and all my learning on these issues comes from reading opinions much more experienced and well-read writers hold forth on. I think a lot of us (myself included) do love a story with betrayal, enemy, danger, but it’s not the only way.

I’m also interested in how automated storytelling has revealed the dangers of an over-reliance on a single pattern. In automated learning, a large amount of data is used by AI to make content based on templates provided by humans. These templates to some extent govern the structure the AI will give to the story. The AI will not come up with much outside the limitations of the template.

If a template explores violence and hatred to grapple with these traumas, that can be empowering, cathartic, necessary. But when all available templates feed our human storytelling with some manifestation of trauma, will a hopeful futurism ever be generated?

I think about this, and how in my opinion early creations and interpretations of myths and religions were useful tools to make sense of the self and the world. But what happens when the traumas that metaphor and myth evolved to teach us to flee instead become permanent templates we never escape from? If the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood crosses over to become a default in-built element of reality? If a conquering hero of myth never escapes the template and manifests in us ourselves never being able to put down our weapons?

When the protagonist’s mother goes against the patterns of the stories commonly told around her, she does so to create templates of love and hope and connection for the next generation. As a mother myself, I can’t argue with that, and that’s what I had the characters draw out and talk about for me in the story.

Resistance is a timeless subject, and there’s a lot of resistance here—from the protagonist pushing back against the idea that there’s only one way for a story to go, to the notion that stories need pain and harshness to be “true.” But the world is made of stories. How have you used, or plan to use, stories to resist that idea of truth?

I don’t think I’ve really used stories to resist this idea yet. The first story I wrote that got published, called “Secrets of the Kath,” contains a lot of violence. I considered it important to not “invisibilise” the darkness of the issues I was writing about. I feel it was the right choice for that story.

When I use storytelling, I don’t want to shy away from the harshness. To some extent, it is an unfortunate inheritance I have to deal with. The person I am, I will have to bring to life stories containing pain. At the same time I also want to explore the logical end of a world that has grown tired of cruelty and builds itself anew in unexpected, interesting ways, with more imaginative and hopeful hearts. The best of stories for me is a person connecting with their whole self and knowing who they are. I feel like this is the most high of stakes. Currently I plan to use stories to depict the use of stories in this direction.

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?

My Future Worlds Prize shortlisted novel is a work in progress right now. It has a lot in common with this short story in that it explores in many different ways what stories can give us. It follows a magic box that opens up to tell any story from the corpus of folktale and tradition that the audience needs to hear. I say “needs” because this is what I believe—there are stories we just need to hear that direct us to solutions, platitudes, thought patterns, that the oral storytellers of all our ancient cultures were so skilled at putting together and delivering. I have some other stuff on the way, and the best way to stay in the loop is through my Twitter @FatimaTaqvi.

I also host a podcast called “Saying the Unsayable” where I talk to authors and editors about the facets of reality they depict through the means of speculative fiction. It has a Twitter account @Say_the_Unsay.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you, I’m so delighted! I had the scene of a mother and a mermaid daughter pop into my brain a while ago. I set it aside for a few years, but when I started talking with my friends who were becoming new moms and hearing what the adjustment was like for them, the scene started bubbling up again. But it wasn’t until I took a writing class with Ploi Pirapokin, who encouraged us to follow your first idea, that I finally buckled up and banged out a working draft. By then, I think my brain had enough time to stew about postpartum mental health, how shame operates in East Asian communities, and how community support can be healing.

The concept of the story feels so rich to me. Is this particular expression of the mermaid-child original to you, or are you riffing off existing folktales? Either way, did folktales influence how you approached the story?

It’s funny because mermaids are popularly depicted as magically girlish, or seductive sirens. But I’ve always thought that evolutionarily, mermaids probably wouldn’t look like a traditionally beautiful woman. Like, can you imagine having long hair in the water while you’re swimming, or trying to hunt? It would be so inconvenient. I like to think that if mermaids were real, they would be apex predators instead. I imagined Pearl would fit the predator-build instead of the Little-Mermaid-build.

To me, this story was taut with the fear of being thrust into a situation that you’re completely unprepared for, and the cold indifference of reality as a whole. Were these the sort of emotions you hoped it would elicit?

For a woman like Li Shing, I empathized a lot with her fear and shame. I thought about how those emotions would limit her perception of other people and the world around her, and how that was part of the tragedy for Li Shing and this family.

Between Li Shing’s need to see Pearl as a monster and all the years she spent desperately trying to hide the truth only to find that nobody else shared her view at the end, I got a strong sense of metaphor—it would be easy to read Pearl as a stand-in for a queer person, for instance, in an unwelcoming family. Did you have that in mind while you put this together?

What I love about reading is how people can get different interpretations from stories, so I don’t want to be a party-pooper and take that away from anyone! But one of the other things I was definitely thinking about was Pearl’s life and her inner world, and how those were fully realized and running parallel to Li Shing’s even though we never get narrative insight into Pearl’s. Sometimes I imagined writing a draft from Pearl’s perspective and seeing how that would change the story.

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?

Right now, I’m working on drafts of speculative short stories about Asian-American experiences. Hopefully, I can find homes for them in the future!

Thank you so much! I’ve been reading Fantasy Magazine for years and I’m so excited to see my work here among all these incredible stories.

I’m part of a writing group with two friends from college, and sometime last year we chose the prompt “Illusion.” I started thinking about my time at Yale, and how we all presented these glowing, successful versions of ourselves when we first got to campus, not deliberate illusions, but subconscious ones. With that mental image in my head, I sat down and wrote the first few paragraphs of “How to Make a Man Love You,” and the rest of the story grew from there.

I thought it was an interesting choice to have this from the perspective of the man who’s being affected by the love potions, rather than the woman who’s instigating the whole thing. Did you have it set up as this perspective from the beginning, and what led you to tell the story like this?

I had the story set up like this from the beginning, because I wanted the illusion to be present for both Zayyan and the reader. I wanted to write a story about what happens, not when an illusion is first created, but when it’s peeled back and we see the truth for the first time. To do that, I knew I needed to make it Zayyan’s story, not Cecilia’s.

A big theme I picked up from this story is that there is, in fact, no such thing as love at first sight—in the absence of mind-affecting potions, of course—and that relationships need constant maintenance to be successful. Was that what you were driving for while you were writing it, or did you have other themes at the front of your mind?

I think that was definitely a part of it, but the main theme on my mind was this idea of illusion versus truth.

When you first fall in love with someone, you’re falling in love with your mental picture of who they are, which is rarely a perfectly accurate picture. And as you get to know them more and more, you have to start accepting who they really are instead of superimposing your own illusions onto them.

At the same time, though, you need to keep some illusions to stay happy in a long-term relationship. Or perhaps not illusions, but at least hope, or optimism. You have to see the person you love as the best possible version of themselves, in order to keep the magic alive.

I’ve always thought that was such an interesting contradiction, that need to see your partner for who they truly are, and yet also see them as someone extraordinary.

This story, to me, is filled with issues of consent—it’s arguable that Zayyan’s only real choice came at the very end—and traversing some very thick weeds; if the situation had been reversed, if Zayyan had been regularly dosing Cecilia with love potions, the story would have read very differently. How did you navigate the issues here during writing?

That’s a great question. I think feeding someone a love potion without their consent, regardless of the genders at play, would be an inexcusable act. There’s no excuse for what Cecilia did to Zayyan. I didn’t intend for the ending to exonerate her for that.

My intention was to focus, instead, on Zayyan’s choices once he realized what was going on. Given this impossible situation, what would he do? I don’t think there’s necessarily a right answer. He could have left her, he could have stayed with her but stopped taking the potions, or he could have made the choice he did, and any of the three, I think, would have been a difficult but justifiable decision.

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?

I have stories forthcoming in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, and Nightmare Magazine. I’m also revising a YA fantasy novel about a watercolor painter who wants to become a magician.

Delighted to be here, thanks for having me! The story started with a sketch of the first sentence, written down in my phone notes: “This is the dead thing becoming the body.” I realized this was more than a writing exercise when I started writing the dialogue for Chris—the first juxtaposition of the hollow prose and the extremely online dialogue was the kernel from which everything sprouted. I knew from the beginning that this was going to be a story about contrasts, and it was very deliberately a thesis about how comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. The rule I followed while writing it was, “it had to be funny, and it had to be morbid as all hell.” It’s about demons and it’s about mall pretzels. It’s about dying on prom night and having to wear your terrible suit forever. It’s about resurrection and going to Target. These are all the same thing.

Between the casual ordinariness of resurrection in this world and the way that the afterlife is shown as an extension of the ordinary, this story struck me as being about the incorporation of the afterlife into the system—that even in death, you can’t run from capitalism. Was that a theme you were going for here, or am I completely off base?

I think in a world where death is just a state change, we would absolutely turn the dead into one of the cogs in the machinery of capitalism, a resource to be utilized by the living, and this story takes that idea to that logical conclusion. I was inspired by the classic idea of “necromancer resurrects skeletons/zombies to do their bidding”—great, now what if it’s just the whole guy you grab, and everything that the guy knows? I was also thinking a lot about what death means in a narrative, actually—because a death in a story isn’t a death in reality. Death in the story is less about actual death and more about being taken off the game board. A death in a story means now you are something that every other character can use for character development. But now Chris is back, and he’s no longer a memory.

What really got me about the way of this world is that, even with an objectively verified afterlife, angels, and demons, there is still no “just world,” and the indifferent cruelty of life extends to who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Were you making a comment on the just world fallacy here, or did you approach the setup from another direction?

I was! I’m glad you noticed! Everyone in this world gets exactly what their emotional state dictates that they deserve (which has some particularly weird implications)! How you feel about the actions that lead to your death matter more than the outcomes of those actions. Death in this world isn’t about deserving, or moving on; it’s about being given the epilogue that you assumed would be yours. Any justice that the characters get within this story is meted out by their own hands. In some ways the commentary that I’m making here is the concept that if there is no just world, then it’s up to you to create your own just world. There’s not all that much theology in this—this borrows a lot of the language of Christianity to make that point, which was a purposeful choice because America is pretty saturated with Christian imagery in pop culture.

Angelica’s plan to fix everything made me think of the hollowness of revenge, causing more pain to others because the person responsible can’t be touched, and how it’s juxtaposed with “justice” here. Did you think of this as a revenge story, or did it come out of another frame entirely?

I like the revenge framework you’ve proposed—I didn’t even think about that in juxtaposition with justice, but you’re completely right. The framework that I always considered it within was that of dissecting and moving on from an inexplicable tragedy. There was a horrible, unexplainable event that altered the trajectory of both Chris and Angelica’s lives, defining their identities in ways they never asked for. It was something awful that Chris did, and something awful that happened to Chris, and something awful that Angelica witnessed and never understood, and now Angelica has unburied the ghost of the event—and the ghost is Chris. And Chris and Angelica both have to reckon with how Chris’s death defined their lives, until they make their peace with it.

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?

I’m working on draft number three of a novel about a kid who really wants to be a wizard and a wizard who really doesn’t want to teach him, and at a future point I have another short story coming out in Lightspeed that I’m really excited about. All my fiction is linked at http://isabel.kim!