We’re so happy to have “The Other River” as one of our fantasy stories this month. What was the inspiration for this story?

The first version of the story I wrote for a friendly contest in a writing group. I used a pair of prompts—a set of words to use—from which I picked joint, monolith, stole, Jeep, and perhaps one more; and the idea of something that has lost its symmetry. A flat tire on a Jeep in the desert came to me almost right away, and within a few minutes I had Sarah-Beth and Emmy in mind.

But in that initial story, which was about seven hundred fifty words, it ends with Sarah-Beth deciding that going into the monolith would be a cowardly death, and her perishing outside in the sun. Narratively unsatisfying! My readers pointed out that she didn’t seem ready to die, and I agreed. The trick, of course, was to find a new ending, not simply living or dying.

What drew you to the setting of a desert? What kinds of existential, poetic, or literary exegesis does it render?

The leap to the desert was intuitive! But once I made it, the resonances were there to pick up—the Shelley reference that Sarah-Beth makes, of course, and the obelisk kept bringing me back to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I thought about bringing in explicitly, including a comparison to the Tibetan Book of the Dead that all her countercultural friends would have been into, but I didn’t keep much other than the idea of descent to the underworld via a tomb and subsequent resurrection in another world.

Also, not going to lie, I had Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in my head on repeat as I wrote. It’s a great song about a road trip through the desert, and the hypnotic repeating riff hit me the same way as Sarah-Beth’s verbal riffs. It also served as a signpost of sorts: the song threatens to veer off into a kind of Orientalism that I wanted to steer clear of, which is perhaps one of the reasons I’m not more explicit about the Book of the Dead. I wanted the story to be as concrete and blunt in its assessments as Sarah-Beth herself.

What made you choose the obelisk as a central narrative object in the story? Is there a possibility of seeing this as an encounter with the other in the homonormative world of Sarah-Beth?

Well, “monolith” on the word list, and coming up with the desert Jeep road trip, pretty much gave it to me. Honestly, I’ve been fascinated with Ancient Egypt since my first trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when I was around four or five years old.

Being inside the monolith is very much about Sarah-Beth coming to herself, ridding herself of most of the illusions that she’s accreted as a sort of armor. She’s stone-cold sober for the first time in months, she’s slept well. Her head is clear, and some of that is coming to terms with her relationship with Emmy and her sexuality more generally. She’s given up looking for an easy way out—a doorway that someone else has left for her—and is forced to be herself. And Emmy will always be a part of that.

The ending was so moving. What was the process like to arrive at this moment in the story?

Well, I’d had a first draft that was really just the opening. And it was obvious she had to go into that obelisk, and that the obelisk was death—purification, bringing her to her truest self, as part of that ritual. And the easy endings were “she stays in there and dies,” and “she comes out again, reborn.” And neither of those was satisfying to me. There needed to be a third way.

And at some point, after weeks of banging my head against the metaphorical wall, I thought of two things that fit together.

One was the final image of the oasis—but like so many oases, a mirage. I’d sort of done that in a story before, “The Star Tree,” where the ending didn’t work until I realized that the stars guiding the narrator weren’t taking him anywhere—but he didn’t know that, and he believed. The ending could read as hopeful to those who wanted it that way (the oasis is real), even if I gestured in several ways towards the alternative (the oasis is a mirage).

The other was the idea of “the other river,” one on the other side of the Land of the Dead, and the idea of the far side of that country. And so here’s a character, reborn, on whatever lies beyond the land of the dead—a world that looks strangely like our own, from where Sarah-Beth stands.

Is it our own world? Is the Land of the Dead just another continent on this round, cosmic world? Sarah-Beth doesn’t know, and I’m afraid that I don’t either. But I’m sure we’ve all had moments in our life where the ground has shifted under us and the world seems strange and familiar all at once, and we have to find ourselves before we can take that next step, and I hope that’s the feeling that comes across.

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

I’m not working on much at the moment. Trying to keep my day job in order while going through chemotherapy hasn’t left me a ton of physical or mental energy to work on much of anything—but I just turned in notice at work, and I’ll be taking some time off before looking for a new role, so I’m hoping to spend some time on writing. I’ve got a pile of first-draft stories that need rewriting, and I’m hoping that’ll get me started and back to generating new content.

I’m also thinking about assembling a collection of my published stories; it might be fun to get them all in one place. One of my first writing lessons was Unicorn Variations, a collection by Roger Zelazny, where the headnotes for each story often gave you the genesis of the idea, or some knotty writing problem he had to untangle to make the story work. I’d enjoy the opportunity to write some headnotes of my own!