It’s so exciting to return to the Eighth Continent with the Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide! It’s been a little while since the last trip. Can you tell us more about the ways you’re approaching this idea of “dreams” and fantasy in “Dream Destinations”?

One of the central questions I’ve been exploring within these destinations is the idea of dreams, both literal and figurative. There’s a way we live in a dreamworld constantly—both from the daydreams we have about the future (locations we dream of moving to, hopes we have for travels, our wishes for better professions or love lives) to the more mystical experiences of wondering whether, as the Buddhists claim, this world is indeed an illusion. There are also literal dreams, which I find fascinating—from the magical worlds we conjure while asleep to the nightmares that reveal our subconscious fears. Life is incredibly mystical, and one of the paradoxes of being human is that to navigate our lives we constantly must narrow the scope of the larger mystery into “the known.” Throughout these stories, I’m investigating the line between fantasy and reality, our dreams versus waking life, and the known world versus the mystical, with each story functioning around a metaphor. For example, “The Emporiums of Sonom” is playful fabulism on one level—with their dream cathedrals and a second city that exists in a somnambulant world where we rack up dream bills we’re forced to pay off—while on another level, I’m writing about the way our lives work, where we do in fact carry around “the bills” of traumatic or ecstatic events that we then work off across our waking lives. In “Montblau,” while the world contained within music is pure fantasy, I’m also talking about the disappearance of a culture’s elders who have sustained a magical city, and this is a metaphor for globalization and the colonization of old cities, customs, and cultures.

Do you have a scope or overarching “map” for this story series? Has that evolved over time?

There is actually a “secret” map of the continent (which I drew long ago in third grade!) Back then I’d create maps of unknown continents with crazy borders that had spikes or snaked in odd labyrinthine shapes, and I’d give them fun names like Shaskabulla and Ntongi. I loved making those, and I wish I could include a photo here, but they’re packed away in boxes at my parents’ home. What’s fascinating about this is that it was only when I was deep into writing the Tour Guide that I realized I was working on the very same project I began when I was a child—an atlas to magical lands.

In this way, the series has allowed me to take a much more imaginative and wonder-filled approach to fiction. There’s a sense of both fairy tale and fabulism that I normally don’t get to play with in my tech-driven, speculative-fiction stories. It also allows me to tap into the books I loved as a child. I’m half Danish, and I can see the fairy tales and drawings of Halfdan Rasmussen and Ib Spang Olsen inspiring these destinations. Dr. Suess is another inspiration. And this is blended with the adult-fiction fabulists I love, like Italo Calvino and the labyrinths of Borges. In many ways you could say that the maps of these stories are really the maps of my childhood and adult life. As for a literal map, a personal dream “destination” is to team up with an illustrator/graphic comix artist to chart out the borders of this expansive continent for the collection!

All of the stories in this series do a remarkable job of zooming in and out of locations, offering both a vast sense of grandeur and also very particular and often haunting details. Can you share with us your process for deciding when and where to give a panorama versus a close-up?

Thanks so much, this was definitely something I was considering in the editing process. Ultimately, I think a lot of this ends up being intuitive versus a planned decision, but I’m certainly aware of the macro vs micro visions and the need to balance the two. For example, I quickly noticed if I stayed zoomed out for too long, the stories tended to flatten (there’s only so long one can hear about generalized beaches or cafés or arcades before they all become the same). So, the key was to dive in, much like if one was searching on Google Maps—you zoom in to street level, to hotel-room level, and one step further to the landscapes within the lives of the tourists themselves—our internal maps of hopes and dreams, our secret despairs, our personalized joys. This zooming in has been one of the joys of writing these stories, because I find the cities surprise me with souvenirs of my own life. Without planning to, I’m suddenly writing about my wish for paradise, or my hopes and fears around love or parenting. In this way, the writing process is very much akin to exploring a new land. I don’t go in with a preconceived plan or plot—a theme, yes—but more than that is a mystery to me. I never outline, I simply begin writing and then see what comes next. Hmmm, what happens if we turn down this street, what’s inside this store, look a beach, let’s go check it out! From this exploration, the story and themes of the destination appear, almost entirely like the adventure of discovering a brand new country.

Speaking of themes, are these stories meant to be read in any particular order, or do you mean them to stand alone? Are there specific thematic or narrative threads that readers may find exploring all of them together?

The idea of “order” has been an interesting challenge given the experimental nature of this collection. It’s both a novel in stories while simultaneously being a collection of prose poems. There aren’t central characters, and the point of view is this fun fourth person (we) collective address to the reader (you). You might say that it’s the invisible guidebook writers who are the central characters—or perhaps it’s us, the implied travelers (the reader) who are just as much the central characters of the book. I do think the stories can be read independently and they are meant to be able to stand alone. Ideally you could flip through the collection, open any location, and be able to read the book in that way, but by reading them grouped together as “sections,” they add up to a bigger emotional whole. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Michael Martone’s Michael Martone are perhaps the closest models to this kind of approach.

Grouping stories together by themes has been a model for assembling the larger book. I’m often playing around and returning to topics like awe, childhood wonder and terror, nostalgia, longing, environmentalism, and the push/pull between accepting the beauty of the present moment versus longing for something other than now. Perhaps, I’m also examining our urge toward adventure, particularly if we expand adventure to both mean literal travel around the globe to metaphorically traversing a distance as small as the space between you and your partner.

Finally, what’s next for the Eighth Continent and for you?

The Eighth Continent is nearing completion and has grown to be encyclopedic (there’s a new series about musical instruments, another on the artists of the Eighth Continent, anthropological explorations of disappearing indigenous cultures, games and their magical rules, and yet another on exotic hallucinogenic plants). Once completed, I’ll be excited to find the right home for the book, ideally teaming up with an innovative publisher who’s interested in avant-garde book design. I’m thinking here of the beautiful experiments McSweeney’s, Drawn & Quarterly, and Hingston & Olsen produce. In my dreams I see the collection being sold with an old-school lock and key, a kind of anachronistic Neverending Story-style affair. So, yes, next is finding the right home for the collection and uniting with a visionary team.

Alongside this book, I’m finishing my third short story collection, which is in the vein of my first two books, Children of the New World and Universal Love. The new collection shares some of the near-future themes of those collections, but dives into what I might call spiritual speculative fiction, where I’m exploring questions of what consciousness is, what happens when we die, and the more mystical elements of world spirituality. There are Buddhist escape rooms where you use virtual reality headsets and attempt to break out of the psychological hang-ups that’ve kept us trapped for decades, Reincarnation Dealers selling off future incarnations on the sly, and mass enlightenment and the ensuing problems that illumination causes. I’ve also recently finished my first novel and have been working on adaptations of my stories to film/TV. It’s been a busy and productive time, and a real joy to dive into all the various projects.