How did “Alterverse” come into being, and what are some of the inspirations behind it?

Thank you for having me! A few years ago, I read an article about the Pacific nation of Tuvalu. This piece of fact emerges in the world of this story—the leadership of Tuvalu announced that it would become the first “digital nation,” in an effort to preserve sovereignty and knowledge of the physical land if the country became uninhabitable due to rising sea levels. I started thinking about what this might look like much further in the future: how technology could be used to preserve and excavate culture that has been lost, but also the reality of how a system like this would be leveraged for profit.

Can you tell us a bit about the story-making process? I’m especially interested in how you selected specific details/setting choices?

I think that what makes this digital world compelling for our narrator and the people that might have built it at first is the ability to almost travel to the past and assemble an identity based on fragments of cultural expression and physical place that would’ve been completely inaccessible otherwise. I wanted to speculate about what might cause a need for this in the future with climate change and physical displacement, but to also think about real moments of cultural displacement and destruction from the past. This made the burning and renovation of the Jaffna library feel like a very natural point of entry into the world.

If you wrote another short story or a novel set in this world, where would you take it? Would you follow the same characters or is there something else in this world you’d want to explore?

It could be interesting to follow this story far off into the future, where maybe the entirety of the world would only exist in these imperfect digital forms. I wonder about how people’s relationship to the Alterverse might change, and who would make the choices about what to keep.

If people liked this story, what else should they read? Do you have any recent authors or stories you’ve enjoyed and would like to recommend?

I am always inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, and recently read Searoad, which is a collection of interconnected short stories that build the world of a small coastal town through the interior lives of different women. Reading it was a really refreshing way to re-encounter her voice and sense of worldbuilding. Some other recent favorites are Liberation Day by George Saunders and salt slow by Julia Armfield.

What have you been working on lately? Is there any exciting news you’d like to share?

My last big piece of work was a collection of five short speculative fiction stories for my senior honors thesis! I’ve been reworking some of the stories into larger pieces and am hoping to start work on a novel in the upcoming year.