I love dogs! No, seriously, dogs are the absolute best. I wish I could have one (or five) but I don’t have the space they need, nor the time to give them the attention they deserve. I grew up with dogs—usually golden retrievers, always several in the household at a time—and I miss their silly slobbery faces. I’ve had to settle for cats, for the time being; they’re terrific in their own way, but the loyalty of a cat is a totally different thing.

In the last semester of my BA, I took a writing seminar on taking risks. Our assignments were completely open ended—we were allowed and encouraged to write whatever we wanted, as long as we could point to some sort of risk that we took. I nebulously knew that I wanted to write something in second person, and I started toying with the opening line of “Spaceship Joyride.” I ultimately didn’t write the story during the seminar, but I kept going back to that opening line—I really loved the sound of it.

I had a lot of fun writing the corporate-speak that MacLeish uses. While I haven’t worked in super-big corporations, that sort of language seems to have so penetrated all work spaces that it’s unavoidable. And it’s always eye-rollingly ridiculous. For this story, I tried to imagine how corporations would take advantage of being able to copy (and copyright) human consciousness, and yet I am sure that no matter what changes the empty buzzwords will remain the same.

I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to “Wednesday’s Story,” which ends with Wednesday, one of the personified Days of the week, having committed a crime. I wanted to follow up on that. On the consequences of her actions. But since the purpose of the personified Days is to tell stories, I knew I needed a story for them to tell within that larger story. I didn’t want to return to my old trick of using another reimagined children’s rhyme to frame the larger story around.

Despite being from a big family, I realized I hadn’t written many sibling stories, and I wanted to change that. I loved getting to explore the sisters’ relationship and follow how it changed and grew over the course of this story. The plot grew out of my suspicion of colonization stories, and of the assumption—still prevalent in more science fiction than I’d like—that there’s a non-problematic way to colonize. And, while I admire the ethos of “leave no trace,” I also wanted to explore its limitations.

This story had its roots in something I saw years ago, an article on the strangest things people had ever turned into New York Subway lost and founds. (Caveat: this story originated so long ago, that I may not even be remembering the details of its origin story correctly. Do you think I can turn a lost inspiration into a lost and found?) Anyway, I remember there being a lost and found snake.

I’m mixed Black/white, and grew up with many European fairy tales. I also have a lot of thoughts of my ancestors who were stolen from their homes and enslaved, and their cultures stripped from them, and that cultural knowledge lost for future generations—effects that I grapple with myself. So I identify very much with my witch, Agnes, when she says, “But this food, I made it mine, like House is mine . . . They don’t get to take it, too.” I’m making the European fairy tales and other trappings of colonialism that I’ve inherited one way or another, mine.

The other theme of antisemitic blood libel comes into the story because it is hard to write anything with an even vaguely Eastern European setting involving ostensible human sacrifice while trying to ignore how historically, Jews were often accused of human sacrifice in the region and persecuted accordingly. I was curious if there were any specific links between construction sacrifice types of murder ballads and other folk traditions, and antisemitic blood libel—and I indeed found some folkloristics research about this that’s linked at the end of the story.

At one point the story asks, what if we understand being changed and making change as inextricably entwined? That’s something I’m thinking about a lot and I’d love readers to think about, too. How might we rethink our ideas of change so that we move smoothly from learning to acting without stalling in between? I think about this particularly in conjunction with social media and twenty-four-hour news, which can be useful resources for learning about instances of oppression and injustice, tragedy and disaster.

I would like to see Indigenous science fiction get more recognition and for more attention to be paid to tribally-specific genres. I’m delighted that Reservation Dogs, which contains many speculative elements, has received much-deserved recognition. But I’d also like to see more Indigenous SF adapted for television and movies.