Midland, Texas was the closest big town to where I grew up, and it had a mall, and in that mall there was the Gold Mine—this videogame arcade. Every once in a while, while our moms were shopping, a friend and me would get ditched there with a couple dollars for quarters, which we’d always blow through in about ten seconds. Or, we’d lose them even faster when we put them up for the next game.

I started playing around with the ideas that people believe they know everything about their partners and that they wouldn’t change a thing about them. If such an idealist were confronted with multiple variations of their partner, with one of them being the original, would they be able to find the exact one? Would they be tempted to pick one with more desirable traits than the original?

I had been thinking about mermaid stories for a while, because mermaids are having a real cultural moment right now and I wanted to write something about them. I hit on the idea of doing a “reverse selkie” story: about a human woman who removes her skin to become a fish. But I didn’t have a plot for it. Then I had a dream about salmon, and when I woke up I realized that, for a salmon, a human marriage would be a magical fairy story.

I’ve been reading corporate memos my entire adult life (I think most of us have) but it wasn’t until Covid that those memos started to come off as slightly dark, if only for the things that it was assumed we already knew. Like, if you took a random corporate memo from during the pandemic back in time and showed it to someone from, say, 2010, they’d have a lot of questions. (Also, and this is definitely related, more often than not I find corporate memos inadvertently hilarious.)

My first jobs were in food service and I can still recall every grimy, demoralizing second of it. I worked at a pizza place when I was fourteen that stole wages from me and gave me my first serious burns, cuts, and experiences with sexual harassment. Later, I worked at a Boston Market and I still remember my worst day: two customers screamed at me about rotisserie chicken skin, and an industrial mixer vat of cornbread batter overturned on me. I finished up my shift finding out I got docked $20 because my register drawer was off by $5, and then I slipped in spilled grease and broke my coccyx.

I wanted Mari to connect with the spiritual and with the physical and how they’re interconnected. There’s been so much talk of intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and how the traumas of our ancestors live in us, in these bodies. I believe that if the traumas of our ancestors live in our bodies then the gifts they carried, collective wisdoms and graces, must live in us too. Each of us lives in a body that comes from more complicated histories than we can ever imagine. I wanted to bring some of those stories, or at least those who lived them, into this part of the timeline.

This was a story that I’d been mulling over for some time because I know that one day, probably sooner than I think, I’m going to have to explain to my kids that our own family has some history of addiction. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, quite frankly, but I think fiction offers a starting point of sorts—a way to be honest, but still safely distant at the same time. A lot of the specifics came together when I read Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing.  soldiers.”

This story is one of my most personal ones yet, because it’s very much about how I developed as an author in the first place. While I gained a lot as a young writer from school life in Singapore—particularly by participating in the Writer’s Circle young writers group in junior college—what largely drove me to improve both as a person and a writer has been my participation in fandom.