Before having kids, I expected to love them. I did not expect that love to be so cataclysmic and terrible. I did not realize the universe would hand me a door to the meaning of life in the shape of a little person, or that invisible golden wires would extend from her every twitch and blink and pierce my skin and burrow into my core. Before I had Aviva, the worst the universe could do was kill me, and it was planning to get around to that eventually anyway.

I’m interested in philosophical ideas, and science, and using those things to speculate about what might be, or could have been, or about how what is happening now could be different. But at the core of it, I am interested in what it is to be human. There is so much we don’t understand at all about ourselves—even about something as simple as what it is to be a self, an individual, an entity on this planet relating to other humans, to our environment. Why am I me, and aware of being myself?

Neverland has pirates and mermaids, making it the perfect setting for a story about pirates and mermaids! Especially since the novel assures us that most of the Neverland stories have not been told. But also, for all of its enticements—nothing but play and ongoing adventure!—Neverland is a deeply troubling, terrifying place, more so than the other famed childhood worlds of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia. And that makes it a rich source for stories.

My favorite advice to writers is to wring the emotional reaction from yourself, first. When writing humor, you need to barely stand how witty you’re being; when you’re writing tragedy, you need to weep; when writing horror, you need to be appalled that this monstrous stuff is coming out of you. Hell, if you’re writing a thriller, you need to fear for your characters. Honestly, if you don’t react yourself, if it’s just a technical exercise, no one else is going to care either.

In “Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills,” I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped this ancient, powerful force into a modern context that rendered her pretty powerless. I think it’s her ambiguous nature that made her a good character to follow to a place of vulnerability. Because, yes, ultimately, it’s a story about home and the different things home means to us. Is it where you are or who you’re with? Is it familiarity or discovery, stillness or movement? For me, there’s no easy definition.

Most of my stories draw heavily on my lived experiences, but this story felt like an exception. While there were elements that came from life—a nightmarish episode with a bear, a beloved aunt, my years living in the mountains—most of it was invented. Flash forward to the present where I’m quarantined in a one-bedroom apartment with my best friend and my girlfriend. I wish I’d written something with a happier ending.

Refuge comes from Australia’s treatment of refugees. For a long time, Australia has been awful to people seeking asylum, especially if they arrive here by boat. For the last twenty or so years, the country has opened and closed island detention centres whose main purpose is to torture its inhabitants. The goal of that torture is to assure people domestically that the government is “strong,” to force the refugees back to the country of their origin, and to frighten other refugees from making the journey to the country.

Scotch whisky is almost certainly the greatest invention of western civilization, but it takes a criminal amount of time to make! I once got to attend a scotch tasting where the host had a 110-year-old bottle with a hand-lettered label. It was magnificent. Clear and bright as a summer’s day. I was transfixed. Here was the physical remains of a hand on a pen, and inside, the liquid distilled from a summer’s grain harvest a century ago. Aged whisky has always been a time capsule.

It started as a novel. This happens sometimes. You can imagine all those footnotes and how they get doled out in a plot line that runs over 300 pages? The main character here never appears in that novel, which was never sent out to editors. It remains one of those projects I stare at and rework and then stare at and then put away. I’m now staring at it again.

I think love is the fundamental vibration of the universe—a mixture of exuberant joy and erotic creation (birds and bees, the earth ripe with spring, the stars in one’s eyes upon seeing one’s lover). Its sensation is a boundary-dissolving limitlessness that allows us to transcend the limited perception of self in order to experience an interconnected merging with other. And to experience love fully means being willing to unwrap the barbed wire of self-protection from our hearts.