It’s fascinating to examine the history and cultural relevance of soap, the way we’ve fable-ized its discovery with this violent, erroneous story (the first soaps weren’t discovered after burning bodies in rivers; they were instead made from heating oil and wood ash), the meanings we’ve assigned to it over the centuries. It feels especially poignant now, when so many are meditating daily on contamination and cleanliness.

My partner wanted me to write a story about the moral panic incited by Pokémon (more on that in a minute). I wanted to write a story that drew on my obsessive thoughts about material waste. He and I often discuss the vast amounts of stuff in the world and have wondered more than once about its fate—about for instance, the millions of Funko Pop toys that must be out there, whose destiny will be to flood the landfills. Or they will form an entire stratum upon the surface of the earth, to be studied by future visitors.

How did “Bhatia, PI” originate? What inspirations did you draw on? As a series of conversations, but basically as a joke, and I mean that seriously. The basic premise—of a fraudulent paranormal investigator running a shoestring-budget out-of-parents’-home operation sort of birthed itself as a minor character I created for a sketch webseries that never came […]

I wrote this story as a present for a dear friend. It is about their stuffed fox, who is a proper and upright gentleman and would never stoop to any sort of trickery.

The inspiration for “NeuNet” is actually alluded to directly in the story. I watched a YouTube video (now lost) that suggested that using humans as batteries as in the movie The Matrix would be inefficient; using them as computers would be a far more useful proposition. That idea wriggled around in my brain for a while, until finally bursting out of its chrysalis when I saw the call for submissions.

One of my friends, while reading this story, made a comment about my ability to come up with so many fantasy names. I was all lol, I can’t claim credit. The name of the Jaani gods are the equivalent Nepali words for animals. For example: Biralo—cat, Chitwa—cheetah, Mayur—peacock, Sarpa—snake. Janawar—animal. At one point of my writing journey, I gave myself permission to use Nepali in my fiction; after all, my thoughts, my linguistic understanding of the world, include Nepali so of course my creative lexicon will reflect that.

The story started as a lighthearted writing exercise because I thought it would be fun technical challenge to try and write a story about the multiverse collapsing since the main character slips through multiple realities. I thought it would just be an excuse to allude to a whole multiverse of alternate universes and to use my most delicious prose. Then I wrote the first few paragraphs and realized that this was a love story, a tragedy, and that it was far less lighthearted than I thought it was going to be.

I believe the initial idea came to me after I watched a video on how Singapore imports and dredges sand to shore up its land mass, spawning illegal dredging operations and disputes with neighboring countries. As climate change worsens, these battles for every resource—even sand—will increase. Most Americans still think of climate change as a problem happening somewhere else or in the future, so I thought, why not bring this already existing dystopian climate reality back home?

I’m fascinated by the process of translation from one language to another. I’m fascinated by how a foreign language might have the perfect word for something that has no single word in one’s native tongue (like the Japanese word “komorebi,” which means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees” or the German word “schadenfreude”—both words which have no single-word equivalents in English).

This story is based on a dream I had in spring 2019. A wild, sad dream, where I was desperately trying to jump to the moon. And on the jump, I saw these fantastic colors all around me. Purples and pinks streaking past me. And I remember waking up literally feeling like I was falling. Like I was being pulled into the Earth. It was terrifying and so intense. So naturally, I tried to recreate it with words.