I think we—humans collectively, I mean—have just about understood that we have a responsibility towards the Earth. I also think there’s a subset of people who believe the problem could be solved if we just shifted our exploitation of our environment outwards—to the moon, to Mars, to the asteroid belt. They’re wrong.

Fungi are wonderful. There’s something so unsettling and yet beautiful about them. There’s an allure in the spores, the feeding off dead matter, the variety of forms. In a past life, before I became a writer, I was a biologist. I loved the breadth and scope of life on this planet. I think fungi have an appeal to people because they’re so alien to our human experience.

This story was vaguely fictional when I wrote it in February 2023, but reality quickly lapped me. I’m a literature professor and I am watching universities force professors to use AI to create course materials (usually because “it’s cheaper”). The potential for fascist censorship is horrifying.

The current iteration of AI that everyone is talking about right now isn’t actually “artificial intelligence;” it’s rebranded machine learning, which is very much not new. “AI” is, to me, a marketing scheme, not a technological breakthrough.

Back then, communing with the divine was couched in images or metaphors of violence: you have these accounts of wounds, being pierced or attacked. But such is the nature of divine violence that it’s transformative, illuminating. In the context of this story, though, it’s also shoved up against a more earthly, clinical violence.

I gave my character Sandy a bicycle because riding a bicycle connects you to the landscape you are traversing in a way that driving a car does not. You feel each hill; you rejoice in each valley. You have the time to appreciate the land. When you’re on a bike, you can’t rush the journey.

You have to laugh to keep from crying—policing injustice, ghosts, family estrangement, adultification, systemic racism—none of that is funny. But hard things are made more bearable by sprouting a little seed of joy in your heart and watering it with laughter at the absurdity of every unfair thing.

Something I have been thinking much about is human evolution and the way technology has essentially become what defines it, but with it comes climate change, comes war and disasters, comes progress—yet even with that progress, it seems we are always taking two steps forward and two steps back.

The crimes that the world heaps upon women, the cycle of violence and beatification—there’s nothing gorgeous or rich or poetic about that. And at first, I thought that was something the title needed to convey. The evil we’re fighting is banal as fuck and let’s not forget it.

I wrote the first draft of “Babywings” after rereading Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” The older I get, the more magical realism hooks its claws deep into me. Coming at the story through this genre, at a sideways angle, has allowed me to grapple with themes that are, for me, more emotionally challenging.