I’ve always had vivid and strange dreams that don’t map well to interpretation. I’m interested in the idea that dreams are the brain’s way of working out something that is going on in the present by applying past experiences. That makes more sense to me than the idea that a dream of a wind-up toy monster spitting sparks across a backdrop of Georgia O’Keeffe skyscrapers would somehow mean the same thing to everyone.

The relationships between women in folklore seem sadly mapped over the myth of exceptionalism we see so often today — one woman’s the fairest or the kindest, and the others are wicked and cruel. You see so many news stories about how a woman is “the next X” (a replacement for that one elusive position) or a headline with a “vs.” in it, like just having two women existing at the same time means they’re in a standoff.

I’ve always been interested in themes of home and family, since I have spent so much time apart from the place and the people who formed me. I am also well aware of the Indian colonial legacy from 200 years of British rule, and how it shapes us today. As an accidental Indian expatriate living in America, the notion of otherness fascinates me — how we humans distance each other and then attempt to build bridges of connection.

Many of my stories are about a desire to escape, which is simply one of the earliest emotions I recall. I cannot speak about fiction in general but my fiction is based on my life and the people in my life. One of the things that happened when you were a woman, and still happens, is that you exist with a set of limited opportunities. Men, they can go to sea and explore the seven seas, but for a long time in many societies women could not do the same thing.

I started outlining this story back in 2006, when Beijing’s smog problem was nowhere near as severe as it is now. But my body is very sensitive to the surrounding environment, and so when the air quality declined, I could clearly sense changes in me, both physiological and psychological. I was living and working in Beijing’s international trade central business district, in the heart of the city, where conditions were especially crowded, busy, and oppressive.

East Wells is a blend of several towns outside Philadelphia; FAR, far outside Philadelphia. These are tiny places with long traditions of hushed, whispered folklore about “gangs.”

Even with short stories, I design the plot as carefully as a standard-length novel. “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” shares a background with my novel GENE MAPPER, so I only set up the drama for this short story. I enjoyed thinking the way Minami talks.

I tend to sketch my stories out in a rough paragraph form before I start to write. This is something I call a thumbnail sketch, from back in my art school days. The specifics, those I tend to discover as I am writing. This story is a little unusual because it started from a very vivid dream in which my husband had a clone that killed himself. It was unsettling and, being a writer, I started to wonder why a clone would do that.

I wanted to do a story about pirates, Maroons, and Seminoles. I had an image of these folks getting on a boat and making their way to freedom. So after I started putting down notes for the story, I did research and found that what I imagined, Seminoles in the early 1800s did. I also had the pleasure of talking with historian Nicole Ivy, who pointed me toward the Ethiopian Leg Myth.

It started off with the scene of a garden on the Moon popping into my mind. In my imagination, it was not a garden inside a habitat or on a terraformed lunar landscape, but a garden on the airless, lifeless surface. How could you do that? What would it look like? Why would you do that? And the story grew backward and forward from there.