These days, I’m drawn to creating new mythologies, like some of what’s in this story. We want to feel we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that our experiences are shared and repeating across time and plane. But the gods and stories of the organized religions I’ve been exposed to haven’t resonated much, so this is my version of that meaning-making.

What is also true is that people who carry trauma themselves and haven’t addressed it might inadvertently pass it on to their children. I have personal experience with how trauma can shape a parent-child relationship and how it can propagate. I feel that intergenerational trauma is the ogre in real life. It consumes children and when they grow up it consumes their children as well.

Writers decant ourselves into books. They are our immortality, our legacy. We hope they will outlast us and spin a connection to people we will never know, as books have connected us to people of the past. Nowadays, we are pretty accustomed to the idea of all the people perishing. But what if all the books went, too?

This is one of my “creature stories,” so the gastor came first. I just kept wondering what an animal would look like if it had evolved to live in space. I honestly just had fun coming up with new physiological adaptations, and I even consulted my sister, who studies atmospheric science, for some help.

There are many kinds of witches, some old, some young, some beautiful, others “grotesque” but what all of them share is that they don’t give a single fuck about your opinion and don’t waste time wondering if they should. And isn’t that magnetic? A person who is so self-possessed that it becomes a kind of magic?

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.