Back in the late sixties or early seventies, a small—and now long defunct—animation company asked me to submit some story ideas. The first version of “Gordon” was one of two notions that I wrote up and handed in. They weren’t impressed with either, but my kids had liked “Gordon,” so I tucked it away in my filing cabinet, thinking that someday I might do something more with it. I had no idea it would take more than 30 years.

Songs are something that humans have always taken with us to war: you can’t go on the march with a painting from home in your pack, or bring your entire library of books with you. […] But you can always sing a song.

I’ve always been fascinated by the secondary or even tertiary characters in stories, the characters who don’t get written about. Who may not even get to speak. I have a tendency to write their stories. […] In this case, I was fascinated by a character in a poem: the Abyssinian maid in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

It’s easy to come up with science-fictional cultures that put no great value on long life, for whom immortality would be unpleasant or even obscene. […] A large number of Americans believe they’re going to be immortal up in the sky after they die on Earth. That’s one of the solutions to the problem, and it takes care of certain aspects like expense, real estate, post-mortem effect, and so on.

I had been reading about Japanese calligraphy and the emphasis placed on creating simple yet beautiful strokes. I wanted to apply that kind of philosophy to a dedicated warrior, mixed with the idea of having a palette of different colored swords.

The idea originated from a number of elements that all came together into this singular idea. The first was a TED talk by Benjamin Zander where he discusses music and passion. At one point he plays two notes and says the job of the C note is to make the B note sound sad. I immediately was struck by a parallel to writing, where we use various prose elements for a specific effect.

Neverland was before Pan; Neverland will be after Pan. There are other routes to the second star on the right, but I think most of them are more individual than this one. This was “everybody into the boat, we’re casting off,” and the kids just ran. Pan comes to your window and promises the most wonderful adventures. I wanted to remind people of that, that Neverland was there a long time before Peter fell out of his pram and got himself Lost.

By using a rather familiar set of genre tropes—one with a history almost as long as the genre itself—you really can observe what social issues have moved in and out of the spotlight over time. Gender fluidity, group dynamics, science without oversight—none of these are new topics in science fiction, but I hope I make observations about each in these two stories that at the very least suggest the flavour of the age I’m writing in and for. If not, that’s certainly something to aspire towards.

This story arose out of my interest in the Algonquin myth of the Windigo. I’ve heard different versions, but the basic idea is that people who resort to cannibalism become these amazing super-powered but cursed creatures. The idea of losing your humanity through the acquisition of greater-than-human power is a fascinating idea, especially when I began coupling it with other cannibalistic mythos.

This was the first story I wrote in which I tapped into, and consciously tried to transmute, my personal tragedies and joys. The discovery of how to do that, and really of the need to do that, was my most important creative takeaway from Clarion—second in value only to the deep friendships that began there and that have changed my life and sustained my art.