My first jobs were in food service and I can still recall every grimy, demoralizing second of it. I worked at a pizza place when I was fourteen that stole wages from me and gave me my first serious burns, cuts, and experiences with sexual harassment. Later, I worked at a Boston Market and I still remember my worst day: two customers screamed at me about rotisserie chicken skin, and an industrial mixer vat of cornbread batter overturned on me. I finished up my shift finding out I got docked $20 because my register drawer was off by $5, and then I slipped in spilled grease and broke my coccyx.

I wanted Mari to connect with the spiritual and with the physical and how they’re interconnected. There’s been so much talk of intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, and how the traumas of our ancestors live in us, in these bodies. I believe that if the traumas of our ancestors live in our bodies then the gifts they carried, collective wisdoms and graces, must live in us too. Each of us lives in a body that comes from more complicated histories than we can ever imagine. I wanted to bring some of those stories, or at least those who lived them, into this part of the timeline.

This was a story that I’d been mulling over for some time because I know that one day, probably sooner than I think, I’m going to have to explain to my kids that our own family has some history of addiction. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, quite frankly, but I think fiction offers a starting point of sorts—a way to be honest, but still safely distant at the same time. A lot of the specifics came together when I read Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing.  soldiers.”

This story is one of my most personal ones yet, because it’s very much about how I developed as an author in the first place. While I gained a lot as a young writer from school life in Singapore—particularly by participating in the Writer’s Circle young writers group in junior college—what largely drove me to improve both as a person and a writer has been my participation in fandom.