Much like happiness and peace are doorways, I see humor as a gateway to expanded consciousness. Humor and laughter expand our spirits outward, while fear and violence force our spirits to cower. In this way humor is transformative, revolutionary, and healing. My hope—as far as the larger market trends go—is that we’re entering a new age of art.

But I have to tell you, the biggest nachas (joy) came from some of my interactions with the kids who read my Gustav Gloom novels for middle-graders. Hearing from a problem reader that they worked their way through the whole series and are better at this book-absorption thing, or being sent a photograph of a potato that’s been painted to resemble my protagonist as school project, is an award of a whole different color.

Style-wise, I wanted to establish early on that the reader is in a sort of epic poem being written by the main character, Anisah, and so I specifically tried to reference the style of Beowulf and The Illiad—stories that generally start with the author calling the audience to attention (“Hwæt!”) or invoking a deity (“Sing in me, Muse,” the first line of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Illiad, which I also cribbed for the title).

I blame authors Phoebe Barton and Derek Künsken. One day on Twitter, they were discussing the various irregularities in English plurals: mouses in houses, oxen in boxen, and hooves on the rooves. With that phrase—hooves on the rooves—I caught the feel of the story all at once. Brilliantly cold midwinter, a deer stalking the night. I’m not sure why. It’s possible that hooves on the rooves made me think of reindeer and my subconscious took a Yuletide leap from there.

The story is a pseudo-sequel to a story I published back in 2010 in Interzone called “Saving Diego” about two estranged friends who meet on Gilder Nefan after a decade of being apart. I’ve always loved that setting and have wished to go back to it forever. Also, at the time I wrote “Still You Linger,” I’d been reading a lot of Carl Jung, specifically his book Man and His Symbols, which explores in great detail the symbology of dream imagery and the collective unconscious.