Most of my stories draw heavily on my lived experiences, but this story felt like an exception. While there were elements that came from life—a nightmarish episode with a bear, a beloved aunt, my years living in the mountains—most of it was invented. Flash forward to the present where I’m quarantined in a one-bedroom apartment with my best friend and my girlfriend. I wish I’d written something with a happier ending.

Refuge comes from Australia’s treatment of refugees. For a long time, Australia has been awful to people seeking asylum, especially if they arrive here by boat. For the last twenty or so years, the country has opened and closed island detention centres whose main purpose is to torture its inhabitants. The goal of that torture is to assure people domestically that the government is “strong,” to force the refugees back to the country of their origin, and to frighten other refugees from making the journey to the country.

Scotch whisky is almost certainly the greatest invention of western civilization, but it takes a criminal amount of time to make! I once got to attend a scotch tasting where the host had a 110-year-old bottle with a hand-lettered label. It was magnificent. Clear and bright as a summer’s day. I was transfixed. Here was the physical remains of a hand on a pen, and inside, the liquid distilled from a summer’s grain harvest a century ago. Aged whisky has always been a time capsule.

It started as a novel. This happens sometimes. You can imagine all those footnotes and how they get doled out in a plot line that runs over 300 pages? The main character here never appears in that novel, which was never sent out to editors. It remains one of those projects I stare at and rework and then stare at and then put away. I’m now staring at it again.

I think love is the fundamental vibration of the universe—a mixture of exuberant joy and erotic creation (birds and bees, the earth ripe with spring, the stars in one’s eyes upon seeing one’s lover). Its sensation is a boundary-dissolving limitlessness that allows us to transcend the limited perception of self in order to experience an interconnected merging with other. And to experience love fully means being willing to unwrap the barbed wire of self-protection from our hearts.