I first wrote this story in January 2017 (it’s been a long and winding road). 2017 was Canada’s sesquicentennial, and this story was largely my way to work through some very, very conflicted feelings about “Canada 150.” At the time, I worked in heritage/tourism, and there was a lot of soul-searching involved in balancing the demand for “FUN HAPPY MAPLE SYRUP PARTY, EH?” and the reality that Canada’s colonial settler history and present are pretty terrible.

Just earlier this morning I was walking through the Ramble in Central Park, not thinking about anything in particular, when I was suddenly struck by a memory of a specific smell: the tart, pungent, synthetic scent of the pleather seats on the bus that I rode as a child. And a feeling of nostalgia immediately overwhelmed me. The memory hadn’t been triggered by some similar smell in the air around me. The memory had come to me completely randomly.

I’ve been thinking about the pendulum of history a lot lately; that process of revolution, backlash, correction, and overcorrection, and the way you can see it within a family as much as you can within a nation. This story began to develop for me when I was thinking about the relationship between science and magic, and how folks like to pretend they’re separate things.

The story was very much inspired by me turning fifty and the realization that I was (at least in some ways) at the midpoint of my life. When I conceived the story, it had a far more downbeat ending, but stories are created in the writing, not in the planning. The ending came as a pleasant surprise to me, even more so given my personal circumstances at the time . . .

Vrath is inspired by a famous character from the Indian epic Mahabharata, which was the starting point and inspiration for a part of Upon a Burning Throne. I was going to write him pretty much as he appears in the novel, which is as a strong supporting character. But I wanted to know more about him than I found in the Mahabharata or any other source.