I try to write people the way I see them in the real world and hope for the best. Louisa reminds me of so many amazing women I know. And if I can’t relate to the characters, I can’t expect the reader to, but I’ve always found it’s a bit of a leap of faith to think that just because I’m relating to a character, that means a reader will, too. Sometimes what I’m struggling to convey comes through, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Hereafter” was my first sojourn into fiction, after a long, exclusive love affair with poetry. I was writing a piece for Synchronic—an anthology of speculative fiction put together by David Gatewood—when I first met Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams.
She was a character in the story I’d outlined, about a platoon fighting a war in another place, another time.

This story started with a voice. Almost literally—I was living in Iowa at the time, in this nice apartment with hardwood floors and lots of light, and at some point the opening sentence just came to mind: “I am ugliness in body and bone, breath and heartbeat.” The voice was very distinct, very compulsive, very easy to write because of how much drive it had. Looking at the piece a number of years after I wrote it, I think the parts where ugliness narrates her experience as ugliness were what came first

If you were only your brain, what about having a body would you look forward to the most? What if your hypothetical body was modular, and you could pick the exact variations you wanted? What if you had to buy everything separately? Would you bother with duplicate kidneys if one would do? What if you could only afford eyes or ears, but not both?

One of the real joys of collaborating is that when one author finds something tricky, it might be something that plays to the strengths of the other writer—or if that’s not the case, any challenges are usually solved by the fresh perspective a collaborator brings. With our collaborations, we each always argue that we’ve done less than half of the work—there’s that magic extra bit that neither of us takes credit for.

I love the ideas of cities as mythic places. And not just cities of myth, but the cities that exist in our world that we build up myths and stories around. I think a good case can be made that New York is the premier mythic city in America. We tell stories about it, we sing songs about what it means to make it there, it has a certain symbolic weight. I wanted to pull the unicorn hunt out of tapestries (although those live in New York as well, at The Cloisters) and into a modern myth.

“The Dark Age” comes entirely from that place of feeling that I was doing exactly what my family needed me to do in order to care and provide for them, and by doing so, I was constantly orbiting them, missing out on all of the moments I so badly longed to witness. To this day, “The Dark Age” takes me back to that place.