I love how you’ve delivered this story from eight distinct perspectives each given a heading or role. Was this always imagined as a story in eight facets? What was the writing process like?

This piece began as a challenge I set for myself to tell a story from at least three distinct perspectives. By the time it was finished, it also became a story exploring the different people we become in different relationships. Each section is named after a relationship between Swimmer and someone else in the story. “Son” and “Brother” are both from Swimmer’s perspective, but show who he becomes in his relationship with his father and Boater, who he sees as a sister.

Right away, you had my attention with the title of this story. Can you share with us how you decide on a story’s title and ultimately how you landed on “The Punishing Animal”?

I hate titling. Sometimes if I’m lucky, a title comes to me when I write a phrase and realize that’s what the story is about. That’s what happened here.

Your setting, Pukaskwa, is so powerfully rendered. What was your approach to striking the balance of detail and immersion?

I think it must help that Pukaskwa is a real national park and I’ve been there. When describing settings, I try to balance a place’s most characteristic details with what features my characters would be most likely to notice. For Pukaskwa, that was easy: It’s a temperate rainforest, extremely wet, and a striking, almost unearthly green.

One of my writing mentors once said that stories can fall into two categories—stories that leave you with questions and stories that leave you with answers. The ones that offer answers are a lot easier to write and to read. This story left me with so many questions about what happens next to these characters, about what we as a society can do to avoid this dystopian scenario, about the power and danger of hate, and—out of pure curiosity—questions about loons. Do you have any tips for how to deliver a satisfying conclusion to a story without answering all of your questions?

I am not sure “satisfying” is the right word. I enjoy reading, and try to write, stories that capture the complexity of the real world. Sometimes this means exploring problems I have a lot of feelings about but no clear answers for. In these stories, the conclusion feels like the place by which the story has completed its sketch of the problem, where saying anything more would ring false because it would be trying to offer a solution I know is too simple.

What other work of yours, upcoming or already available, would you like to share with our readers?

If you liked the nature writing in this story, I have a novel called Dry Land that came out from University of Wisconsin Press in 2023. Set in WWI, it follows a young gay forester who discovers he has the magical ability to grow plants—but that nature can’t be saved by magic. You can learn more here: uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/D/Dry-Land.