The story has such a fascinating arc. What was the inspiration for this story? Were there any writers or moments from life you were thinking about actively while writing this? What made you start writing it?

I’d say my main inspiration comes from thinking (maybe too much) about divinity. Not from a particular theological perspective, but more as a general concept. If a creator exists for a world, what are its responsibilities to what it creates? We often think of creators as judges, but I’m interested in the inverse question. How might a creator be judged, and how might it respond to that judgment? Can a god grow and change?

Of course I am using an infinite library story to explore these questions. Definitely influenced by Borges and other infinite library stories I’ve read. Another influence was the film Mother! While I don’t think the film was successful in every sense, what I loved about it was the use of grounded human details as a sort of allegory for this sweeping cosmic story. I think of “Dekar Druid and the Infinite Library” as a messy extended metaphor, where the metaphor starts to break down as the story unfolds. Eventually what the characters are supposed to represent stop mattering, and who they are takes the forefront.

The scene with The Stranger is so enjoyable on the sentence level as well. I have always found scenes with divination of any kind to be difficult to write. How did you manage to strike a balance between the metaphorical elements of the scene and the more immediate things like the now pay me moment at the end? Also why not a name but The Stranger instead?

You know, I think the story’s project helped me a bit. Because I wasn’t trying to be overly concerned with what everything meant, it freed me up to have fun. I had a lot of fun writing that scene, trying to imagine this fictional divination deck and how the Stranger would talk about individual cards. I think the more important thing in the scene is Dekar, how he is responding to the reading. My hope was that readers would find in him an anchor. Is he unsettled? Then something unsettling is definitely happening.

About Stranger: I think she chooses that name in the moment because she wants to keep him at a distance. It is her revenge for what he’s done to her. Her name is hers. Withholding it is an act of agency.

I really enjoyed how much liberty the story takes in moving between the real and the unreal. Do you think this story speaks to the precarious line between the things we make up in literature and what happens around us in real-time?

Oh, for sure. I’m always interested in that boundary. I feel like everyday life slips into the unreal/surreal all the time. It is hard to explain that feeling when it happens, but heightening it in a narrative gets at the approximate experience.

Dekar’s everyday life is very strange. But it is normal to him, even boring. We take for granted the strangeness in our own life. We get used to it.

Do you think it would be unfair to say that Dekar is hallucinating?

I like that reading. No, it’s not unfair.

I can’t help asking after reading the dialogue ‘So many questions to be asked. So many terrible answers’: What is the purpose of terrible answers?

The line is to hint that the rabbit hole goes deeper, and Dekar knows it. He has already reached his limits, and he doesn’t want to know more. He fears it might unravel him. And I think he is right about that, on a very literal level.

What is the next project you’re working on?

Right now I am working on a co-written novel with four other writers. We’re actually working on the third one now, even though the first one will be just coming out (by the time this story gets published). That first novel is called Transmentation | Transience. Our pseudonym is Darkly Lem.

I am also working on another strange god story that I hope to include in an upcoming collection. Hopefully it works out.

Lastly, I’ve been slowly working on a standalone novel. It’s a love story set in an afterlife. Also a road trip story. And there’s a Groundhog Day element to it. That one is probably going to take me a while.