Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

A major part in the conception of this story were the night terrors I used to have as a kid. You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and everything seems different than what it looked like during the day. More sinister, dangerous, and ambiguous. A child’s imagination can do a lot with that (see for example the chilling Skinamarink). When I was little, I was certain that the clothes that rested in piles around my room were monsters that would eat me. At the same time, a lot of grown-up conversations seemed mystical to me. Especially the ones that happened after I went to bed, the ones I could only listen to as whispers through the walls.

Another thing that had always stuck with me were the Ogre’s daughters from the fairy tale Hop-o’-My-Thumb. Sure, the hero of the story and his brothers were saved at the end due to the hero’s actions. But did the girls deserve to be eaten just because the Ogre was their own father? It bothered me that this sacrifice was never addressed.

Somehow the two things came together in my brain and this story was born.

There’s a strong undercurrent here of dealing with abusive parents—like you say, “an ogre preys on children”—not to mention the fear of becoming one’s parents. What led you to approach this in a way that so blends the metaphorical with the actual?

As I said earlier, to me it was also a question of who deserves to escape an abusive household. Who, at the end of the day, deserves to be saved? Why are the ogre’s daughters not given a second thought in the fairy tale (well, the answer is probably because it’s a fairy tale, but still . . .). The protagonist is a queer girl who meets another queer girl, who also deals with an abusive household. Don’t these girls deserve to have the life they want? A home of their own? I tried to make that happen for them in the story since it might not have happened in a typical fairy tale.

What is also true is that people who carry trauma themselves and haven’t addressed it might inadvertently pass it on to their children. I have personal experience with how trauma can shape a parent-child relationship and how it can propagate. I feel that intergenerational trauma is the ogre in real life. It consumes children and when they grow up it consumes their children as well, until someone manages to break the cycle.

It’s not often that I encounter stories written in the second person, but its effect can’t be denied. How do you choose which perspective to write from story to story, and what about this story led you to using second person?

When I started writing in English, in the 2010s, my stories usually came out in third person. Perhaps they were not as personal or I didn’t know the characters very well, but I didn’t question it for some time. I just went with it. As I kept writing, the stories kept demanding to be written in different POVs, like first- or second-person singular, and sometimes second person plural.

Nowadays a perspective doesn’t always come naturally to me. There were stories that I had to rewrite the first few thousand words of using a different POV because something wasn’t working (I am working on a story like that right now). But I am glad to do it even when it’s not easy because each story deserves to have the right POV. First person is very personal. Second person to me is still personal but gives a little breathing room to the characters. Third person is when I want the characters to have secrets that the readers are not privy to.

As I said this story is very personal to me for many reasons. But because it’s also very dark I didn’t want to emphasize that closeness. I wanted the characters to experience that darkness with a bit of privacy, if that makes sense, letting the readers connect the dots.

The terror and monstrousness of hunger is strong in this story, and you’ve dealt with hunger in some of your other works. What is it about this theme that attracts your attention as a foundation for stories?

As someone with a parent who was born at the tail-end of WWII and the beginning of the Greek Civil War, I grew up with stories of hunger and starvation. You could say I was nurtured with those stories, as ironic as that sounds. Greece had gone through an extensive period of famine during WWII which killed hundreds of thousands. The need to feed was a protagonist in many of my family’s stories and it was also the reason for sickness and death among many family members. I believe that’s why it’s such a strong element in my fiction.

Like in fairy tales, food, feeding someone, and being hungry are usually a substitute for love or for the need of love. But that need for love can’t be fulfilled if the person doesn’t have healthy foundations. It becomes a twisted thing, a kind of abuse that seeks to break everything and everyone in order to satisfy itself. This is what is happening in this story. The parents perpetuate the cycle of abuse thinking they are giving love and asking to receive love in return. But their interpretation of the situation is skewed and that subsequently hurts their daughter.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I just finished writing a new novelette! I know this might not sound like much but I am a slow writer and this one had a very challenging structure (it is formatted as a series of Goodreads reviews). Now I just hope I can finish a couple more short stories and then I am not sure. The inner workings of my mind are a mystery.