The author has requested that a spoiler alert be mentioned at the beginning of the interview.

This is such a thinking and engaging story. What inspired you to write this story?

Thank you for the compliment; I’m honored.

I wrote the first draft at a writing retreat. I’d employed a brainstorming exercise Larissa Lai taught me years ago, and came up with the self-generated prompt words ill-fitting, nautical, undertaker, dandle, and foreign. Then I just started writing. Sometimes I get into a “trance” or “groove” where the sentences just sort of appear on the paper without my really understanding why. That’s usually a sign that my unconscious mind is working overtime, and it’s up to me later to figure out what the heck it was trying to tell me. The second draft obviously involved a lot more crafting, and the theme (to the extent that there is a theme) didn’t appear until then. The only thing I know for sure is that I wanted to write something about death, and that this time ’round, death was more of a comma than a period.

I am fascinated with the idea of embalming. According to you is it an art or a technology?

That’s an intriguing question, since the word “technology” derives from the ancient Greek tekhne, literally meaning “art.” But I take you to intend “technology” to mean “tools engineered to achieve a concrete result,” and “art” to mean “a communication of an emotional reality.” In those senses, of course, it’s both. Embalming is clearly a set of tools that achieves remarkable results in the preservation of bodies, but of course its intention is a communication—either to ourselves or to the gods—of our feelings about death and eternity. C. S. Lewis said (I’m paraphrasing here) that we are animals, and therefore live in time, but that we are also partially divine, and therefore contain an awareness of eternity, and that it is this contradiction that powers most of our emotional and intellectual lives. The decay of the body is perhaps the most brutal reminder of time, and preserving it is therefore an attempt to reconcile those two things. (Disclaimer: there’s no actual embalming in this story (in fact it’s prohibited), and I know very little about how it’s done.)

What was the more challenging part of writing this story?

As mentioned above, the first draft was written more-or-less in a fever, which is “easy” in the sense that it involves almost no cogitation or planning, but just pure output. But it’s also “hard” in the sense that it’s like driving at night with no headlights or running with your eyes closed: it’s kind of terrifying. (This is especially true because on previous occasions when I have channeled this unconscious creative part of my brain, what has come out has sometimes been horrifying, making me wonder who the heck I really am.) But as with almost everything I’ve written, it was the second draft that really taught me what was going on. The very last line wasn’t added until that second draft.

I absolutely loved the ending. Why this particular ending?

Initially I’d thought that Gallam’s dream was simply going to be a way of solving his dilemma of how to drape the garment, and communicating the quest-reality of the deceased and his crew to the reader. But once he, and therefore I, was immersed in that reality, I realized that Gallam could not emerge from it without being fundamentally changed. The vision is so vibrant and urgent, compared to Gallam’s own life, that he would have to be tempted to join the quest—and the ending would have to be either his acceptance or his refusal of that invitation. The reader of fiction, the viewer of art, the audience of film, is invited to join in a new reality, and some of us join it wholeheartedly, with no reservations and no regrets. I suppose Gallam is the fan I would be, if I had the courage.

Is there a project you are working on currently? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

I’m always interested in voicing, and so I’m always looking for different ways to tell a story. I’m especially drawn to “negative space,” where the narrative forces the reader to imagine/supply much of the story (or at least key aspects of it) themselves. I have various “experiments” in the works, but I have no idea when any of them will come to fruition. (My process often takes a long time, and there are drafts and fragments I’ve been tinkering with for ten years that still haven’t coalesced.)