“Sarah’s Laugh” builds off such a chilling and sobering concept. There’s so much explored in just a few thousand words from the political elements to the social realities to Sarah and her laugh and beyond. Can you talk about some of the inspirations behind this story?

So a lot of writers are scholars and academics with deep backgrounds in history and sociology. I am not one of them. My approach is much more gestalt, so it’s hard to say what the specific inspirations behind this particular story are because it’s kind of . . . everything. Like a lot of people, my head is buried in news and social media and talks with my neighbors. I’m always in the center of the most politically awkward conversation at the con bar, but I can’t point to too many specific references that inspired this story. It kind of came out of the subconscious soup that paying attention to the world cooks up. I think it’d be dishonest to point to too many specific things because a lot of the things that resonate about this story are inspired by the rhyming spots in history—things that happen over and over again, in slightly different shapes, like injustice, subjugation, rebellion, and liberation.

There is one very specific inspiration that didn’t work out how I wanted it to, but still left a mark on this story. James and Sarah’s last name is in homage to the enslaved blacksmith who led Gabriel’s Rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. He armed and mobilized hundreds of enslaved people across ten counties and three cities. The rebellion failed because two other enslaved people snitched in exchange for their personal freedom, and Gabriel and many of his accomplices were captured and executed. This story begins in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, but in the first draft I wanted to start it in Richmond, and there were a lot of not-so-subtle references to the rebellion. The problem is, I don’t know Richmond at all, and I have very little stomach for writing even righteous violence, which would have been essential, I think.

I did, however, have friends who lived in the Virginia town that Miller’s Square is based on, so I changed the starting point, switched to not-so-subtle-references to a certain ham company, and the only thing that remains of Gabriel in this story is the surname Prosser, which may not even have been his. It was the surname of the man who held him captive. If you read the most recent histories, Gabriel reportedly never used it himself, but he’s still referred to by it often. It’s a nod to the history of rebellion in the state where this story starts, and also to how easy it is to slip wrong details into history if you ask the wrong people or if your lens isn’t wide enough to capture multiple perspectives.

All of the other places mentioned in the story are real, and most of the other names—for example, the Evans mentioned in the title of the in-world infamous treaty—are references to characters in other stories I’ve drafted that are connected to this one.

While you were working on this piece, what elements were planned ahead and which developed more naturally? Were there any aspects of the story or storytelling process that came particularly early while writing it or particularly late?

Honestly, this story was really hard work. The first few drafts were entirely different in tone and content. Much bloodier, much grimmer, less hopeful. Sarah was always involved, but there were very different things happening around her.

I had a lot of trouble structuring the story, getting the events in order and getting the world-building details right without losing the characters. At one point I actually printed the whole story out, cut it up paragraph by paragraph, and sat in a bar and played literary tangrams with the pieces to try and figure out how to make all these mini infodumps of doom into an actual story.

I also cut a lot of violence. My mind’s eye kept creating this image of an itty-bitty girl with ashy knees and big Afro puffs holding a big pink plastic key every time I wrote something gory, and I’d feel a little guilty. Like, does she really need to see all that? Is the blood and terror the most important thing you need to tell here, or is there something else you should be focusing on?

The first page I wrote was the Richmond wall getting Laughed down, and these violent, martial scenes were sprouting from that, but it all felt wrong. The more I thought, the more I realized that the first story behind any violent movement or upheaval is all the quiet, intentional anomalies that lead to it. For example, Gabriel, enslaved by Prosser, was a rarity among Virginians even before he led his rebellion. He was literate, privileged to travel freely, trusted by the ruling class. He spent years bopping around in the background, making weapons in secret, training people how to use them, and then they went and trained and mobilized others. Hundreds of little anomalies in the expected social order, hundreds of little actions that blatantly opposed the status quo, adding up to what would have been an enormous change, had they not been betrayed by opposing anomalies. “Sarah Laugh” is that kind of story. I hope the reader gets a sense of the whole world falling down around her while she’s mostly unaware. There’s a much larger story happening around Sarah, she’s just a catalyst.

Also, Zipporah didn’t exist at all until the very last draft, and then she stuck around until the final bell. Originally, Sarah’s mother was living, and the story was told in her voice, but she’d gotten pissed off with James for essentially using their daughter as a revolutionary tool and erased herself from the narrative. Her telling the story was a way of adding herself back in, and she was doing so both in a research library at Rutgers as part of an initiative to preserve the history of the Walls, and while walking around San Francisco, preparing to go and reintroduce herself to Sarah. That got way too complicated, and when I tried to pull her voice out of it and have her fade into the background, it just didn’t make sense for a mother to leave her daughter in this situation, or even allow the Laughers to form and put her child in danger. Also, to be honest, I just never really felt her living and breathing, no matter how I wrote her. So I did a Snow White and killed her off, but now I needed a stepmother figure.

I really wanted this story to be told in a woman’s voice, but I didn’t really want it to be a woman I liked or agreed with or even fully understood myself. I wanted her to be as alien, in her way, as Sarah and her laugh. I tried writing from the perspective of a neutral observer, an old woman who had lived in San Francisco for many years and saw everything pre-Walls through kind of a nostalgic filter, but she just wasn’t very interesting. I also knew I needed a way to give more voice to the order of things that Sarah and James were upending and couldn’t figure out how. But while doomscrolling one day I came across this very righteously sincere montage of sound bites of prominent right-wing evangelical Christian women, and I was struck by how simultaneously familiar and bizarre they sounded. I grew up deep in evangelical culture but escaped in my early thirties and hadn’t been exposed to it at all for about a decade when Trump first got elected. The way these women sounded was both sense and nonsense to me, in that I realized that I probably know some women with similar views who were so likable and acceptable in their own community spaces that I never caught on to who they really were until a few US presidencies ago. Zipporah was created as a mouthpiece for that realization, and she instantly had sound and weight in my imagination, so she stayed.

Over and over again, as I was reading this story, I would come to a chilling detail and stop to process what I’d just read. Often, I’d go back a few paragraphs and start again, just to experience the moment a second time. Are there any lines that still hit you hard when you reread it? Are there any corners of the story that you’re especially proud of and would like to illuminate?

Ooh, yes. There’s a line about how Sarah inspires revolutions even in cities where there is no Laugh. “People tell stories, you see. People slip through the cracks in walls and then back through with seeds of revolution braided into the rows of their hair.”

I forgot I wrote that in the first draft and when I rediscovered it I was like “whoaaa, that came out of my brain? Go ’head, me!” It almost got cut a couple of times because the first few drafts of this were just way too long and preachy, but I rewrote whole pages just so that I could keep that line from draft to draft.

I also think that Zipporah is sometimes quite funny and inappropriate, in her guilty way, and I hope that comes through to the reader in the same way that I hear it.

How is “Sarah’s Laugh” in conversation with other stories of yours? How is it in conversation with the work of others or the realities we live with every day?

It’s funny you ask that, because this is actually the last story I wrote in a series of stories about revolutions in walled cities that I wrote a long time ago and am currently rewriting and editing.

The short backstory is that once upon a time I was a theology student in England, and I was briefly really interested in the way that some Biblical narratives take on very different emotional resonances depending on how they’re presented, culturally. For example, the stories of Jericho and the early judges of Israel in the biblical books of Joshua and Judges are preached as liberatory narratives in the Black American church. There are gospel songs about how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, about being delivered from oppression after enduring hard times. It’s even taken on a secular resonance, thinking of the recent song entitled “Jericho” by the artist Iniko (bit.ly/4duGaJF), who I highly recommend listening to.

I was stunned—open mouth, short of breath, skin crawling shocked—the first time I heard a pastor from a different culture preach on those same stories as narratives of rightful conquest and dominion. It had just never occurred to me, because I didn’t grow up hearing those stories in that way.

But that got me to really do a deep dive into those two books of the Bible. There are all of these weird, distinct stories about these obscure judges pulling down power structures in very different ways, often accompanied by great tragedy and personal loss, and Jericho is what starts it all. So I wrote a bunch of stories based very loosely on that, set in a near future corporatocratic America. Each judge became the inspiration for someone who sparks a revolution in their city, aided by a little supernatural tic, like a Laugh or something stranger.

And then, because I was a very stressed theology grad student with low self-confidence, a lot of financial problems, and a visa that was going to expire really soon, I told myself that those stories were very stupid and pushed them to the back of my brain until early in 2022, when I was rereading old stuff looking for inspiration for new stuff. I found the stories and realized that they were, in fact, quite stupid, but the concepts were interesting. I also realized that while I had all these judge stories, I didn’t have a Jericho story yet, so I decided to write one, as a way of seeing if the concept still had any real life. (I guess it does.) That story turned out to be “Sarah’s Laugh.” Because I’m no longer very religious, that enabled me to take a much freer approach than I had with the previous stories.

As far as other writers that this story is in conversation with, I think that’s really for the reader to decide, although of course I have my own ideas. I’d be interested in hearing what real-world inspirations and other writers people think this dialogues with, and how. For me, the true test of whether or not I’ve accomplished what I wanted in a story is if readers have the same sorts of ideas about who the piece is talking with that I do.

Do you have any recently published stories or authors you’d like to recommend?

I do have a few other recent publications. Late last year, I had a science fiction story called “Palimpsest” (bit.ly/3NJ94LN) about AI, death memory, and grieving in difficult families, published in Strange Horizons. I also had a horror short called “Bird Watchers” (bit.ly/4durTg8) in Neon and Smoke, a new magazine that prides itself on highlighting work that is half-genre, half-literary. All I’ll say about that story is: Daphne du Maurier, eat your heart out.

But I read much, much more than I write, and I love recommending writers. I write a monthly review of a new novel here at Lightspeed, to start with. I recently reviewed an odd little novel called The Witch by Marie N’Diaye, a Senegalese-French literary writer (bit.ly/4dukflQ). It’s not at all what you’d expect from a novel about modern witches—it’s very subtle, very internal, and super weird.

As of this interview, I’m currently reading the novel Dazzling by Chikodili Emelumadu (bit.ly/41LMHZd), which is written so lushly and asks the reader to consider empathizing with the villain before you even know who it really is. It’s about two very similar girls with very different lives and intersections with the supernatural, and the way in which their differences and similarities are illuminated is so wonderfully done.

Other than that, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry this year. I’ve gotten really into Arthur Sze, who happens to be the current US Poet Laureate but also writes a lot of poems about space and natural science. I’m also reading Aja Monet’s collection Florida Water (bit.ly/4v5fjKt), which carries a lot of ritualistic motifs that connect to the supernatural. Neither of these poets are explicitly speculative, but there is a lot of intersection with the speculative in the subject matter that they work with in their verses.

All I really talk about on the internet is what I read and the slightly unhinged intuitive leaps I make as a result, so do find me if you like book chatter. I’m either EqualOpportunityReader or EQReader on all the socials. I also have a website in dire need of updating: www.EqualOpportunityReader.com.

What have you been working on lately? Are there any particular themes you’re exploring? Is there any exciting news you’d like to share?

I’ve decided that my project for summer 2026 is to revisit the other eight stories I’ve written connected to the events of “Sarah’s Laugh” and edit them into publishable shape. I’m a very different person than I was when I first drafted these, with a much broader understanding of the world and human nature, so there’s a lot of work to be done to smooth them out. But I’m looking forward to doing so, and I’m the type of writer who writes slowly, but constantly, so it feels like a manageable goal. If I manage to accomplish this, who knows? Maybe it’ll lead to exciting news. But for right now, nothing big is happening. I’m just writing and submitting and querying, while trying to figure out how to interact responsibly and meaningfully with the current state of the world and keep up with my day job. Watch this space, I guess?

Read Melissa’s review of Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory in this issue of Lightspeed!