In “Dirge and Gleam” we follow Lillian and the ghost that clings to her shadow as they search for a magical school that accepts all “lost and wild things.” What inspired you to write this story?

I love the magic school genre. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Naomi Novik’s The Scholomance series are incredible. When I was younger, I couldn’t get enough stories about wizards learning magic, like Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. With my four-year-old daughter, we read Sangu Mandanna’s excellent Jupiter Nettle and the Seven Schools of Magic graphic novel over and over. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write my own version of a magic school story.

Though I love learning, I didn’t like going to school. Growing up, school campuses felt deadening, places where I was always uncomfortable, or in trouble, or getting picked on and getting into fights. But when I went to college, I loved that environment so much that I never wanted to leave. This was finally a place where learning felt thrilling and magical. So when thinking about whether to set my story in a magical college or some kind of magical high school, the choice to make it a college was pretty easy for me.

The magic school genre also presents an interesting problem. The most famous book series in it—you know the one—has some really regressive ideas embedded throughout, and its author is a bigot who tireless works to harm queer people. I feel like we need more magic school stories, explicitly queer ones, as many as possible, a tidal wave to wash that other series away.

I was fascinated by the glimpses we caught of the students and the physical manifestations of their abilities. How did these different kinds of magic take shape for you?

I had a blast coming up with the various schools of magic! I tried to make interesting combinations so that the schools would feel unique. If you can speak with ghosts, you’re also good with memory and the mind. Language magic also comes with control over fire. If you’re someone who can see the future, you deal with weather magic and ruins too.

I also tried to make sure that my categories weren’t too close to what I’ve seen in other books and games. I want it to feel new, and I’m probably not done tinkering with it.

I think the physical manifestation of magic came from me getting bogged down in the mechanics of casting spells. Should there be words? Gestures? Special materials? In the end, I decided to focus more on the magic itself, how it could slip its leash and run wild, changing everything around you.

The idea of emotional tethers was another intriguing element of how magic works in this world, especially with how the events of the story play out. How did you go about developing the relationship between magic and emotion?

Since I decided that magic schools were postsecondary, this raised some questions. Why don’t people learn magic when they’re younger? What happens if they do?

There’s an established trope that magic can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I thought, what if I really push that? What if someone without the proper training is a live wire, shocking everything and everyone around them? In that case, you don’t want these kids to know magic until they are emotionally ready to control it.

I love how Grossman links magic to pain: In The Magicians, Dean Fogg tells the Brakebills students, “I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain.” I wanted to do a similar thing, linking magical aptitude to strong feeling. In my story, it doesn’t have to be a painful feeling, but it often is. And to be in control of your magic, you need self-knowledge, to face an ugly or embarrassing side of yourself and accept that this is also you. It may not be all of you, but it’s a part that you can’t leave behind or suppress. This emotion becomes a doorway into power.

In terms of craft, leaning so heavily on emotion being the gateway to magic helped me flesh out the characters. Building Prima around a core of anger and Melanie around guilt affected their body language, dialogue, actions, everything. Their emotions animate them. And filtering all of the language in the story through Lil’s obsessive fear of loss was a good way to make the voice interesting and emotional. Lil doesn’t see anything in a neutral way. She’s always pleading, regretting, needing, grieving.

The character of Dulce, who acts as a guardian between the two worlds, reveals a sinister side to magic and its consequences. Can you tell us more about the role she has in the story?

We want institutions to protect us, but they have their own agendas. Universities are wonderful places, and I love them, but they are never quite as good as they ought to be. Never do enough to protect their most vulnerable students or to stand up for those students’ rights. Especially not now, and probably not ever. I wanted to include a character who had been utterly failed by the school, used and punished for something that wasn’t her fault. A reminder that, as wonderful as the school is, it has hurt people before. I wanted the fictional university to mirror how real institutions can allow their students to come to harm.

Do you have any other works you’d like to talk about?

I have a short story collection coming out soon called Vulture Gold. A dark country of sadness and wonder, where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. Growling, prickly feathered stories that blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman’s sins. A boy with a single swan’s wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them, the queen of the dead sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones.

The publisher hasn’t made the official announcement just yet, so I don’t have any more info at the moment. Keep your eyes peeled!

I’m currently drafting a novel-length version of “Dirge and Gleam.” The characters will be largely the same, but a lot of the story will be shifted around, remixed, amplified. In this version, I’m leaning hard on the idea of institutions failing and harming us, how no one is going to save us but ourselves. I’m having a lot of fun writing it, but it’s still years away.