Welcome to Lightspeed Magazine! We’re honored to share your story “Child of The River” with our readers. Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

When I write stories that have heavy tones of fantasy, I tend to include things like gods and complicated magic systems. With this story, I wanted to write something simpler, something that seems almost possible even if it contains hints of strangeness.

Also, I tried to give the narrator and his ancestors a kind of power that forces them to give back. They don’t get to control the elements freely like powerful mages. In the end, they are claimed by the forces that gave them those powers in the first place.

This story explores growth, loneliness, and the desire to escape fate. These were all feelings I experienced at the time I wrote it and tried to replicate in a world that closely resembled my own.

There’s a lot here about, while not necessarily fate, the demands of elders—in this case, the river—for the narrator to subject himself to something imposed on him. Whether readers read it as being subjected to cruelty, taking up responsibility, or something else entirely, what were you looking to explore with this?

The whole point of this story, at least from my perspective, is to show that some things are just unavoidable. There are so many stories out there where the main character cheats fate and escapes whatever destiny the universe or their family tries to force on them. I was going for a touch of horror or at least something dark in this story, so I knew it had to end with the narrator eventually succumbing to the demands of fate and showing just a bit of hopelessness and bitter acceptance.

The narrator’s line “the dreams always sap all my energy out of me” hit me hard while reading; it’s a powerful and common feeling in these times. How did the plague years affect the way you planned or wrote this story?

This is such a great question! I wrote the first draft of this story in 2021 and I haven’t changed much about it since then. During the pandemic, I tended to write darker stories. Maybe it was a reflection of the world around me or it was some form of escape, I’m not really sure.

I still have several unfinished horror stories from that period on my computer and I’m unsure if they’ll ever see the light of day. They’re much darker than this story, though. Maybe the world will get to experience them someday as well.

While the story was very specific about the supernatural qualities it dealt with—the nature of the narrator’s mother, the river spirits, and so on—it only hinted at where it took place on Earth, which to me gave it the warm sense of a very old, deeply told story. What led you to shape it in this way?

Most of my stories are based in secondary worlds, a byproduct of growing up reading too many Forgotten Realms books. I have never been too good at writing about the real world, especially the modern world. This is why most of my stories feature forests and small towns. I don’t have to come up with names for highways, streets, monuments, etc.

However, most of the work I started in the pandemic was set in the real world. In this story, I wanted to blur the line between the real world and the worlds beyond because the narrator himself is trapped between two worlds. So I had fun trying to give the readers a taste of how he feels.

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?

Apart from the inexhaustible pile of uncompleted short stories, I’m currently trying to finish a challenging but fun novella told from the POV of the most unreliable of narrators—a literal god of trickery.

My first novelette, which is based on the misadventures of the aforementioned god, “A Dish Best Served Cold, or An Excerpt From the Cookbook of The Gods,” will be published in a future issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

I also have a flash piece, “In Every Version of The Universe You Are Gone,” coming soon in Baffling Magazine.