We’re honoured to share your story “You Knit Me Together in My Mother’s Womb” with our readers. Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

This story started out as a “What if,” and I think I’ll answer several questions at the same time if I say this story came about after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overturned Roe v. Wade. At the time, I started wondering what new laws would be passed, what restrictions might be placed on reproductive rights, and what freedoms women would lose. I also wondered—and tried to figure out—how women in such a case might fight back. I gave Abby all the collective anger of my female friends and family, but also their fight. I gave her the anger I feel at the way this world treats my two daughters.

Unfortunately, the story has also proved prophetic—we’re seeing the not-so-slow erosion of women’s rights, and I wonder what grand gesture will stop it.

What about the background of this story called to you to write it, and in what way does your perspective as an author illuminate it? Between the depiction of the government as foolishly incompetent and the focus on hard, draining resistance, this is the most 2025 story I’ve read so far this year. How important do you think it is to tell stories like this in our new age of fascism?

I think fantasy and science fiction have always been opposed to oppression. There’s always an evil man standing in a tower somewhere, a great all-seeing eye peering out at his domain, and there’s always a band of men (or hobbits) rising up to meet him. Or there are a hundred men clamoring for power after the king dies, carving up the country, fighting over the spoils. Or some dark rumor has made its way into the southern reaches of Mirkwood.

So much of fantasy has been a look into the dark heart of humanity. How power corrupts. How greed and anger and desire always end up on fire, with people lying dead in the streets, carrion birds coming down out of a clear blue sky to peck out the eyes of the unliving.

What I think is important is realizing fantasy isn’t fantasy. It isn’t even fiction, just a retelling of our world, with all its angers and fears and bad people, in the hopes that others will see the world the same way, and start to change it.

There’s a lot layered in here, from the “if this goes on” speculation to the demonstration at the climax that for all its posturing, the government doesn’t really care about unborn children. Is there anything you placed in the story that you wanted to make sure readers took away from it?

It’s hard for me to guess what readers will take away from a story. But your analysis is spot-on—I find it difficult to believe the government cares about children when it’s so difficult/expensive to get good childcare, good healthcare, and a good education without going into severe debt. When our schools are being shot up every day. When there are measles and tuberculosis outbreaks in several states because some people don’t believe in vaccines that have saved millions of lives.

If we really wanted to incentivize parenthood, giving birth, raising children, etc., we’d provide more help for those trying to do it in a country that’s become affordable only for the affluent. Since we don’t do those things, I have to assume we don’t really care about the children.

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 write pop culture and personal essays on Substack, if any readers want to follow me there (substack.com/@paulcrenshaw). For fiction I’ve got a few more short stories in the works, and a fantasy novel set in a city with problems readers might see as familiar—a clash between the upper and lower classes, a clergy with as much power as the ruling council, and a citizenry on the verge of rebellion.