Welcome to Lightspeed Magazine! We’re so happy to have “The Star Where We Meet” as one of the science fiction stories for this month. Can you tell us about what inspired you to write this story?

This story very much started from its opening paragraphs, which spilled easily onto the page. It followed pretty quickly that the narrator had been dreaming about his dog and mother, even though he knew that he never had a dog and couldn’t remember his mother. At that point, I thought, Oh my gosh! What’s going on here? What is this story about?

When I started writing, I was a pantser. During the Odyssey workshop, Jeanne Cavelos convinced me that I should spend more time prewriting and thinking about story elements. I tried it and was solidly convinced. So, now I had this opening, and I sat down to figure out what this character wanted and how he was going to get it. For me, story begins and ends with character. The conversational style of this particular narrator also intrigued me, and I wanted to explore that voice further.

I thought the decision to write this piece in first person was very bold and worked very well, bringing an emotional immediacy to the piece that would’ve been lacking otherwise. Did you play around with other POVs? Or was it always in first person?

This was always in first person because it was so much about the voice of the narrator. When I wrote that first line that contained a parenthetical expression, I knew this piece had a strong conversational style. I wanted to know more about who the narrator was speaking with. Of course, the reader is an obvious answer, but I felt he was speaking to someone else. This is a first contact story, so I understood that the protagonist was speaking to the entity he was traveling to meet. Only later did I discover that my protagonist had traveled a thousand years to tell this story to the son he left behind.

What attracts you to exploring this idea of “multiverses” or the concept that there are branching possibilities which exist within one life—the idea that in one universe we are the ones leaving, and yet in another we are the ones who are left?

As I mentioned, “The Star Where We Meet” began as a first contact story. When I figured out that the narrator was travelling to meet his own son, that’s when the story splintered into a multiverse story. Familial relationships figure strongly in my writing, and this story gave me a chance to explore the father/son dynamic. We grow up and leave our parents to have a family of our own. Our children then grow up and leave us. Within a single lifetime, we experience similar interactions from different points of view; we live in multiple roles. This story allowed me to highlight the friction between those roles and explore not only the costs, but also the rewards.

This piece asks so many important philosophical questions. I would love to know—do you think the cost of following a dream could ever be too high?

The characters within this story make the difficult choice to leave home, leave the people they love behind, knowing that they will never see them again. Something similar has long played out historically. Within my own family I have ancestors who left their homes as part of a diaspora. They crossed an ocean on a ship, heading for a different life, suspecting they would never see their families again. In many cases, they didn’t. I remember watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a child and confronting the final scene when Richard Dreyfuss’s character leaves everything he knows behind to join the aliens. Afterwards, my mother asked my sister and I if we would make the same decision. I responded pretty quickly that I would, and I think that hurt her feelings a bit. For much of my life, I would have made that decision to leave without question, but now it gives me pause. Aside from the courage it takes to leave everything you know behind, there’s a real human cost to ourselves and those we care about. I think that’s generally true of following any dream. It’s always a bit selfish, but if we’ve done it right, hopefully the journey brings us back around to what’s important. In my mind, that’s building balanced and meaningful relationships.

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

I was recently accepted into Clarion West’s 2026 novel writing workshop. I’m so excited for the opportunity to work on my novel-in-progress with Karen Lord and the other nine students in my cadre. I’m writing on a fantasy novel that explores the parent/child relationship and the nature of belonging. Of course, I love the short story form and continue to work on these short-form stories when I can.