It’s exciting to see “Lotus Dew for the Emperor’s Tea” in Lightspeed Magazine! Can you talk about this story’s background and the inspirations behind it?

There are two main streams of inspiration for this story, which converged in a single central image/idea:

1. The quest for immortality

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of the quest for immortality, and Chinese legends abound with such tales—Taoist sages “spiritually cultivating” their way to immortality and riding away on cranes; emperors poisoning themselves with “immortality” elixirs that contain mercury and arsenic; an emperor who funds multiple failed expeditions to Penglai, the fabled land of immortals. And of course there’s the tale of Chang’e, the goddess of the moon, who stole an elixir of immortality from her husband Hou Yi, drank it, and flew away to the moon. In most versions of this tale, Chang’e drinks the elixir for virtuous reasons: She’s trying to prevent the elixir from being taken by an evil man who would have used the gift of immortality to become a tyrant on Earth. In some stories, this evil man is her husband’s apprentice; in some stories, the evil would-be-tyrant is the husband himself. But in another version of the tale, Chang’e is given no virtuous reason for her theft: She simply takes it. And for some reason, I love that tale best.

2. Water for tea

Somewhere, I came across a reference to The Classic of Tea by Lu Yu, an eighth-century work which is known as the world’s earliest monograph on tea. In it, he waxes eloquent on the importance of the quality of the water used for brewing tea. Somehow, this single reference sent me down a rabbit hole, to websites that claimed ever more fabulous legendary sources for tea-brewing water: first snow-melt, spring rain, dew drops on lotus leaves. And from there, it was a small leap to imagine a fabulous, immortality-giving tea brewed from the dew drops collected from lotus blooms.

I braided together Chinese immortality legends and tea legends into this tale, as many as I feasibly could, and under various guises and with various twists. Putting it all together was so much fun, and it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever written. I can’t go into all the references here, but I do want to note that the “Grandmother Tea” character in my story is inspired by a historical personage mentioned in Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea as “an old woman from Guangling.” She apparently sold amazing tea, for people competed to buy it and “her pot never emptied.” An officer found her suspicious and imprisoned her, but, with tea pot in hand, she flew out her prison window. And that’s all Lu Yu gave us. I decided to give a little more.

What was the development process like for this story? I’m especially interested in how the tale and the narrator weave together in deliciously inextricable ways. Did one side develop first and the other become inlaid? Did they form as one cohesive idea and expand from there?

The narrator came late to this story. I knew there had to be a narrator, a storyteller relating these immortality tales to someone. And the tale of the Moon Heron and her lover was the first immortality tale to come fully formed to my mind. But I wasn’t sure, at first, who the narrator of these tales was (an itinerant tale-teller at court? An omniscient narrator?), or who was being told these stories. That all came later, and then it was a delight to see how the narrator (and her audience!) fit into the story.

This story has luscious detail and lilting repetition. Can you talk about how these qualities grow and develop through the drafting, revision, and polishing processes?

I admit that I do not write many drafts of a story. I tend to revise as I write, so it’s more like there’s just one draft undergoing continual revision until finished. Once that first draft is completed, it usually just needs one or two “cleanup” edits focused on plot consistency and grammar. I think the detail and repletion in this tale just came about organically as I wrote it; certain phrases or images get stuck in my head, and I repeat them as I go along. I can’t really explain it better than that!

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

I just finished Theodora Goss’s newest collection of short stories, Letters from an Imaginary Country. Like all her previous collections (which I also recommend!), Letters is just gorgeous, filled with elegant tales of imaginary lands just a step or two removed from our own. One of my favorite tales in the collection is “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology,” in which a group of graduate students basically imagines the country of Cimmeria into existence, with consequences that none of them could have foreseen (“Cimmeria” (bit.ly/4c2Peok) was first published in Lightspeed, by the way, as were a number of stories in this collection).

Two other collections that came out in the latter half of 2025 that I loved: Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten, a horror collection steeped in 90s nostalgia, and featuring stories that examine identity, belonging, and the experiences of girlhood and womanhood in the 90s and beyond. And Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha, a collection of wonderfully weird horror. Ha excels in evoking quiet, creeping dread, and just plain weirdness. But his bizarre worlds have something important to say about our world, too.

One last recommendation: I’m currently reading Opacities by Sofia Samatar. This is a work of nonfiction, not fiction. It’s a series of musings on writing and the writing life, framed as a series of letters or addresses to a friend. It’s chockful of quotes from other writers; it’s like a conversation among multiple writers. It’s hard to describe. But I love it, and I will take any opportunity to recommend the work of Sofia Samatar (if you haven’t read her fiction yet, please do. And then read everything else she’s written).

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?

My first collection of short stories, The House of Illusionists and Other Stories (bit.ly/4kg3RGP), came out in 2025 from Interstellar Flight Press. I’m still very excited about it! Seventeen stories of fantasy and science fiction, set in worlds both close and far from our own.

As for current projects? I have a few ideas swirling around. Right now, I’m struggling with a Snow White retelling. We’ll see if I manage to wrangle and pin it down.