“Breaking the Frame” was born from photographs. My friend Maria Dahvana Headley had shown me a book of Francesca Woodman’s photos, and they haunted me—I couldn’t get Woodman’s work out of my head, and I dreamt of the pictures.

I spent a lot of time sitting in the Chicago airport, waiting to change planes, coming up with the details of this society. A few things became clear pretty quickly: With six different sexes, everything would become a lot more complicated, and you needed six sets of pronouns to differentiate them. None of the pronouns should conjugate exactly like “he/his/him” or “she/hers/her,” or you would lose some of the jarring quality of them.

She’s very romantic, as the young are romantic, but she’s also a realist, as the young can be realists if they’ve got the right temperament. I see her as making both fairy-tale and adult choices—the fairy-tale ones in Faerie; the adult ones when she is back in the real world, facing going home to her certainly-displeased parents.

he idea for this story didn’t start with memories at all—it started from some idle speculations about what it might be like to be a child on a colony ship. I wondered whether it might be easier to skip childhood entirely and emerge as a fully-grown crew member.

The Puzzle Lands books are a quirky sort of low-tech fantasy: gritty, fast-paced, and darkly humorous. The setting is entirely imaginary, but includes two cultures in conflict: the Koráyos, a stern, egalitarian people, and Lutawa, an extreme patriarchy bent on expansion.

Since much of my own short fiction stresses characterization, I particularly admire stories in which individual characters are basically absent, and the story is about entire peoples, species, ideas.

The story kind of tells its own history: I was researching the actual process of brain death, and realized what a mushy concept it really is. Basically, the body goes through a shutdown sequence, and “death” is the point at which medicine can no longer reverse the process. But that point has been moving; with CPR, defibrillators, and ventilators, legal “death” stopped being about the heart and now takes place in the brain.