Humor is so difficult to pull off, because different people have different definitions! My first professional story, “The Wanderers,” is a dark humor story, and when it was first published, I read this review that said it was “trying too hard to be clever.” I laughed about that and said to my friends, “I am clever! I wasn’t just trying!” But the truth is some people will think you’re clever and others won’t.

I was just concluding work on my doctoral dissertation as I wrote the story, and a big component of what I was doing had to do with theories of physical space and how people exist in those spaces, using Foucault’s writing from The Order of Things in particular. When something like that is taking up that much real estate in your brain, it’s going to come out in lots of ways you maybe didn’t anticipate.

Much like happiness and peace are doorways, I see humor as a gateway to expanded consciousness. Humor and laughter expand our spirits outward, while fear and violence force our spirits to cower. In this way humor is transformative, revolutionary, and healing. My hope—as far as the larger market trends go—is that we’re entering a new age of art.

But I have to tell you, the biggest nachas (joy) came from some of my interactions with the kids who read my Gustav Gloom novels for middle-graders. Hearing from a problem reader that they worked their way through the whole series and are better at this book-absorption thing, or being sent a photograph of a potato that’s been painted to resemble my protagonist as school project, is an award of a whole different color.

Style-wise, I wanted to establish early on that the reader is in a sort of epic poem being written by the main character, Anisah, and so I specifically tried to reference the style of Beowulf and The Illiad—stories that generally start with the author calling the audience to attention (“Hwæt!”) or invoking a deity (“Sing in me, Muse,” the first line of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Illiad, which I also cribbed for the title).