I’ve heard it said that readers of fiction have a greater capacity for empathy than non-readers. I have no idea how true that is, but it feels good to say. We can read facts all day, but we won’t necessarily understand how a situation might feel until it happens to us. Imagination helps with that, but where our own imagination fails us, fiction steps in and leads us around for that proverbial mile.

The idea for “Come-from-Aways” came from an article I wrote for a local magazine about the Shag Harbour Incident, a well-documented UFO crash that took place in the sixties near my home in southwest Nova Scotia. There’s a great little museum in the town of Shag Harbour and several witnesses still living in the area who are happy to chat about the crash.

My dreams love to kill me off. They kill me off in intensely gory ways, in highly cinematic ways, in highly mortifying ways. I am well-used to dreams where I am in a car that plunges off the edge of a mountain road into water many hundreds of feet below, and indeed have them so frequently that my dreaming self is occasionally able to say, “Oh, this. I’ve been through this already. I don’t need to worry about this.”

top nattering around the edges and reading every single “advice on writing” book or essay you come across—I am convinced that this is a pernicious form of writer’s block and the only way to avoid it is to hold your nose and jump in. Remember that if your first drafts stink, that’s a good thing: It means you have something to work with in subsequent drafts, which is where the real writing happens.

One way I deal with fear is to write about it, or try to imagine it. I’m comically afraid of blood, for instance, so the idea of fetishizing it makes my stomach do a flip—that’s why I wrote a story in grad school about someone who does. Trying to write about an act like this is a way of staring directly into that fear.

The pain that is called “phantom limb” is caused by the loss of a major part of someone’s body; it consists of physical pain in the illusory presence of a body part that is gone. The emotional pain that my protagonist feels when he thinks of the people he loved that he’s lost—his mother, his brother, his daughter—is analogous. He’s not remembering the good times with any of those people, only the pain of the loss of what was.