I really believe in place as character. Modern humans like to pretend geography is not important, since we can now live in deserts or mountaintops, but that is really an illusion. Geography shapes us, shapes our cultures and our imaginations, and in that sense, place is character. I am very much affected by place—whether it is a concrete jungle or wilderness. As a physicist, I am particularly aware that matter speaks—through physical laws, through constant interaction with its surroundings.

The original story notion is some twenty years old, but I wasn’t writing short pieces then. I think that the theme of an ad man who accidentally ends the world was a reaction to black people being encouraged to straighten their hair and lighten their skin . . . and encouragements for black women to find white men sexually appealing while simultaneously erecting barriers between black men and white women. That’s a very old game between males, and there are some nasty side effects.

We communicate almost continuously in smaller and smaller bursts, email chains, Facebook, texting, Twitter—a trend ultimately expressed in Instagram, where we reduce what we have to say to a single image. The adage that a picture tells a thousand words has become literally literal in that and emoticons. Because of that constant interchange, I know more about what’s going on with more of my friends who live over a greater distance than ever before. But I see them less than ever.

Childhood is a wellspring for a lot of writers, I think, a place of intense feelings and clarity of vision. And of course those are also the reasons we need art—to experience powerful emotions and to see things in a new way. A kid’s perspective is great for that. When you write a young voice, you remember how it was to be utterly, stupidly passionate about things, and to perceive the injustices we often learn to close our eyes to later. Kids are not fooled when we try to cover up inequality.

Shelly evolved as I wrote. At the start, I knew that she was a Chinese-American girl. Despite the speculative element, I wanted the story to take place in more or less the present. Given that I wanted to write a figure skating story, that meant the mother had to be this huge Michelle Kwan fan. It’s hard to overestimate the impact Michelle Kwan had on Chinese-Americans of a certain age. Everything else about Shelly more or less fell out of that.