I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted.

I think it’s actually commonplace among writers to borrow bits and bobs from life, sometimes even including their own, to build the telling details that give a fiction some depth of field. Words pretending to be worlds—which is not every story, granted, but at least those attempting this to any degree—need to suggest that a story is like life, that there’s more to what’s on the page than what’s actually on the page, like how in life there’s no bottom to the depths you can uncover from a person or object or situation: if you pull any thread long enough, the entire universe unravels from it.

My studies certainly play a major part in how I come up with ideas and in the way I approach character and plot. For example, I often touch on the theme of the world as theatre or draw directly from Greek tragedy, while religion and intertextuality are at the core of many of my stories. But it’s not just the ideas; my studies have shaped the way I view the world, and so the lens through which I approach story. My media & cultural studies background has taught me that culture is the result of practices of representation and articulation, which always invites one to question and study power—where it resides, how it articulates the world.

Shorts are great if I have one discrete idea with just a few characters. I can focus on a scene, a single encounter, a single incident. For “The Island of Beasts,” I really wanted to focus on this meeting between werewolves on a remote island. I didn’t want to explain the entire world, all the characters’ histories, what happens next. Short stories mean I can really bring that microscopic focus in and not have to stretch and expand past that. Ultimately, I find I can really pack a lot of conflict and character into those brief, intense moments. That can be very satisfying.

I’ve done cosmic horror before (see my very short story “Windshield,” or “During the Pause” over at Apex), whenever it suited my purposes to reduce my protagonists to the level of ants. I’ve enjoyed other practitioners following in Lovecraft’s footsteps, though not the man’s own work (I find him dire). Generally, I think horror is scarier when the menace is comprehensible, but think there’s room, once in a while, for a glimpse of something too big to be understood.

When I was ten or eleven I read this series of children’s books in Urdu featuring a boy who travels with snake charmers and has a pet snake. He and his snake have many adventures. Subsequently I dreamed about becoming besties with a snake or two for years. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. The Indian subcontinent, of course, has many myths about snakes who assume human shape after a hundred years. I wanted to write a story about that. The research and details naturally followed.

I wanted Miriam to outgrow her mother, to come to the realization that her mother’s dictates are entirely arbitrary and based on some drama that has no basis in reality except in her mother’s mind. The problem is that when you finally shed someone else’s storyline, something you have been living within your entire life, what do you replace it with?

This is kind of weird, but I have these half-waking anxiety dreams about spiders descending from the ceiling onto me while I’m sleeping, to the point where I wake up in a panic, convinced there is actually a spider in my bed. So you’ll see spiders appear here and there in my fiction, although I wouldn’t say I’m arachnophobic, exactly. It’s just really creepy when they’re dangling on their threads, tiny legs working . . . ugh!

Many years ago, when I lived and worked in Sequoia National Park, I worked ten days and had four days off. Sometimes, I could run those four days together so I had eight days off to go hiking. I was on such a trip once when I realized I was being followed by a young couple from Germany on the same trail. We didn’t walk together, but we were in shouting distance of each other. Eventually, a man passed me going in the other direction. What was it about him? I’ll never know. He sent a cold shiver down my spine, and I remember thinking how glad I was that those other two were close behind.

So many of us think of a home as a living and breathing place. A house is witness to all of the good and all of the bad. Knowing what goes on behind our own closed doors and shuttered windows, we can only guess at what happens with our neighbors. So I wondered, if a house did have a soul and if a home is inherently good, then how would bad things affect it? How would a home exhibit PTSD? Would it co-opt the residents and use them? Was that the visible symptom?