I wrote “Down Here in the Garden” shortly after I moved to California. It was during the midsummer heat, and Donner Pass was populated with vacationing families. It was a gorgeous, idyllic camping spot. Touchingly, a child had left a mason jar of dried beans at the Donner Party memorial, and a drawing of a covered wagon and pioneer stick figure girl. Beneath it in crayon: “To Patty Reid, aged 8.” At once, I felt transported back one hundred and fifty years to this same lake.

One is struck by the sheer staggering volume of young, fresh, powerful, innovative, incredible artists whose voices were silenced by HIV/AIDS before they’d had a chance to change the world like they clearly would have. And not just writers—the editors, agents, critics, audiences who supported and built these voices . . . it’s hard not to come away feeling like fiction was in the middle of a real revolution in terms of storytelling and voice and content and attitude, which was strangled in its crib by a deadly disease and a toxic, homophobic patriarchy.

I had to mull over ideas for a long time before I settled on one I liked. I had just read an article about the curative properties of raw honey, and particularly its ability to aid in the healing of wounds. So that was probably the actual seed. It’s a real thing, by the way. Raw honey is legendary for its ability to cure stubborn wounds, and now there’s scientific evidence to support that folk remedy.

I get bored sometimes, because selkies are almost always women who spend their long periods of captivity in relative passivity. My favorite selkie women burn down houses and murder fishermen to get back to the sea. People still resist seeing men in damsel roles, so male selkies are rare. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single butch selkie of any gender, which would be a delight.

[The inspiration] was the idea of dolls and how different people imbue them with different meanings. Some people will look at a doll and think it’s cute, others that it’s horrific. I liked the idea of a grieving man finding solace in the strangest of places. Grief can do peculiar things to you.

Monsters are always fun to write about, right? Of a surety, the world is full of them. […] It didn’t take long for the story to take shape, but when I realized where it was going and the underlying metaphor, I almost didn’t write it.