I rarely have any kind of clear intent when I begin writing. I write to discover the story, which means I have to try out a number of different takes on it. I’ve recently become a professor, and I’ve been told that in academe, creative practice is considered the equivalent of the research that happens in scientific practice. I’m beginning to agree, because drafting a story is experimentation. I have no clear-cut sense of how I create a character. Sometimes I begin by writing a monologue, feeling around for the overall tone they may take in the story, their habits of speech.

The primary bond among the women in this story is their relationship to shame, which is a bond and burden I think many women, especially black women, share. The protagonist and her mother live with a lot of shame—body-shame and the shame of the curse, of being its cause and its consequence. Clara and Josephine haven’t yet experienced the shame of being a Clay, of having to live in that house, no matter how much they think they know about Cornelius and his family, and this is why they’re willing to seek out the protagonist.

I was thinking a lot about bodies when I wrote this story, in particular that being infected by or being turned into a zombie is an enforced physical and mental change, a concept that borrows from the Haitian zombie history. I was wondering how a character who has changed his body would react to being in this world where an enforced change is possible from a terrifying exterior source. My character is also used to hiding, to navigating unsafe spaces, which reflects the unfortunate reality that many queer and trans people experience on a daily basis.

Good horror movies are thinner on the ground than good written horror, in part because some of the folks who make them think sadism is enough. (More so, in recent years.) What I want from them is what I want in all good stories: an interesting perspective, a reason to care, a lack of compromise . . . and because the genre presents this pitfall, best avoided, a lack of nihilism for its own sake.

It’s been close to eight years since I last visited Puerto Rico. Since then, so much has changed, including the destruction that occurred because of Hurricane Maria. I’ve had so many conversations with my father regarding places that have disappeared, plazas completely missing because of the hurricane. When I was writing “Crave” I wanted to try to remember the smells of the island on my first visit at five years old. The island was in so many ways a magical place for me, so outside of the concrete jungle I grew up in in the Bronx, New York.

One of my favorite words is chiaroscuro. I adore black and white films and the specific structure and design that goes into filming for that style, especially noir—and on the other hand, I also love super-rich-color-palette visual eye-feasts that are also abundant. So when it comes to my writing, I think I have a mix of intuitive flow and very specific, controlled architecture. (Great descriptors, by the way! I really like those.) I often think of stories in word clusters that evoke a style, or mood, or texture: so like, for “Mr. Try Again,” the words were vicious, teeth-filled, frigid.

While I was writing this story, I was thinking about this infuriating trend wherein women are expected to conform to beauty standards, but the products and industries and practices that they use to conform to those beauty standards are dismissed as frivolous and stupid. That line of thinking brought me back to fairy tales. In my view, the modern tendency to sneer at fashion and makeup while still expecting women to conform in certain ways is connected with the old trope in folktales where women are supposed to be passively beautiful.

iction is always political, especially when the author pretends it isn’t. The choice of what to depict and not depict is a judgment about which stories we privilege. To paraphrase something Rabih Alameddine has said much better: If, while the news is full of women calling out powerful men who subjected them to sexual violence, I’m writing a story about a man reconciling with his estranged werewolf father, that’s a political decision. That’s not to say there isn’t a great story there too, or that it’s bad or wrong to write that werewolf story, but we’re kidding ourselves if we say it’s a neutral choice.

The idea for “Owner’s Guide” came from a memory I had of foul-smelling water in an apartment I once rented. Pipes were eventually replaced and the odor went away, but I’ll never forget that creepy-crawly, vaguely sinister feeling of violation and how much it bothered me. Not just the fact that this key element of my hygiene was somehow rotten, but the big unanswered question behind it all: why did the water smell? Even now, I’m not really sure I want to know the truth. Instead I wrote “Owner’s Guide” to solve that mystery in its own way.

The head in a box obviously has resonances with the brain-in-a-jar trope of classic science fiction (and the head-in-a-jar parody of Futurama). There’s a lot of tension between autonomy and lack thereof when you’re a head in a jar (or a box). You can’t move on your own, you’re entirely dependent on outside technology and outside caretakers for your existence, but at the same time you’re free from a lot of mundane concerns: you can eat whatever you want, nobody’s going to ask you to make your bed or take out the trash, etc.