This is such a fierce story with a powerful point of view. Speaking of point of view, one of the elements I enjoyed from the jump was the way you toyed around with perspective between the relatively straightforward story of the Victim and the unnamed narrator discussing the events with their girlfriend. What made this framing feel right to you?
I wanted it to feel really specific and personal, but also distant and removed, which would have been almost impossible to do simultaneously in text! Using this particular narrative framing allowed me to zoom in and out when needed and also gave it a kind of true crime show feeling, where current interviews are interspersed with flashbacks of the past crime happening.
The facts of this story are such that its tragic arc is immediately familiar to us, and by not deviating from that expectation, the story drove that point home even harder. What compelled you to write “Here I Go Again”?
The 2020 murder of Sarah Everard shook some things loose in my brain, and over the next couple of years, I wrote a few different stories (and even a novel) exploring gender and power dynamics. In the end I realised that I was doing exactly what I wrote at the end of “Here I Go Again”—trying to turn back time, to resurrect these women, to change the story that has already been told. I have to accept that I don’t have the power to alter the fates of the dead, but, at the same time, I don’t have to accept that this story is one we’re stuck with forever. I can work to help change the story for present and future generations, which is why I donated the entirety of my payment for “Here I Go Again” to Refuge, which is a domestic violence organisation based in the UK. I’ve also taken part in charity readings to raise money for similar organisations.
Additionally, having read E.A Petricone’s absolutely incredible, Shirley Jackson award-winning novelette “We, The Girls Who Did Not Make It,” I was struck by how the woman helping two men to kill young girls clearly doesn’t think she’ll meet the same fate, that she is somehow separate and distinct from the herd. As I described that story in my article for A Personal Anthology, “Sandy believes that her position as bait and accomplice keeps her safe; Sandy is wrong.” Everything comes full circle, as I was lucky enough to be collaborating with E.A. on a story during the same month I received the acceptance from Nightmare for “Here I Go Again,” and I got to gush to her about how much she’d inspired me. (The article in A Personal Anthology is available to read at https://bit.ly/4jrNiqf.)
The repetition of the phrase “here I go again” in all kinds of different contexts was such a nice touch; it really tied everything together. Why did you settle on this phrase to be the crux of the story and your title?
In the original ABBA song, the singer dramatically bemoans her inability to stay away from her lover. “Here I go again” is a sigh of resignation for an outcome that the singer considers predetermined due to her inability to escape the cycle, and I felt that this interpretation made it feel thematically similar (albeit in a much more horrific way) to the premise of my story. The outcome is set in stone from the very first line; “This woman—walking alone, at night—is going to be killed.” We know what will happen if we keep reading, but something makes us hope that it won’t turn out how we fear. Look at me now, she sings, will I ever learn? The idea of taking the words of a chirpy pop song and scraping the darkest, deepest underbelly of those lyrics really appealed to me and gave me a way to say something which I’d struggled to voice comprehensively before.
The inclusion of names only at the very end of the story packs such a devastating punch; why did you decide to simply go with “the Victim,” “the Mortgage,” and so on until that point, and why did you provide names at all given what you’d set up?
I wanted the story to act as a kind of template; these fake names are merely placeholders for real ones that can be slotted in with very little change to the premise. I wanted to show that this story could be happening to anyone, that you could fall prey to the random whims of an unknown attacker. Any one of us could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and never see it coming. It’s an alarming truth considering that most violence against women happens in the home, and stems from preexisting relationships, and yet these unprovoked attacks in the outside world are also a pressing concern. If women aren’t safe inside the house or outside of it, where are we safe?
The names included at the end are three real women who—at the time I wrote this story—had been some of the most recent victims of attacks like this. I could have included so many more, including sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were stabbed to death in a London park in June 2020 by a stranger, proving that not only lone women are targeted, and whose treatment postmortem by the police resulted in two officers being jailed for thirty-three months each.
“Like a bag of unrolled dice,” “like ladders with glass rungs”—what beautiful similes! “Here I Go Again” is full of these little moments of beautiful writing; what well do you draw from when you write small, evocative nuggets like these?
I use senses other than sight and sound as much as possible to evoke the exact feeling I’m trying to get across. The ladder example is particularly interesting because I knew how it “felt” in my head, but explaining that in detail is more difficult! We think of a ladder as something stable and helpful, but when you introduce the idea of glass rungs there’s a kind of uncertainty and danger inherent there—stepping onto a see-through rung might produce a feeling of instability and vertigo, a sense that something which should be solid and visible underfoot . . . isn’t. Also, glass is slippery, and we rarely use it for anything to walk on, so it adds an additional textural feeling that is, hopefully, disquieting for the reader.
On your website, it says that one of your stories has been made into an “avant-garde opera.” I have to ask, what’s the story behind that?
Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lampreas contacted me out of the blue, explaining that she was working on a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and asked if she could use a poem of mine as one of her tracks. I was absolutely delighted, and I even managed to see Stephanie sing the piece live at a festival in Edinburgh, which was a dream I didn’t even know I’d had prior to that moment.
What do we have to look forward to from you in the future?
I recently published a historical sapphic romance called The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet, the first of my Austentatious series which takes beloved characters and makes them hella, hella queer. I’m also working on a horror novella project right now with my fiancée, Z.K. Abraham, as well as my collaborative craft anthology An Honour and a Privilege, both of which will be coming out in winter 2025. I’ve been lucky enough to have my short horror/SFF work optioned for TV this year, so hopefully I’ll be able to reveal more about that soon!
