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he found the first man on Tinder, or maybe on Hinge, and the restaurant where they met was glowing with antique lamps and green brocade wallpaper and velvet couches, everything soft and inviting, not a single hint of what was to unfold in an hour or two.
Little is more crushing than the idea that no matter what you do, you are only capable of destruction, and everyone knows it. I wanted to weave that fear into this story, and to push tenderness and violence up against each other. How can we understand one without understanding the other?
Inspiration: A relationship—everything but the drill.
The idea for this story began in my final week at the Clarion Writers Workshop. I wanted to write a haunted house horror story using stripped language, but unsurprisingly, it became strange and detailed and maximalist. It’s the perfect piece to summarize my time at Clarion, as it was collectively inspired by all the great stories I read over the summer of 2023.
This piece was one of my Clarion West Workshop stories, for one of the days we issued a challenge in the group to write something erotic for a particular week (shout out to Samit for being amazing during “Chaos week”) and this was the result of it.
It’s a little difficult for me to think about the initial process of this piece because I’ve continued to think about it quite a lot since initially writing it, to the point where it’s now the kernel of a someday novel project about occupation by a victorious fairyland.
When my daughter was a newborn, I found I only had the attention span to write micro and flash; I wrote a lot of it. I was also sleeping very little at night and crashed most afternoons, which for me is when the weirdest dreams happen. “NotRob” was one of them.
This is a retelling of a Chinese folktale that I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s been through a lot of revisions. The two things that helped it come into its final form were cutting half the word count, and finding a voice for the main character that suggests that the horror is not only in what is happening, but those who might be complicit in the act.
I wrote this story while reading Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar, and with some songs on repeat from an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog.
As so many pieces of this length do—and I’m not the only writer who will report this—the idea and storyline for “The Dark Devices” came to me in a very visceral, very disturbing (wait for it) flash. The writing itself? A little research on Pieter’s period and country before that could happen.
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