There are a ton of passages from books and stories written by men that make me wonder if they had ever seen a woman in real life. Boobs that expand to show arousal and Barbie crotches if they’re virgins, wild stuff like that. I just took what they started to its monstrous extremes.

When I was a kid, I had horrible allergies (still do, actually) but I also caught a couple of skin infections that I won’t detail. This happened right around the time we moved to a new city where suddenly my “Asianness” also became front and center. With all this hitting a kid roughly at the same time, it wasn’t hard to feel absolutely helpless and alien.

“Taking Control of Your Life in Five Easy Steps” is inspired by and dedicated to all the people who have tried to sell me their quick and easy surefire fixes for my mental illness. —PHL

I grew up at the southern edge of Ontario’s “near north,” and as winters got warmer and shorter, we’d hear stories of people going through the ice. As a kid, I worried about losing family members that way. This story is a response to the loss of northern ecosystems to climate change and how that loss is reshaping families who live in and love the cold.

On a barren hiking trail this past summer, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a young person just off the path, half-hiding, peering quizzically at me. The sun was blinding. I blinked and the person was no longer there. I followed the trail, and circling back to the same spot I saw, or imagined I saw, a blur of a face peeking from behind a tree. There, then gone. Did I see someone? Who? What were they doing? And why? I chalked it up to the heat. But the questions remained.

This is actually the second time I wrote this—I threw away the first, unsatisfactory version years ago. But this is one of those ideas that doesn’t give up easily, and the final lines haunted me until I wrote it again.