The idea of “explorer-scientists” who are held up as bastions of white Western civilization due to their feats and character—but whose careers are actually built on exploiting indigenous traditions and people—was a jarring contradiction that I wanted to explore, and overturn, here.

The concept came from an incident of violence that occurred in my city, just a block away from my house. A young boy and his mother were randomly stabbed in the parking lot of a grocery store and the boy did not survive the attack. That same day, my young son and I had been out on a peaceful walk in our neighborhood, not more than a few hundred yards from where the murder occurred.

I think so much of contemporary discourse about writing and reading involves statements of needing to “be seen” in fiction, to find recognition—but there’s also, for me, a deep pleasure in experiencing narratives of difference, to sit in lives, for a while, that are not my own.

I have a vivid memory of being in a home where they kept taxidermied hunting trophies in a room that was probably 20’x15.’ The walls were covered by at least two dozen deer heads. Having that many frozen eyes staring at you is pretty unsettling.

I was also thinking of how predatory nostalgia can be. It can be comforting to sink into remakes and sequels and old favourites and I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But that comfort can also be a trap. Christie’s replica bedroom is one example, as are the other guests feasting on their past. The Concierge is a manifestation of the temptation to live in eternal stasis.

I was one of the interpreters/co-navigators with a DeafBlind writer at a residency program, so we spent a lot of time together, and in between chatting about books and writing, we folded origami. I’d grown up folding paper cranes, but to fold with my DeafBlind friend required different techniques than making the folds by sight.

I obtained a degree in clinical psychology, which helps, but I’ve always been adept at imagining other people, the conversations they might have, their reasons and motivations. The degree helped me understand the underpinnings of disordered behavior, but I don’t think it would’ve had as much impact if I hadn’t already been very good at empathy.

As I wrote this story, I was mulling over legacy and inheritance, how the way I experience the world now is affected by the way Chinese Americans were treated then. The panic around the bubonic plague resonates with that of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent wave of Asian hate, for instance; questions of femininity and labor persist as well.

Many of the attacks aimed at trans people are aimed at removing us from public life. Banning us from restrooms (or forcing us into restrooms where we know we’ll be unsafe), taking away our drivers licenses, forcing us into the closet if we need passports . . .

It was absolutely intentional to not just critique the “traditional” three-act structure but to expose its inherent violence through the story’s very bones. For women like Mirlande, who is undocumented, Black, and Haitian, that very structure gaslights on a narrative level.