Old structures intended for human habitation often transmit a sense of the previous occupants and of past times. Attributing a sinister nature to those former occupants, as well as imagining their lingering influence, often coincides with the level of rustication or dilapidation that has taken hold of the place. Age insinuates a new character. It’s perfectly natural to respond to this sense of a place with a shudder. But that’s also far too rational an explanation.

All that surrounds us—sights, sounds, colors, music, words, fragments of conversations—penetrates our minds to some degree and is turned into something else. Think of an earthworm’s castings, which are the product of what passes through its body to be transformed into something new and enriched, or at least different from what it was. The process happens whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s beyond our control. As Stephen King once remarked, if you eat asparagus tonight, your piss is going to smell funny tomorrow,

It’s one of those stories that started from like eight different directions at once. I had to put it together like a puzzle, one piece at a time. I remember sitting in a friend’s kitchen in St. Paul, working on the middle section, so it took a long time to do. Sometimes the stories I like the best work out like that: they don’t have a concrete beginning. They’ve just always been with me.

I think trucks and the desert are firmly entrenched in the Australian psyche. My husband used to work for a drilling company and drove road trains (three trailers) full of drilling equipment between work sites all over Queensland and South Australia. He’s got some crazy stories from that time, and I just write them down. I’m sorry to say the exploding cow is a true story. And his window was open.

Stories of terror and wonder are an escape from reality, but also another way of looking at our own existence, dealing with our emotional needs. Ghost stories, for instance, can be metaphors for the way we deal with our unease with death. Tales of magic are the way we fulfill the very real human need for wonder.

I’ve had an uneasy relationship with this genre, because I think there’s something very racially essentializing about the classification of ghost stories as horror. Dead people are part of my daily life, as they are for many nonwhites practicing traditions of ancestor reverence. So my Asimov’s SF story “The Rainses’” (which was reprinted in Filter House), for instance, never felt all that scary to me. But it was for some readers, because of the ghosts.

I wrote “Down Here in the Garden” shortly after I moved to California. It was during the midsummer heat, and Donner Pass was populated with vacationing families. It was a gorgeous, idyllic camping spot. Touchingly, a child had left a mason jar of dried beans at the Donner Party memorial, and a drawing of a covered wagon and pioneer stick figure girl. Beneath it in crayon: “To Patty Reid, aged 8.” At once, I felt transported back one hundred and fifty years to this same lake.

One is struck by the sheer staggering volume of young, fresh, powerful, innovative, incredible artists whose voices were silenced by HIV/AIDS before they’d had a chance to change the world like they clearly would have. And not just writers—the editors, agents, critics, audiences who supported and built these voices . . . it’s hard not to come away feeling like fiction was in the middle of a real revolution in terms of storytelling and voice and content and attitude, which was strangled in its crib by a deadly disease and a toxic, homophobic patriarchy.

I had to mull over ideas for a long time before I settled on one I liked. I had just read an article about the curative properties of raw honey, and particularly its ability to aid in the healing of wounds. So that was probably the actual seed. It’s a real thing, by the way. Raw honey is legendary for its ability to cure stubborn wounds, and now there’s scientific evidence to support that folk remedy.

I get bored sometimes, because selkies are almost always women who spend their long periods of captivity in relative passivity. My favorite selkie women burn down houses and murder fishermen to get back to the sea. People still resist seeing men in damsel roles, so male selkies are rare. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single butch selkie of any gender, which would be a delight.