I think it’s really important that a story is allowed to go out in the world and breathe. It should have the ability to belong to its readers, and sometimes that might even mean readers changing the meaning from my original intention. Of course, there is a limited range of interpretations for every story, but I don’t like to be too rigid. I once spoke to a college class that had read a couple of my stories and I loved hearing some of the interpretations.

I’ve always liked the sad and weird and unsettling, although my favorite things manage to be all of that and funny, too. My first memory of being a creep comes from the age of eight or so, when our family canary died and my dad buried it in the garden. I dug it up three days later, just to see. The canary’s head came off in my hand, and it didn’t have eyes anymore. Shit like that makes me a good writer, but an awkward party guest.

Sometimes the idea for a story comes out of nothing much more complex than wanting to evoke a feeling. I had been writing lots of rather wild, rather expansive things — big “what if” stories, in which you come up with an absurd take on the world, and then see how far it can be explored. And I remember feeling the urge to write something in contrast that was much more claustrophobic.

While the twins are the focus of my story, motherhood is the central theme for me. Mothers often love too much, and sacrifice their own health and well-being for their children. Mothers will die for their children, but sometimes it’s too much. So for the story, I just thought about the way motherhood can be both the most pure and corrupted form of love.

A friend of mine told me about getting a call from an ex-girlfriend asking if he could come get her from a cult, simply because she didn’t have anyone else to ask. He did, it was a little weird but in the end that was it: he was asked to give someone a ride and he did. Then I started thinking about how differently that might have turned out if both of them had been different sorts of people, how odd it might in fact go, and that led to the story.

I was in middle school when Columbine happened, and I remember very clearly how terror gripped my school and my community. It felt like the news was just saturated with coverage — videos of the kids crawling out of those windows, parents sobbing, the grainy footage from the cafeteria. Then after that was the speculation about the shooters, their parents, the role Marilyn Manson and video games played in their violence, and so on. It felt like it never ended.

I never write a story with a political or social agenda in mind. The elements come out of my own experiences, what is going on around me (in the media, on the subway, things I overhear) and what has happened to me in the past. However I do think that racism of the type practiced in Grand Beach, so prevalent in “genteel” communities, is the most insidious type of all. How can you protest or cry out against someone politely dismissing you?

South Korea has a reputation for being a fairly conformist, law-abiding place, and I loved the idea of a very non-traditional Korean woman, popping pills and driving a renegade scooter through traffic. And then poor Darlene is at loose ends in a foreign place, and more or less just tagging along. They seemed like a pretty interesting pair to me, with good potential to get into trouble.

My number one terror is of captivity, so much so that when I was a teenager I made a promise to myself that if it ever became apparent I was about to be imprisoned, incarcerated, or taken hostage by crazies claiming to have my best interest at heart, I would kill myself before allowing that to happen. The protagonist in the story is already imprisoned and helpless and facing terrible mutilation, the price she is paying for committing what is considered sexual deviancy in her world.

When we accept the exploitation of various classes and minorities (like children in Victorian England) for the profit of the powerful, that we tend to see “the world” as inherently unjust and cruel, when it’s actually a particular group of people creating and enforcing that world. If you think, for instance, about some of the most resonant horror stories, you can see this too.