I felt that thing a lot of first-gen kids talk about feeling: neither here nor there, too Russian to be American, too American to be Russian, both and neither at once. I wasn’t embracing the beautiful, complex mess of self back then, either. Different and complicated felt like the last things you wanted to be, and I grasped at every opportunity to smooth my differences and complications away. Part of that was an acute obedience that, thankfully, I’ve mostly shaken off since. Finally, like Uly, I was an only child who early on came to consider our family computer my easiest and most tolerant friend.

I think fans can expect everything I write will have the weariness, dread, and anger of living on the knife’s edge of a failing world paired with my silly devotion to empathy. The narrator of “Home” is a monster but one that breaks my heart as much as repulses me. Fans can expect a lot of that but (usually) with more jokes. I love horror though, so maybe reader excitement will encourage more utility knife murdering. One can never say for sure.

I’ve always been interested in stories that begin after the epilogue—stories that acknowledge that life goes on, past the big moment of narrative catharsis. A character’s just been through a huge adventure, had a bunch of trauma dumped on them, saved the day . . . and what happens next? I love seeing characters reckon with what they’ve just been through, so I try to be really intentional about where I position a story within the broader timeline of a character’s life.

As I thought about what I was trying to say in this story, to make it more than just a transcription of a bad dream, it occurred to me it was really about the tension between belonging and unwelcomeness, the idea that someone who doesn’t even know you can project a feeling that you don’t deserve to be in the place you call home. How much of your identity are you willing to erase in order to escape that negativity? I’m the daughter of an immigrant, so that was definitely on my mind as I wrote this story.

While I may not be a mother, there were other elements of the narrator I could resonate with in order to access her voice. In many ways, she represents qualities in myself that I’m uncomfortable with, pushed to an extreme. One of those is the instinctive voyeuristic streak that I think we all have as humans—the desire to experience someone else’s life, to know their secret business. It’s what draws us to fiction, to gossip, to pornography. What makes the story compelling is our urge to see more of the narrator’s shameful secret.

Like most of my stories, “Wallers” started out with a simple sentence: “The day her mother brought Mr. Nelson home, Martha faded into the wallpaper.” I paused, had some coffee, added two more sentences, and then stopped. I had no plot, no other ideas, just that tidbit about Martha fading into the wallpaper, to be safe. And the story pretty much stayed there for . . . well, longer than I care to admit. And then I ended up on a panel about experimental stories.

We wrote this story during Clarion West when we collectively fell in love with the music of Be Steadwell after attending her concert with our classmate Gabriel Teodros. It was week five, we’d already written five short stories apiece, but for some reason, we decided that we needed to collaborate on a story together with her songs as a baseline. We won’t get into more detail because that ruins the mystique. So long story short, in the span of a few days, we all brainstormed the plot, wrote an outline and a rough draft.

I’ve always been interested in laughter as a behavior. It is such a strange phenomenon—how physical it is, and also how it can be so sudden, uncontrollable, and contagious. A while ago I was reading about theories for why we laugh and was intrigued to learn that we don’t have a clear answer. Some of the most popular theories include laughter as a recognition of incongruity, as a feeling of superiority, or as a release of tension. We think of comedy as being “happy,” but in a way, a joke is actually quite an uncomfortable thing.

This story started from what began as, and remains, the first line: “The caveat is that I’m going to lie to you.” (In fact, the original working title was actually “Caveat”!). While this story is first person, to me, the narrator is always as much, and often more, of a character than the people we see in the story. It takes some drafting to find the voice’s nuances, but once I do, I can find the rest of the story—what situations are most interesting for this voice? What is it trying to tell the reader or what is it trying to hide? What details does it notice and what significance does it attach to them?

My wife Chrissy and I were discussing submission calls that I used as prompts to produce stories. At the same time, my dog investigated something like a dead rabbit—something gross—and as always, I wondered what the heck he was thinking. What does the world look like to a creature like that? My dog also has strong herder stock and clearly sees himself as the sheepdog to our family. So by the end of the walk we imagined a ghost dog who was so protective he couldn’t bear to pass on.