Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.

I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted.

I think it’s actually commonplace among writers to borrow bits and bobs from life, sometimes even including their own, to build the telling details that give a fiction some depth of field. Words pretending to be worlds—which is not every story, granted, but at least those attempting this to any degree—need to suggest that a story is like life, that there’s more to what’s on the page than what’s actually on the page, like how in life there’s no bottom to the depths you can uncover from a person or object or situation: if you pull any thread long enough, the entire universe unravels from it.

My studies certainly play a major part in how I come up with ideas and in the way I approach character and plot. For example, I often touch on the theme of the world as theatre or draw directly from Greek tragedy, while religion and intertextuality are at the core of many of my stories. But it’s not just the ideas; my studies have shaped the way I view the world, and so the lens through which I approach story. My media & cultural studies background has taught me that culture is the result of practices of representation and articulation, which always invites one to question and study power—where it resides, how it articulates the world.