I loved this story. What was the inspiration behind it? Did you run into any challenges during the writing process?

Thank you! I wrote “Bunny Ears” as part of a larger project, a story collection revolving around games and the folklore of children—legends, superstitions, rhymes, riddles, pranks, jokes—that is now a real, book-shaped thing called Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine. I knew I wanted to write a summer camp story, but more than that I wanted to write an only child story: a love letter to the self-sufficient, too-grown-up, poorly socialized kind of only child I most definitely was. Since the book deals with childlore—the specific strain of folklore learned and passed on to children by other children—I’m interested in the ways the same stories and traditions get around to so many of us. How was I, before the age of home internet, drawing a “cool S” in my notebook identical to the doodles of another kid three thousand miles away? Another kid a decade earlier, a decade later? In other words, “Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?” ( The Atlantic, November 8, 2022: bit.ly/46dS8DI). The article posits that siblings have a lot to do with it; older kids teach younger kids the ways of the world. New kids are major propagators, too, arriving at their new school carrying lore from the previous one. But someone like Hannah, who has no siblings and is a loner by nature, didn’t have those access points. So I had to drop her into the land of colliding personalities, campfire tales, and unenforced bedtimes, where childlore is basically bible: sleepaway camp.

In terms of challenges, the day-of-the-week structure put down some useful parameters. Maybe one challenge was the one I’m always having, or the ambiguity I always have one eye toward: Did this “really happen” or was it “all in her head”? In the first draft, Olivia and Yume don’t show up in the clearing in the final moments. I think the fact that they do get brought in adds a decisiveness to Hannah’s situation, in the end.

As someone who also attended a summer camp when they were younger, I found so much relatable to the setting of this story: the inter-camp politics, the activities, the rituals and rites of passage that camps like these force you to go through. Is this coming from past experiences? Were your camp experiences similar (except for, y’know, the horror parts)?

A fellow summer camp survivor! Yep, went to a bunch. Day camps and sleepaway camps, 4-H camp and barely-thrown-together kick-this-ball-around camps and one time a horseback-riding camp I couldn’t have been remotely qualified to attend. Once my cousins, visiting from out of the country, even came with me. Hannah and I differ in that she’s miserably out of place at camp and for the most part I had a great time. I dreaded school, the social aspect anyway, but something about the novelty and short term limits of summer camp made it more approachable. In this new environment you’re just passing through, it’s easy to feel like you can be anybody. I still love unfamiliar places. Probably the most horrifying thing that happened at my summer camps—and it was horrifying—was they made us sing for everything. Publicly, solo, in front of everyone in the mess hall. We had to sing for our mail (how you know I never once read my mail). We had to sing for seconds at mealtimes. We had to sing whenever we got caught with our elbows on the table. And I never went to music camp!

There’s an underlying theme here of how stories are told and how they propagate: how they travel, how they change, and, in the case of “Bunny Ears,” how they become reality. Was this something you were thinking about while writing this story? How does the bunny ears story keep itself alive?

I love this! I don’t recall thinking about it in such neat terms, but it makes a ton of sense: stories and bunnies, proliferating, spreading pervasively. What strikes me about Hannah is she’s not afraid of the bunny-ear kids, by all appearances the most fearsome thing at Colden Hills Music Camp. Instead, her anxieties are laser-focused on walking around in her swimsuit, and having to be social at the ice cream social, and not getting picked up at week’s end. The bunny-ear kids? They’re her ticket out of here. She needs them. And probably what’s given their legend the longevity and wide reach it has, is that she’s not the only one. Hannah feels lonely and abandoned, and she believes that joining up with the bunny-ear kids will cure her of this forever. But I think it comes sooner than that: The story of the bunny-ear kids—the existence of the story itself—proves she’s not alone, because it’s mattered enough to enough people that it’s still circulating, growing, running wild. And I think for every kid who hears about the bunny-ear kids and gasps in terror or consternation, there’s another kid going, Hey, yeah, that’s me.

What’s next for you? Do you have anything coming out soon or that you’re working on you’d like to talk about?

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is available for preorder now, and “Bunny Ears” is there alongside some award-winning stories and some never-before-seen ones, too. In story news, my Snegurochka retelling set in and around a Myrtle Beach Señor Frog’s, “How to Make a Snow Maiden,” is on the stellar ToC of We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2024, one of my favorite anthologies. I’m also wrapping up edits on my first novel. Thanks for reading!