I am a sucker for sensory detail in stories, so “Root Canticle” had me from the opening paragraph with the vivid descriptions of the familiar gone terribly wrong (“flexing concave and convex like the thudding of ventricles”—chef’s kiss). In fact, the entire story is filled with these rich details. What is it about creating a believable yet fantastic setting in horror that you find most appealing?

Thank you! I love nature-focused imagery in stories and in poetry. The more specific the biome, the better. For this piece, I enjoyed the exercise of taking mundane elements of nature—mold, bugs, backyard deer, invasive plants you’d see on the side of the highway—and making them as upsetting as possible.

What can you tell us about the spark behind the story?

I sat down to make a story about a messed-up house. As we all know, this is a vital genre of storytelling. Then the house, or at least its subterranean inhabitant, demanded more of me as we went along: why she was there, and how she felt about it, and what she was fighting for, or who.

Here, the narrative voice is as important as the environment, the way the details unfold like petals from a black lotus or skeletal lily. Did you intend on using a first-person conversational narrative or was that a later development?

The conversational narrative was there from the start! I wrote the first line knowing almost nothing about the piece other than that it was going to be a conversation taking place between the entity in the cellar and an unfortunate intruder on their way to being digested, and I slowly built up the rest of the plot from there.

This story could be said to be a feminine horror story. A shattered relationship, wounds and stigmata that would not heal, seeking vengeance not war, the forgiveness of an undying love. What is it about the representation of the feminine in horror that appeals to you? Are there any authors whom you feel portray this element of fiction well?

There’s something appealing about the way it often evokes and builds a sense of barely restrained fury. For authors, I liked Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado for how I felt it rolled the unsettling and surreal together with human emotions of grief, anger, fear, and so on. And of course she also guest-edited the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 anthology, which includes several pieces that are delightfully eerie in their own ways.

You are a prolific writer both in prose and poetry. What sparked your love affair with the written word?

Partial credit is shared among too many books, and too many people who gave me books, for me to list here. Anyway, if we go all the way back to the beginning, it probably started with a mandatory, incredibly early bedtime, and with my five-year-old self staring wide awake at a dark ceiling for hours, making up stories while waiting to fall asleep. Though it would be several more years before it occurred to me to write any of it down, I think the die was cast by that point.

Is there anything else you would like to tell eager readers? Any upcoming projects for 2023?

Yes, I am currently working on several other stories! I got back into writing short fiction in earnest last year, and now I’m slightly afraid that if I stop, I will forget how.