There are a lot of hard choices to make in this story. There are the things we wish to believe, and the fear that reality might be different. For example, the different imagery for how the narrator chooses to see his sister. This is a powerful theme. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Story is how we make sense of the world—through personal stories, family stories, the stories our community tells. I think we use those stories to help us deal with various aspects of life, including trauma, and I think that’s healthy, to make sense of the world in a way that lets us move forward. I doubt that there’s some universal experience, a one true way that we all move through life. We do our best to make sense of what’s going on around us, but sometimes we butt against something that doesn’t jibe, and there’s a dissonance created. It’s in that liminal space that we’re more likely to find something approaching universality—if there is such a thing. Is the narrator’s sister alive or dead? There’s a case to be made for either interpretation. It’s in the friction between those two views that the narrator finds his mother sitting in the moonlight.

There is also a wonderful mystical shadowland feel to the imagery, but we are continually wrenched back into the brutality of their reality, such as when he acknowledges how he treated his mother, how he barely returned home. How did you go about balancing the “real” world aspects and the “mystical” aspects? In the end, they coalesce in the story in a beautiful, and poignant manner.

You could interpret this as the mother’s dream world breaking down to allow reality to seep through, but I created the story to have those two versions of reality lying side by side, each pushing for dominance and then ceding to the other. The narrator’s mother retells the story of the lights beneath the willow. The protagonist has grown up listening to this story, and the lights within that story touching his hand is the most vivid memory from his childhood. There’s something deliciously ironic and sad in that. I think about my own childhood memories and how many of them came from old photographs and family stories. They all start to blend at some point, to become part of a unifying personal history. In a way, much of this is about memory and how we (re)construct our past.

I note that you’re a visual artist, some examples of which can be seen on your website. Do you find that these two creative modes have a reciprocal role in the creation of this story? It’s an incredibly delicately visual story.

My training as a visual artist has deeply influenced my development as a writer. I see my stories in layers, beginning with large forms and then adding light and shadow. The details come last. Imagery is so important to me. My characters move through space before they find words.

It’s important to me that the reader move through the rooms of “The House of the Hidden Moon” in a very physical way. I want them to see the various aspects of the mother sitting in the moonlight, to feel the weight of her sitting in that chair or standing by the window. I want them to hear the voices pushing from the shadows.

I see you have a few stories coming out soon in various publications. Would you like to give us a little insight into what else you’ve done, and what you’re working on for the future?

I’ve focused on short story writing during the past couple of years, and I continue to write in that form because I love it so much. But I’ve decided that I also want to try longer form fiction, so I’ve been including those projects in my daily writing practice. I just finished a novella that I’m getting ready to submit. It’s an historical science fiction piece set in the primordial forests of the New World just prior to the American Revolution. I’m also working on my first speculative novel, and that project is filling up much of my writing time. I love bouncing back and forth between projects. It keeps me from getting bored.