Years ago I read that Bill Gates has a turn-of-the-century fully AI-enabled house. Everything in it is specialized for its inhabitants. I wondered: What if it was left empty? Alone. Without purpose.

I’ve been meaning to write a boto story for so long—like years—but I could never really find the right entry point for it. There’s a really great Atlantic article by Sushma Subramanian called “The Dolphin Myth that Refuses to Die” that explores the origins and perpetuation of the boto myth in the Amazon. That article really got me thinking about my adoption.

I was moved to write not a dark fairy tale itself, but a dark story about fairy tales. My starting point was, “what if someone became obsessed with fairy stories, what then?” This made me think about the infamous Cottingley fairies, and the attempts to discover “real” fairies. I imagined an old French woman painstakingly hunting for real magic in her life.

Each volunteer might have their own reasons why working with incarcerated people is meaningful but maybe fundamentally it has to do with prisoners being humans, and like the rest of humanity, there is a need for them to be emotionally healthy and to develop both intellectually and artistically.